Music and Digital Media
A planetary anthropology
Edited by Georgina Born
Georgina Born is Professor of Anthropology and Music at UCL, and she directed the ‘Music, Digitisation, Mediation’ research programme. She has performed in experimental rock, jazz and improvised musics, and her scholarship combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music and digital/media.
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 Buenos Aires' independent music sector
4. Oral traditions in the aural public sphere: digital archiving of vernacular musics in North India
5. Online music consumption and the formalisation of informality: exchange, labour and sociality in two music platforms
6. Max, music software, and the mutual mediation of aesthetics and digital technologies
7. Remediating modernism: on the digital ends of Montreal’s electroacoustic tradition
8. The dynamics of pluralism in contemporary digital art music
9. Music and intermediality after the internet: aesthetics, materialities and social forms
10. Postlude: musical-anthropological comparativism – across scales
‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ - Marina Peterson, University of Texas, Austin
'The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' - David Toop, London College of Communication
‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ - Eric Drott, University of Texas, Austin
‘This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.’ - David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds
‘Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of—and advancement of—theories of mediation.’ - Jonathan Sterne, McGill University
'Music and Digital Media is a nuanced exploration of the burgeoning digital music scene across both the global North and the global South. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this collection will become the new standard for this field.' - Anna Tsing, co-editor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene
Format: Paperback
Size: 234 × 156 mm
556 Pages
Copyright: © 2022
ISBN: 9781800082441
Publication: September 12, 2022
