Switched on Pop - Space, The Final Frontier: Madonna, Stephen Puth and Street Studios

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

Find out how music creates a feeling of space in this three part episode. First, we may not realize it when we listen to Madonna's new record, but the location of her music is essential. In exploring her catalogue we hear the sound of different eras by just the space evoked in a song. Second, the same is true for Stephen Puth who uses spacial effects for brilliant creative purposes on his song "Look Away." When music is recorded in a studio with perfect acoustics, engineers manipulate that audio to place it in a 3D virtual space using reverb, delay, volume, panning and filters. Each of those effects changes our relationship to the music, and in Steven's case, the lyric. Finally, when we get outside the studio, like with Found Sound Nation and Make Music Day's “Street Studios”, music can echo the geography it is made in. Take this wild journey with us and truly expand your listening.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, Madonna's 14th album, Madam X, recently came out. And it was inspired by her move to Portugal. And it made me think that we've been neglecting an essential piece in all of our musical analysis. Okay, I'm on the edge of my seat. What would that be?

Space. We don't talk about space enough. The final frontier. The space and place a song is recorded in affects the way it sounds and how we perceive it. So when a song is recorded in studio, producers use production effects to create a sense of place. Today we're talking about the way space, whether it's an actual space or production effects, shapes a song's mood. and sound. And to get us right into it, let's listen to Madonna's new track, Medellian, with Maluma. One. I took a pill and had a dream. Yes, I'm in. I went back to my 17th. Hmm. Dig it. So does anything stand out to you about this track immediately? One thing that stands out to me is the Soto Voce whispering that Madonna does at the very beginning of this.

track. Yeah, exactly. And it sounds like it is in your ear. It feels like Madonna is with you. Yeah. And then all of a sudden she moves into the verse and her voice becomes more ambient and far away with delay and reverb affecting her voice. This made me think about David Burns' theory about music and space. Do you remember this? Refresh my memory. David Byrne being the former frontman of the talking heads, musician, polymath. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, he has this great book, how music works. And he sort of disrupts this idea that music comes from the singular mind of the creative genius and perhaps actually is more made for a particular geography, for its space. He says that music perfectly fits the place where it is heard sonically and structurally. It is absolutely ideally suited for

the situation. The music, living thing evolved to fit the available niche. He talks about how hand drums are great for the outdoors, while Gregorian chant is great for cathedrals. Mozart's small ensembles playing fast melodies fit in royal halls, whereas Wagner's harmonically rich orchestras are better suited for opera halls. He even brings it into his own world and says, you know, those fast punk style of guitars that he was playing at CBGBs are made for those tight walls.

where all of the thick distortion in the guitars just perfectly embodies the angst of that space. So back to Madonna. She has this song Medellin, inspired by her move to Portugal and sort of being awash in Latin culture. She records it with a Colombian music star, Maluma. There's obviously a lot of Latin influence going on in this song, but I want to move beyond genre and think about just space within the track. how can space locate us within a song visually or like in a 3D like way? How can it inspire creativity or even bring us to a specific location? And we're going to do this through a couple of case studies.

First, we're going to listen to Madonna and get a bit of background on how does space work in music. And then I speak with Stephen Puth about his song Look Away. We're going to listen to a really interesting creative use of space. And finally, we're going to move. Out into the streets of, actually, a number of countries around the world, we're going to talk to an amazing organization called Street Sounds, which records music in different spaces all around the globe. Right on. All right. I'm ready for this adventure through space in time. To kick us off, I want to give a bit of background about what is space in a recording studio? Because there's this very artificial thing that happens. We go into a perfectly, you know, sort of silent, perfect space.

that allows us to then manipulate the sound of a voice or instrument and put it in a space that is perhaps unnatural, not the actual place that it was recorded in. And sound engineers have all sorts of tricky ways of doing this. The easiest would be to change the volume of a song. If you decrease the volume, it sounds as if something is fading off into the distance. You can also, to give a sense of 3Dness,

you can pan a voice or an instrument from left and then to write and place it within the stereo field. Another fun thing you can do is you can filter off all of the high end of a sound, which will make it sound as if it's coming through another room, all of the high frequencies being blocked by a door or a wall. But some of the most fun things you can do is adding reverb. This is how you create the sense of actually being in a space. Every space has a sound,

the way in which all of the frequencies of that sense, bounce around the room and come back to you. So you could take my voice, for example, and you could put it in a room by using a reverb effect. Or you could put it in a larger hall, in a giant cathedral, or even inside a reverberating giant metal plate. It's even possible to create entirely unrealistic, made-up sci-fi-like spaces that could never exist in reality.

