How Fiona Apple’s amateur room acoustics welcome listeners through the revolving door
In 2020 musician Fiona Apple released an album recorded completely in her Venice Beach home, with no professional DAW training, thereby riddling the album with dog barks, passing cars, doorbells among the household sounds. Apple stated that the rooms in which she recorded Fetch The Bolt Cutters had not been treated with acoustics in mind. The sleek wooden floorboards provide natural reverb across the album, found most prominently in the percussion.
The track “Ladies” exemplifies how these conditions affect the drums. They sound thin and distant which would traditionally be frowned upon from a mixing perspective, however, Apple used this to create a rich and complex stereo image by pairing the room reflections with the closely miked vocals. In “For Her”, the stereo field is instantly expanded by sporadic clapping and there is audibly more space in the vocals. This can be heard quite specifically at 0:22 seconds; the size of the room can be heard in the subtle reverberance of the lower harmony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ewavfe-mMQ
Apple took a risk with her project, as the highly reflective surfaces could have easily buried the inflexions of her musical score and absorbed the bass which as a female vocalist with a lower register would flatten her performance and make the shrill accents far too abrasive to listen to. Despite these hypothetical ailments of an untreated home studio, Apple embraced her lack of knowledge to produce an album that felt disobedient and clumsy and intimate that I don’t believe she could have completed had she not pushed the boundaries of acoustics.
References:
C Battman, 2020, “The homemade insight of Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters”, The New Yorker, viewed 14th Oct 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-homemade-insight-of-fetch-the-bolt-cutters
E Nussbaum, 2020, “Fiona Apple’s art of radical sensitivity”, The New Yorker, viewed 14th Oct 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/fiona-apples-art-of-radical-sensitivity
E Sokol, 2021, “Does Wood Absorb or Reflect Sound?” , Better Soundproofing, viewed 14 Oct 2021 https://bettersoundproofing.com/does-wood-absorb-or-reflect-sound/#Does_Wood_Absorb_or_Reflect_Sound_-_Acoustic_Properties_of_Wood
R Handler, 2020, “Allow Fiona Apple to reintroduce herself”, Vulture, viewed 14th Oct 2021 https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/fiona-apple-fetch-the-bolt-cutters.html
