Senior Lecturer in Music at University of Birmingham. PI on Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music (AHRC Leadership Fellowship). Research interests: experimental and electronic music, British popular music, internet history, history of music technology, computer music composition, psychoacoustics
This paper presents two projects that use the audible resonance of hollow objects as the basis of... more This paper presents two projects that use the audible resonance of hollow objects as the basis of novel tangible interaction. EchoSnap explores how an audio feedback loop created between a mobile device's microphone and speaker can be used to playfully explore and probe the resonant characteristics of hollow objects, using the resulting sounds to control a mobile device. With PlayableAle, the tone made by blowing across the top of a bottle is used as a method of controlling a game. The work presented in this paper builds upon our previous work exploring the concept of resonant bits, where digital information is given resonant properties that can be explored through physical interaction. In particular, this paper expands upon the concept by looking at resonance in the physical as opposed to digital domain. Using EchoSnap and PlayableAle to illustrate we present a preliminary design space for structuring the continuing development of audible resonant interaction.
This thesis comprises a body of theoretical and practical work that asks, broadly, what it means ... more This thesis comprises a body of theoretical and practical work that asks, broadly, what it means to listen 'in the present'. However, the question is less about whether such a thing: is possible and more one of why it should emerge at all; what does 'presentness' stand for in the listening strategies of John Cage, or in the instantaneous forms of La Monte Young? And why does it appear with such urgency in the music and sound art of the last sixty years? I argue that the aesthetics of presentness should be understood in relation to two dimensions of music and sound art; one, an objective dimension relating to time, form and musical history; and the other, a subjective one relating to musical experience in everyday life. In the first case, presentness is considered amongst ideas of temporality and non-temporality that pass between visual art and music through the late 20th Century, where space comes to be extolled and time is equated with finitude. In the second, it is placed in conversation with ideas about emotion, autobiographical memory, and power. Here, presentness represents a path to emergent experiences that are not steered by the emotional contour of the music, whilst also giving: permission for alternative listening states such as trancing. These themes are explored over four sections that each take in a variety of perspectives, engaging literature, film theory, critical theory, philosophy, and perceptual and cognitive science. These ideas are sounded out and critiqued through my own compositional practice, which draws on the sciences of psychoacoustics and music psychology to render audible to the listener the mechanisms of audition. In these spatial sound works, auditory illusions and perceptual anomalies coalesce to 'choreograph' both general and particular aspects of auditory perception, dramatising the present of listening.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Several scholars have noted parallels between the online communicative tactics of the American al... more Several scholars have noted parallels between the online communicative tactics of the American alt-right and those of industrial musicians in the 1970s and 1980s. This article explores these connections further by analysing the informational media that industrial musicians developed. Between the mid-1980s and 1990s, these zines, handbooks, and websites made a strenuous break with the values of democracy, egalitarianism, and grassroots authenticity that were the default ideological ‘mode’ of DIY. Where the Californian ideology would centre the summer of love and the politics of the New Left, the zines ambiguously celebrated the nihilistic, authoritarian, and occult vectors of psychedelia – tendencies that have been associated with the late 1960s fate of the counterculture rather than its earlier heyday. The article tracks these themes from Vague magazine and Rapid Eye, to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 1990s, to neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment, asking whether comm...
“Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden - step out of the space provide... more “Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden - step out of the space provided” Nurse With Wound. The 1979 debut album by Nurse With Wound is perhaps less famous for the music it contained than an accompanying text printed on its inside sleeve. Dubbed the ‘NWW List’, it is a collection of 292 outsider artists and bands (‘electric experimental music’) that inspired NWW; some known, most obscure, and a few potentially fictional. Providing fans and collectors of experimental with an unofficial road-map-cum-shopping-list of rare, visionary and exotic music across ‘art’ and ‘popular’ styles, its fame has accumulated such that, today, items sell on Ebay for upwards of a thousand pounds. Yet the significance of the list is not only as a spirit-seeker’s handbook. More than this, it has come to represent a shift in the praxis and self-understanding of underground music culture relative to history, where passive notions of ‘influence’ and ‘inheritance’ are displaced by the more active and performative concepts of ‘genealogy’ and ‘history making’. In today’s electronic music, these processes are everywhere: in the creative practices of individual artists, the curatorship of record labels, the texts of record stores and music critics - even in the individual sounds and technologies. Without the recovered historical signifiers and uncharted paths that thread throughout and mark the terrain of contemporary electronic music genres - J.D. Emmanuel’s new age-meets-minimalism masterpiece Wizards in Noise; the production sound on Don Henley’s Boys of Summer in Hypnagogic Pop; the Radiophonic Workshop in Hauntology - their very separateness as genres is compromised. How do we theorise this acceleration, diversification, and individuation of genealogy in electronic music today, accounting for the multiple conflicting historical paths that are threaded by artists, labels, genres, and institutions, and that are performed through texts, sounds, artefacts, and other mediums? Music criticism on the subject has so far been nugatory, resorting to well-worn end-of-history narratives of crisis, decline, and malaise in popular culture. Drawing on the NWW list, and informed by the concept of ‘the contemporary’ as a distinct moment of historical-time consciousness, a first aim of this paper will be to argue against this intellectual trend, figuring the ‘hauntological’ turn, not as a symptom of crisis or inertia, but as part of a reflexive expansion of what constitutes the aesthetic object. Central here is the role and function of the Internet in today’s electronic music genres, and the aesthetics of the archive that has emerged in relation to it. The second aim of my paper will be to consider the implications of these actions for music studies in general. If there is a ‘musicological’ intent to these acts of curation and history-making, augured by the expanding archive of popular music housed on the Internet, then how can musicology-proper utilise them in productive ways? This section will draw on Branden W. Joseph’s 2008 study of Tony Conrad, and Georgina Born and Nicholas Cook’s recent statements on the notion of ‘relational musicology’, for methodological and theoretical support.
Noise seems to stand for a lack of aesthetic grace, to alienate or distract rather than enrapture... more Noise seems to stand for a lack of aesthetic grace, to alienate or distract rather than enrapture. And yet the drones of psychedelia, the racket of garage rock and punk, the thudding of rave, the feedback of shoegaze and post-rock, the bombast of thrash and metal, the clatter of jungle and the stuttering of electronica, together with notable examples of avant-garde noise art, have all found a place in the history of contemporary musics, and are recognised as representing key evolutionary moments. Noise therefore is the untold story of contemporary popular music, and in a critical exploration of noise lies the possibility of a new narrative – one that is wide-ranging, connects the popular to the underground and avant-garde, fully posits the studio as a musical instrument, and demands new critical and theoretical paradigms of those seeking to write about music. Resonances is a compelling collection of new essays by scholars, writers and musicians – all seeking to explore and enlighten...
Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cul... more Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages. Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations. At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
This chapter presents a genealogy of the noise music offshoot known variously as ‘extreme’, or ‘r... more This chapter presents a genealogy of the noise music offshoot known variously as ‘extreme’, or ‘radical’ computer music, as well as ‘computer noise’. But the musicological typologies of offshoots and sub-genres that we customarily employ are called into question when it is not music but ‘noise’ that presupposes them. So the chapter is also an attempt to identify what qualities a sub-genre would honor were it to belong to this family. I argue that every appearance of noise must grapple with this question anew, and further, that this struggle with the fixed classification of genre is a part of noise’s aesthetics. As such, the question of what noise is, and how it works in music, is implicit throughout. The chapter works through such issues as noise and genre, noise and influence, and noise and the digital, before moving onto a close examination of the relationship between institutional electronic music and bedroom techno, particularly as it plays out in the work of Florian Hecker and Iannis Xenakis.
This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly soci... more This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly sociological in orientation, it has three main foci. First, it addresses practitioners’ and theorists’ resistances to the concept of genre in experimental musics. Drawing on recent developments in genre theory, it discusses the problems of agency, mediation and scale that any discussion of genre calls forth, pitting them alongside theories that emphasise genre’s necessity and inevitability in communication. The second section examines the politics of genre as they play out in practice, focusing on the Prix Ars Electronica festival and the controversy that ensued from the decision to change the name of the Computer Music category in 1999. The analysis focuses on issues of institutional mediation, historicity, genre emergence and the politics of labelling as they come into view when two broad spheres – electroacoustic art music and ‘popular’ electronic music – are brought into the same field t...
The desire for instrumental qualities in computer music often leads the artist to a process of “s... more The desire for instrumental qualities in computer music often leads the artist to a process of “synthetic limitation,” wherein constraint is designed into a performance system, permitting creation only within prescribed limits. These practices can emerge as a consequence of the sheer dearth of possibilities available to the digital artist: as though the path to new sounds and ever more intimate control leads ultimately to a retreat. The author's response to this perennial dilemma has been to try to discover instrumental limitations within the ear itself. He describes an “ear-as-instrument” approach to the composition of Correlation Number One (CNO), an eight-channel computer music work he created in 2010 that uses a self-authored form of Distortion Product Oto-Acoustic Emission (DPOAE) synthesis.
