1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking the History of Technology-Based Music
This Handbook explores and critiques a new sonic reality – one which unearths new narratives that chart embryonic practices from the early twentieth century that have developed in parallel with accepted narratives of electronic music.
Today’s musical and artistic practices within technology-based music represent radical changes in production, engagement and dissemination of all sonic arts for composers, musicians, listeners, media content creators and casual music users. Constant everyday exposure to electronic or processed sounds influences our listening skills and listening intentionality, and our ideas of what constitutes valuable sound experiences have expanded radically. What are we listening to? How and why? This new reality is also more inclusive, and technology-borne music now appears as the new folk music – unwritten, improvised and finding its own relevance unfettered by the traditional hierarchies of taste. It is also where black and Asian technology-based experimental music is emerging with its own sonic genealogy, where music is no longer limited to sound only but can be more fruitfully seen as a branch of media arts, combining diverse materials, techniques and tools into more holistic experiences.
Preface. JØRAN RUDI, MONTY ADKINS Introduction: Re-Framing and Re-Thinking. JØRAN RUDI, MONTY ADKINS
Part 1: Technology Adoption and New Practices 1. The Irrational Roots of Electronic Music. SIMON CRAB 2. Tracing Music Technology to its Interdisciplinary Roots. JOSEPH HYDE 3. Ernest Berk: Piraparana. MONTY ADKINS, SAM GILLES AND IAN HELLIWELL 4. Antinomies of Net/Satellite Communication: Strategies of Musical Interaction. ARILD OVE BOMAN 5. Continuities and Discontinuities in Thought, Infrastructure, and Organisation in UK 'Electroacoustic' Music since 1975: Observations, Entanglements, and Reasons for Optimism. SIMON WATERS 6. Networked Performance as a Space for Collective Creation and Student Engagement. HANS KRETZ 7. Environmental Sonification as Transversal Practice. ÅSA STJERNA
Part 2: Participation and Agency 8. The Expanding Fields and Practices of Technology-Based Music. ULF A. S. HOLBROOK AND JØRAN RUDI 9. Re-patching Varèse: Dub Delays, Turntable Ensembles, and Drum Machines as Sites of Sonic Collision. MATTHEW WRIGHT 10. A Closer Listening. LOUISE GRAY 11. Technology as Noise. PAUL HEGARTY 12. The Noise Selector. AMIT DINESH PATEL 13. Expanding the Scope: Presence, Visibility, and Interpretation. CATHY LANE 14. Sonic Alterities: Reimagining Histories and Technologies in Sound Art. LINDA O KEEFFE 15. Japanese Sound Performance as Conceptual Representation. MIKAKO MISUNO 16. Whose Post-Acousmatic Colonial Future? The South African Post-Acousmatic. CAMERON LOUIS HARRIS 17. Technologies of Capture and the Global Souths. BUDHADITYA CHATTOPADHYAY
Part 3: Instruments and Software 18. Electricity, People, and Cultures. Another Piece of History of the Theremin Musical Artefact. JOHANN MERRICH 19. Issues of Ubimus Archaeology: Feedback Amplitude Modulation. NEMANJA RADIVOJEVIĆ, VICTOR LAZZARINI AND DAMIAN KELLER 20. Following Women Users: A Feminist Historiography of the Fairlight CMI MANUELLA BLACKBURN AND PAUL HARKINS 21. Upsetting the Controls: Considering Controllerist Practice in Computer Music Performance. MANOLI MORIATY 22. Max – Expansion from a Programming Paradigm to a Community Discourse. JAEHOON CHOI 23. From Infinity to Infinity: U.N.I.T.Y. In Hip Hop and Electroacoustic Music Production. MARGARET SCHEDEL AND WENDEL PATRICK 24. Turntablism. MARIAM REZAEI
Biography
Jøran Rudi was educated at New York University and pioneered the digital development of music in Norway as composer, studio director (NOTAM 1993–2019), technologist and historian. He is currently the Leverhulme Professor at the University of Huddersfield.
Monty Adkins is a composer and professor of electronic music at the University of Huddersfield. He has worked extensively on the tape archive of Roberto Gerhard and has published four edited collections on the composer’s work. He is currently leading an Arts and Humanities Research Council research project investigating the electronic music of Ernest Berk.
An incredibly comprehensive and much-needed addition to the conversation surrounding music technology, this volume is a profound and fascinating reframing of electronic and experimental music history through the lens of composers, performers, practices, concepts, instruments, and communities that have been completely ignored or otherwise severely overlooked in the traditional academic discourse. I highly recommend this for anyone who listens outside of the norm.
- Sarah Davachi, musicologist, composer and performer of technology-based music.
Histories calcify. This applies to experimental art forms and new technologies as much as it does to more conservative fields. Every so often ideas have to be refreshed, revised, returned to a state of fluidity. This well-curated book is one of those agents of change, dealing as it does with legacies of techno-mysticism, noise as disruption, ethnomusicological field recording, prototypes of net communication, technology as politics and overlooked figures whose significance has only recently been recognised. To apply a Pauline Oliveros maxim to the entire volume, the question is not 'what am I hearing' but 'how am I listening'?
- David Toop, musician, author, Emeritus professor, London College of Communication
