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Dawn of the DAW: The Studio as Musical Instrument. By Adam Patrick Bell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

The twentieth-century witnessed a period of rapidly evolving do-it-yourself (DIY) recording philosophies, practices, and technologies in the United States. Gradually, DIY recording technologies and practitioners helped expand straightforward acts of capturing real-time musical performances into diverse practices of collecting, creating, and manipulating sounds. In the latter half of the century, the proliferation of professional and recreational audio technologies led to the development of two distinct high-fidelity and low-fidelity DIY movements. In Dawn of the DAW, Adam Patrick Bell reexamines the well-researched history of sound recording, paying particular attention to the subtle and drastic changes in DIY recording practices and the evolving role of twentieth-century music producers. Drawing upon an impressive wealth of ethnographic data and secondary source material, Bell convincingly suggests that contemporary DIY recording culture is the result of the evolution, rather than revolution, of twentieth-century recording philosophies, practices, and technologies which inform the current practices of DAW-dependent, twenty-first-century DIY music-makers. As a music educator, Bell attempts not only to shed light on DIY music-makers’ production practices but also their tacit learning experiences. Drawing upon Lucy Green’s influential study of how popular musicians learn, he argues that music educators should adopt DIY recording practices to create music pedagogies that are more reflective of real-world music-making and learning. However, his framing of the study within the context of music education leads to some theoretical and organizational issues that detract from the book’s overall effectiveness. Nevertheless, he provides valuable insight into the diverse music-making and learning processes occurring within DIY recording studios which continue to serve as relatively understudied ethnographic sites. Beginning with the invention of Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877, part 1 of the book examines DIY recording practices within the context of sound recording history. Bell explains how the oft-mentioned phonograph was one of the first instances of home recording, as consumers had the ability to both record and listen to themselves with Edison’s cylinders. However, the arrival of the gramophone marked a division between music recording and listening, as consumers were unable to self-record on gramophone discs. Thus, “the act of recording was no longer participatory, [sic] it was proprietary” (7). This shift sparked a division between technological processes and music-making practices, providing the foundation for the twentieth-century professionalization of audio engineering.