Pioneering Work in Live Sound Studies
I was among the first scholars to complete a PhD focused specifically on live sound—and likely the first to examine live sound production and reception through an interdisciplinary lens. My dissertation, The Co-Evolution of Improvised Rock and Live Sound, combined ethnographic fieldwork with historical, technical, social, and economic analysis. Centered on the jamband community, the project explored how musicians, engineers, and fans co-developed technologies, aesthetics, and participatory culture.
A Cultural Approach to Technology
The dissertation was framed by Afro-diasporic paradigms, including improvisation, groove, embodied listening, and both secular and religious audience traditions. This framework helped me argue that live sound is more than an artistic and technical craft; it is also cultural domain that actively shapes musical meaning and audience experience and while also being transformed by social, musical and technological innovation.
Building a Field
Since completing my PhD at Brown, I’ve worked with scholars and industry professionals to expand this research into a larger initiative. Live sound remains underexplored across fields like Western musicology, popular music studies, sound studies, and audio technology research. As co-author of Live Sound Matters (Routledge, 2021), I helped document the emergence of live audio production as a distinct industry and cultural force beginning in the 1960s.
In 2024, I helped organized the first Live Sound Studies Online Symposium, a public forum connecting academic, technical, pedagogical, and creative perspectives. My recent article, “Credit Where It’s Due,” outlines the mission of this growing field and calls for a more inclusive understanding of all participants in the live music ecosystem.
Teaching Through Research
My research directly informs my teaching. I encourage students to approach literature, history, music, media, and culture not as isolated fields, but as interconnected systems shaped by people, technology, systems and institutions. My classes often include fieldwork, collaborative research, and multimedia analysis.
Students might create podcasts, mind maps, or soundwalks; investigate oral and musical traditions; or map visual and sonic environments. Just as my scholarship blends theory and practice to help document cultural and social history, I help students to develop habits of inquiry, observation, and connection that have shaped my own interdisciplinary, multicultural research.
Since I regularly present my research at international conferences, exploring themes like the cultural work of live sound, or the role of engineers and fans in shaping musical genres, I also encourage students to experiment with presenting their own arguments and ideas. Public speaking not only deepens my research, it models the kind of interdisciplinary curiosity, critical thinking, and communication I want my students to practice.
WRITING
2024 Reeder, Nick “Credit Where It’s Due: A Research Network Studying the History, Practice, and Broader Significance of Live Audio Production.” Live Sound International. June 2024 Issue.
In this article, I outline the mission of Live Sound Studies, and briefly summarize some of the papers given at the first Online Symposium, held in February, 2024. A more detailed summary will be available on our website, and the conference is currently viewable on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLUe0B-6pgAELiKZKbLmZYQ
2021 Dahlie, Christopher, Johannes Mulder, Sergio Pisfil, and Nicholas Clark Reeder. 2021. ‘Live Sound Matters.’ in Christopher J. Anderson and Sergio Pisfil (eds.), Researching Live MusicGigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals (Routledge: London).
In this chapter, we present historical examples taken from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in order to introduce readers to an understudied area of music production: live sound. The live sound industry as we now know it emerged around the mid-1960s in response to demands for amplified performances of popular music. It formed within broader areas of the live music industry, including concert touring, logistics, promotion, production, ticketing, technology development, and manufacturing.
Drawing on our ethnographic, historical, technical and sociological research, as well as analysis by other scholars and industry figures, we show that the progressively mediated nature of music requiring large-scale amplification occurred alongside new ways of envisioning the role and importanceof concert sound.
Like broadcasting and recording, live sound has been a transformational domain of cultural production and economy. In its first two decades, it was an endeavor that required not only the development of new socioeconomic systems, logistical systems, and technological artifacts and practices, but also the creation of new participatory roles for sound technicians and other crew members. Musicians, audiences, and other participants also formed novel roles and relationships in the process of developing new esthetics, social norms, technologies, and markets for amplified performances. Today, live sound is an omnipresent part of aglobal audio culture increasingly shaped by the creative, economic, and social significance of live music. Live sound is central to what makes live music a meaningful part of people’s lives, whether at mass participatory events, at home or in virtual configurations. Live sound matters.
2014 Reeder, Nicholas Clark. ‘The Co-Evolution of Improvised Rock and Live Sound: The Grateful Dead, Phish, and Jambands’, Brown University.
This dissertation examines the co-development of improvised rock music and live sound engineering during formative periods. It is an extended case study of a distinct music culture, an in-depth analysis of the symbiotic growth of live performance, sound technology and audience culture, and the first PhD project to look at the history of audio production and reception through through the lens of Afro-diasporic social and musical paradigms such as improvisation, polyrhythm and groove, social dance performance settings and religious culture.
