Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 1 Songwriting, Digital Audio Workstations, and the Internet Joe Bennett Abstract This chapter investigates the interrelationship between songwriting process and product, focusing on two digital tools that became available to songwriters toward the end of the 20th century: the Digital Audio Workstation, and broadband internet connectivity. Two songwriter case studies are used—a ‘digital immigrant’ (Prensky 2001) who began to write songs professionally before either of these tools were available, and a ‘digital native’ who has always used DAWs and an internet connection in his songwriting. The participants were asked to describe their creative processes in detail, and to reflect on how these tools may have influenced their decision-making and artistic direction. From these and other studies the author attempts to describe behaviours and affordances engendered by digitally-enabled songwriters and to speculate regarding these tools’ influence on the creative product. Keywords Songwriting, creativity, digital audio workstation, composition, case studies Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 2 Hypothesis: the technology of a musical tool defines its creative affordances and its constraints (Mooney 2011, 142). This chapter explores the hypothesis through the lens of digital and online tools, but I suggest it applies equally to every kind of ‘music technology’, including every musical instrument. For example, a (normal) piano covers just over 7 octaves but cannot play microtones; therefore piano compositions generally use a wide range of pitches but are non-microtonal. A bluegrass five-string banjo is tuned GDGBD, with the first of these being a single high drone string; most bluegrass banjo repertoire is played in G major and features a prominent high G note in the melody. As Thor Magnusson writes, music technologies in the hands of a skilled creator might be described as as ‘cognitive extensions’ (Magnusson 2009). Research into music composition has often focused on the creator’s agency, and much of the literature studies composers of instrumental art music aka ‘classical music’ (Roe 2007; Simonton 1994), probably due in part to the relative dominance of classical music (compared to popular/commercial musics) in many university music departments. Because music composition is usually a solitary act, researchers must deal with the question of epistemology i.e. how can we know the mind of the composer? John Sloboda (1985) identifies three possible methods—examining ‘sketch’ manuscripts, verbal interviews, and live observation (of composers or improvisers). Most prior and subsequent composer creativity research has used one of these methods, with the majority of the work favouring the interview, although some researchers (Collins 2007) have attempted to combine observational and interview methods by asking the composer to narrate as they compose. But in attempting to understand creative activity, there is a risk of ignoring the role of the tool, because the composer will likely be fluent in its use, making it transparent to the creator and therefore invisible to the researcher. There is now a large body of literature dealing specifically with the role of computer tools in creative processes (Chadabe 1984; Kimura 2003; Wanderley and Orio 2002) and a subset of this research evaluates the influence of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) on Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 3 popular music songwriters and producers (Bell, Hein, and Ratcliffe 2015; Marrington 2011, 2017; Strachan 2017). In this chapter I aim to build on this work through two case studies evaluating not only the role of the DAW, but also of the always-online working environment. Neither DAWs nor the Internet existed in their current forms before the 1990s, and therefore their use by songwriters is a recent phenomenon, even in the context of the relative youthfulness of commercial popular songwriting.1 My own previous research into songwriters’ creativity has focussed, variously, on ontology, epistemology and pedagogy (Bennett 2011, 2014b, 2013). In each of these investigations, and in prior work, I have developed a preference for three methodological approaches. First, I use a case study/ethnographic approach rather than large-scale surveys, because every song is different, and professional songwriters, for the most part, appear to eschew a ‘template’ method of writing songs. Second, I interview only professional songwriters, defined as those who are members of Performing Rights Organisations (PROs) and whose works have generated royalties. Not only does this deal with the possibility that professional and amateur songwriters exhibit different creative behaviours (Gooderson and Henley 2017), it also guarantees that there must have been an audience for the songwriter’s work (I take the philosophical position, after Csikszentmihalyi’s Systems Model of Creativity (1988), that a song cannot be be considered a creative object without a listener). Finally, wherever possible, interviewees’ comments are analysed in the context of their songs’ characteristics—to attempt to draw correlations between the creative act and the creative object. This chapter features case studies of two professional songwriters, Ben Camp and Bonnie Hayes. 2 They share several relevant characteristics; have both had international commercial success; they have written songs with computers; they have experienced adaptation 1 2 For research purposes I define commercial popular songwriting as beginning in 1952, the year in which New Musical Express published the record sales chart in the UK. The 1950s represent a significant timeframe, being the decade when sales of sheet music declined in favour of sales of recordings. This research focuses on US and UK commercial songwriting 1950s-2010s. Disclosures: Bonnie Hayes and Ben Camp are both songwriting faculty at Berklee College of Music in Boston, my own employer. Both have given permission for their interviews to be made freely available, and excerpted in this chapter. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 4 of their creative processes in response to technologies; they are currently teachers of songwriting; they are experienced collaborative songwriters; and they now use DAWs and Internet tools as part of their songwriting process. They are different ages—Camp is in his 20s and Hayes is in her 60s, meaning that they provide an opportunity to observe past and present music technologies from different career-path perspectives. Any case-study research methodology has inherent limitations. The small number of participants creates difficulties in inferring the prevalence of identified behaviours, there is a risk of researcher bias in the selection of participants, and subjects may be influenced by the observation effect. I acknowledge the first two by drawing no inferences about the popularity of particular working processes (other than the inferences made by the interviewees), and the last by using retrospective reporting—that is, the analysis of the songwriting process is only undertaken after the song is complete. Retrospective analysis of the creative