Phil Spector is often referred to as one of history's first true music producers, and his famed ’Wall of Sound’ has been the model for many future musical productions. However, Spector's productions can also be seen as an early manifestation, among others, of a much more general change in the auditory popular culture around 1960 away from the conventional approach to musical sound as something that depends on a musical performance and, secondary, its technical reproduction and towards a conception of music as a form of design. Hence, Spector's productions make a favorable material for a more general investigation of the relationship between music and design.

Despite the rather extensive literature on Spector and his music, and on sound recording and sound production in general, so far the different aspects of Spector’s design have not yet been subject of a broader phenomenological and aesthetic investigation. ”Music and Design” explores the key elements in Spector's musical project through an analysis of his use of repetition, accumulation and synthetizised sound in hit recordings such as He's a Rebel (1962) and Be My Baby (1963). It is argued that Spector’s productions are basically characterized by a displacement of the auditory focus from media external conditions to the musical sound as simultaneously a more synthetic and mediatized and a more massive and ‘massified’ soundscape. This mediatization of the soundscape would later constitute a predominant aesthetic model not only in current music production, but in modern sound design in general.