This paper presents two projects that use the audible resonance of hollow objects as the basis of... more This paper presents two projects that use the audible resonance of hollow objects as the basis of novel tangible interaction. EchoSnap explores how an audio feedback loop created between a mobile device's microphone and speaker can be used to playfully explore and probe the resonant characteristics of hollow objects, using the resulting sounds to control a mobile device. With PlayableAle, the tone made by blowing across the top of a bottle is used as a method of controlling a game. The work presented in this paper builds upon our previous work exploring the concept of resonant bits, where digital information is given resonant properties that can be explored through physical interaction. In particular, this paper expands upon the concept by looking at resonance in the physical as opposed to digital domain. Using EchoSnap and PlayableAle to illustrate we present a preliminary design space for structuring the continuing development of audible resonant interaction.
This thesis comprises a body of theoretical and practical work that asks, broadly, what it means ... more This thesis comprises a body of theoretical and practical work that asks, broadly, what it means to listen 'in the present'. However, the question is less about whether such a thing: is possible and more one of why it should emerge at all; what does 'presentness' stand for in the listening strategies of John Cage, or in the instantaneous forms of La Monte Young? And why does it appear with such urgency in the music and sound art of the last sixty years? I argue that the aesthetics of presentness should be understood in relation to two dimensions of music and sound art; one, an objective dimension relating to time, form and musical history; and the other, a subjective one relating to musical experience in everyday life. In the first case, presentness is considered amongst ideas of temporality and non-temporality that pass between visual art and music through the late 20th Century, where space comes to be extolled and time is equated with finitude. In the second, it is placed in conversation with ideas about emotion, autobiographical memory, and power. Here, presentness represents a path to emergent experiences that are not steered by the emotional contour of the music, whilst also giving: permission for alternative listening states such as trancing. These themes are explored over four sections that each take in a variety of perspectives, engaging literature, film theory, critical theory, philosophy, and perceptual and cognitive science. These ideas are sounded out and critiqued through my own compositional practice, which draws on the sciences of psychoacoustics and music psychology to render audible to the listener the mechanisms of audition. In these spatial sound works, auditory illusions and perceptual anomalies coalesce to 'choreograph' both general and particular aspects of auditory perception, dramatising the present of listening.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Several scholars have noted parallels between the online communicative tactics of the American al... more Several scholars have noted parallels between the online communicative tactics of the American alt-right and those of industrial musicians in the 1970s and 1980s. This article explores these connections further by analysing the informational media that industrial musicians developed. Between the mid-1980s and 1990s, these zines, handbooks, and websites made a strenuous break with the values of democracy, egalitarianism, and grassroots authenticity that were the default ideological ‘mode’ of DIY. Where the Californian ideology would centre the summer of love and the politics of the New Left, the zines ambiguously celebrated the nihilistic, authoritarian, and occult vectors of psychedelia – tendencies that have been associated with the late 1960s fate of the counterculture rather than its earlier heyday. The article tracks these themes from Vague magazine and Rapid Eye, to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in the 1990s, to neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment, asking whether comm...
“Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden - step out of the space provide... more “Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden - step out of the space provided” Nurse With Wound. The 1979 debut album by Nurse With Wound is perhaps less famous for the music it contained than an accompanying text printed on its inside sleeve. Dubbed the ‘NWW List’, it is a collection of 292 outsider artists and bands (‘electric experimental music’) that inspired NWW; some known, most obscure, and a few potentially fictional. Providing fans and collectors of experimental with an unofficial road-map-cum-shopping-list of rare, visionary and exotic music across ‘art’ and ‘popular’ styles, its fame has accumulated such that, today, items sell on Ebay for upwards of a thousand pounds. Yet the significance of the list is not only as a spirit-seeker’s handbook. More than this, it has come to represent a shift in the praxis and self-understanding of underground music culture relative to history, where passive notions of ‘influence’ and ‘inheritance’ are displaced by the more active and performative concepts of ‘genealogy’ and ‘history making’. In today’s electronic music, these processes are everywhere: in the creative practices of individual artists, the curatorship of record labels, the texts of record stores and music critics - even in the individual sounds and technologies. Without the recovered historical signifiers and uncharted paths that thread throughout and mark the terrain of contemporary electronic music genres - J.D. Emmanuel’s new age-meets-minimalism masterpiece Wizards in Noise; the production sound on Don Henley’s Boys of Summer in Hypnagogic Pop; the Radiophonic Workshop in Hauntology - their very separateness as genres is compromised. How do we theorise this acceleration, diversification, and individuation of genealogy in electronic music today, accounting for the multiple conflicting historical paths that are threaded by artists, labels, genres, and institutions, and that are performed through texts, sounds, artefacts, and other mediums? Music criticism on the subject has so far been nugatory, resorting to well-worn end-of-history narratives of crisis, decline, and malaise in popular culture. Drawing on the NWW list, and informed by the concept of ‘the contemporary’ as a distinct moment of historical-time consciousness, a first aim of this paper will be to argue against this intellectual trend, figuring the ‘hauntological’ turn, not as a symptom of crisis or inertia, but as part of a reflexive expansion of what constitutes the aesthetic object. Central here is the role and function of the Internet in today’s electronic music genres, and the aesthetics of the archive that has emerged in relation to it. The second aim of my paper will be to consider the implications of these actions for music studies in general. If there is a ‘musicological’ intent to these acts of curation and history-making, augured by the expanding archive of popular music housed on the Internet, then how can musicology-proper utilise them in productive ways? This section will draw on Branden W. Joseph’s 2008 study of Tony Conrad, and Georgina Born and Nicholas Cook’s recent statements on the notion of ‘relational musicology’, for methodological and theoretical support.