Ooh, can we do one of those for my voice? Yes, would you like to say something nice into the reverberated sci-fi world? To infinity and beyond. We just saw Toy Story 4 last week. Okay, sorry, please continue trails. And finally, one of my favorite things you can do to really play with a sound and give it a sense of space is to add a delay. This will make a sound echo, like it's in a giant cavern and repeat over and over.

You probably know a lot of these sounds because different spatial effects are often associated with whole genres. We're going to come back to Madonna in just a second, but first I just want to give you a sense of the way in which we perceive the timbre of space can be actually connected to a particular era or genre. Check out this song. I bet you've heard it before. That's I'll be so lonely, baby. Well, I'm so lonely. I'll be so lonely. That's Elvis Presley's

Heartbreak Hotel. Exactly. And in it, you can hear his voice has this kind of funky, very quick delay sound. It's called a slapback delay, and it's made

in multiple ways, but usually you take one sound, and then you delay it just a little bit. I mean, by milliseconds, and it creates this sort of wider,

stereo effect and it really is synonymous with so much 1950s country music. In this case, they actually made the delay by taking a speaker, putting it in a hallway with a microphone at the other end of the hallway, and playing Elvis's voice through that speaker down into the other microphone to create a delay in the signal. They didn't have as many fancy techniques as we have on a computer today. So that's how they had to do it in a physical speaker. But when you hear that 50 slapback sound, you think country. You think 50s. Yeah, absolutely.

If we wanted to move into the 1980s, you could hear a sound like this one. Phil Collins. That drum sound, they call a gated reverb, is one of those impossible to create sounds in a normal environment. It's a really big reverberating sound that is quickly cut off in an unnatural way. And when we hear it, we immediately think 1980s. Oh, yeah. The sound of the gated reverb isn't so much about putting us in a place, almost as it is, about putting us in an era.

Right, right. Lastly, I want to play you one of my favorite spatial effects that became, in many ways, the sound of 90s and aughts dance music. Ooh, that's awesome. Who's that? That's deaf punks around the world. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know that.

Everyone, I knew that. Please continue. And what's happening here is that there is a very simple cutoff on the higher frequencies that are all rolled off. And then slowly those higher frequencies enter back into the space. And this is using what you call a filter. It gradually increases very much like the sound of listening to music behind a door, like you're not in the music club yet. like you're not in the music club yet, and then the door opens and you walk into the club.

I feel like you're taking an elevator up into the center of the club. Yeah. That, you know, and then you, or like a platform, you know, that, like, slowly comes up, subterranean, and you, like, hear it louder and louder and then finally, boom, you just, like, plop you in the middle and you're dancing. But, yeah, okay. Okay, so these different spatial effects actually have this whole genre

and error characteristics to them, But they also transcend that. In a creative way, spatial effects are constantly used to place us within the song and are used creatively to give us a sense of location. So that I've shared with you a couple of these techniques, volume, panning, filter, reverb, delay. Now is the time in which I quiz you, Nate. Okay. This is slightly stressful. Yeah.

So I promised that we would come back in. listen to more Madonna. Throughout her career, she has used just brilliant production within her music. And one thing that I always pay attention to is what's going on

in her voice. So I'm going to play you a handful of clips and I want to see if you can identify what is the sound that is making the effect of her voice. Okay.

You know these songs. Now you have to figure out do you know what's happening to the sound of Madonna. Is it gonna be one of the techniques we just discussed? It's gonna be all of them. Oh, okay. Ready. All right, and just to increase the difficulty, I'll also ask you to ID the track. I hate you. Okay, go ahead.

Name that song, name that effect. Okay, the song is a little prayer. I don't know what the title of it is. Oh, that's embarrassing. when I call your name. Like a prayer. I wasn't sure because I was like, wait, is it like a virgin? Like a prayer, she has two songs that are like a blank.

That is true. I'm just going to point out that that's a little, you know, kind of unoriginal. Okay, the effect that I'm hearing on this one, the voice sounds kind of reverberant and spacious. And this is like an 80s track. So is there some kind of 80s plate reverb or something on her voice here? You know, I haven't gone as far to identify. the style of reverb, but I would assume that it is...

Oh, Charlie hasn't identified. Wow. I would assume that this is some kind of hall reverb because I think here that she's singing like a prayer, perhaps in a cathedral, it tries to put us within the idea of... These religious overtones. Yeah, that's cool.

