Dr. Toby Seay is Professor of Music Production in the Music Industry program. He has had a long career in the music industry as a musician, recording engineer, technical consultant, and audio preservationist. Seay has engineered recording artists such as Dolly Parton, Randy Travis, Delbert McClinton, Ringo Starr, David Wilcox, Kirk Whalum and many others. Seay has recorded numerous Gold and Platinum Certified recordings as well as 8 Grammy winning recordings.
Seay is a researcher of music production and sound engineering practices, sonic aesthetics and mediative perspective, and audio recording preservation practices, specializing in multi-track materials. He is a founder and member of the Society for Music Production Research (SMPR); member of the Audio Engineering Society (AES); voting member of the Recording Academy (Grammys); member of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) where he served as President from 2017-2020; and Chair from 2020-2021 of the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA).
Seay is the Director of the Drexel University Audio Archives, which is home to the Sigma Sound Studios Collection.
Dr. Toby Seay examines archival resources, sound engineering practice, and studio workflows as influencing factors in creating identifiable sonic signatures on sound recordings, positioning the sound engineer as the author of sonic aesthetics. Additionally, he examines audio preservation practices and standards, specializing in multi-track audio formats, and how these resources can be used within music production education and musicology research.
Seay’s research in music production is centered on Sigma Sound Studios and its role in the creation of the Sound of Philadelphia. The Sound of Philadelphia, often referred to as Philadelphia Soul, is an African-American soul music genre, which came to prominence in the 1960’s with its peak in the 1970’s. His particular focus is on the sonic characteristics that give the music recordings created at Sigma distinction from the music recordings created elsewhere. Using archival materials from the Sigma Sound Studios Collection in Drexel University’s Audio Archives, Toby focuses on the effect of non-musical entities on the Sound of Philadelphia, such as acoustical environments, recording procedures, and recording technology, making the distinction between the imprinted sounds of the captured recording versus the musical content of record production. This research sits at the nexus of sound studies, ethnomusicology, and popular musicology.
As an audiovisual archivist, Seay’s research focuses on multi-track audio preservation. Identified as a research gap in archival studies, the preservation of multi-track audio materials presents a unique, under-documented set of preservation conditions, such as format obsolescence, file and metadata management, and media preservation. This research looks at these complex conditions and provides metrics, models, and solutions for the preservation of analog multi-track objects. Furthermore, this research aims to showcase the importance of multi-track objects as research materials for music production research and education and how institutions with strong internal user-groups, such as musicologists, music production students, audio engineering students, and library science programs, are well suited to providing the necessary resources for the preservation of multi-track collections. Seay created the Drexel University Audio Archives as a laboratory for preserving the Sigma Sound Studios Collection (donated to Westphal College in 2005) and creating an accessible resource for music production.