Scholarship

Alan Williams earned his Bachelor of Music, Third Stream Studies from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1982. He earned his M.M. (2001) and PhD (2006) in Ethnomusicology from Brown University. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts Lowell since 1995, achieving the rank of Professor in 2016. A former Chair of the Music Department, he currently serves as Coordinator of Music Business. From 2018-2020, he was the Richard and Nancy Donahue Endowed Professor for the Arts. He has served on several organizing committees for the Art of Record Production and for the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.

Book Chapters

“Welcome to the Machine: Musicians, Technology, and Industry” inThe Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production, Simon Zagorski-Thomas and Andrew Bourbon, editors. Bloomsbury Press, 2020. 

"Surround Sound Auteurs and the Fragmenting of Genre" in The Art of Record Production 2017 Proceedings. J-O Gullo, Editor. Royal College of Music Press, 2019. 

“Weapons of Mass Deception: The Invention and Re-invention of Recording Studio Mythology” in Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound, Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett, editors. Bloomsbury Press, 2018.

"The Problem and Potential of Commerce: Applied Ethnomusicology and the Music Industry" in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. Svanibor Pettan and Jeff Todd Titon, editors. Oxford University Press, 2015, revised 2019. 

“‘I’m Not Hearing What You’re Hearing’: The Conflict and Connection of Headphone Mixes and Multiple Audioscapes” in The Art of Record Production: an introductory reader for a new academic field. Simon Frith & Simon Zagorski-Thomas, editors. Ashgate Press, 2012.

Peer-Reviewed Journals 

"Technostalgia and the Cry of the Lonely Recordist" in The Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 9, April, 2015.
http://arpjournal.com/technostalgia-and-the-cry-of-the-lonely-recordist/

“Putting It On Display: The Impact of Visual Information on Control Room Dynamics” in The Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 6, June 2012.
https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/putting-it-on-display-the-impact-of-visual-information-on-control-room-dynamics/

"Celluloid Heroes: Fictional Truths of Recording Studio Practice on Film" in The Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 5, July, 2011.
https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/celluloid-heroes-fictional-truths-of-recording-studio-practice-on-film/

 "Navigating Proximities: The Creative Identity of the Hired Musician” in The Journal of the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association (MEIEA), Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 59-76, November, 2010.
http://www.meiea.org/Journal/Vol10/Williams

“‘Pay Some Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain’ – Unsung Heroes and the Canonization of Process in the Classic Albums Documentary Series” in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 166-179, July, 2010.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2010.01234.x

“‘I’m Not Hearing What You’re Hearing’: The Conflict and Connection of Headphone Mixes and Multiple Audioscapes” in The Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 4. September, 2009.
https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/%E2%80%9Ci%E2%80%99m-not-hearing-what-you%E2%80%99re-hearing%E2%80%9D-the-conflict-and-connection-of-headphone-mixes-and-multiple-audioscapes/ 

“Divide and Conquer: Power, Role Formation and Conflict in Recording Studio Architecture” in The Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 1, February, 2007.
https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/divide-and-conquer-power-role-formation-and-conflict-in-recording-studio-architecture/ 

“Been Drowning Me Out: Sonic Aesthetics, Neo-New Traditionalists, and the Performance of Process” in ECHO, the online journal of the Dept. of Musicology at UCLA Vol. 4, No. 2, October, 2002.
http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume4-issue2/folk/williams.html

General Press

“David Cassidy: a legend, lovingly manufactured” in Campus News, December, 2017.
http://cccnews.info/2017/12/09/david-cassidy-a-legend-lovingly-manufactured/

“Rocking With The Wrecking Crew” in HOWL Magazine, March, 2015.
http://howlmag.com/rocking-with-the-wrecking-crew/

Click here for more about Alan’s career in music and academia.