Noise seems to stand for a lack of aesthetic grace, to alienate or distract rather than enrapture... more Noise seems to stand for a lack of aesthetic grace, to alienate or distract rather than enrapture. And yet the drones of psychedelia, the racket of garage rock and punk, the thudding of rave, the feedback of shoegaze and post-rock, the bombast of thrash and metal, the clatter of jungle and the stuttering of electronica, together with notable examples of avant-garde noise art, have all found a place in the history of contemporary musics, and are recognised as representing key evolutionary moments. Noise therefore is the untold story of contemporary popular music, and in a critical exploration of noise lies the possibility of a new narrative – one that is wide-ranging, connects the popular to the underground and avant-garde, fully posits the studio as a musical instrument, and demands new critical and theoretical paradigms of those seeking to write about music. Resonances is a compelling collection of new essays by scholars, writers and musicians – all seeking to explore and enlighten...
Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cul... more Digital ethnography has a double meaning, referring both to the ethnographic study of digital cultures and to the development of digital methodologies to enhance anthropological, ethnographic and related interdisciplinary research. In this paper we combine the two. We offer a critical and reflexive introduction to novel internet-based methodologies that complement offline ethnographic research. Our aim is to show the powers of such methodologies and how they can be used to supplement other sources of ethnographic insight. The chapter’s ethnographic focus is on two digital music cultures, both of which make significant use of the internet: Vaporwave, a contemporary genre, and Microsound, an established and long-standing one. By comparing the two genres, and analysing their online practices, we show how they represent distinctive moments in the evolution of the internet as a digital-cultural medium. We therefore contend that digital methodologies oriented to our actors’ uses of the internet must be attuned to its cultural and historical variation: to the internet itself as a cultural form, and its changing contributions to such digital-music assemblages. Methodologically, we adapt tools developed previously for Actor Network Theory: the issue crawler software (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm). Brought to digital music genres, these tools analyse the exchange of hyperlinks amongst actors online, mapping, visualising and making available for further analysis relations among some of the many entities––labels, platforms, venues, festivals, funding bodies, distributors, critics, bloggers, fans, co-artists, allies––that mediate, and are mobilised by, such genres. Coupled with analysis of the two genres’ offline social and cultural formations, and supported by qualitative insights from genre theory and media aesthetics, such network visualisations offer ways of significantly deepening the analysis of genres with online emanations. Yet, importantly, adequate interpretation of the network visualisations demand that they are combined them with other sources of ethnographic knowledge. Use of these tools, combined with the methodological principles we set out, can be transposed, we contend, into many spheres of ethnographic enquiry where cultural scenes and practices combine offline and online manifestations. At the outset, we analyse the distinctive ways in which uses of the internet enter into the aesthetic and communicative practices of Vaporwave and Microsound. We proceed to analyse the temporality of these practices––including the temporality of the web; through the case of Microsound, we trace the beginnings of the migration of electronic music cultures online in the mid-late 1990s, and through Vaporwave, we examine very current, transmedial aesthetic uses of the internet. Together, the two demonstrate how the web is employed, with various levels of emphasis, in several ways: 1) to circulate music in the form of text, recordings, and objects; 2) to cultivate, publicise and distribute knowledge and facilitate discussion, via blogs, mailing lists and fora; 3) to accumulate, and accelerate the accumulation of, cultural capital through the creation and exchange of symbolic, semiotic and material links; and 4) as an expressive and aesthetic medium, part of a genre’s larger transmedial aesthetic assemblage. Indeed, in the case of Vaporwave, the internet acts as a rudimentary content creator, providing––in the guise of recycled web content––the substantive material through which the music is realised. Our comparative analysis of Microsound and Vaporwave affords insights into the historicity of the web, showing how online communities and digitally-native practices have developed from ‘wide’, open, and often anonymous social networks to more ‘local’ and intimate communities that, in their small scale, seek to mimic or replicate ‘offline’, co-present musical socialities. In the case of Vaporwave, this historicity enters into the very aesthetics of the genre, as artists and other actors engage in knowing, postmodern play with the signifiers of the early days of web 2.0.
