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Hearing for Your Audience—Beat Production as a Psychoacoustic Art
In this chapter, I focus on the ontology of beat production as a species of record creation. Record production is a psychoacoustic art form, where one person (or group) encodes an audio document (i.e., a record), and a second person (or group) receives and listens to the same document. Before this document is sent away, the person encoding also listens to it—typically, revising the audio numerous times—before eventually finalizing and distributing it.
In this way, producers hear records for listeners, on their behalf, long before these documents are released or sent away. In fact, the record creation process requires producers to constantly scrutinize their work so that they ...