Exactly. Okay, I'm going to reluctantly give you points on that one. Fair enough. All right, song number two. This song is just called music, I believe. Correct. Yeah. And I'm going to say because the voice sounds like it's not so much volume here,

but like it's getting the quality of the voice is changing, that there's some kind of, this is using the sort of frequency rollout effect to make it feel like she's coming out from behind a door and then back in. Fingers crossed. That's right. This is the filter effect, exactly. The filter effect, yeah. Yeah.

Your ear is serving you well. Oh, I'm sweating bullets over here. Okay. Clip three. That's not a... I've never heard. No one's ever heard that song. That's...

You just recorded that. Let me play you the hook. Oh. That's ray of light. That's ray of light. Wow. Yeah, I don't know if I've ever heard the verse to that before. Fascinating.

This is very instructive. Oh, but this is tough. What kind of spatial effect are they using? I don't know, I'm stumped. Yeah, this is a little more subtle. This is a delay effect. Every time that she sings a line, you can hear that line kind of repeat. Oh, yeah.

Similar to the Elvis slapback, but, you know, a digital version. Interesting. Except for here, I think what we're getting is that delay. We're going to hear it a number of times. It's not just a one-off delay. It's occurring again and again. And for me, this is kind of like the ray of light metaphor. Yeah.

extending, literally, but rays of light reaching out and extending. Yeah, kind of slightly mystic, perhaps. I'm into it, yeah. So I'm going to give you actually just negative one points on that, which I think just sets you back to one point, total. No, two points. No, no, no, no, no, you lost a point. You didn't not get that point.

You lost a point for misidentifying. Right, but I had like a prayer and then... Music. Music. And I'm saying you just lost music. Yeah, you're right, you're right. Okay, I'm bad at it. I have one point.

All right. Let's move on to one of my favorite Madonna songs and I'll give you an opportunity to earn your points back if you can identify the other musical technique

happening in this track. Oh, man. My Madonna knowledge is feeling me hard here. I don't know the name of the song. Tell me that I'd like to. really beautiful. Oh, come on here. What does you say right here? Take a bow. Take a love?

Take a bow. Okay, I think I can't hear it very well. Take a bow, you got it. And what is the spatial effect that you're hearing? I feel like, is this another reverb effect where we're in like a big hall again? Yeah, this is just the thickest 80s reverb sound. This is actually probably one of those digital reverbs that is doing things that are even slightly, unnatural. I love the sound. It is the sound of my youth. I was going to give you some extra bonus points here. There is another one of my favorite musical techniques, one of your favorite musical techniques that's going on completely unrelated to space. Did you hear anything special? Is it double

tracking in the voice? Not voice related. Not voice related. And it's one of my favorites. Oh, God. This is horrible. I don't know. I don't know. I'm very careful. curious to find out. This is one giant example of text painting. Okay, you'll have to walk me through that. All right, let's listen to it one more time. Listen to the bass. I think you're going to get what I'm talking about.

You're making this sound really obvious, but I don't know if that's entirely true. This is text painting because the base is descending down and down and down. down throughout the entire verse, the base is taking a bow. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. I think you really... Man, the extra credit actually hurt you.

Oh, this is a shame. That is some deep juju there, man. I don't know. Okay, fair enough. I'll take the hit. I'll take the hit. I'm going to give you some obvious stuff to end this out. You can round out and hopefully come out above.

Oh, go, co, co, co, oh. This is Vogue. Yes. And the effect we're hearing there is, are we talking about that little thing at the end? It's like, boom, boom, vo, vo, that exactly. Okay, I don't know what that is, but I like it. That's a delay effect. It's a delay effect plus a filter, maybe?

Yeah, so a delay effect often can change on each repeat. What you hear will be modulated in some way. In this case, we're actually losing some of the low end on each repeat. Yeah. So just as I suspected, delay plus filtering. And if you listen to the very beginning of the song, I'll give you one last opportunity. What are you looking at? There's delay there.

And there's volume, too, actually, because she's speaking, but it's very loud. So they've clearly up to the volume there at that moment to bring it closer to your ear. This is actually maybe perhaps fairly challenging. This is probably a combination of like a slap back delay type thing from like we heard in Elvis, but there's definitely some reverb on here as well, which is to say all these different effects will get used in various combinations, the changing of volume, moving things from left to right, filtering things out, adding reverb, adding delay. These are all creative tools that are used to give us a sense of space. And what I want to do is move to a really fun case study about this.