process has its own epistemological challenges, but I suggest that it is an acceptable compromise between mitigating the observation effect and providing authentic evidence of process. DAWs and the Internet The DAW in its current form (as at 2017) can be defined as a computer software application that enables the user to record and store musical gestures or audio, and then manipulate these stored elements to achieve the desired sound. DAWs are multi-timbral (many sounds at once) and feature virtual instruments and effects that enable the synthesis of electronic sounds, sample playback of pre-stored sounds, and the processing of audio playback in real time. The most common layout of a DAW screen display is in a two-dimensional grid, the horizontal axis representing time, scrolling from left to right during record or playback, and the vertical axis representing individual sounds—audio or instrument ‘tracks’. This chapter refers primarily to two of the most common DAW tools 1990s-2010s—Apple’s Logic Pro and Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 5 Avid/Digidesign’s Pro Tools, both of which are considered industry standards in popular music recording and production. Our two case study songwriters have experience of using both Logic and Pro Tools. Figure 1 - Logic Pro Arrange Window (image source—author’s own) Logic’s Arrange Window shows the tracks arranged vertically, with sections of recorded music as rectangular ‘regions’ displaying the waveform (for audio tracks) or the notes (for instrument tracks). The currently selected track (in this case, the backing vocal) shows a single channel strip which includes a volume fader and access to effects plugins. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 6 Figure 2 - Pro Tools Edit Window (image source—Soundonsound.com) In Figure 2 above we see a screenshot of the Pro Tools edit window. The song displayed is Pharrell Williams’s 2013 hit ‘Happy’ (Tingen 2014). From the top down, the first 16 rows (tracks) represent the instrumentation—drums, percussion, electric piano and bass, immediately followed by 8 tracks of hand claps (3 tracks in the choruses, augmented by a further 5 clap tracks for the song’s two breakdown sections. Below the claps can be found four tracks of Williams’s lead vocal, captured in several different takes using a variety of microphones, followed by 6 tracks of block harmony backing vocals singing the word ‘happy’. At the bottom of the picture are additional vocal tracks/takes, some of which appear not to be in use. Reading horizontally, even in this low-resolution picture it is possible to see the song form clearly, with additional elements (shown as rectangular Pro Tools ‘regions’) appearing in each 16-bar chorus to thicken the texture and arrangement. The production team has added ‘markers’ for each section, similar to rehearsal markings in an orchestral score, and providing instant access via keyboard shortcuts. Edit points can be clearly seen as separate regions, typically in 4 or 8-bar sections, demonstrating that the final vocal is ‘comped’ (composited) from many takes, an activity that is considerably easier to achieve using DAWs than earlier technologies such as 2-inch multi-track tape. We can infer (by careful listening while looking at the waveforms in Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 7 the picture) that many instrumental and vocal elements have been copied between choruses; the song has clearly been assembled in the DAW from multiple short sections and takes. Although the technological antecedents of the contemporary DAW are hardware-based recording systems (Leider 2004, 53–83), their visual metaphor, as shown in the examples above, is one of an orchestral score—the music ‘moves’ from left to right, and the sounds are stacked vertically. The Internet-based tools that the case studies interrogate will be considered in three categories; asynchronous communication (email and attachments, Skype video messaging, Google Docs), synchronous communication (Skype conversations, phone calls), and cloud-sync storage tools (Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Google Drive). The first two, as we shall see, enable songwriters to record and communicate collaborative songwriting or production ideas regardless of physical location or schedules; the last enables entire recording sessions to be collaborative, simultaneously or asynchronously, in separate physical locations. Case study #1 - Bonnie Hayes Bonnie Hayes is a professional songwriter from California, who is now based in Boston. As a recording artist and session musician she had early success in the 1980s and subsequently began to produce or write songs for others, including Bonnie Raitt, Bette Midler, David Crosby and Cher (Hayes 2008). She now teaches songwriting at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Like many professional songwriters, Bonnie often starts a new song from a title, and notes that this can engender a lyric-centric approach to songwriting. I, and most pro writers, sometimes work from titles. It frames [the creative process]. It is lyric centred songwriting; […] you don’t really have a song unless you know what you are singing about. (Hayes 2016) Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 8 Hayes observes that the DAW’s layout encourages certain creative behaviours that draw the songwriter away from traditional linear lyric/melodic composition and towards a more production-centred ‘vertical’ approach; When I sit down [with a DAW] I will get a pad [soft keyboard chord sound] and I will make some kind of cool little [4-bar] loop of chords. Then I will make a beat for it. I am not thinking about the lyric or the narrative. (Hayes 2016) She believes that her pre-Internet songwriting experiences have ingrained a linear, longer-form approach to harmonic ideas, which she contrasts with a more contemporary vertical approach. Because I have been writing for so long … I tend to write a four bar set that repeats two to four times. Then I will write another part that is the antidote to the first part. [Other songwriters might] write a two to four bar pattern and then they paste it in ten to twelve times. That is how track writers write. (Hayes 2016) Hayes defines ‘track writers’ as producer-cowriters who create full-arrangement backing tracks consisting of rhythm, harmonic and arrangement ideas. Track writers typically work with ‘topliners’, vocalists who write melody and lyric only, sometimes in fragments that are manipulated and moved around by the track writers to create musical form. Hayes mentions Ester Dean, a current US-based topliner who has co-written songs for Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Britney Spears and many others (Seabrook 2012). Dean (and Hayes) often begins a DAW-based vocal writing session by referring to text-based notes previously taken on their smartphones. Smartphone note-taking apps are, of course, merely a digital version of the commonly used ‘Songwriter’s Notebook’ (Schaible 2016), but they have the added advantage of ubiquity—a phone is always on hand. Toplining necessarily requires improvising, responding in real-time to the ‘vibe’ of the backing track—meaning that the topliner is likely