Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society [1 ed.] 1848600453, 9781848600454

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society
2 After the Orgy: The Internet and Popular Music Consumption
3 Apps, Laps and Infinite Tracks: Digital Music Production
4 From Iron Cage to Digital Bubble? Mobile Listening Devices and the City
5 Vox Pop: Exploring Electronic and Digital Vocalities
6 Playsumption: Music and Games
7 Afterword: Digitus
References
Index

Citation preview

Popular

Music Digital Technology and

Society

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

Popular

Music Digital Technology

Society

and Nick Prior

SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044

Nick Prior 2018 First published 2018 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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Editor: Michael Ainsley Assistant editor: John Nightingale Production editor: Imogen Roome Copyeditor: Neville Hankins Proofreader: Christine Bitten Indexer: Martin Hargreaves Marketing manager: Lucia Sweet Cover design: Lisa Harper-Wells Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in the UK

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952247 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-84860-044-7 ISBN 978-1-84860-045-4 (pbk)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vii

1

Introduction: Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society

1

2

After the Orgy: The Internet and Popular Music Consumption

33

3

Apps, Laps and Infinite Tracks: Digital Music Production

59

4

From Iron Cage to Digital Bubble? Mobile Listening Devices and the City

97

5

Vox Pop: Exploring Electronic and Digital Vocalities

119

6

Playsumption: Music and Games

147

7

Afterword: Digitus

173

References Index

187 205

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing the acknowledgements for a text like this is a bit like writing the credits for an album. On the surface it looks to be a relatively straightforward exercise, though the length of the credits tells an altogether more complex story. Like albums, books are profoundly collective accomplishments: generated, processed and marshalled by plural agents, actors and materials. They emerge out of a haze of conversations and cloud of influences, cohering around a few good (and less than good) ideas and some hunches, and shaped over time by the ebb and flow of academic and technical labour. In this case, the book’s contours have been shaped by the pleasures and challenges of teaching on the topic of digital technology and popular music in the Sociology Department at the University of Edinburgh, and so my first thanks go to all the students who have contributed to the course over the years. Much like the unsung heroes and heroines from the world of session musicians, it is your enthusiasm and dedication that leaves the biggest imprint on the text. Particular thanks to Arek Dakessian who tutored on the course with such verve and devotion, and to the course administrators, Sue Renton, Karen Dargo and Joanne Blair, for their professionalism in keeping the course running like clockwork. My PhD students, past and present, have been a constant source of inspiration, tackling topics of immense interest and import and lighting the way by sticking to their tasks even when progress seemed agonizingly slow. That this book took the long journey it did was partly a matter of contingency and partly down to the desire to aim for the high standards set by students and colleagues in their own work. If I have fallen short of those standards, it is not for lack of good role models. Books like this require enthusiastic funders and backers, and so my grateful thanks to Sage Publishers and particularly the commissioning editors, Chris Rojek and John Nightingale, for their support in making the book happen, and for their patience as they awaited its arrival. Thanks also to the technical and design staff at Sage for their guidance and efficiency throughout the process. The text was completed while on sabbatical, so I

viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

owe a debt of gratitude to the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh for giving me the time to finish the book and for funding parts of the research on which it is based. The marks and traces left by music in the text are too numerous to mention, but my thanks go to all the musicians who gave up their time to talk to me about their own practices and to the bands whose music leaked into the writing. Thanks also to Simon Frith and members of the Wednesday music seminar group who were always a source of inventive ideas and inspiration. I count myself lucky to have met so many considerate and smart friends through the seminar. Particular thanks to Arnar Eggert Thoroddsen, Matt Brennan, Mark Percival, Paul Harkins, Tami Gadir, Kieran Curran, Kyle Devine, Richard Worth, Tom Western and Adam Behr for their all-round brilliance. To my family – my brother, mum, dad, aunties and stepdad – I owe you so much, but particularly your love and encouragement over the years. Without your guiding emotional presence the book would have been so much harder. Dad, I still see your love and draw strength from it. Finally, the book was completed in Japan, a place I now consider my second home. The more I have got to know the people, culture and language of that country the more I have felt its inscrutable layers nourish the text. My thanks, in particular, to Katsuya Minamida, Yoshitaka Mouri, Tomoji Ebitani, Noriko Nakahama Davidson, Kanae Muraki and Jason Karlin for their advice, friendship and encouragement; to the University of Tokyo of the Arts (Geidai) for hosting me as a Visiting Fellow in the Spring/Summer of 2017; and most of all to Hitomi Kobayashi for her unswerving love and kindness in the book’s final stages. ! Accreditation over, I am obliged to say that any faults, flaws and foibles are entirely my own. Parts of the book have appeared elsewhere in preliminary forms, but all chapters have been substantially revised, updated and rewritten and none appear in their entirety as they do here. Select elements of Chapter 1, ‘Introduction: Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society’, appeared as ‘The Rise of the New Amateurs: Popular Music, Digital Technology and the Fate of Cultural Production’, in Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff and Ming-cheng Lo, Routledge, 2010. Chapter 2, ‘After the Orgy: The Internet and Popular Music Consumption’, is an expanded version of the chapter ‘Beyond Napster: Popular Music and the Normal Internet’, Sage Handbook of Popular Music, edited by Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman, Sage, 2015. Chapter 3, ‘Apps, Laps and Infinite Tracks: Digital Music Production’, draws on ideas first aired in