I spoke with songwriter Stephen Puth about his new song Lookaway that he wrote and produced with his brother Charlie Puth. And I think what we're going to find here is that space can be an essential component to musical storytelling. We'll check that out after a quick break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals.

who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Honest to God, like fucking skinny. I want to be jacked. Without context, tone and sculpt are rooted in diet culture.

We're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes. specifically women feel like they have to shrink in order to expand. And I'm just saying, no, let's just like lift heavy shit and like take up space. That's the expansion. I'm Robin Arson and this week on Project Swagger, I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body, especially after two babies. Listen now at Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, this is Stephen Puth. Where did this song come from?

What's its premise? So the premise was actually the acoustic guitar for the beginning. And it was an iPhone recording. So Charlie had asked me to send him boom, boom, boom, boom, just on the iPhone. Slowly, fast, individually, like one by one. I didn't know why he's asked me to do this before. And I was like, okay, cool.

and I just sent it to him He chopped it up And he pretty much left it as is I mean if you actually listen to the beginning of the song Like you hear You know when you put the phone down When you're recording a voice memo It makes that almost type noise

That's like in the song Which is kind of nice if you listen This is actually from If you listen I wonder if I jack it up You can hear the weird white noise hiss Where it's like It's that

Essentially that that hiss Then also when you take that that with this. That's the iPhone, dropping it on the ground, putting it on this table. So that's how the song starts. It's one, two, three, and then putting the iPhone on the table. I guess a month later, that little guitar idea became this whole pretty, like, nicely built-out production idea with a couple melody ideas down.

I'm really interested in what the song has to say. So what's the lyric about? Well, the lyric is picking apart a thing that I feel like everyone can go through in a relationship where it can either be before the fight, after the fight, when all hell is calm down. Now it's like you try to look at each other to make it up and someone's just looking away. And that's a very normal thing I've personally gone through a lot. I feel like it's very relatable. And the thing is, the song doesn't imply, like, oh, we're broken up now.

Like, it doesn't even necessarily imply that. It implies that it's actually all in my head the whole I'm paranoid thing. The whole concept is being paranoid. And it's like, why are you looking away? Like, I thought we were, and it's, the reality is there's always going to be highs and lows and relationships. And sometimes you get those, I'm just going to look away for a second moment. Yeah, I like that.

I definitely get the sense that. have the narrator asking, like, are we on the brinks? Or, as you said, is this just happening in my head? And what I really like about the song is how the production mirrors that sort of duality between what's actually happening versus what might be happening in someone's head. So what I hope we could do is listen to the beginning of the song and think about how those things might come together, how the narrative and the production of the song claps onto each other. All right, so you've got to these conclusions, but I feel of all. All right, so you've got two different voices going on.

Can you explain what we're hearing here? I mean, from a creative perspective, to me, it kind of feels like the conscious speaking after the line. I mean, the performance was just two tracks, and just it's like one's kind of in the background a little bit wetter. What do you mean by that? the idea of something's a little bit wetter. More reverb.

Like, it just sounds like it's in the background more. It's just sounds, it's a little more verb where the lead is a little bit more drier. I don't want to think about, think about you and nobody else. And then in the background, it sounds kind of dreamy. But like a haunting dream, like a Tarantino movie. That's how this song feels to me. The intro is like, it's like a Tarantino movie. Okay, so we have, on one hand, we have the narrator, you, singing,

directly and it's dry as you said it's clear it's present and then the reverberations of what you're saying off in the distance like in the subconscious sort of reinforcing this maybe something's off here yeah that's how i interpreted it at the moment it was just hey just just sing it as two separate parts you'll see why and then once it was like that i picked up really quickly and i thought to myself that's a really good idea and it makes the song more alluring and almost that like haunting feeling, but in a good way. But like your thoughts are haunting you. So I thought it was a great effect and a good little trick for the narrative. Let's keep on going into the pre-chorus. Okay, so pre-chorus, what happens to the voices? It's still the same thing where it's the two leads

going, maybe I'm paranoid, paranoid. And then it just kind of says it. It got these thoughts in my head. And it's like the perfect sentiment for how the voices are acting right now. It's the thoughts in your head. Here I feel like you have this, originally this very dry sound. And here the wet sound, which is sort of the subconscious, all of the thoughts in your head feel like they're starting to take over. They're surrounding what was the dry lead vocal. Yeah, and I think here what's kind of cool, if we play it again.