to be influenced by the production, tempo, arrangement and dynamics, and also by any cultural allusions to existing songs or styles. Hayes Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 9 does not consider herself a natural topliner, and instead uses the process as a starting point for ideas that can then be edited. While writing in this way, she uses the DAW to create a ‘positive feedback loop’—a flattering vocal sound in order to inspire better vocal ideas and to separate the creative and editing roles while generating melodic or lyric material. In this context, Hayes the singer represents a DAW-based tool, a temporary instrument whose function is to provide creative inspiration for Hayes the songwriter. I will start with a mic and a dark room and a pair of phones and a really good vocal sound. I will get a [signal processing] chain on my voice that hypes it. I need to create that positive feedback result for myself. A lot of people say that you shouldn’t put effects on your voice because you don’t want to lie to yourself. Well that is true when you are cutting your final vocals, because I don’t want to lie to myself either. But when I am writing I *do* want to lie to myself. [I use] a CLA compressor with a short slap [doubling delay effect] and then sometimes a large room type of reverb. [The vocal processing] just keeps me from worrying about whether I am singing flat, or the way my voice sounds on a particular note. In being creative you want to keep that editor, that critic out of that process. For me, choreographing my own positive feedback loop is just something that I have learned how to do. It gives me freedom from [my] own critical facility. (Hayes 2016) The improvisatory environment created by singing over a backing track requires Hayes to record multiple takes and then select usable ones, and she differentiates between the subconscious, non-analytical improviser role and the selective editor role. The former, she says, is representative of the listener’s own instinctive reaction to the melody and lyric. I don’t care [why I like an idea]. I don’t care to know what that reason is necessarily at any point because it doesn’t matter—[it] isn’t the thing that people respond to or love. When I improvise vocal ideas over a backing track, the words that come are clichés. Then [later] I am in an editing mode. I don’t curate it: if I liked it there is a reason. (Hayes 2016) Hayes has adapted to DAWs during her career. Having begun as a singer-songwriter who wrote on piano, she gradually began incorporating various emergent technologies through the 1980s-1990s including keyboards, hardware multi-track recorders, and drum machines, Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 10 adding a software sequencer3 in the late 1980s and introducing a computer-based DAW to her workflow during the 1990s. She believes that each new technological tool has created a predefined set of constraints that engender a particular type of musical product. Reflecting on the creation of her 1989 song Have a Heart (as recorded by Bonnie Raitt), Hayes states that the song started with a commercial brief, but its creation was part-steered by hardware technological factors, including the keyboard sound and the drum machine loop, as well as a right-hand piano shape with moving bassline, and a traditional title-driven lyric concept. Sounds for me have been so powerful. I wrote whole songs based on having a [keyboard] sound that I loved. I would find a set of chords in this sound. Have A Heart was written [using a Roland D50 preset] pizzicato with a short delay. My brother [Chris Hayes] was in Huey Lewis and The News; he wrote a bunch of their hits. He said, “We are looking for songs … we want some reggae…”. I had my other brother Kevin come over—he was the drummer in Robert Cray’s band at the time. I asked him “what is a reggae beat?”. He programmed a four bar loop [on an Emu SP1200 drum machine]. I wrote all the music and I put in the hook, “Have a heart” that night. That was all driven by the sounds of the D50, the beat that I was able to make on the SP1200 that Kevin made and the prompt of, “Write a reggae song”. (Hayes 2016) Even as a pre-DAW composition, Have a Heart’s songwriting process uses a number of partly pre-defined technological, ergonomic and commercially-derived musical objects that both influence the songwriter’s creative choices, and appear on the finished (Raitt) recording.4 We hear the commercial imperative (write a reggae song), the hardware influence on groove/tempo (a programmed SP1200 loop with a genre-typical ‘one-drop’5 reggae bass drum), a chord pattern created by maintaining a right-hand shape on the keyboard, the influence of the texture from the D50 preset timbre, and a time-tested songwriter inspiration technique (work outward from the title). These elements serve as a creative scaffold upon which Hayes builds 3 4 5 Performer for Macintosh. Released in 1985 by Mark Of The Unicorn (MOTU) software, Performer was one of the first software-based MIDI sequencers. Its successor, Digital Performer, was released in 1990 and added digital audio recording features. That these elements survive in Raitt’s recording is all the more remarkable because the song was, as Hayes states, actually written for a different artist, and was picked up by Raitt later. The bass drum does not appear on the downbeat and instead emphasises beat 2/4 or 3 depending on tempo (in Have a Heart’s verse it appears on beat 2 and 4 of the song’s 68 BPM half-time feel). Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 11 specific melody and lyric choices. Have a Heart could be described technologically as a crossover song. It contains creative practices from an earlier acoustic songwriting tradition such as title-first writing, harmonic variation from verse to chorus, and adapted chord loops at the end of the verse, but it contains elements of what I suggest later became common DAWinfluenced practices, such as being inspired sonically by a keyboard patch, using chord loops and working from a fixed, repeating drum loop. Since the early 2000s Hayes, like many songwriters and producers, has collaborated with others online. She highlights two tools that are important to her creative workflow— Dropbox and email. Dropbox works by synchronising the local files on one computer with cloud-based server storage; the files can be then shared with any other online computer and synched to the local hard drive. It is a useful tool for DAW-based musicians because it balances the benefits of online collaborative work (speedy, distance-neutral and asynchronous) with the way DAWs necessarily record audio (by writing multiple audio files in real time to the computer’s hard drive). Offline DAWs can record audio but cannot share it with other computers; multitrack audio files are too high-bandwidth to be recorded reliably over most Internet connections in real time. Importantly, Dropbox works in the background without user intervention—when sharing files users can operate their recording/writing sessions normally, and the most recent versions will automatically sync to all connected DAWs. Hayes recalls a period in the early 2000s when she was operating a studio and coproducing