If analysis means studying something in order to gain knowledge and understanding of it, then there are any number of ways of analysing recordings, and any number of reasons for doing so. Performers, recording engineers, historians of recording technology and historians of performance practice listen to recordings with quite different kinds of knowledge and understanding in mind: analysis means different things to them. The same applies to acoustic scientists, record collectors and archivists, or communication theorists, not to mention people in the A&R divisions of record companies whose job is to spot the next big hit. The list goes on.

This chapter basically assumes that your reason for analysing recordings is to gain a better understanding of them as culturally meaningful objects, and more specifically that you are primarily interested in the effect of music as experienced in performance, whether live or recorded. In that sense its orientation is musicological, although that too is a term that can be defined in different ways. Recordings are a largely untapped resource for the writing of music history, the focus of which has up to now been overwhelmingly on scores, and recent technological developments have opened up new ways of working with recordings – ways that make it much easier than before to manipulate them, in the sense that we are used to manipulating books and other written sources. I begin by introducing software that makes it possible to navigate a number of different recordings, and to create visualisations that help to heighten aural understanding of what is going on in the music.