This in particular. Okay, that's not a crazy production. trick. It's like a lot of DJs are known for doing that, reversing the vocal, leading into the big part, or to start a song sometimes. What I think is so cool about it, play it one more time. It's just kind of cool because it reminds me of, I don't know, if it was the narrative of a movie and the thoughts in my head just started spinning around in my head, that would be the sound to define it. And it's just, it's the ghosts, reverses, because too much stuff's going on. And then what's really nice is it obviously makes everything feel more verbed out and swelling, and then it just

gets super dry. I was looking at you the other day. Yeah, you used to look in my eyes, now you look away. Okay, so what happens there? It's just a very dry lead vocal. I mean, yeah, we've heard a bunch of songs use vocoders before that are super tight, like gated, dry, and it can be really impactful. And what are you saying?

Well, that's what gets the idea. I have all these thoughts, and then I was looking at you the other day. You used to look at my eyes and now you look away. I get the sense you're like, you're looking at the person. And all of a sudden, you've created direction in the song, in your head to all of a sudden, boom, I'm looking right at you. Yeah, all the swirling feelings, the sonics. And then it becomes, yeah, it's very directional.

Because so far, I mean, you've heard a guitar, a couple weird percussion hits. my vocal, and then in the pre-course you hear as like a pat. So that's like the one artificial thing, and it's still analog, so it's still relatively organic. And I feel like the vocoder, like the pop vocoder has played a role in more DJ-type songs, which is fine. It's just, I thought what makes this song really interesting is that one could say, oh, it's just doing what other songs have already done.

It's like, okay, fair point, but no, because you're taking an acoustic guitar, which is just always the implication is, wow, organic, stripped down. And then you're building this narrative both lyrically and sonically. So by the time you get to this part, you just think yourself, you're just like, what the heck just happened? We just started it at the beginning with a guitar, which was a voice note, and now we're at a vocoder. And to me, like, that makes the song drive really, really cool.

It snags my attention. Like I am immediately brought in right here because I'm expecting to land in a chorus and all of a sudden everything is dropped out. It's just your voice and even though it is affected, it's affected in a way that's just yeah, pay attention. Let's see where it goes. All right, so what happens? Well, it's a double chorus. The first one's down and then the second one just picks up. Before there was just vocoder and vocal, and now you're having a full track building up into an instrumental post. And originally, actually, when we were writing it,

we had a whole different set of lyrics. And for the longest time, I was actually still thinking of them, where the back half was what it is now, and the first half, I think it was something like, I was looking at you the other day, and when I looked at you, like, something about you changed. It was something like that. but it made more sense to be just the same thing twice.

It just sounded clear to the point. So using it twice just seemed way more effective. And yeah, I mean, the build-ups, it's awesome. And it's still all pretty organic. I mean, it's adding more guitars, bass. Even the percussion still, it's pretty organic. But it feels massive as it drops into the instrumental and it like grooves on.

Not that it's a drop, but rather the instrumentals building. It's not used with these fat sounds that take up like a whole field of frequencies. When we're listening to the chorus, I get a reverberation of what we've heard in the verse, but in an amplified way, meaning we start with a vocal that feels very dry. And then as all of the backing vocals come in to surround it, things get wider and bigger. And it's almost as if as you're going into the drop, that paranoid self-conscious comes back. And we're sort of waffling from that direct dry space to that in your head reverberant wet space. Right.

And I think what's even cooler about the actual format of the song is this is the first time you're hearing this moment. And since the beginning, I mean, biously speaking, I've been hooked where like as soon as the verse comes in, it makes you kind of turn your head. You're like, whoa, what's that? And then keeps taking you through the journey. It's not like you had a little foreshadow of the melody

with the intro of so you have no idea that's coming. So when it does and the way it presents itself, it shocks you in the coolest way. Are there any other surprises that come up in the song for you? I think the ad libs, how typically when you write a song, I don't know, when I do sessions at least, I've noticed a lot of times, people are like, oh, it's the third chorus, let's put an ad lib track down.

And some songs do do that. And what I think is really cool about this song is the ad libs are sprinkled out where it's not just overwhelming, like, the last chorus, here's this huge ad lib. So, like, you start to hear some in the second chorus. And it's just little things.

Like, just filling in a little blank space, but not too much where it's like, whoa, and this is suddenly changed now. After the second chorus, it goes through another four bars of the instrumental. And then it drops down. And it sounds like wolves howling. Maybe you're so beautiful. Beautiful it makes me insecure.