for other songwriters. At this time, she worked with remote musicians through file sharing. Note that in the description below, Hayes requires only individual audio takes from her guitarist collaborators, and the process is maximised for time-efficiency, financial cost and bandwidth usage. We might reasonably speculate that file-sharing bandwidth was an even more important creative consideration at this time, broadband speeds having increased by approximately 50% year on year. (Nielsen 1998; updated 2016) Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 12 Rather than getting a guitar player into the studio for a four-hour session for which the client is paying … I relied on a trusted network of people with their own home studios. I had my four guitar players—the guy that plays pedal steel and lap steel and slide; the Bill Frisell [sonic textures] guy; the rocking guy who writes pop hooks; and the guy that plays mandolin, banjo and so on. I would send the stems [individual audio tracks] or the whole session [entire Pro Tools file] if we had enough time to upload all that. Or sometimes I would just send a [stereo audio file of the] mix. I would say, “Give me four takes. I need a chorus part that is kind of a jingle jangle part. I need an intro hook of some kind. I need rhythm guitar and I need an acoustic part”. They have Pro Tools; I have Pro Tools. We are trading files through Dropbox. That is still the way people are doing it. I just sent files this morning to Chris Dugan from Green Day and we are using Dropbox. (Hayes 2016) Here, then, the creative process is facilitated by the transparency of the tool—all parties are using the same version of Pro Tools and the same file-sharing platform. The DAWs are operating locally, writing files in real time to each satellite studio’s hard drive; the online file transfer occurs automatically and invisibly through Dropbox. Hayes implies that the faster the broadband connections, the more likely the whole Pro Tools session is to be shared. Slower connections encourage only individual audio (WAV or AIFF) files to be shared. Whichever method is used, the multi-device approach affords literally mobile creativity. I like to have access to stuff without having to download it. Luckily for me Dropbox doesn’t limit how many computers I can have. I have all my devices connected to Dropbox. I can listen to any rough [mix] on any device that I have—my three different iPads, my two computers or my phone. I can get [to the audio] anywhere that I need it. (Hayes 2016) Hayes also observes that good file management skills from all concerned are essential if efficient distance collaboration is to be achieved; The thing about Dropbox is that many people don’t understand the way that it works. [Inexperienced users] will listen to a file when you give them access and then move the file on their hard drive [revoking others’ sharing access]. But most pros are pretty good at [using] the cloud at this point. (Hayes 2016) Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 13 Email, by contrast, is lower bandwidth and requires manual user interaction and file management. Hayes, like many other songwriters, uses email in three significant ways during the collaborative songwriting process—for sending lyric drafts and edits as text, for sending audio attachments (e.g. of rough mixes or draft musical ideas), and for discussing/negotiating with co-writers. These activities often overlap in a single email exchange. Hayes notes that in face-to-face co-write sessions time may run out, leading to the collaboration continuing over email. In the scenario she describes below, the ever-important test for ‘singability’ of lyrics becomes fragmented, with each co-writer working from a shared backing track. [At the end of a session we might say] “These lyrics are not right on point, so why don’t we each work on them?”. Usually I send a draft, they send their revisions back and we are kind of passing them around. Then the person who has [the most recent draft] will work from a [backing] track that we make, even if it is just guitar. Then we each sing the song with the track and see how the words lay and how they fit. (Hayes 2016) Hayes is a self-confessed early adopter; she has, over a long career, evaluated each emergent technology and made a decision about whether it will be useful to her creative processes. For her own songwriting, the forced unfamiliarity with the tool can itself be a creative advantage, enabling exploration of new and unpredictable compositional choices; I have been pretty much an expert Pro Tools user for 20 years. It was the DAW I settled on. But right now the thing that is driving my writing is learning Ableton Live. It’s not easy, especially if you are used to timeline type DAWs with the Mix window and the Edit window. [Ableton’s] idea of having little ‘scenes’ is so alien to the way that I am used to thinking about working in DAW that I am really having to sort of redo my brain. My own formula for writing has gotten a little bit boring to me, so using [an unfamiliar tool] is a way to shake it up. (Hayes 2016) Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 14 Figure 3 - Ableton Live Arrangement Window (image source—author’s own). Although time can still be represented horizontally, this window is a less literal metaphor (than Logic of Pro Tools) for an orchestral score. The user can quickly manipulate effects, sample selection, synthesis parameters, and the song’s timeline, without leaving the arrangement window. Ableton Live’s interface affords certain creative activities that Hayes describes as less ‘linear’ than those engendered by Logic or Pro Tools. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 15 Case study #2—Ben Camp Ben Camp is an early-career songwriter who has achieved international success in the US and Europe, with notable pop co-writes for Victoria Justice (US) and MainStreet (Netherlands) and many techno/house dance and remix credits as an artist/producer under his own name. He is a graduate of, and now a member of the songwriting faculty at, Berklee College of Music in Boston (Berklee 2016). The beginning of Camp’s professional songwriting post-dates the birth of the DAW, and all of his commercial releases date from the 21st century. He is a ‘Digital Native’ (Prensky 2001) 6, in that he has had access to DAWs throughout his career, and operates today in a permanently online environment. Like Hayes he is an early adopter of new technologies, but as we shall see he uses a wider variety of digital tools and relies more heavily on Internet access. Reflecting on a recent face-to-face writing session 7 with three other co-writers, he recalls (like Hayes) a writing session that began with a patch—a specific keyboard sound, which, he says, immediately suggested some other musical characteristics; I brought up a [piano sound] patch on the computer and then started tweaking reverb settings to get a nice piano tone. It had a long reverb which meant we were probably going to be doing something down-tempo, probably more of a ballad, and maybe a little bit more sparse arrangement because otherwise the reverb would get cluttered up and you’d lose the entire effect of the piano. (Camp 2016) Here we can observe a musical constraint (tempo) being introduced in response to a DAW stimulus—the reverb decay of the piano sample software instrument. This sound was used to perform a very familiar building block in the form of a vi-IV-I-V chord loop, with each 6 7 We need not discuss here any pedagogical debates related to Prensky’s arguably controversial educational claims; the term ‘Digital Native’ is relevant in this context because it describes someone young enough never to have known a non-digital world. Camp is a songwriter for whom digital tools have always been available; Hayes can remember using pre-DAW songwriting methods. In Prensky’s terms, Camp and Hayes represent a Digital Native and a Digital Immigrant respectively. The song, which is not yet released at the time of writing in October 2016, is called ‘I Wish I Could’; the artist is Emily Luther. For research purposes I was given access to the pre-release recording. