Technical work in music : Towards a new category of actors in musical and artistic works

« Roadies », « Sound engineers », « Sound designers », « Sound technicians » are common actors of musical art worlds. They are systematically present wherever sound-reproducing technologies are used. Wherever musicians play in a microphone, the sound is caught, mixed, recorded and/or amplified in order to be listened on speakers, either in the same time and place in the case of a live show, either in another time and place in the case of recorded music, either in the same time and in another place in the case of a live broadcast. In each case, technicians are employed in order to ensure the good transmission of the sound from the musician to the ears of the audience. Despite this systematic presence, the role of these actors in musical production, as well as their social trajectories, are clearly understudied in sociology. In his classical book, Howard Becker classifies technicians as « support personnel », a form of miscellaneous category « designed to hold whatever the other categories do not make an easy place for » (Becker, 1984 :2). The more recent stream of research around cultural intermediaries (Negus, 2002 ; Wright, 2005 ; Hesmondalgh, 2006 ; Maguire & Matthews, 2010) could have paved the way towards their study, but empirical works (Cronin, 2004 ; Entwistle, 2006 ; Moor, 2008 ; Maguire, 2008 ; Molloy & Larner, 2010 ; Brennan & Webster, 2011 ; Foster and al., 2011 ; Scott, 2012 ; Friedman, 2014 ; Griswold & Wohl, 2015 ; Lizé, 2016) consist mainly in the study of people funding artistic activities, « gatekeepers », distributors, and all kind of actors that do not directly act on the material form of the artistic object, whereas it is the case of technicians. Nonetheless, isolated works suggest that technician’s roles in musical works is anything but secondary. Edward Kealy (1979) showed how the restructuration of the profession in the US in the sixties heavily contributed to the emergence of the rock aesthetic, in which, among other things, music started to be played live according to what have been recorded in studio, in opposition with the convention of « fidelity » in effect before world war 2 (Maisonneuve, 2009). Ethnographic works focusing on musicians (Perrenoud, 2007 ; Rudent, 2008) also mention the leeway of technicians in recording sessions, and suggest a role that is both artistic, social, and technical (see also Horning, 2004 ; Leyshon, 2009). We are currently conducting, as a PhD thesis, a study of sound engineers in musical production in order to define more precisely in what consists technical work in musical worlds. Driving on a series of individual interviews and participant observations, we will present the figure of live sound engineers, technicians that handle the process of amplification during live performances. We will show that their role, like the one of recording sound engineers, is divided between social and technical work. We will also see that a distinction between classical music and popular music clearly exists in the approach of the amplification process. Finally, we will propose to extend the analysis of technical work in art worlds beyond the specific case of music, and we will look for common properties between our sound engineers and other kind of technical positions such as films editors (Le Guern, 2004) or translators (Kuipers, 2015). We will propose the notion of « technical intermediaries » to define a larger category of analysis that could describe technical work in art worlds.