I just love that part because it's obviously not a full third verse, because then the song would probably be touching for a minute, closer to like three, three, 34 minutes. It's just a little bit, but it's the perfect bridge because there's been a melodic journey, I guess, is how I would describe it, where you don't need to hear another melody, you don't need to hear chord changes. You just give it the same way, but now it has impactful words that conclude everything you said, where you're starting to blame yourself. Maybe you're so beautiful. It makes me insecure. Cash had just literally just said that the way I just said it. And I was, we just kind of perked up.

We were like, that's really hard. That's really sick. And then it takes you to the last chorus where you have the ad lib track, but then also into the instrumental bit, you now have the pre-chorus layered over a chorus again, where you have the Mabian Paranoids, mixing with the, I was looking at you the other day.

That's like an old late 90s trick that was very common. Yeah, it's definitely on some Max Martin vibe. And I guess it's the math to it. Yeah, I guess, oops, I did it again. Yeah, it's oops. Oofs I did it again. It's just great how they kind of change the swing of it, I think.

I mean, even country music does it. You know the song. I hope you dance. I hope you never lose your sense of wonder. The famous country song. And the last chorus, it's like, Dance, da-na-na-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And it's under her singing the same chorus,

and it's like the perfect fit. And I love when songs do that. It's definitely gonna take me a while to get better at my production to nail that, to think like that. But sometimes it happens accidentally too, which is great. And yeah, it's a great way to make. the song come to a full conclusion. Thank you, Stephen.

Thank you. In speaking with Stephen, I really discovered that space is an essential part of storytelling. Inasmuch as space can be used to sort of place us in an era, right? Like we talked about that sort of Phil Collins' drum space effect. You hear that and you're in the 80s. I really like the idea of how locating us within the song in terms of our closeness to a voice or distance from that voice can actually tell us something about

the emotional state of the songwriter. Yeah, and you know, I appreciate this discussion because space is something we experience every time we listen to music, right? Like, that is just unavoidable. Music only exists in space, even if it's in what the musicologist, Eric Clark would call the virtual space

of a set of speakers or headphones. And so it's interesting, but it's also very elusive property. You know, we talk about pitch and rhythm and those are very fixed and easy to locate. Space is a little more, you know, we don't have the same vocabulary really to talk about how we experience music in space. So I like this kind of stab at starting to think about that aspect of music, the physical,

geographical, spatial aspect of it. Yeah, I love how you frame that. This idea that so much contemporary popular music is recorded in a sort of virtual space. Oftentimes we want to have a space which is, fairly neutral or imparts just a very subtle sound into the signal of whatever it might be, whether it's a voice or an instrument. And then so much of what happens beyond that is in post-processing creating these virtual spaces. We go from a sort of neutral space into a virtual space. And I'm also curious, though, about what happens when we get outside of those beautiful

studio spaces or perfectly baffled bedroom studio? There are ways in which the actual location of a recording can inform the sound style and entire experience of music. I spoke with one of the founders of an organization called Street Sounds that sets up mobile recording studios all around the world and allows people to create music out on the street in collaboration with literally thousands of other musicians. And what results is an entirely idiosyncratic, spacious, and collaborative output that is unlike, I think, what we hear in these virtual spaces. Let's check it out. My name is Christopher Marinetti. I'm a composer, producer, inventor, and educator. So you run programs that put music into spaces all over in wildly different geographies.

Yes. In the case of street studios, what is it and what happens? The premise is really simple. The idea is taking the recording studio and just putting it on the street and making the process of recording music, of creating music really, really easy for people to jump. into so anybody can walk up and start working with a producer and start creating a song. And the kind of beautiful thing that happens is one person will walk up, start a song, leave, and then maybe 10, 15 minutes, an hour later, another person will come and kind of complete that song with like a chorus or a hook or a melody.

And so after the first couple times I was kind of like a Like a KATHLEEN UNDER COURGY And so after the first couple of times we were doing this I started saying to people it was It was kind of like a collective unconscious of the sound Like a sonic collective unconscious You know Jung's idea of like collective unconscious

