Counterhegemonic Practice in Digital Music Counterhegemonic Practice in Digital Music: How Interfaces and Networks are changing the cultural and political map of underground music (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, 2016
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.
Rauh A 2019 review the cambridge companion to music in digital cultureity
the interactions between amateur musicking and capitalist infrastructures, the formation of identity and fandom, commercial free-use and misuse of product, and the growing fascination with vernacular forms of lipsynching. Although Snell's examples predominantly come from around a decade ago, her research will undoubtedly be useful for scholars working on the contemporary proliferation of lipsynching on apps such as TikTok. Her closing remarks on her own lipsynch videos as Fredasterical (p. 138) are inspiring, and weave together her thoughtful analyses with personal experience in a poignant way.
This thesis examines the transformations of music circulation and consumption brought about by new media platforms. Specifically, it shows how the social and technical design of online music platforms link the consumption of music immanently to its circulation. The thesis makes contributions to ethnomusicology, media studies, and digital anthropology, as well as to the study of music's technical cultures. It is based on a comparative ethnographic study of music circulation and consumption within two field sites: the commercial streaming service Spotify and the extralegal, unlicensed peer to peer platform 'Jekyll'. Governance comes to the fore in both sites: the study shows how practices of music curation, collection and consumption are regulated by the technical design of these platforms. Surprisingly, music consumption and circulation on Jekyll generates a variety of social relations, including pronounced social hierarchies. This is far less apparent on Spotify, due to the platform's individuated mode of address. The subjectivities of online music consumers are mediated by both their personal histories and by the broader technical genealogies of the platforms they use. The thesis illuminates the mutual interdependencies of the licensed and extralegal spheres, two domains often portrayed as not only separate but antagonistic. It also provides insight into the hybrid modes of exchange that generate digital music platforms. Through examining the entailments of circulatory participation, the study offers new insights into digital polymedia and to labour, exchange and governmentality online, as well as providing nuanced understandings of the ownership and collection of music in digital environments. Moreover, it advances new concepts to identify core aspects of digital music cultures, namely 'circulatory maintenance' and 'circumvention technology'. The thesis shows overall how Spotify and Jekyll are not merely emblematic of emergent consumption practices engendered by new media, but are bound up in the mutual co-creation of culture, engendering novel musical subjectivities, practices, socialities and ideologies. The complex musical, technical and social assemblages formed around music circulation online point to the affective potentials of music itself, producing inalienable attachments to the objects through which music is formatted, experienced, and circulated.
(Book Review) The cambridge companion to music in digital culture press
Popular Music Journal, 2019
the interactions between amateur musicking and capitalist infrastructures, the formation of identity and fandom, commercial free-use and misuse of product, and the growing fascination with vernacular forms of lipsynching. Although Snell's examples predominantly come from around a decade ago, her research will undoubtedly be useful for scholars working on the contemporary proliferation of lipsynching on apps such as TikTok. Her closing remarks on her own lipsynch videos as Fredasterical (p. 138) are inspiring, and weave together her thoughtful analyses with personal experience in a poignant way.
The Rise of the New Amateurs: Popular Music, Digital Technology and the Fate of Cultural Production
This article takes its cue from work on “digital democracy”, web 2.0 participatory cultures and the self-sufficient amateur producer. It argues that we can identify a proliferation of digital culture built upon an increasingly decentralised system of cultural production in spaces like YouTube, Myspace and Flickr. Though largely confined to middle-class techno-literates, the article points to the impact of micro-organisational cultural worlds on the record industry and suggests that punk’s “DIY aesthetic” has become a structural condition of cultural production. The figure of the “new amateur” is injected into this story as a novel technocultural type, equipped with high-quality cultural tools, whose practices are transforming boundaries between professional and amateur, expert and non-expert, authentic and inauthentic. Keywords: amateur, digital, DIY, production, new media, web 2.0, music
The Cambridge Companion to MUSIC IN DIGITAL CULTURE
The Cambridge Companion to MUSIC IN DIGITAL CULTURE, 2019
The impact of digital technologies on music has been overwhelming: since the commercialisation of these technologies in the early 1980s, both the practice of music and thinking about it have changed almost beyond all recognition. From the rise of digital music making to digital dissemination, these changes have attracted considerable academic attention across disciplines,within, but also beyond, established areas of academic musical research. Through chapters by scholars at the forefront of research and shorter 'personal takes' from knowledgeable practitioners in the field, this Companion brings the relationship between digital technology and musical culture alive by considering both theory and practice. It provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to the place of music within digital culture as a whole, with recurring themes and topics that include music and the Internet, social networking and participatory culture, music recommendation systems, virtuality, posthumanism, surveillance, copyright, and new business models for music production.
Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! Crossing Borders of Underground Music Scenes. Book of Abstracts.pdf
Dear colleagues, We are delighted to meet you all at the third KISMIF International Conference ‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast!’ (KISMIF) International Conference, here at Porto, this year dedicated to the theme ‘DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places’. This initiative follows the great success of the two first KISMIF Conference editions (held in 2014 and 2015), seeking to voice the will of the many researchers who have sought to promote an annual scientific meeting for the discussion of underground music scenes and do-it-yourself culture at the highest level . The KISMIF Conference 2016 is once again focused on underground music, directing its attention this time towards the analysis of DIY cultures’ relationship to space and places. Thus, we challenge students, junior and senior teachers/researchers, as well as artists and activists, to come to the KISMIF International Conference and present works which explore the potential of the theoretical and analytical development of the intersection of music scenes, DIY culture and space under a multidimensional and multifaceted vision. We hope with this to enrich the underground scenes and DIY cultures analysis by producing innovative social theory on various spheres and levels, as well as focusing on the role of DIY culture in late modernity. Indeed, the role of music and DIY cultures is once more an important question – taking place in a world of piecemealed yet ever-present change. The space, spaces, places, borders, zones of DIY music scenes are critical variables in approaching contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground and/or oppositional nature in order to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism. Territorialization and deterritorialization are indelible marks of the artistic and musical scenes in the present; they are related to immediate cosmopolitanisms, to conflicting diasporas, new power relations, gender and ethnicity. As in previous KISMIF Conferences, it is our intention to welcome reflexive contributions which consider the plurality that DIY cultural practices demonstrate in various cultural, artistic and creative fields and to move beyond music in considering artistic fields like film and video, graffiti and street art, the theatre and the performing arts, literature and poetry, radio, programming and editing, graphic design, illustration, cartoon and comics, as well as others.
Perspectives on networked music culture: Audio files, audiophiles, and the reflective musician
griffith.edu.au
Web 2 has impacted on all levels of music culture but this has been primarily visible in contested ideas about technology, media and file-sharing. Much less so has this phenomena been discussed in relation to its effects on career musicians and their place in an increasingly disintermediated recording industry. This article examines musicianship which has arisen since the massification of sound recordings 'as' music, and its adoption of audio engineering skills as an extension of artistry. It considers the ways in which music practices may not align with popular media conceptions of genre, stardom or value, and in how consumer technologies blur the boundaries around differing aspirations for musical engagement. Given the ongoing disintegration of the recording industry and parallel innovation imperatives from governments, it is argued that universities now occupy a unique role in responding to these challenges and opportunities for new musicianship and its future role in society.