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

‘Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern’, New Formations, 66, Spring 2009: 81–99, as well as ‘OK Computer: Mobility, Software and the Laptop Musician’, Information, Communication and Society, 11(7), October 2008: 912–932. Chapter 4, ‘From Iron Cage to Digital Bubble? Mobile Listening Devices and the City’, is a revised version of the article ‘The Plural iPod: A Study of Technology in Action’, Poetics, 42(1), February 2014: 22–39. And Chapter 5, ‘Vox Pop: Exploring Electronic and Digital Vocalities’, draws on the article ‘On Vocal Assemblages: From Edison to Miku’, for a special issue of the journal Contemporary Music Review, 36, 2017.

1

INTRODUCTION: POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

‘

I hear you’re buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real You want to make a Yaz record. I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars. (‘Losing My Edge’, LCD Soundsystem, 2002)

’

A MICROPHONE HAS ARRIVED A microphone has arrived.1 It’s a chunky red and black unit, made primarily of plastic, and it incorporates three high-spec condenser microphones – ‘ideal for musicians on the move’, says the promotional literature. It’s not just a microphone, however, but also an audio interface, which means it can act as a bridge between my laptop, its audio software and any sounds I choose to record with it. I’ve already recorded some: the distinctive sounds of a Japanese koto and some everyday household noises, like washing machines, flickering candles and tin pots. It’s fallen over a few times because the stand is quite flimsy and the cables are too short. I had to go online to figure out which way to point the thing when recording vocals and it took me a while to find a volume level that didn’t add too much hiss to the recordings. In a matter of days it’s moved from a boxed-up item of stock, to a hotly anticipated object in transit, to a domesticated device in a mobile recording studio (Lehtonen, 2003). I’m struck by the immeasurable complexity that lurks behind this object – the extensive processes, materials and practices that orbit around it and which have made it possible. The unit itself is a physical object, of course, designed, or ‘scripted’, to certain specifications and for certain uses and users

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POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

(Akrich, 1992). It’s made under late capitalist labour conditions, assembled in a factory in China and circulated in a global system of commodity exchange and advertising. The manufacturer’s website displays an image of a musician strumming his guitar by the sea while the microphone captures the results, and this fantasy of masculine creative freedom has clearly done its job on me. Technically, the object comprises an integrated circuit of internal components, such as transducers, semiconductors and sensors that capture sound and turn it into malleable information. It’s the recipient of complex histories of disparate inventions exploited by a burgeoning musical instruments business. There’s a manual and set of online materials that came with it, but I’ve learned over the years that it’s sometimes better just to dive in with music technology – until I get stuck, that is. Let’s explore these object relations further. For the microphone to have arrived it must have passed through a cluster of networked infrastructures that facilitated its storage, order and delivery. There are online ordering mechanisms to consider and physical stock to account for, their circulatory logics governed by the backstage work of algorithms and Internet protocols in all their global diffusion (Beer, 2009). Trucks are driven, inventory is filled, parcels are delivered, electronic money is transacted. That the unit itself is a USB microphone with a lightning connector aligns it with a now ubiquitous constellation of digital practices and processes: a world where sound is transformed into code and where it is possible for musicians to take their recording studios with them. It therefore speaks of significant changes in how music is produced, who makes it and where (Théberge, 1997). Flexible, light and mobile, it belongs less to the modern place of the recording studio than to new ideals of making music in the interstices of time and space, where inspiration might strike at any minute. It is part of an evolving ecology of digital production that includes laptops, smartphones, software studios and Wi-Fi. Very much a twenty-first-century device, in other words. And yet the class of objects it belongs to – the microphone – has a history that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the invention of new sound recording technologies shaped not just what music sounded like, but what it was (Chanan, 1995). Microphones accompanied a new familiarity between listeners and singers that mediated the intimate sensibilities of love and loss characteristic of modern popular music. Singers learned to adjust themselves to the microphone, their posture and vocal technique bending to its presence. In conjunction with various subsidiary allies, from microphone stands and cables to mixing desks and pop shields, it has come to signify something essential about popular music: a crowd’s expectancy that a band will take the stage, a singer belting out a take in a vocal booth, or a hip-hop

