art v. artifice
The purpose of this site is to document the advent of select modern sound recording techniques and examine their implications and ramifications on the way we experience music and on a broader philosophical level. This exploration inevitably begs the question: where do we choose to draw the line between authenticity and falsity? Between art and artifice?
When looking into modern recording techniques, it is impossible to ignore the all-powerful Pro Tools, which was originally called Sound Tools, released in 1991 by Digidesign (Milner 387). This program allowed engineers to mix "in the box," free from the sprawling, time-consuming set up of a purely analogue system. As Milner notes, Pro Tools finally eclipsed other methods as a factor of cost. The tidily contained, user-friendly system, with all its little cheat codes, saved a good deal of time in the studio, not to mention its comparably low cost that sometimes incited independent engineers and musicians to begin buying their own set-ups, which, really, marked the beginning of the decline of the recording industry on such a large scale. As Pro Tools continued to thrive, the company developed and bought up programs such as AmpFarm, Autotune, Beat Detective, Omnisphere, Bomb Factory, and a thousand others, which, along with other digital recording platforms, such as Logic, set the standard for how music should sound in 2002, or 2007, or 2012.
It should be noted that the scope of this project is limited to Pro Tools, and to the examination of very few of its capabilities that any other professional recording platform could also do.