This chapter presents a genealogy of the noise music offshoot known variously as ‘extreme’, or ‘r... more This chapter presents a genealogy of the noise music offshoot known variously as ‘extreme’, or ‘radical’ computer music, as well as ‘computer noise’. But the musicological typologies of offshoots and sub-genres that we customarily employ are called into question when it is not music but ‘noise’ that presupposes them. So the chapter is also an attempt to identify what qualities a sub-genre would honor were it to belong to this family. I argue that every appearance of noise must grapple with this question anew, and further, that this struggle with the fixed classification of genre is a part of noise’s aesthetics. As such, the question of what noise is, and how it works in music, is implicit throughout. The chapter works through such issues as noise and genre, noise and influence, and noise and the digital, before moving onto a close examination of the relationship between institutional electronic music and bedroom techno, particularly as it plays out in the work of Florian Hecker and Iannis Xenakis.
This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly soci... more This article explores the workings of genre in experimental electronic musics. Predominantly sociological in orientation, it has three main foci. First, it addresses practitioners’ and theorists’ resistances to the concept of genre in experimental musics. Drawing on recent developments in genre theory, it discusses the problems of agency, mediation and scale that any discussion of genre calls forth, pitting them alongside theories that emphasise genre’s necessity and inevitability in communication. The second section examines the politics of genre as they play out in practice, focusing on the Prix Ars Electronica festival and the controversy that ensued from the decision to change the name of the Computer Music category in 1999. The analysis focuses on issues of institutional mediation, historicity, genre emergence and the politics of labelling as they come into view when two broad spheres – electroacoustic art music and ‘popular’ electronic music – are brought into the same field t...
The desire for instrumental qualities in computer music often leads the artist to a process of “s... more The desire for instrumental qualities in computer music often leads the artist to a process of “synthetic limitation,” wherein constraint is designed into a performance system, permitting creation only within prescribed limits. These practices can emerge as a consequence of the sheer dearth of possibilities available to the digital artist: as though the path to new sounds and ever more intimate control leads ultimately to a retreat. The author's response to this perennial dilemma has been to try to discover instrumental limitations within the ear itself. He describes an “ear-as-instrument” approach to the composition of Correlation Number One (CNO), an eight-channel computer music work he created in 2010 that uses a self-authored form of Distortion Product Oto-Acoustic Emission (DPOAE) synthesis.
This paper presents new research in genre theory and analysis using digital ethnography methods. ... more This paper presents new research in genre theory and analysis using digital ethnography methods. First, I address some of the problems and contradictions of genre in music, focusing on questions of agency, mediation, and the disavowal of genre by practitioners, art theorists, and critics. Second, I assess recent attempts to revive genre theory and make it into a workable concept for music, arguing that, alongside a focus on promiscuity, social mediation, and temporality, an attentiveness to ‘where’ it is that genre communities come together - including both offline and online spaces - is essential. In the third section, I examine the art music genre of microsound, providing a brief genealogy of the genre from its coinage by Iannis Xenakis, to its takeup on the .microsound mailing list, to its present-day form as a concept embodying sound art, DSP research, avant-garde composition, and post-techno styles. Following the rhetoric of the genre itself, I propose that microsound can be conceived of as a ‘cloud’ or ‘network’ of human and non-human actors: none of them indigenous to the genre, all having different levels of influence, and all - crucially - contributing something essential to what the genre ’is’. The fourth section uses Richard Rogers’ Issuecrawler (an online ethnography software) to analyse microsound’s social mediations as they are performed online. Using the .microsound mailing list as a knowledge source, I analyse patterns of online interlinkage amongst artists, record labels, festivals, magazines, concert halls, and other institutions associated with the genre, furthering the insights of the earlier genealogy of microsound using these empirical methods. Further work would multiply the types of association amongst actors to include formal connections amongst artists and texts, amongst others.
