School of Performing Arts - Theses

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Distilling an essence: the structuring of the recorded pop/rock song form

Farnan, Peter ( 2014)

For the last fifty years, in Western culture, the recorded popular song has found expression in myriad styles and evinced rich and diverse responses, while adhering to consistent underlying structural conventions. This practice-based research project examines these conventions from musicological, semiotic and phenomenological perspectives and explores how an approach attuned to the conventions can result in an expressive realisation of the form; an ineffable ‘essence.’ To this end, the methodology will extend Roland Barthes’ concept of the grain of the voice to include the songmaker’s experience of the materiality of the composition and also the sonic surface texture of the recording.