Digital vocal editing, plug-ins and the fetishism of voice and technology in 21st-century Western commercial popular music production

This thesis describes and interrogates the increasingly significant role of vocal editing in the production of Western commercial popular music in the 21st-century, drawing on two years of multi-sited ethnographic research with ‘producer-songwriters’ working in this genre in the UK. In it, I argue that producer-songwriters’ digital vocal editing practices fetishize both singing voices and the digital technologies which are used to edit them. These two different fetishisms which exist in the practice—of the voice, and of technology—are synergistic and strengthen one another. Furthermore, this co-productive fetishism is reflected in the specific ways in which the music spotlights the lead vocal part. Additionally, key companies within the Western music technology industry (including Waves Audio, Universal Audio and FabFilter) both exploit and drive these fetishisms through the design and marketing of plug-ins (software programs) for vocal editing.
The thesis is divided into five main chapters. Following a review of relevant literature in ethnomusicology and popular music studies in the introduction, Chapter 1 explains the theoretical frame of fetishism. Chapter 2 illustrates how the fetishism of the voice is perpetuated among producer-songwriters by their aesthetic discourse which privileges ideas of the voice occupying an ‘up-front and central’ position within the metaphorical space of the popular music ‘mix’—an aesthetic aim which I term ‘vocal foregrounding’. The subsequent chapters of the thesis focus on a set of creative practices employing different technologies which are central to vocal editing and which are deployed serially across “vocal chains”—tuning & comping (Chapter 3), equalization (EQ) (Chapter 4) and compression (Chapter 5). Each contributes to the commercial pop vocal sound, and each is associated with a different kind of fetishism of technology which interacts with and reinforces the fetishism of the voice. These chapters also address the main plug-ins and marketing techniques used by the plug-in industry to perpetuate such double fetishism.
This thesis contributes to existing musicological literature in two ways. First, I approach the practice of vocal editing and production from an aesthetic perspective, explaining how the sound of commercial popular vocals is created through multiple, cumulative digital processes which are influenced by external cultural and economic factors, rather than focusing on individual technologies in the process and their associated histories (e.g. AutoTune). Secondly, I build on existing ethnomusicological approaches to music and technology by not only engaging fully with the practices and discourses of the digital production of commercial popular music through my fieldwork, but also by supplementing this ethnographic focus with a variety of Western pedagogical sources about sound processing, production and mixing, contextualizing my informants’ practices within a transnational culture of music production.

Keywords: ethnography
anthropology of music
digital vocal editing
autotune
vocal production
music technology
vocal editing
commercial popular music
musicology
popular musicology
music production
popular music studies
music ethnography
Advisor: Born, G