This paper describes a process of ‘composing with absent sound’ in the realisation of Correlation... more This paper describes a process of ‘composing with absent sound’ in the realisation of Correlation Number One, an 8-channel computer music piece that uses high frequency tones to generate distortion-product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAE) in the listener’s ears. Following a survey of other works created using the phenomena, the artistic motivations and technical implementation of the piece are described. Through a reflection on form arising as a product of limitation - in this case, that of the human auditory system - a notion of the ear as an active, productive sense organ emerges, in contrast to contemporary sound studies discourse that favours a depiction of the ear as a passive receiver.
A conference exploring the epistemological, methodological, ethical, and disciplinary problems th... more A conference exploring the epistemological, methodological, ethical, and disciplinary problems that arise when studying music in the age of abundance.
Location: Online / Dome Room, University of Birmingham
Dates: Wednesday 8 September (09:00) - Friday 10 September 2021 (18:00)
Recursions: Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective
St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edin... more Recursions: Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh 24-25 October 2019 Patrick Valiquet & Christopher Haworth, convenors Keynote presentation by Eric A Drott
Cybernetic thinking, engineering and pedagogy left indelible marks on the progressive arts and sciences of the late twentieth century. There is now widespread recognition of the role cybernetics played in inspiring many Cold War composers and improvisers, from Cagean experimentalists and Schaefferian acousmaticians to afrofuturists, conceptual artists, ravers and psychedelic rockers. Less widely acknowledged is the extent to which cybernetics shaped the epistemology of late twentieth century music theoretical, pedagogical and ethnographic research, including early iterations of what is now called sound studies, notably in the work of Jacques Attali, Christopher Small, Barry Truax, Charles Keil and Steven Feld. In fact, the impact of cybernetic principles and methodologies on our understanding of music and musicality is ongoing. They permeate the management and outreach discourse of the institutions that support music and music research. They lie at the foundation of recent accounts of cognition and brain function involving predictive processing, dynamic systems theory, and ecological models linking perception with action. They are even gaining a significant foothold in the study of music history, both directly in the computational techniques reshaping corpus studies and network analysis, and indirectly through the ideas of communication and social theorists like Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.
Assessments of the political and scientific value of cybernetics have been as varied as its applications. On one hand, it has been said to offer an open, nondualist alternative to the ontology of modern science (Pickering 2010). On the other, it seems to create the conditions for a permanent revitalization of the modern project, optimizing life, knowledge and society in terms of automated information exchange (Tiqqun 2001).
We seek to gather researchers interested in cultivating a deeper understanding of the ways cybernetics, systems theory and information theory have informed musical practice, theory, policy and industry since the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on perspectives from cultural, social and intellectual history. We are especially interested in proposals that expand the framework of normal musicological inquiry to encompass: the role of cybernetics and information theory in constructions of race, gender and/or ability; connections between music and other cultural or scientific practices; ideas and practices inherited from the work of 19th and early 20th century educationalists, scientists and spiritualists; and connections with the management of decolonization and deindustrialization in science, culture and education policy at local, national and/or international levels.
Presenters will be given 30 minutes plus 15 minutes discussion time. Proposals of 250-300 words should be submitted to Patrick.Valiquet@ed.ac.uk by 30 April 2019. A programme will be announced in mid June.
The Return of Actor-Network Theory:
During the last ten years there has been an unexpected res... more The Return of Actor-Network Theory:
During the last ten years there has been an unexpected resurgence of interest in the body of literature-cum-methodological toolkit known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and primarily associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. A cross-disciplinary revival, it encompasses philosophy and media theory (the new materialisms, ‘thing theory’, and the Object-Oriented Philosophy of Graham Harman and his adherents), the digital humanities (the rise of digital methods for tracing networks in social science research), and the history and sociology of art (through the recent work on networks of human and nonhuman actors in avant-garde genres), amongst other disciplines. But this development is an intriguing one, not least because it was declared as early as the late 1990s that ANT was defunct, and that the name should be discarded. For example, in an essay called ‘On recalling ANT’, Latour announced that there were four ‘nails in the coffin’ for actor-network theory: ‘the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!’