It felt like this way of making music with people across time almost like one person would start something and then somehow someone else would just never having met them or seen them kind of completed this song in a really beautiful way. And you're not doing this just in one location at a given time? No, no. So there will be one studio happening in New York. There'll be another studio happening in, you know, Karachi. We've tried to link them before, actually, you know, linking them so that people across multiple streets are, trying to find a way of connecting to each other. That's kind of a dream. That's a vision of the future, I think. So each year, Street Studios runs a Make Music Day where you're recording Street Studios

in multiple locations. Where did you go this year? This year we were in New York. We were in Budapest, Hungary. We were in Quedito, Mexico. We were in Moscow, Russia. We were in Detroit, Los Angeles, Stanford, Washington, D.C. and I think there was, I think there might have been one other that happened in India. So walk me through, what happens on Make Music Day? So at the beginning of the day, the producers collect their gear. They try to find an economized production setup, so breaking their studio down to the simplest elements. Headphones or speakers, a computer and audio interface, a mic or two of their choosing,

and maybe one or two interfaces to interact with people. And then usually we recommend that producers bring a musician friend or a friend, vocal friend, who can help bring people into the studio who can also be kind of jamming while they're recording. So producers will take their setup. They'll set up on a local street. Sometimes they'll move around throughout the city in a day to different locations. And they'll usually set up, we usually like to go to a high traffic place,

set up for maybe two, three hours. And often what happens is it's just like, it's just kind of roll, a song just rolls into the next, into the next and in the next. A lot of producers will use Ableton Live because of the sort of ability of flipping the, you know, the traditional way of recording on a timeline, you know, flipping that vertically and making a series of time loops that change over time. So songs will play in loop and last for, you know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes while people are passing through those songs in a way. And then after two, three hours, we'll switch locations. And then the producers will work on those tracks, usually post-produce them a little bit. And then we'll send them out to everyone who participated, who gave us their

info. And that... Wow. So how many, how many participants did you have this year? Counting all the studios is well over a thousand, you know, people walking through. I mean, I'm not even totally sure of the total number, but it's a lot of people that will visit a given street studio, 20, 30 people in an hour, you know, so. And so that loop, that song, which is being created, has layers and layers of different people's perspective, sound, ideas, and city background noise going on at any given moment. Yeah, exactly. So it'll start with, you know, maybe laughter. It'll start with an element that maybe someone didn't even mean to contribute and then it will build. Or sometimes it's just, sometimes it's nice just to include a jam that, you know,

oftentimes a group of people will come and have a moment where they're just jamming. We generally try to not overproduce them. So there's enough of this sort of, I think the best ones are maybe not overproduced where there's still enough of a feeling of that particular time and place where you can kind of feel get transported to the feeling of like being on that street corner people laughing people joking singing a song that they grew up singing singing a pop song that happens to be working over this particular groove you know so it's really that feeling of like transportation that um i think that i get excited about when when that when it's working well so what are some of the surprising sort of

interactions that happened. Oh man, so many funny things. I remember one that we did in Hungary many, many years ago. There was this old, old white-haired guy who came up and he was just observing the studio for maybe 30 minutes, a long time. And finally someone else came over to him and one of the people from our team and they said, you know, would you like to join? I mean, there was a Swiss German speaker. I was like, would you like to join? And he just stepped up to the mic and made an amazing, sung an amazing song. It was like some song that is from his childhood.

And it just fit so perfectly over the groove. We were just all like freaking out. And he was a biologist or some very smart scientist, but it was a really nice moment. One of their fun story that came to mind, too, was doing this in Rafisk, Senegal, outside of Dakar. One of our fellows is a pretty well-known rapper out in Rafisk and in Dakar and Senegal. And we didn't really realize the full extent to his kind of, like, local fame. Like, he was like, the Beatles were into, you know, people would just rush his car, his entourage when he came through because he's, you know, he means so much of the community.

He's, he learned kind of hip-hop from the American style from watching, you know, MTV and growing up on the TV. But the lyrics, like what he talks about are so, so deep and address the struggle so specific to that community that people are really, really a fan of this guy. His name is PPASA, PPS. And so we were out on the streets just getting mobbed by people who were his fans, who just then jumped on the song with him and started making music. I think that's one of the fun things about this too is the kind of feedback loop. Like you do something into the microphone and you immediately hear yourself or hear it get warped is really kind of brings you back to this time of like mirth making as a child and just having fun. I think it's a nice thing to be able to see people have that interaction on the streets.

