Ethnographic Approaches to Discographic Production in Sardinia, Italy

Marco Lutzu

2024-01-01

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Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss how, even within the domain of traditional music, the processes involved in the mediatization of a musical performance inevitably bring a certain degree of ‘opacity’ that depends both on the constraints of recording technologies and on the ‘performative project’ that shapes every recorded artifact. Fundamental for the analysis of the four case studies presented here were my eight years working as manager and sound engineer assistant in a Sardinian recording studio, together with my archival research on historical recordings. Drawing on my training as an ethnographer, I argue that an ethnographic approach to the recording studio can make these processes of mediatization more transparent, offering new methodological and theoretical perspectives to address the study of the technological mediatization of musical performance.