Some aspects of this resurgence are simple enough to comprehend. Arriving just ahead of the World Wide Web, ANT would anticipate the vogue for thinking in terms of ‘networks’ as opposed to bordered entities such as ‘nation’, ‘institution’, and ‘society’, even if its own understanding of the concept was different to the topological webs of data it now seems to invoke. Similarly, its controversial injunction to afford agency to human and non-human actors alike, accepting no a priori asymmetry between them, can be seen as an important antecedent to the renewed turn towards materiality and the corresponding critique of anthropocentrism that has been gestating for some time in the humanities. But ANT has been criticised for its philosophical naïveté, its underdeveloped account of power, and its presentism, amongst other things. The time seems ripe to review the merits and limitations of ANT inside of this renewed context, asking whether its takeup in philosophy, media theory, and history of art reinvigorates ANT or repeats its perceived failings.
This stream invites papers that
a) Consider the contemporary currency of ANT as methodological practice:
• Issues of translation: what frictions/novelties emerge when ANT is ‘applied’ outside of the Science and Technology Studies field in which it was originally developed?
• Digital methods and ANT: the World Wide Web as a medium to locate and analyse networks: e.g. political controversies, social networks, art genres and movements etc.
b) Critically engage with the legacy and philosophical presuppositions of ANT:
• Empiricity and the place of the transcendental in ANT.
• The mutation of ANT into Object-Oriented Ontology: Graham Harman as a reader of Latour.
• ANT and ‘posthumanism’, or the critique of anthropocentrism: is there room for the subject in ANT?
• The relationship between ANT and other important accounts of technological mediation, such as Derrida’s concept of originary technicity - recently taken up and expanded by Bernard Stiegler and David Wills.
• Latour’s critique of modernity and the nature-culture / subject-object dichotomy, plus its relationship to earlier (dialectical, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist) analyses.
When Douglas Kahn’s first book, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, was published... more When Douglas Kahn’s first book, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, was published it entered a very different intellectual landscape to the one we inhabit today. In the late nineties, there was no ‘sound studies’ to speak of. Outside of the music disciplines, the cultural study of sound was scattered across various outposts in communications studies and media theory, art history, literature, urban planning and design, philosophy and more. During this time, it was customary for a monograph on sound to begin with some form of treatise against occularcentricism: the cultural and scholarly bias for objecthood, vision, the image, and concepts of ‘the gaze’ as objects of study. An inherited notion of sound as the ‘forgotten’ object in our cultural environment, and hearing the forgotten sense, seemed to fasten itself to sound, bestowing upon it the status of the perennial underdog - the ‘always emerging, never emerged’ (2005: 249). But the recent boom in scholarly attention to sound means that it can no longer complain of (nor exploit) its own neglect. Sound studies is now a thriving interdisciplinary field, as witnessed by the yearly onslaught of new monographs and anthologies, the slew of high profile international conferences, the new journals and special editions in established journals, and the initiation of large interdisciplinary research centres devoted to the study of sound and sonic cultures. An outcome of sound studies’ ongoing disciplinisation is the possibly reluctant emergence of a ‘canon’ of significant works, which Noise, Water, Meat is now firmly installed within. Ostensibly a history of sound in the arts, the book has come to assume a position alongside the likes of Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past and Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity as a field-defining history of modern aurality; a counter-narrative to textual and image-based histories of modernity.
Resonances is a compelling collection of new essays by scholars, writers and musicians, all seeki... more Resonances is a compelling collection of new essays by scholars, writers and musicians, all seeking to explore and enlighten this field of study. Noise seems to stand for a lack of aesthetic grace, to alienate or distract rather than enrapture. And yet the drones of psychedelia, the racket of garage rock and punk, the thudding of rave, the feedback of shoegaze and post-rock, the bombast of thrash and metal, the clatter of jungle and the stuttering of electronica, together with notable examples of avant-garde noise art, have all found a place in the history of contemporary musics, and are recognised as representing key evolutionary moments. Noise therefore is the untold story of contemporary popular music, and in a critical exploration of noise lies the possibility of a new narrative: one that is wide-ranging, connects the popular to the underground and avant-garde, fully posits the studio as a musical instrument, and demands new critical and theoretical paradigms of those seeking to write about music.
