Music is a networked process. At all levels, it involves connections between different parts—the references in lyrics, the chemistry of a band, the signal path in the studio, the clips in a DAW. In order to build software for music, we need to develop a structure that makes affordances for this network, that privileges the ability to make connections, to explore new paths and branches—to grow one’s network, so to speak.
In order to understand the structure of these networks, we must ask questions of the musical process as a whole. Who is involved? What tools do they use? What artifacts do they create? How are these organized? How are these evolved?
What follows is the product of my own experience, research and observations. The musical process is different for everyone and no single framework can fully describe it, but what I have done here is attempt to capture the patterns that I have seen, and arrange them in a roughly linear timeline. We’ll use these patterns to construct loose frameworks for how music is made, both in a traditional studio and in a more modern “bedroom” studio.
We’ll first consider the traditional music-making process, at a bird’s eye view. We’ll separate the process into four phases—Exploration, Composition, Recording, Production—and explore the types of activities and the tools used for these activities in each phase.
We can briefly consider the traditional process of “manufacturing” a song (or album) from the research and development; to the initial experiments; to the assembly, refinement, final polishing and quality assurance.
In essence, songs loosely flow through the above phases, though not necessarily in the order presented or as a serial procession of steps. Creative work involves loops, parallel tasks, and back-tracking. For our purposes, however, these phases give a good overview of the process of designing a song.
We can use these stages to understand the tools and artifacts needed to create music—sheet music, writing instruments, musical instruments, speakers, mics, effects boxes, mixing boards and more.
First, we find that it takes music to make music. In sourcing references to serve as guidance, inspiration, orientation and direction for the project, we turn to live or pre-recorded music from others or riff on instruments or vocals of our own. We are semantically browsing for meaningful content—things that align, in terms of feeling or emotion, with what we want to express in our own creations.
The tools for this exploration are sound playback systems and music libraries, instruments, pens and paper, the brain, field recorders and mics. In general, we want objects that easily and simply facilitate the playing back, creating or recording of sounds.
We are building a collection—an arsenal of inspiration—that will serve as a moodboard for the design. In this stage of design, we want to privilege tools that offer lightweight ways to scan large bodies of references and to store our thoughts—prototypes and sketches. Thus, the exploration phase can be said to return a reference layer, useful for building on top of.
As the direction hardens, we begin to produce the base usable units within the song: lyrics, rhythm, melodies and harmonies. We begin to construct the different instrument layers, assign vocal roles, and arrange the different scenes within the song. We can think of this stage as moving blocks around a timeline, representing different instruments and vocalists playing and singing at different times, and the different parts that each of these blocks are playing.
At this stage, the goal is to build cohesion between these blocks, in terms of how the blocks work together at each unit of time and how the blocks work together across time. In this, we are defining our form across space and time. We decide what notes and words will fill the space across a stretch of time, and what instrument or voice will sound these.
Often, this process takes place with writing tools and surfaces, like pens and paper or markers and whiteboards. We produce artifacts like sheet music and lyrics—linear arrangements of musical content across time. We use these artifacts to guide the Recording Phase.
Once we know how the song will go, it’s time to record it. This often involves the use of a recording studio, and always involves the use of microphones (unless the piece of music is solely digital or MIDI-based, but we’ll ignore those for now). We might choose to sequence recording different parts at different times, or have certain groups of musicians play at once. We are conscious of the nature of the recording setting, the arrangement of the mics and players, and the techniques for coaxing and nudging a recording in the right direction (thinkings like pop filters on mics, stuffing drums with blankets, etc).
This system often involves the use of a recording engineer to manage the above, as well as when to start and stop the recording, to cue the tracks correctly, to select the proper tracks to send to each artist’s headphones, and to properly organize and store the results of the session. Often nowadays, this will be done within a computer, using digital versions of the recordings, in a piece of software like Pro Tools or more traditionally, this is done onto magnetic tape.