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 16 chord played for one full bar each. Even at this early stage, Camp recalls, the songwriting team was considering what are arguably elements of arrangement in the form of particular chord inversions. These were used less to define the finished song than as a vehicle to drive the next idea. In the following section we can observe the three now ‘fixed’ elements—chord loop, tempo and keyboard patch—framing the iterative and interdependent creation of lyric, chord inversions and melody ideas. Lyrically, Camp searches for the protagonist’s emotional perspective, and uses his knowledge of song form conventions to balance lyric detail (in the verse) with summative simplicity (in the chorus). From the sonic cue, we built a four-bar chord loop 8 but we were still playing around with voicings and rhythmic comping patterns. We’d try singing something and we might adjust the piano to fit. And then we’d adjust the piano and try singing something else. The first lyric [contributed] by one of the other writers was “It kills me when you’re good to me / because I know I’ll never give you what you need.” Sets up the whole story. He had pitched it as a chorus idea [but] I instantly knew that’s what we should be opening [the verse] with. I thought, “If I’m this person… ‘I can’t give you what you need’, what am I going to say?” And I said, “I’m sorry.” Well how do we make music out of that? So I decided to simply repeat it. That meant that the chorus could be a bit simpler: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wish I could change.” We decided that when we went to the I chord9 in the third bar [on the word [‘change’], we should do an inversion so that it didn’t feel so final. That emotion didn’t really lend itself to [a harmonic resolution]. (Camp 2016) The co-writing team, here, appears to be considering every creative decision in the context of how the final recording will sound, rather than compartmentalising songwriting, arrangement, recording and production. Traditional pre-DAW songwriting decisions (melody, harmony and lyric) are made in tandem with arrangement decisions such as chord voicings and production decisions such as reverb time and synth patch—and all of these elements can be iterative influences on each other. And in Camp’s co-writing team, not only are two different 8 9 The song is in G major, performed at 64BPM, and the pattern is | Em / / Em7 | Cmaj9 / / Cmaj7 | G / / / | D / / / | - an extended version of the commonly used vi-IV-I-V loop, but with some very specific piano voicings. Camp uses standard Roman numerals for references to harmony—he actually says “the ‘one’ chord”. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 17 software platforms in use for different functions, the DAW is not the only technology in the room—phone apps also play a part. We use Ableton Live for the scratch vocal, the piano sound and the sound design. Ableton doesn’t perform as well for doing vocal comps10, so when we were ready to record something a little bit more final, we switched to Logic Pro X. Part of my writing process is that I don’t like my voice, which means that I have to rely on other co-writers’ vocals. So I pitch melodic ideas to Emily; if it sounds good when she sings it back, we take a voice note [using a smartphone audio recording app], so that if we forget what it was later, we can go back. So usually, whenever there’s a moment that gets anybody in the room excited, we pull out a voice note and record that. (Camp 2016) The phone app provides immediacy, and ensures that good melodic ideas are retained without interrupting the workflow. Although the DAW itself is capable of recording vocals at any time, the co-writing team appears to choose usability and speed over sound quality in the early stages, when writing the melody and lyric. As the co-write progresses, the team works for more than an hour on melodic ideas for the ‘I’m sorry’ chorus, eventually settling on a vocal take that the artist records into the DAW. Camp’s creative contribution continues after the co-writing session has finished. At the end of the session, I was tasked with recording vocals, comping vocals, tuning vocals and doing a vocal mix. So even after the singer has left the room … I’ve still got four different versions of the verse to choose from. It means I can easily switch back and forth between melodies and make compositional decisions much later in the process. At that point the closing line of the chorus was, “I wish I could change.” I felt like it was too closed… too resolved. So I cut off the word ‘change’. We ended up with, “I wish I could change. I wish I could,” and it gave this really, really nice unfinished feeling to the chorus. (Camp 2016) This is an example of a DAW-specific songwriting practice. Although it is of course easy for any songwriter to subtract notes or words from a sung phrase without computer assistance, the compositional gesture is inherently DAW-native; an audio section is sliced, 10 ‘Comping’ or vocal compositing—splicing together the best parts of several takes into a single vocal performance; comping has for many years been common in popular music vocal recording and pre-dates DAWs. Logic Pro X has an easy to use mouse-drag comping feature. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 18 copied, the copy is moved ‘to the right’ and truncated. This single-syllable subtractive vocal edit here effectively changes the melody, lyric, phrasing and, subtly, the protagonist’s expressed feelings. The DAW empowers Camp as a songwriter to create a sung phrase that was not fully generated by the topliner’s vocal. Like Hayes, Camp alludes to the potentially overwhelming set of creative choices provided by DAWs, precisely because creative decisions can be altered or reversed later in the process. He observes that there is a risk of the DAW’s complexity disrupting his creative workflow. It’s Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice [(Schwartz 2004)]—a huge problem with [DAW-based co-writing]. I’ve got a 1TB drive on my computer. I’ve got easily 70GB of samples. If I’ve made up my mind to change the kick drum, I’ve got another 2GB to 3GB of kick drums to choose from. Unless I really know what I want and where to find it on my hard drive, I could go down a very deep sinkhole and ruin the vibe of the session for the other people in the room. (Camp 2016) Aware of this risk, Camp has developed specific strategies to ensure that good ideas can be captured without disrupting workflow. Indeed, he notes that sometimes such workarounds can create desirable but unintended song artefacts, particularly with the inclusion of a smartphone; I might have a rhythmic pattern in my head but without the drums available or the mic set up—and I don’t want to slow down the writing session. So what I’ll do is pull out the iPhone, slap it out on my knees, record it and then import it to the DAW. Oftentimes that will be an artefact that stays on the finished record. (Camp 2016) Like Hayes, Camp observes that in a co-writing session his analytical mind must be subservient to his creative voice, and he often takes a lo-fi approach to recording new ideas, deliberately separating the songwriter and the producer roles. There was a song I was working on out in Los Angeles, and I was in a room where the acoustics were terrible with a $200 mic—not an ideal recording situation. But I had a great percussionist in the room, so we relied a lot on his groove. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 19 But I just said, “This is the sound that I’m listening to now in the creative process. So let me build everything else around that. We’ve got a roomy tone and it feels like you’re at a house party and somebody’s just picked up a box of Rice-A-Roni [dry rice ready meal] and is jamming on it. That’s the record that we’re making.” So, in that case, then the topline started vibing around that. I had somebody play a mouth trumpet solo as part of the hook. It all just felt like you were hanging out with your buddies. We weren’t worrying about the final record. When I start thinking about, “What is the finished record going to be?” that’s usually when I end up putting myself into analysis paralysis which can cause damage to the creative process. (Camp 2016) The presence of DAWs and smartphones means that every idea can be recorded, and Camp believes that their omnipresence in his songwriting has affected the development of his aural memory as a composer; I have never written songs without the availability of tech. As a result, I have not had much impetus to strengthen my musical memory. I constantly have technology to rely on, so I can make ten different versions of something. I don’t have to make commitments, I don’t have to make decisions, and I do not have to remember things. I can always go back to the voice note [audio file], and that limits … how far I can explore without the crutch of having to go back and listen again and again. (Camp 2016) Camp uses online tools in his songwriting, and compared to Hayes he has integrated more of them into his co-writing workflow. Everything he creates is permanently Cloudsynced, using Dropbox and similar tools. His phone is always available to record audio and text and to export either straight into the DAW and/or to the Cloud via Wi-Fi; collaborators may be in the room or online. When embarking on a session with a new co-writer, creative approaches, prior work and template track ideas will be shared online in advance of their meeting in person; Before the session starts we might send SoundCloud links so we can get familiar with each other’s work. I’ll maybe do doing a little onine research about them, looking at Facebook or Twitter pages, how many fans they have, what music they’ve done in the past. I’ll probably hop on Spotify to check out their catalogue and see what’s getting the most plays. I’ll email them and ask what kind of music they’re into, and ask them to name two or three songs they wish they’d written. (Camp 2016) Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 20 Camp is an advocate of Google Docs in songwriting, and uses multi-user editing on the shared document; he describes instances where all the co-writers have the same lyric open on their smartphones, which, being online, will automatically update across all devices when an edit is made. This means that edits can take place before, during or after a writing session, and can occur from anywhere. The sharing features are used in conjunction with revision history (the ability to recall any previous lyric edit) and the comments tool. This combination of factors effectively spreads the creative process of lyric writing—across the creative timeline, across collaborators, and across geographical distance. But like the DAW itself, Google Docs can generate content very quickly, and introduces unlimited decision-reversal opportunities, forcing the songwriter to find strategies to commit to ideas in order to maintain workflow and critical judgement. There was a time when the act of typing words into a computer felt [to me] like songwriting, whereas at this point in my writing career it’s become clear that a lyric is not a lyric until it’s sung. You have no idea what it’s going to sound like, what the impact of it’s going to be until you hear it coming out of somebody’s mouth. When I’m writing [text with a word processor] I can tell that my mode of thinking and my creative mode are different than when I am walking around the room, [inventing] lyrics off the top of my head. I can sit down on Google Docs and I know what the melody is, I know how many syllables I’m matching and I know what the rhyme is. And I can come up with 20 different lines to fill that and I can have the singer sing all of them. But disproportionately, it is the things that I come up with while walking around the room that are more likely to make it onto the record. But the technology gives me this false sense of security in that I can see the quantity of what I’m writing… that makes me feel “Yes, I’m really songwriting now.” (Camp 2016) Camp is an enthusiastic user of videoconferencing—a synchronous online tool—and he notes that there are creative advantages beyond the simple expediency of being able to collaborate over distance. Reflecting on a recent coast-to-coast USA co-write (Ryder, Camp, and Pramik 2015) over Skype, he observes that despite the limitation of latency (which prevents playing together in real time), the technology can create a virtual ‘side room’ for cowriters to develop ideas in a semi-isolated way; Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 21 Oftentimes, collaborating with people [in a room], I can’t go into my own head for too long because somebody’s going to ask me a question. So I can’t let a musical idea stew, or work on something in private. With Skype, I can press mute on my microphone or theirs. It’s like an optional one-way mirror. When we were writing ‘Ruins’ that actually is how the chorus came about. We were kicking around ideas and [Ryder] said, “Ruins,” and I said, “Okay, give me a minute.” I muted [all of the Skype audio] and I just worked out a chord progression and how I felt the word ‘ruins’ would sit in that… Then I popped back in and said, “Guys, I’ve got it.” In the meantime, while I was doing that, David had been working through to construct some drums and beat sounds. Now, they’ve taken what I’ve given them and what they’ve recorded with the chorus and