Music, for the most part, obscures the story of its making. These beautifully constructed edifices (finished, suspended, awaiting the press of a play button) render the labour of their making – in all its complexity, repetition, agony, pleasure, indecision and epiphany – pretty much invisible. But not, as the analyses in this book show, entirely inaudible. The focus is, refreshingly and simply, the sound of popular music as it has been rendered in the digital era (coming to pass sometime around 1980). The result is a text of directness, clarity of purpose, compelling music, insightful analyses, revealing discussions of production practices and nuanced extrapolations to the broader complexities of the shifting socio-cultural reception of popular music over the past few decades.

Divided into eight chapters, the central six focus on prevalent techniques and technologies in popular music production. Chapter 2 addresses a new kind of spatiality permitted and encouraged by digital delay and reverb; Kate Bush's ‘Get Out of My House’ (1982) is used to show how those treatments meaningfully disrupt a transparent signification of natural space. Chapter 3 explores the effects of hyperaccurate timing and synchronisation permitted by the emerging MIDI protocol and its associated devices taking Prince's ‘Kiss’ (1986) as the exemplar; Chapter 6 counterpoints this discussion with the ‘accurate inaccuracy’ (p. 109) of now-possible impossible grooves afforded by the extraordinary capabilities of technology to manipulate sound in time (Brandy and Snoop Dogg provide the early 2000s’ wonky soundtrack). Chapter 4, taking a cue from Portishead's ‘Strangers’ (1994), traces the shift in the value and use of noise, previously inevitable and ubiquitous in analogue recording processes but now a counterpart to pure, digital silence. Chapter 5 reconnects with the temporal dimensions of music by exploring the ability to cut and paste in unprecedented quantities and how the audibility of this process inflects our perception of temporal coherence (or how different temporalities can be simultaneously at play); Los Sampler's’ ‘La Vida Es Llena de Cables’ (2000) and Squarepusher's ‘My Red Hot Car’ (2001) show us how it's done. Chapter 7 couples software engineering and a far-reaching analysis of (primarily) the voice as it is rendered distant yet intimate, human yet machine by Auto-Tune; and, in extending this argument, the power of popular music to comment (at least) upon the complex realities of contemporary political and cultural life. The conceptual and philosophical dimensions of the book's argument reaches its height in this nuanced discussion of gender and self (pp. 126–31) prompted by Lady Gaga's vocal staging in ‘Starstruck’ (2008), which follows on from the vulnerable isolation of Bon Iver's ‘Woods’ (2009) in which Auto-Tuned vocals express an inability to express (pp. 117–20).

At either end of the book, Chapters 1 and 8 set up and recapitulate the main themes of the text. Chapter 8 would make a good starting point for someone wanting to map out the contours of the argument in a little more detail before getting to the main course (or as an introductory set-text chapter for students). In sum, the authors make three claims about the effects triggered by the digitisation of technology (see p. 133): (a) there's a new compositional palette; (b) there's a new sense of space and time; and (c) the relationship between humans and machines is once again placed under the microscope. It seems bold to claim that the very fabrics of our art form have been cast anew (sounds, time, space), but the argument is robust: all of the techniques that are possible using digital technologies were possible in the previous analogue era, but they proliferate numerously because they're now so much easier to carry out (pp. 40, 101 and 103, for examples). Yet what can be explained as a quantitative change in fairly standard operations is really more profound when understood in terms of the qualitative shift that came about. Alongside the ease and speed of interventions and manipulations, the undo function encouraged an experimental attitude because greater risks could be taken (pp. 111, 114 and 139). Those who remember the one-step limit of the undo function on earlier versions of Cubase, for example, may also remember the extra level of care one took before chopping something up (and the relief when undo steps became pretty much infinite).

That relationship between technological capacity and the music is at the heart of this book. The two aspects are entwined as mutual players in the creation of new, beguiling sounds; but neither one (the computer) nor the other (the art) is subservient. As Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen have it: the listener becomes ‘aware of the recording/production medium's double function, to mediate and to be that which is mediated’ (p. 89, original emphasis). This perceptual awareness that technology is in the frame partly arises from the sheer number of interventions that must be going on (nobody could be so bad at editing that they hadn't noticed all those pops and clicks) but it also leaves its trace in other ways. The analyses in this book are fascinating because they do what good analyses should do: ‘analysis sharpens the listener's ear, enhances perception and, in the best of cases, deepens appreciation’ (Agawu Reference Agawu2004, p. 270). What I thought was happening in Prince's ‘Kiss’ turns out to be something else: the sonic thumbprint of side-chain noise gating. I now hear the music differently.

Society (this nebulous bunch of listeners) hears the music differently, too. A particularly neat aspect of this writing is that equal consideration is given to both production practices (see the documentary information provided as the backdrop to the explanation of Prince's exploitation of side-chaining, pp. 52–7) and listening practices. The theme of listeners’ historical contingency runs throughout the book, explained as a gradual process of absorption and naturalisation. The superimposed spatialities of Bush's music might have been confusing and disorienting when first encountered, but probably not now; the noise on mid-20th century recordings probably got perceptually louder once the context of silence was encountered (listeners stopped listening through and starting listening to this noise; see p. 68); the glitchy sounds of technology failing are part of the sonic fabric of popular music rather than some experimental by-product; and the artificiality of Auto-Tune that was denigrated in the late 1990s was made powerfully expressive a decade later.

As a listening punter, this is all interesting stuff, but it's also grist to my mill as a practitioner and lecturer. The examples covered in the book articulate much about my own production practices (from the mundane actions I take for granted to the more fundamental desire to be experimental); the historical backdrops offered in each chapter (e.g. delay and reverb (pp. 21–7), MIDI (pp. 49–51), recording eras (pp. 62–6), software development [p. 104]), along with the analyses, offer crucial overviews that students (of technology, of analysis, of sound or music generally – distinctions that don't seem so important in a book like this) will find invaluable. The prose is light and fleet-of-foot; heavyweight ideas (e.g. ecological theory, spectromorphology) are invoked in passing as theoretical context but the focus remains stringently (thankfully) on the sound of popular music as it results from the use of digital technologies. Some of these tracks will certainly find their way into my analysis and composition teaching; and all of these tracks will find their way back into my regular playlists (but I'll hear them differently this time around).