Papers
'Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music', Cultural Sociology, 2: 3, 2008: pp 301-319.
Bourdieu’s cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu’s ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu’s field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music style called glitch, a style characterised by sonic fragments of technological error. Whilst we learn a lot about the social trajectories of glitch from greater sensitization to its position in a structured setting of socio-economic relations, it becomes difficult to account for the centrality of technological mediators to this contemporary style of music using Bourdieu’s categories alone. The paper pursues the possibility of supplementing or combining a Bourdieusian approach with Actor Network Theory.
Keywords: Field, Bourdieu, Glitch, Music, Technology, Latour
Like'Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern', New Formations, 66, Spring 2009: 81-99.
In this article I examine music’s technological mediations, linking this to recent attempts to theorise the shifting nature of contemporary popular music. The basic argument is that we can learn a lot about where we are in the history of popular music by looking at conditions of cultural production, not merely at single styles, techniques or devices such as the sampler. I want to suggest that an examination of recent production techniques and technologies labelled ‘digital’ can tell us significant things about contemporary musical cultures, including how they are meeting broader tendencies towards flexibility and de-materialisation in social practices at large, but that this meeting takes place in an extended moment of cultural acceleration and intensity – a hypermodern moment. This moves music onto terrains that threaten, stretch and play with boundaries between human and machine, as well as real and simulated, although not always in expected ways.
'OK Computer: Mobility, Software and the Laptop Musician', Information, Communication and Society, 11: 7, October 2008: 912-932.
In this paper I address some images, categories and open-ended trajectories of the laptop in music production. The aim is to explore the laptop’s increasing presence in the sites of music, from cyberspace to live venues, as well as the relationship between music and mobile computerized space. Implicit in the paper is the claim that the laptop is a neglected device, but that close attention to its position in cultural networks and everyday settings is one way of examining some possible ways into the complex entanglements and layerings of mobile space. The first part of the paper explores the laptop as the archetypal nomadic machine of the digital age, inserted into mobile networks, hubs and flows. The laptop mediates mobility and by doing so not only serves macro-processes of social and economic change, but also opens up creative possibilities for the musician beyond the studio and the home. The second part of the article examines the role of software in activating the laptop’s capabilities. The growth of music software and Virtual Studio Technology in the early 2000s, it will be argued, represents a major transformation in music production. A case study is made of a single application, Ableton Live, to show that new forms of music software encourage norms of creativity and play that take it beyond emulations of hardware studios. A residual distrust of the laptop’s automative capabilities, however, reprises an anxiety in the history of popular music around questions of creativity and musicianship. The final part explores this anxiety and argues that the laptop is a place-holder for conflicting meanings about what belongs in music: productivity and creation, reality and virtuality, play and work, the cybernetic and the organic. It thereby reveals socio-technical imbroglios in action, where digitized music and software code meet the material properties of technologies and the practices of users in complex, networked societies.
Keywords: laptops, music, digital, mobility, software, technology
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