they take a sample of Ryder singing, “Ruins,” and start pitching it up and down, and use it as a sample embedded into the beat. (Camp 2016) Here, the videoconferencing medium has significantly affected the collaborative team’s dynamic, as well as influencing its task distribution and working methods. The mute buttons allow the group to be synchronous or asynchronous at any time, and ideas can be developed together or alone based on workflow efficiency or creative impulse as needed. If this form of songwriting has a pre-Internet antecedent, it is perhaps the idea of stepping out of the room, but I suggest that the separation of audio and video, and the ability to share independently created digital artefacts and text or weblinks in real time, play a significant part in defining this as a new way of working for songwriters. Affordances or constraints… or both? In addition to Hayes and Camp, both of whom were interviewed specifically for this chapter, I have observed in other songwriters many of these technologically influenced creative behaviours—in my own interviews (Bruford 2012; Turpin 2010; Ashurst 2010; in Bennett 2014a) and also in published songwriter interviews (DeMain 2004; Egan 2004; Seabrook 2015; Zollo 1997). These technologies are unquestionably ‘enablers’ of creativity, but they also have the capacity to change a songwriter’s creative activities through the design and constraints of Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 22 the computer interface itself. The technology also influences how songwriters interact with it and with each other: both Hayes and Camp give examples of their songwriting teams planning a co-writing session’s structure around the available technology, both live in the room and time-shifted into the future. The DAW’s affordances and constraints are shaped not only by its capabilities but also by its graphic user interface (GUI) design, and it is possible that we ‘hear’ the results of this design in contemporary popular music. Computer interface design is not uncontroversial, given its power to affect every user action, and recent scholarship (Breinbjerg 2011; Magnusson 2006) has begun to consider it as a subdiscipline of aesthetics. Hayes, for example, states that she is currently learning Ableton Live because she believes that its interface will change her approach to songwriting; she is using the tool intentionally to change the music she creates. The orchestral-score style vertical layout of most DAWs (e.g. Logic’s ‘Arrange Window and Pro Tools’s ‘Edit Window’) may encourage loopbased writing, because the default setting of the software is to display only a few bars horizontally on screen, with several vertically stacked tracks. This layout, I suggest, makes the songwriter more likely to work on vertical production elements and instrumental layering, and to pay less attention to linear elements. I refer to this creative behaviour as ‘verticality’, and it is one of a number of activities that are encouraged by DAWs. In the following section, I have attempted to synthesise taxonomies of possible behaviours when songwriters interact with DAWs and online tools. This list is not exhaustive, but each point represents a behaviour that has been observed or reported by more than one songwriter. Considering that all of my interviewees have experience of co-writing with others, we may infer that some of these behaviours are widespread in contemporary commercial songwriting. Each one of the behaviours is titled according to the songwriting activity the technology affords or encourages. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 23 DAW affordances Verticality: the XY axis and playback-looping facilities of a DAW may encourage users to work on a small section of music, pushing the songwriter toward ‘vertical’ creative activities (arrangement and production) at the expense of ‘horizontal’ activities (melodic form or lyric narrative development). Role-shifting: the DAW’s ability to record release-quality audio at any time has blurred the lines between songwriting and production activities, meaning that creative decisions about either activity may take place at any time in the production chain. Nonpermanent generation: the knowledge that creative contributions may not be permanent can empower songwriters to generate ideas more freely and prolifically, albeit adding more subtractive editing later in the process. Time-shifting: offline non-linear editing enables melodic and lyric decisions to take place after a co-writing session. Paradox of choice: DAWs allow the commitment to creative choices to be delayed indefinitely, which can slow down workflow. Subtractiveness: DAWs can enable large amounts of content to be generated quickly with few workflow incentives to delete ideas, requiring the songwriter to discard a larger amount of material (than might be generated in a pre-DAW era writing session). Distraction: Operating the DAW can take a songwriter away from content generation, and risks slowing workflow. Some songwriters may undertake non-DAW activities (e.g. walking round the room singing) to mitigate this. Constraining the inner critic: the temptation to DAW-edit content immediately may slow the production of new ideas; some songwriters may avoid editing activity to mitigate this risk. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 24 Internet affordances Enhanced workflow: co-writing sessions require ongoing generation and evaluation of creative stimuli (Bennett 2011); videoconference and real-time file sharing tools can accelerate workflow. Pre-writing: Internet tools enable co-writers to learn quickly about others’ work and make some creative decisions about a co-write before the team meets. This creates greater opportunities for creative promiscuity, with some songwriters having many writing partners. Post-writing: Internet tools may enable collaborative songwriters to continue to work on ideas after the writing session has finished; post-writing can occur in a variety of locations and environments, and the results can be shared with the team. Post-writing affords time-shifts and place-shifts in the creative workflow. Tag teaming: cloud-syncing services such as Dropbox and email make it easier for songwriters to collaborate linearly and asynchronously, regardless of location. Mobile connectivity: the ubiquity of smartphones combines the older technologies of dictaphone, notepad, CD collection and reference library in a single device; some songwriters have integrated smartphones fully into their workflows and may even use them to generate usable audio artefacts. Conclusions and further work Are technological affordances and constraints unprecedented in composition? I speculate that they are not. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, a piano-playing composer is encouraged by the nature of the interface to work non-monophonically. When composing ensemble music straight to score, writing a long, solo unaccompanied part requires page turns or new single-sheet pages, whereas writing additional instruments is done on the same page. