Choir recording practices and choir sound libraries have both established themselves in the workflow of modern film composers, but has audio technology now advanced to a point where one person can perform and engineer an entire choir? This project aims to demonstrate autonomous recording practice for a full range, mixed-voice choir within an independent studio for professional applications.
Autonomous studio practice simulating live performance is a popular professional workflow for creating scores for motion picture, particularly for pre-dub stage demos. In this research, the sonic signifiers of live choir recording and the musicology of artificial choir creation by a solo practitioner is examined through the lens of the parent disciplines of studio production and vocal performance. A series of practice-based case studies, through a portfolio of recording works, and comparative analysis reveals practice-led methods of producing sonic liveness in artificial choir recordings in a project studio. The application of modified dynamic performance, audio engineering production levels, reverberation, and psychoacoustic phenomena are investigated as tools to create a sense of aesthetic liveness. This doctoral project suggests that a hyper-real or surrealist approach to traditional choir and its recording practices, can be adopted via self-production, heavily mediated by technology, transforming an ancient art form into a new sonic profile. Six works were chosen for case studies that would present a diverse range of characteristics of choir recordings. This variation encouraged general themes to be developed from the insights and tensions that arose from the case studies.
The conclusions revealed, producing a choir with one vocalist, does allow for realism to be achieved when compared to reference recordings. Though this does not quite achieve the sound of a real choir, however, this method would produce enough realism to meld successfully with an orchestral score for film.