IASPM UK’s online ‘London Calling Conference featured our British Academy funded research and more on this can be found here: https://london-calling-iaspm2020.com/paul-thompson-sue-miller-barkley-mckay-leeds-beckett-university-uk/

Archaeological researchers are finding new ways to explore historical events, practices and processes. A particularly potent method is experimental archaeology, which involvescontrolled experimentation in order to answer specific questions. For researchers working in the fields of music performance and music production, this approach can help to gain new insights into what happened during a recording session, and more importantly, why certain decisions were made. The starting point, or the archaeological data here, are the recordings that were produced in Havana and New York in the late 1950s and late 1960s. A method of working backwards from the finished product, or reverse engineering, can only reveal some information of the processes involved however. Recreating the conditions of a recording session as closely as possible can provide an additional direction of analysis (Ingold, 2009) as the creative process is examined forwards.