What is the role of space play in all these different geographies? How is the space interacting with the music? The space influences everything from what the sound actually sounds like to your mood, your energy, what you transmit into the microphone. I think space is such a mood maker and is also so important because we try to find space that creates a sort of permeability for anyone to come up and have an experience making music. So for this project, it's about space. is everything space is the piece in a sense what passes through the microphone at

that particular space and time is the is the work is the work of art and it's the voices of kids and old people and you know birds or whatever it is but it's it's passing through and it's it's in essence that's that's really the the gold there is is trying to draw out from that space something that you might not have heard if you are just walking down the street and are not sitting there for four hours recording people. We're going to play a clip from the most recent day of music. Could you cue up what we're going to be hearing? This clip is a mix, is actually a collage of several different street studios in action. One of them from an amazing,

these two musicians are incredible out in Russia. One is Anton. And he's actually started a whole community around beat making in Russia for young people. It's an amazing new community, Muskeliad School. And then this other sort of Russian YouTube sensation, Mitya. He was a global beatboxing champion, millions and millions of YouTube views. But then he really dug deep and became a producer and much more of a musician learning a lot of instruments. So they're one of the teams. And then there's a friend of ours, Zubin Hensler.

who's an amazing producer, trumpet player, and musician. A number of other people are on this track that I don't have time to say, but I'll say one other, this gentleman out in Detroit, Sacramento Knox, who is also doing some really amazing community building out in Detroit, did an amazing track as well. So we're going to a number of different geographies, even in just this short clip. Yeah, we're going to Hungary, Mexico,

Russia, Michigan, California, New York, Connecticut, and D.C. Wow. I am so happy Let's make music guys Let's make music I am so happy Let yourself Let yourself

Forward love Let yourself Over love Let yourself Forward love Oh, love. Let yourself. Choke the neck in the game in the squeezing.

Inhale, exhale, having trouble breathing. See, verse number two when I'm still on the row. Trying to rock the nation like my man, Jayco. Always getting grain. I'm eating cereal. And all my jealous cats, I'm yelling out Cheerio. Hey. Whoa, I really dig this.

It's almost like the drawing game, Exquisite Corpse, where you fold a paper into the three parts and then draw something on the top part and the other person can't see it and draw something in the bottom, et cetera. It creates these compositions that aren't what you expect to hear. They're not predictable in the same way as a lot of the music we listen to

is because they're not following the same rules. They're tracking these different places and styles and melding them together. I'm into this. Totally. And space here, I think, becomes almost just sort of like a default aspect, to that creative process.

You are literally getting the sounds of what's happening in the street behind you and the location that it's recorded in informs all of the stylistic and cultural background that those artists are bringing together. And for me, this takes us back actually to that David Byrne text

that I had mentioned at the top of the episode in which music is often recorded for the space that it's made in, rather than by some soul, creative, perfect moment, just hitting someone in the head and then the music perfectly comes out. He posits that music is made for the space that it's meant to be heard.

When we were listening to Madonna, we were hearing probably more of those virtual spaces, spaces that were made up, that were done with effects in a studio where her recording would have been dry and less affected than what it is to record your voice out on a street. And we live in this strange moment where the place that music is meant to be heard is, well, you know, it could be in a club, it might be out of a laptop speaker, but probably more and more is happening out of our earbuds. And I think it makes us question, are we listening in a virtual space or a physical space when the actual phenomenological experience of having earbuds puts the music directly in our head?

that it's not actually happening in a room. Yeah, and you know what I love about this discussion is whether we're listening to a single Stephen Puth track or a number of different Madonna tracks. It's like a song or multiple songs can bring you from one sort of virtual space to another. And that's part of the fun of listening to music too is being able to be transported to these places that you couldn't visit over the course of three minutes in your physical form. It is a, as you put it, a virtual experience that we're constantly being transported into different places. And I would urge listeners to think about as they're hearing a song, where are they? Locate yourself in that song. Are you next to the singer?

Are they far away? Is there something happening off to the left or to the right? And how does that inform how you experience that music? music. Does it feel intimate and personal? Does it feel psychedelic and wild? Space is one of the essential ways that we have emotional relations to our music. So check it out. And if you have particular songs that you love, both you, Nate, and all of our listeners, that use space in creative ways, share them with us. We'd love to hear what you're hearing. Switched on Pop is produced by me Charlie Harding and me, Nate Sloan.

We're mixed and edited by Brandon McFarland. Our production fellow is Megan Lubin. Our community manager is Sarah Terry, and our executive producers, Arnashah Kerwa, and Liz Nelson. We're a production of Vox Media. You can find more episodes of Switched On Pop at our website, switchedonpop.com on iHeartRadio,

the Apple podcast app, Spotify, anywhere else you get podcasts. And share your creative space. ideas with us on social media at SwitchDunpop, Twitter, Instagram, all the places. We love talking with you there. This has been a lot of fun. We'll be back again in another week with another episode of Switched On Pop. We'll see you next Tuesday.

And until then, thanks for listening.