Translating Mixed Multichannel Electroacoustic Music With Acoustic Soloist to the Personal Stereophonic Listening Space: A Case Study in Jorge Gregorio García Moncada’s La Historia de Nosotros

This chapter outlines the processes undertaken during the production of a commercially released two-channel stereo record of Jorge Gregorio Garci?a Moncada ?s La Historia de Nosotros (in English, The Story of Us). As a case study, the production is interesting, as a number of quite specific issues were overcome, technical and practical, as well as musical and aesthetic, that may be pertinent to other practitioner composers and music producers who are working within the electroacoustic domain and are interested in creating recordings for domestic consumption. A strong theme emerged relating to translation: how one may translate eight channels to two; to what degree one should manipulate high dynamic range electroacoustic music to make it work in a record production context; how a live chamber music percussion element should be considered and pre- sented in terms of staging within an electroacoustically driven production; and the fundamentally different, though overlapping, production values that have to be put in place when considering the development of an elec- troacoustic composition compared to a record. Issues were considered and resolved using a range of technical and aes- thetic principles. These were seated in the literature from the disciplines of both electroacoustic composition and record production, and were applied to create the final commercial recorded artifact.