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Location: Online / Dome Room, University of Birmingham
Dates: Wednesday 8 September (09:00) - Friday 10 September 2021 (18:00)
Contact muscon2021@contacts.bham.ac.uk
St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh
24-25 October 2019
Patrick Valiquet & Christopher Haworth, convenors
Keynote presentation by Eric A Drott
Cybernetic thinking, engineering and pedagogy left indelible marks on the progressive arts and sciences of the late twentieth century. There is now widespread recognition of the role cybernetics played in inspiring many Cold War composers and improvisers, from Cagean experimentalists and Schaefferian acousmaticians to afrofuturists, conceptual artists, ravers and psychedelic rockers. Less widely acknowledged is the extent to which cybernetics shaped the epistemology of late twentieth century music theoretical, pedagogical and ethnographic research, including early iterations of what is now called sound studies, notably in the work of Jacques Attali, Christopher Small, Barry Truax, Charles Keil and Steven Feld. In fact, the impact of cybernetic principles and methodologies on our understanding of music and musicality is ongoing. They permeate the management and outreach discourse of the institutions that support music and music research. They lie at the foundation of recent accounts of cognition and brain function involving predictive processing, dynamic systems theory, and ecological models linking perception with action. They are even gaining a significant foothold in the study of music history, both directly in the computational techniques reshaping corpus studies and network analysis, and indirectly through the ideas of communication and social theorists like Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour.
Assessments of the political and scientific value of cybernetics have been as varied as its applications. On one hand, it has been said to offer an open, nondualist alternative to the ontology of modern science (Pickering 2010). On the other, it seems to create the conditions for a permanent revitalization of the modern project, optimizing life, knowledge and society in terms of automated information exchange (Tiqqun 2001).
We seek to gather researchers interested in cultivating a deeper understanding of the ways cybernetics, systems theory and information theory have informed musical practice, theory, policy and industry since the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on perspectives from cultural, social and intellectual history. We are especially interested in proposals that expand the framework of normal musicological inquiry to encompass: the role of cybernetics and information theory in constructions of race, gender and/or ability; connections between music and other cultural or scientific practices; ideas and practices inherited from the work of 19th and early 20th century educationalists, scientists and spiritualists; and connections with the management of decolonization and deindustrialization in science, culture and education policy at local, national and/or international levels.
Presenters will be given 30 minutes plus 15 minutes discussion time. Proposals of 250-300 words should be submitted to Patrick.Valiquet@ed.ac.uk by 30 April 2019. A programme will be announced in mid June.
During the last ten years there has been an unexpected resurgence of interest in the body of literature-cum-methodological toolkit known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and primarily associated with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. A cross-disciplinary revival, it encompasses philosophy and media theory (the new materialisms, ‘thing theory’, and the Object-Oriented Philosophy of Graham Harman and his adherents), the digital humanities (the rise of digital methods for tracing networks in social science research), and the history and sociology of art (through the recent work on networks of human and nonhuman actors in avant-garde genres), amongst other disciplines. But this development is an intriguing one, not least because it was declared as early as the late 1990s that ANT was defunct, and that the name should be discarded. For example, in an essay called ‘On recalling ANT’, Latour announced that there were four ‘nails in the coffin’ for actor-network theory: ‘the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!’
Some aspects of this resurgence are simple enough to comprehend. Arriving just ahead of the World Wide Web, ANT would anticipate the vogue for thinking in terms of ‘networks’ as opposed to bordered entities such as ‘nation’, ‘institution’, and ‘society’, even if its own understanding of the concept was different to the topological webs of data it now seems to invoke. Similarly, its controversial injunction to afford agency to human and non-human actors alike, accepting no a priori asymmetry between them, can be seen as an important antecedent to the renewed turn towards materiality and the corresponding critique of anthropocentrism that has been gestating for some time in the humanities. But ANT has been criticised for its philosophical naïveté, its underdeveloped account of power, and its presentism, amongst other things. The time seems ripe to review the merits and limitations of ANT inside of this renewed context, asking whether its takeup in philosophy, media theory, and history of art reinvigorates ANT or repeats its perceived failings.
This stream invites papers that
a) Consider the contemporary currency of ANT as methodological practice:
• Issues of translation: what frictions/novelties emerge when ANT is ‘applied’ outside of the Science and Technology Studies field in which it was originally developed?
• Digital methods and ANT: the World Wide Web as a medium to locate and analyse networks: e.g. political controversies, social networks, art genres and movements etc.
b) Critically engage with the legacy and philosophical presuppositions of ANT:
• Empiricity and the place of the transcendental in ANT.
• The mutation of ANT into Object-Oriented Ontology: Graham Harman as a reader of Latour.
• ANT and ‘posthumanism’, or the critique of anthropocentrism: is there room for the subject in ANT?
• The relationship between ANT and other important accounts of technological mediation, such as Derrida’s concept of originary technicity - recently taken up and expanded by Bernard Stiegler and David Wills.
• Latour’s critique of modernity and the nature-culture / subject-object dichotomy, plus its relationship to earlier (dialectical, phenomenological, structuralist, post-structuralist) analyses.