Baptiste Bacot (University of Oslo)
Bass music production under the microscope. Challenges and perspectives of a DAW musicology

What exactly happens in the black box of the EDM production studio? How is the creative process transformed by Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), and how is rhythm—“the raison d’être of EDM” (Butler 2006)—designed in grid-based environments? Often made with DAWs, Bass music brings together a range of bass- and percussion-driven EDM subgenres such as dubstep, drum’n’bass or glitch-hop. This presentation shares early results of an ongoing project that scrutinizes the production of Bass music by looking at a corpus of Ableton Live Sets (ALS) from Mr. Bill, a professional EDM producer, DJ, and educator. 

A highly valuable resource, these files are particularly suited to engage with the introductory questions: they open access to the music production activity and the creative process at the DAW level. However, the volume and complexity of the corpus pose a series of methodological challenges as well. ALS are explored as XML files in which production information is retrieved by computational means. They also allow for partial exports of tracks (stems) and subsequent signal analysis. In turn, these quantitative approaches invite us to revisit the original ALS files with a qualitative perspective. Ultimately, the corpus study suggests that EDM creation is as much about sequencing sounds (organising events on the grid) as it is about shaping rhythm through production decisions (designing spectral and dynamic properties of musical sounds). The final part of the presentation introduces the ethnography of EDM production I recently started to broaden and balance the ALS corpus results. 

Baptiste Bacot studies the materiality, the creativity and the performance of electronic music with mixed methods, including ethnography and computational musicology. After earning a PhD in Music, History, Society from the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris, France), he conducted research at STMS Lab at (Ircam, Paris), and at the CRIStAL computer science Lab (University of Lille, France). He is now postdoctoral research fellow working on rhythm and music production at RITMO, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion at the University of Oslo (Norway).