Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies
- Editor: Hennion, Antoine
- Editor: Levaux, Christophe
Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies
- Editor: Hennion, Antoine
- Editor: Levaux, Christophe
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About
This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies.
Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies draws together a wide range of both leading and emerging scholars to offer a critical survey of STS applications to music studies, considering topics ranging from classical music instrument-making to the ethos of DIY in punk music. The book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology. Raising crucial methodological and epistemological questions about the study of music, this book will be relevant to scholars studying the interactions between music, culture, and technology from many disciplinary perspectives.
Contents
- Foreword Howard S. Becker
- Introduction Antoine Hennion and Christophe Levaux
- I. Histories
- 1. Rameau and Harmony: Can Theory Make Reason of Music?
- Antoine Hennion
- 2. Sounding Standards: A History Concert Pitch, between Musicology and STS
- Fanny Gribenski
- 3. Is DIY a Punk Invention?: Learning processes, Recording Devices, and Social Knowledge
- Francois Ribac
- 4. Secure and Insecure Bases in the Performance of Western Classical Music
- Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
- 5. Deep Structure: The Generative Subject in Actor-Network Theory and Musicology
- Patrick Valiquet
- II. Instruments
- 6. Sonic Imaginaries: How Hugh Davies and David Van Koevering Performed Electronic Music's Future
- James Mooney and Trevor Pinch
- 7. Following the Instruments: The Designers and Users of the Fairlight CMI
- Paul Harkins
- 8. The Interface and Instrumentality of Eurorack Modular Synthesis
- Eliot Bates
- III. Technologies
- 9. Human Sounds and the Obscenity of Information
- David Trippett
- 10. STS Confronts the Vocaloid: Assemblage Thinking with Hatsune Miku
- Nick Prior
- 11. Similarity and Difference in Sound Studies (and elsewhere)
- Basile Zimmermann
- IV. Practices
- 12. Smartphones, Streaming Platforms, and the Infrastructuring of Digital Music Practices
- Paolo Magaudda
- 13. Tracing the Music Actor-Network: Losing the Meaning of Musical Experience? The Limits of a Routinization of Science and Technology Studies Applied to Techniques and Knowledges of Music
- Francois Debruyne
- 14. Musicalized Images: Composing, Playing, Remixing, and Performing Net Art
- Jean-Paul Fourmentraux
