The first comparative ethnographic study on the impact of digital media on worldwide music.
Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.
Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.
542 pages | 14 halftones | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2022
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Music: Ethnomusicology
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Music, Digitisation and Mediation - For a Planetary Antropology
Georgia Born
2. Soundtracks in the Silicon Savannah: Digital Production and Aesthetic Entrepreneurship in Nairobi, Kenya.
Andrew J. Eisenberg
3. ‘In the Waiting Room’: Digitisation and Post-Neoliberalism in the Independent Music Sector in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Geoff Baker
4. Orality in the Aural Public Sphere: Digital Archiving of Vernacular Musics in North India.
Aditi Deo
5. Online Music Consumption and the Formalisation of Informality: Exchange, Labour and Sociality in Two Music Platforms
Blake Durham and Georgina Born
6. Max, Music Software, and the Mutual Mediation of Aesthetics and Digital Technologies
Joe Snape and Georgina Born
7. Remediating Modernism: On the Digital Ends of Montreal’s Electroacoustic Tradition
Patrick Valiquet
8. The Dynamics of Pluralism in Contemporary Digital Art Music
Georgina Born
9. Music and Intermediality After the Internet: Aesthetics, Materialities and Social Forms
Christopher Haworth and Georgina Born
10. Postlude: Musical-Anthropological Comparativism – Across Scales
Georgina Born
References
Index
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Music, Digitisation and Mediation - For a Planetary Antropology
Georgia Born
2. Soundtracks in the Silicon Savannah: Digital Production and Aesthetic Entrepreneurship in Nairobi, Kenya.
Andrew J. Eisenberg
3. ‘In the Waiting Room’: Digitisation and Post-Neoliberalism in the Independent Music Sector in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Geoff Baker
4. Orality in the Aural Public Sphere: Digital Archiving of Vernacular Musics in North India.
Aditi Deo
5. Online Music Consumption and the Formalisation of Informality: Exchange, Labour and Sociality in Two Music Platforms
Blake Durham and Georgina Born
6. Max, Music Software, and the Mutual Mediation of Aesthetics and Digital Technologies
Joe Snape and Georgina Born
7. Remediating Modernism: On the Digital Ends of Montreal’s Electroacoustic Tradition
Patrick Valiquet
8. The Dynamics of Pluralism in Contemporary Digital Art Music
Georgina Born
9. Music and Intermediality After the Internet: Aesthetics, Materialities and Social Forms
Christopher Haworth and Georgina Born
10. Postlude: Musical-Anthropological Comparativism – Across Scales
Georgina Born
References
Index