This article is one of a series exploring the spatialization of sound sources in recorded songs and how they may be understood (see also ‘The Virtual Performance Space in Rock’, twentieth-century music 5/2). Its theoretical basis is multi-faceted, utilizing notions of ecological perception, of the sound-box, of the singer's persona, and of interpersonal distance in communication, as well as further concepts from cognitive science. It focuses particularly on image schemata and proxemics, exemplifying them across a range of genres, while also addressing them critically, for instance from a feminist perspective. Finally, it explores how this theoretical basis helps us not only to understand the contribution of spatialization to the interpretation of songs and their meanings, but also to shed light on the role of other musical domains.

When a stereophonic track is heard through headphones or over loudspeakers, the image of a virtual performance is created in the mind. This virtual performance, which exists exclusively on the record, can be conceptualised in terms of the ‘sound-box’ (Moore 1993), a four-dimensional virtual space within which sounds can be located through: lateral placement within the stereo field; foreground and background placement due to volume and distortion; height according to sound vibration frequency; and time. From the mid-1960s, the increasing shift from mono to stereo meant that producers and engineers had to contend with the notion and potential of a song's sonic arrangement or mix, resulting in a disparity of sonic placement and a diverse range of sound-box configurations. By 1972, a normative positioning of sound sources within the sound-box was established, which we term the ‘diagonal mix’. This article focuses on the consolidation of this norm by means of a ‘taxonomy of mixes’ and the utilisation of visual representations which detail the sound-box configurations of a variety of pop/rock, easy listening and psychedelic tracks from 1966 to 1972.

Analysis of the spatial elements of popular music recordings can be made by way of the ‘sound-box’, a concept that acknowledges the way sound sources are perceived to exist in four dimensions: laterality, register, prominence, and temporal continuity. By late 1972 producers working across a range of styles and in different geographical locations had adopted a normative positioning of sound sources across these dimensions. In 1965 no such norm existed. This article contextualizes the notion of the sound-box within academic discourse on popular music and explores the methodology employed by a research project that addressed the gradual coming-into-existence of the norm, which the project defined as the diagonal mix. A taxonomy of types of mix is offered, and a chronology of the adoption of the diagonal mix in rock is presented.

This article develops a theoretic base for the hermeneutics of spatialization in recorded popular song, drawing from work in ecological perception, cognitive linguistics, proxemics and some music semiotics. It uses this base in order specifically to observe a range of uses of the deictic expression ‘here’ in the lyrics of popular songs, and from this observation to construct a typology. It draws from a very wide range of Anglophone genres, stretching across most of the previous century and beyond, exploring the varying extents to which the music that encompasses such lyrics helps to fix a type of location indexed by ‘here’. Such an exercise forms part of a larger programme to establish a grounding that permits a reasoned response to Ricoeur's call to interpret the text by means of disclosing a ‘possible way of looking at things'.