Music- How Does Recorded Music Affect Listener Expectations?

This post is more of an open-ended question than an answer.

How much has recorded music changed listener expectations for how music should sound?
In the history of music, recording technology is really a recent development, but the effects of the recording process are now inescapable.
The vast majority of listeners hear much more recorded music than they do live music. So through conditioning, recorded sound is heard as “normal” and live sound is heard as “different”. Depending on the live sound setup, almost all of the effects applied to a recording can be replicated live including reverb, pitch-correction, and echo effects. The reverb effect in particular is so matched to some styles of music like 80s ballads that when performed live, artificial reverb is added to the singer’s microphone.

Pitch-correction or the brand name of Autotune may be the most criticized music technology. But that could be because it is more talked about in mainstream media than other effects. It first appeared in the late 90s and became popular due to the effects it created on Cher’s hit Believe. In some ways, listeners felt that they were being misled. An original performance may not have been pitch perfect, but computers allow it to become perfect. No longer was there any doubt that recording engineers could manipulate every aspect of a recording.

However, the very basis of recorded music is manipulation that cannot be captured live.

In the early days of radio, singers described as “crooners” became popular as they experimented with distance from the microphone. Instead of singing on a stage a distance from the audience, crooners got extraordinarily close to the microphone. The result was that the singer sounded so close to the listener, as if the performance was just for you. This sound could not have been found in a large concert hall.


Along with the perceived closeness of the sound, clarity of the text and diction had to be altered for recorded singing. The technique of diction used in large performance spaces sounded ridiculous when recorded, as if every syllable was over-pronounced. Singers could use a more natural inflection with consonants to record vocals.

I find that preparing singers to use good diction in a live, unamplified performance can be difficult because the vocalists they listen to in recordings are not pronouncing their words in a way that is necessary to be understood from a distance. The result is that using diction required for a stage feels unnatural to the singers and does not sound normal to them because the recordings that we consider “normal” singing do not pronounce words that way.


The recording process not only changes the sounds of singing, but also instruments. Although not quite as drastic a change as singing, instruments could be played in different ways that would not work in unmodified ways. Beyond the obvious amplified instruments like guitars and keyboards, composers writing for recorded orchestras could feature combinations of instruments or solos that maybe would not work in a live setting but when miked closely could be heard easily. It is not uncommon in a film soundtrack to have a solo instrument heard clearly over an entire orchestra. When composers try for a similar effect with a live, unamplified orchestra, they may find that their solo instrument is buried if the rest of the orchestra is to play at the same volume.

Despite so many of the adjustments made to recordings happening after the fact, I do not see recording and audio manipulation technology as cheating. Rather, I see it as another layer of creativity in music. It’s as if the Digital Audio Workstation (audio editing software) is an instrument itself and the audio engineer puts their own touch on the music through their edits.


Once audio recordings became widely available, music was never going to be the same. This does not mean that recorded music has replaced live music or made it obsolete. In some ways, computers have allowed recording technology of some kind to be more accessible to most musicians. Since many more musicians have the ability to present polished recordings, perhaps the ultimate judge of a performer’s merit is how well they can perform live.

What are your thoughts? How much has recorded music changed our expectations for live music?