The study argues that in collaboration with engineers and fans, the Grateful Dead and subsequent “jambands” such as Phish and Widespread Panic have developed a paradigmatic model of music culture encompassing three interrelated components: the performance of improvised dance music, the creation of live sound, performance and recording technology, and the development of fan communities and techno-cultures.
In order to document the role of sound production in shaping the powerful experiential aspects of concerts, the project examines the technologically mediated aspects of performances from the perspectives of musicians, fans and sound engineers. I base my arguments on participant observation and ethnography, combined with cultural, historical and technological analysis.
The project focuses on the role of teamwork between performers and engineers and reciprocity between band and audience in constructing genre. The dissertation shows that, in contrast to academic narratives, live sound and studio recording co-evolved alongside other domains of audio, conditioned by high fidelity, acoustic engineering practice and ideology, and that within the jamband community’s participatory techno-culture, both amateur and professional live recording practices generated a related set of aesthetics, values and ideas about authenticity. This study also builds on historical work that scholars of music technology and sound culture have pursued at the intersection of sound fidelity, acoustic science and listening culture. It shows that beginning in the 1960’s, advances in live performance and audio production converged with broader social and cultural movements to spur a creative renaissance in popular music driven by the demand for live music.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:386265/
https://brown.academia.edu/NickReeder
SELECTED ACADEMIC CONFERENCE PAPERS
2024 Live Sound as an Interdisciplinary Field of Study, Live Sound Studies Online Symposium, (SUNY Fredonia, NY), February, 2024
Audio engineer and ethnomusicologist Nick Reeder began the symposium by reviewing recent scholarship underlining the increasing socioeconomic and cultural importance of live music. He argues, however, that the focus and methodology of live sound studies should be inclusive and strive to encompass the practices, values and experiences of its full range of participants, including audiences. He suggests that initial studies should be undertaken using ethnographic and sociological methods of observation and analysis, in order to outline the social history of live sound since the 60s and to provide a technically simplified explanation of the basic roles involved in live performance, production and reception so that a wide readership be able to engage with it these themes profitably.
Reeder argues that biases towards the study of music as text (classical music) and commodity (popular music) have helped diminish the attention afforded to live music, also dismissing the art and technique involved in live production by treating amplification/production as simply the passive replication of performance. Drawing on concepts of social setting and historical meaning taken from classic models of music culture and genre, as well as testimony from industry professionals, he introduces themes from case studies presented in the collaborative chapter “Live Sound Matters,” written by the organizers of the symposium, Chris Dahlie, Jos Mulder, Sergio Pisfil and Nick Reeder. To make the point that live sound plays the central social role of facilitating communication between participants at an event, he highlights the evolving role of stage monitoring technology and shows how early 70s innovators sought to improve sound fidelity across multiple domains of audio: PA amplification, instrument and system design, and both studio and live recording and monitoring systems. These advances helped move Afro-influenced genres like improvised rock into bigger venues without losing qualities of sound and audience interaction associated with more intimate performance settings.
Finally, Reeder suggests that we produce a volume of key terms for live sound studies. He provided an example, acoustic functionality, to help explain the role of live sound in facilitating basic aspects of communication that, prior to the use of amplification and stage/in-ear monitoring systems, would have been handled by performers and other participants by physically positioning themselves or their instruments.
2019 The Controller as an Agent of Unpredictability: Electronic Music, 60s Counterculture, and the Early Live Sound Industry, The Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production, Annual Conference, Boston, MA, May 2019.
2017 Colorado Bluegrass, Jambands, and Modern Concert Sound, Society of Ethnomusicology, Annual Conference, Denver, CO, October 2017.
2017 “A Religious Experience From 18th Row Center:” The Importance of Live Sound to the History of Audio Production. International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Annual Conference, Kassen, Germany, June 2017.
2016 Matrix Recordings: The Role of Jamband Fans in Creating a Live Sound Aesthetic. IASPM US/Canada, Annual Conference, Calgary, Canada, May 2016.
2014 Fan “Matrix” Tapes: Amateur Technologists, Professional Engineers, and Improvisational Rock Community. IASPM ANZ, Annual Conference, Dunedin, New Zealand, December 2014.
2009 Jeff Stevenson’s The Full Speed Tea Offering: Technology, Community, and Musical Meaning at the Berklee School of Music. New England Society of Ethnomusicology Conference, Yale University, New Haven, CT, May 2009.
2009 Using Hypermedia For Research, Brown University, Providence, RI.
RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS
2013 Dissertation Research Fellowship, Brown University, Providence, RI
2011 Dissertation Research Fellowship, Brown University, Providence, RI
2010 Dissertation Research Fellowship, Brown University, Providence, RI
2009 Tinker Grant for Pre-dissertation Research in Salvador, Brazil
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