From the 1980s through the early 2000s, a golden era for southern roots music, producer and three-time Grammy winner Scott Billington recorded many of the period’s most iconic artists. Working primarily in Louisiana for Boston-based Rounder Records, Billington produced such giants as Irma Thomas, Charlie Rich, Buckwheat Zydeco, Johnny Adams, Bobby Rush, Ruth Brown, Beau Jocque, and Solomon Burke. The loving and sometimes irreverent profiles in Making Tracks reveal the triumphs and frustrations of the recording process, and that obsessive quest to capture a transcendent performance. Billington's long working relationships with the artists give him perspective to present them in their complexity—foibles, failures, and fabled feats—while providing a vivid look at the environs in which their music thrived. He tells about Boozoo Chavis’s early days as a musician, jockey, and bartender at his mother’s quarter horse track, and Ruth Brown’s reign as the most popular star in rhythm and blues, when the challenge of traveling on the "chitlin’ circuit" proved the antithesis of the glamour she exuded on stage. In addition, Making Tracks provides a widely accessible study in the craft of recording. Details about the technology and psychology behind the sessions abound. Billington demonstrates varying ways of achieving the mutual goal of a great record. He also introduces the supporting cast of songwriters, musicians, and engineers crucial to the magic in each recording session. Making Tracks sings unforgettably like a "from the vault" discovery.

Pro Tools First: Fundamentals of Audio Production introduces users to the power of Pro Tools software and marks the first steps toward developing core skills in audio production. The book covers the basic principles you'll need to complete a Pro Tools First project, from initial setup to final output, and it is designed for those who are new to professional audio production and also for experienced users who are unfamiliar with Pro Tools software. This book is laid-out to mirror the creative process of audio production-from set up, to the recording process, editing and mixing, and then creating the final files. Interspersed within each chapter are short hands-on tutorial exercises which give users a chance to explore the concepts and techniques being discussed and hear the results. For those interested in gaining official Avid certification, this book is also a valuable introduction for further learning and through the Avid Learning Series curriculum.

Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue—a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine sounds the statue might make—The Sculpted Ear rethinks this relationship in light of discourses on aurality emerging within the field of sound studies. Ryan McCormack argues that the sounding statue is best thought of not as an aesthetic object but as an event heard by people and subsequently conceptualized into being through acts of writing and performance. Constructing a history in which hearing plays an integral role in ideas about anthropocentric statuary, McCormack begins with the ancient sculpture of Laocoön before moving to a discussion of the early modern automaton known as Tipu’s Tiger and the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Finally, he examines statues of people from the present and the past, including the singer Josephine Baker, the violinist Aleksandar Nikolov, and the actor Bob Newhart—with each case touching on some of the issues that have historically plagued the aesthetic viability of the sounding statue. McCormack convincingly demonstrates how sounding statues have served as important precursors and continuing contributors to modern ideas about the ontology of sound, technologies of sound reproduction, and performance practices blurring traditional divides between music, sculpture, and the other arts. A compelling narrative that illuminates the stories of individual sculptural objects and the audiences that hear them, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the connections between aurality and statues in the Western world, in particular scholars and students of sound studies and sensory history.