Building on ideas from cognitive metaphor theory, Making Sense of Recordings offers a new perspective on record production, music perception, and the aesthetics of recorded sound. It shows how the language about sound is intimately connected to sense-making - both as a reflection of our internal cognitive capacities and as a component of our extended cognitive system. In doing so, the book provides the foundation for a broader understanding of the history of listening, discourses of sound quality, and artistic practices in the age of recorded music. The book will be of interest to anyone who asks how recorded music sounds and why it sounds as it does, and it will be a valuable resource for musicology students and researchers interested in the analysis of sound and the history of listening and record production. Additionally, sound engineers and laptop musicians will benefit from the book's exploration of the connection between embodied experiences and our cognitively processed experiences of recorded sound. The tools provided will be useful to these and other musicians who wish to intuitively interact with recorded or synthesized sound in a manner that more closely resembles the way they think and that makes sense of what they do.

Whether social, cultural, or individual, the act of imagination always derives from a pre-existing context. For example, we can conjure an alien's scream from previously heard wildlife recordings or mentally rehearse a piece of music while waiting for a train. This process is no less true for the role of imagination in sonic events and artifacts. Many existing works on sonic imagination tend to discuss musical imagination through terms like compositional creativity or performance technique. In this two-volume Handbook, contributors shift the focus of imagination away from the visual by addressing the topic of sonic imagination and expanding the field beyond musical compositional creativity and performance technique into other aural arenas where the imagination holds similar power. Topics covered include auditory imagery and the neurology of sonic imagination; aural hallucination and illusion; use of metaphor in the recording studio; the projection of acoustic imagination in architectural design; and the design of sound artifacts for cinema and computer games.

Whether social, cultural, or individual, the act of imagination always derives from a pre-existing context. For example, we can conjure an alien's scream from previously heard wildlife recordings or mentally rehearse a piece of music while waiting for a train. This process is no less true for the role of imagination in sonic events and artifacts. Many existing works on sonic imagination tend to discuss musical imagination through terms like compositional creativity or performance technique. In this two-volume Handbook, contributors shift the focus of imagination away from the visual by addressing the topic of sonic imagination and expanding the field beyond musical compositional creativity and performance technique into other aural arenas where the imagination holds similar power. Topics covered include auditory imagery and the neurology of sonic imagination; aural hallucination and illusion; use of metaphor in the recording studio; the projection of acoustic imagination in architectural design; and the design of sound artifacts for cinema and computer games.

Building on ideas from cognitive metaphor theory, Making Sense of Recordings offers a new perspective on record production, music perception, and the aesthetics of recorded sound. It shows how the language about sound is intimately connected to sense-making - both as a reflection of our internal cognitive capacities and as a component of our extended cognitive system. In doing so, the book provides the foundation for a broader understanding of the history of listening, discourses of sound quality, and artistic practices in the age of recorded music. The book will be of interest to anyone who asks how recorded music sounds and why it sounds as it does, and it will be a valuable resource for musicology students and researchers interested in the analysis of sound and the history of listening and record production. Additionally, sound engineers and laptop musicians will benefit from the book's exploration of the connection between embodied experiences and our cognitively processed experiences of recorded sound. The tools provided will be useful to these and other musicians who wish to intuitively interact with recorded or synthesized sound in a manner that more closely resembles the way they think and that makes sense of what they do.