Decis Dish: A capella as an art form

Last week, I went to the Senior Fellowship presentations to hear my friend’s talk about the record industry. One thing he said really resonated with my experience in recording a cappella music. Jamie Berk ’11 commented on how modern recording has become an artificial process for many artists. A track can be re-recorded until it’s perfect, parts can be reused elsewhere in the song and hundreds of special effects can be added through digital mastering. The final product is no longer a representation of anything the artist has ever played in any one moment in time. Suddenly the idea popped into my head that maybe a cappella music isn’t meant to be recorded in a studio.

Freshman year I ran for the Decis album producer position because I wanted to get more involved in the group and I already had some experience with recording. I had no idea that this job would dominate the next three years I spent in the Decibelles. For those of you who don’t know, there is a recording studio hidden in the bowels of the music department. You literally need to go down five flights of stairs from Spaulding Auditorium in order to reach it. This studio is particularly good at changing equipment every few terms (forcing you to re-learn how to use it), randomly losing saved data and sharing a wall with the percussion studio (nice planning).

But it’s still a great resource to have here at Dartmouth. The person whose voice I’m recording can pop into a swelteringly hot soundproof box, throw on some headphones so she can hear the electronic version of our song as well as the voices of those who have gone before her and sing her part into the microphone. I can play it back immediately and make her try again if she’s off pitch or doesn’t match the syllables perfectly, and we can match her voice alongside that of an ’09 I recorded years ago. So it’s a pretty handy way to get a recording perfect.

Yet I still can’t shake the feeling that a cappella isn’t meant to be recorded this way. Is this actually a ‘perfect’ way of recording? A cappella arrangements are about the sum, not the parts. One guitar riff moves between two different parts, the sopranos finish the phrase that the altos started, the basses and tenors alternate downbeats and upbeats. It’s about the interaction between the parts and the way they move together, grow together and somehow jell together.

I’m still putting my best efforts into finishing this CD, and will be so relieved and proud to hold the actual disc in my hand after years of hard work, but I’ve come to the conclusion that a cappella should only be recorded live. The Cords’ rendition of ‘Footloose’ is not the same without the dance moves and the way they take the stage one by one. The Subtleties carve the soloist’s name into the side of the imaginary car in ‘Before He Cheats’, but you can’t capture that in the little soundproof box. And I can’t shake the fleeting memory of my very first frat show with the Decis, when a ’10 put on a pizza costume and fell to the floor during ‘Keg in the Closet’. It’s the performance that makes a cappella so special. The visual aspects, the group dynamics — some things just can’t be captured in sound alone.