Discover Society

The latest issue of Discover Society features pieces by two members of CURB.

David Beer offers a reflection on the invisibility of the recording engineer in our experience of popular music and culture. Based on his research with recording engineers at various stages of their career, Dave highlights the hidden labour of this profession, and the varied meanings they bring to their own understandings of their work. Thinking about their role in shaping our mediated worlds brings us a heightened sense of the balance between the artistic and technical elements of the contemporary soundscapes that enrich our cultural lives.

Daryl Martin offers a comment on a 1960s proposal for the regeneration of a large part of Staffordshire through the opening of a new centre of higher education; the Potteries Thinkbelt. It never got built, but revisiting the New Society archives and excavating this plan might give us food for thought as to the way in which higher education has developed to this point, and where it might go in the future. If nothing else, it highlights the gap in aspiration and creativity between how Cedric Price thought of higher education then, and how we've become accustomed to thinking about the sector now.