The Boyd Arts Blog

Why Can't I Listen to the Duruflé Requiem in the Car? One of the side effects of my teaching position is that I’m spending a fair amount of time in the car. It gives me a lot of time to think and react to various media that I consume. I’ve also been working on implementing more robust recording archives for my program and figuring out some metadata aspects of that.  Recently, instead of thinking about recording, I was in the mood to listen to some Duruflé—particularly his requiem and the whole “Quatre Motets...” This was a task that should have seemed rather simple: pull up Amazon Music and ask. Well, beyond Speech to Text having no idea who Duruflé was or that Ubi Caritas was something other than “duraface covy caritas”—don’t get me started on the larger work, apparently called “duraflake California motet”. When I did finally stop and manually type “Duruflé Requiem” into Amazon Music, it found me a couple versions that were fine, but after starting to listen, when my listening wa...

What's the point? The traditional business model for the recording engineer has decreasing viability. For decades, the engineer served as the gatekeeper of a specialized, highly technical environment, representing a necessary upfront cost in the creation of a widget to be sold. In this role, the engineer was integral to producing a high-quality product that could provide a return on the investment of the recording. When the final output was a tangible unit—a record, a tape, or a CD—the value of the engineer was easy to quantify. Money was spent on the front end to ensure the product met the standards required for the marketplace. Today, the widget has become much more a byproduct of a process than a product to be sold. As recording tools have become integrated into every laptop and phone, the traditional path to recouping a front-end investment has disappeared. For most musicians, the recording is now a digital asset consumed for free or for fractions of a cent. Without a direct co...