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 25 This simple fact of ergonomic workflow must have encouraged many a composer to substitute texture for linear development—so the affordances and constraints of a DAW’s main arranging window may represent a meta-echo of the 12-stave orchestral score on which it is implicitly modelled. And pre-DAW popular songwriting was no less influenced by its historical interfaces, particularly the guitar. Reflecting on the composition of ‘In The Midnight Hour’, guitarist Steve Cropper states (Mulvey 2015) that the riff was composed by moving a barre chord in line with the fret-marker dots on his Fender Telecaster. So in this respect, the DAW is perhaps just another interface, with its own work habits that affect the musical outcome in some way. But internet connectivity is a newer arrival, and its effects on creators are more difficult to ascertain due to the manifold ways users can interact with online tools. It changes not just the potential practices of music creation, but also the information flow in and out of the songwriter’s creative brain. It can be an information source (using a rhyming dictionary website), a communications tool (Skype or Dropbox collaborations), a sonic reference point (Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube) or even a sonic palette of its own (downloadable sample sets). This increased information flow is additional input/output, but may also itself be a subtractive constraint, by offering the constant opportunity for distraction from interiorised creative processes. Smartphones, as both Camp and Hayes attest, may function as reference tools, notebooks, recording devices or communication conduits, and may serve all four functions in a single writing session. So it is certainly accurate, if unremarkable, to state that songwriters are influenced by the technologies they use. These case studies, along with other music creativity research cited at the beginning of this chapter, demonstrate that songwriters make creative decisions because of, in spite of, or in sympathy with the available technologies. The DAW encourages some creative activities while discouraging others, and we can reasonably infer that a change of process will lead to a change in the product. Considering that almost all commercial mainstream popular music is created using one of only a handful of DAW software applications, their interface Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 26 designs could be substantially influencing the way songwriters work. It is clear that many successful songwriting teams collaborate using online tools; these certainly provide convenience but also appear to engender creative behaviours that influence the finished product. So if we know that process influences product, what does this mean for the continued evolution of the popular song? Our case studies show two writers whose songs contain musically specific echoes of the creative technologies they used, but my research methodology only shows results on a per-song basis. Future research may be able to take a ‘big data’ approach, and draw correlations between the availability of a particular technology and the statistical frequency of a particular characteristic. There are certainly characteristics of contemporary songs that are more demonstrably more common now than before DAWs and The Internet. For example, at the time of writing, the current top 10 worldwide Spotify streaming songs11 (all presumably created using DAWs) make substantial use of 2- and 4-bar harmonic or audio sample loops, with more than 50% of them consisting entirely of a single loop. Contrast this with an equivalent chart from 30 years previously (October 1986)12, and all of the songs use longer chord chains over a greater number of bars. Has verticality crossed from songwriter habit to listener preference? Our case studies’ observations about the influence of technologies on their lyrics highlight an even greater challenge for songwriting research, because although lyric writing is clearly responsive to technologies, it is also particularly receptive to the cultural zeitgeist — and has always been. This, and the challenges of analysing lyric themes and characteristics using consistent metadata, means that we may never know the extent to which lyric writing has 11 12 October 2016 (Spotify streaming top 10): Closer by The Chainsmokers; Starboy by The Weeknd; Let Me Love You by DJ Snake; Cold Water (feat. Justin Bieber & MØ) by Major Lazer; The Greatest by Sia; Side To Side by Ariana Grande; In the Name of Love by Martin Garrix; My Way by Calvin; Heathens by Twenty One Pilots; One Dance by Drake. October 1986 (UK singles top 10): Every Loser Wins by Nick Berry; True Blue by Madonna; All I Ask Of You by Cliff Richard And Sarah Brightman; In The Army Now by Status Quo; You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon; Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles; Rain Or Shine by Five Star Tent; Suburbia by Pet Shop Boys; Don't Leave Me This Way by The Communards; Midas Touch by Midnight Star Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 27 changed in response to new technologies from the 1980s to the 2010s. Approximate calendar correlations between technologies and song characteristics are easy to find, but to identify the reason a song sounds the way it does, I have yet to find a better method than to ask the songwriter. DAWs blur the lines between composer, lyricist, arranger, engineer, performer and producer (Strachan 2017, 48–49); this has implications for copyright and may already be provoking a re-evaluation of the word ‘songwriter’. Popular song is arguably now more of a timbral and production language than ever before, and DAW production is clearly a large part of why listeners like a particular recording. Perhaps this state of affairs foregrounds timbral considerations for listeners, and downgrades ‘sheet music’ characteristics such as melody, lyric and harmony in song appreciation. This has implications for creative ownership and creators’ careers, because most international laws describe two different music copyrights that can be owned—the musical work and the sound recording (Demers 2006). How might these laws be interpreted when the creative act of DAW songwriting creates both copyrighted objects simultaneously and indistinguishably? Should producers be considered songwriters for royalty distribution purposes? The Internet affords different distributions of creativity across time and place, and changes what it means to create a song with others. As new technologies emerge, working practices will continue to adapt to them, and we will inevitably hear the results, whatever they may be, in the finished songs of the future. Oxford Handbook of Creative Process in Music – Oxford University Press, 2018 – [final peer-reviewed version] 28 REFERENCES Ashurst, Jez. 2010. Jez Ashurst interview - on collaborative songwriting (April 2010) Interview by Joe Bennett. Audio/unpublished. Bell, Adam, Ethan Hein, and Jarrod Ratcliffe. 2015. ‘Beyond Skeuomorphism: The Evolution of Music Production Software User Interface Metaphors’. Journal on the Art of Record Production, no. 9. Bennett, Joe. 2011. ‘Collaborative Songwriting – the Ontology of Negotiated Creativity in Popular Music Studio Practice’. 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