INTRODUCTION 3

artist simulating the sounds of a digital drum machine. To say that there would be no such thing as popular music without it seems a little trite. Let’s just say that microphones and music are co-dependent and that, while they are shaped by the external world, they also shape that world and the sounds within it. Thinking through this object implies an understanding of the various social, technological and musical practices that are bundled into its production, its circulation and its use. When you open it up to close scrutiny, it starts to reveal a life composed of multiple layers of material and nonmaterial forces that shape its cultural biography (Lash and Lury, 2007). It therefore provides an aperture on the interconnections between music technology as ‘things’ and music technology as sites where practices, discourses and symbols unfurl. I begin with this chunky red and black microphone, then, not because it is a particularly special case, but because it illustrates the constraints and opportunities afforded by technologies as they interact with popular music in a changing social world.

POPULAR MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY The starting point for the book is that all music is technological in the sense that it is mediated by technological materials, forces and processes. There are no ontological grounds on which to claim that live or recorded music has a life abstracted from the world of objects. Indeed, while definitions of popular music may vary, with authors placing different emphases on its mass market appeal, its vernacular origins, its distinction from classical music, its industrialization and its formal structures (Wall, 2003), what subsumes all these definitions is the fact that popular music can only exist in conditions where it is mediated by a panoply of nonhuman materials, many of which are ignored or ‘hidden’ (Latour, 1992). It is enrolled and co-existent with diverse artefacts that, in turn, associate with and call forth specific types of engagement. It has a life in circuits, bodies and techniques. If this all sounds extremely broad, it merely takes it cue from recent thinking in Science and Technology Studies (STS), where technology is more than the spectacular machines of ‘high’ technology, as if high and low were purely technical attributes (Kleinman, 2005). It is more than synthesizers, drum machines, personal computers and iPhones, important as these things are. It is also the practices that accompany these objects, the discourses that promote their visibility, and the logics of engagement that bring people and artefacts together in particular ways (Bell, 2006). In short, to follow MacKenzie and Wajcman’s (1999) well-known definition, technology encompasses three main

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POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

components: the material objects themselves; the activities that revolve around them; and the know-how that facilitates their use. This definition points us to a situation way beyond musical purity. To paraphrase Frith (1988a), it is not that technology applies to or gets in the way of musical expression, for that implies that the two exist on different ontological planes, one for unsullied creativity and the other for the tools that materialize or obscure the author’s aesthetic vision. The sound of popular music is always already technological. Its origins begin with electronics, mechanical reproduction and amplification, after all, while the act of composition is always a matter of human–non-human conjunctions (Jones, 1992). Hence, as Negus puts it: Musical composition and performance practice is not something which exists in some pure state (which has subsequently been corrupted) outside of its immediate realisation in and through particular technologies and techniques. Music machines have continually provided new opportunities for sound creation, changed the existing relationships between instruments, and changed the nature of musical skills. (1992: 32)

Whether it is the gramophone, the electric guitar, the MP3 file, the lighting rig, the amplifier, the recommender algorithm, the reverb unit, the mixing desk, the PA, or something as ordinary as a rotary knob, technology is in music. The two are inseparable. And lest we assume popular music to be unique, here, or be tempted to hark back to more chaste times, violins and acoustic guitars are technologies for all that, as are the various associated elements – from strings and plectrums to songbooks and batons – that hold musical practices together and shape the musician’s body. Just take a look at the thickened tips of a guitarist’s or violinist’s fingers. The overall aim of the book is to sharpen our understanding of how these conjugations work, to engage readers in the debates that arise from them, and to illustrate their precise configuration in a post-1980s context in which digital technologies have emerged and become prominent. Based on a range of primary materials and secondary sources from the humanities and social sciences, mainly sociology, the book explores the complex ways music technologies get into music production and consumption, how the sonic and the digital constitute each other, and the issues sparked by their mutual entanglement.2 For, while the advent of digital technologies, or what I shall be calling ‘digital formations’, is not best cast as an absolute departure or technological break from an analogue past (not least because these two terms are never quite as straightforward as they seem), this moment does present opportunities to examine the weft and weave of popular music history. From software studios to smartphones, video games to the Internet, streaming services to

INTRODUCTION 5

music-making apps, landscapes of popular music have been dramatically reshaped, and this warrants close attention to the depth and richness of technology’s connection with musical forms, habits and techniques. Before describing the historical focus, organization and main themes of the book, let me draw out some foundational principles and starting premises. On what grounds do the domains of music and technology come together and why should this interest us? Where is music located in an era of technological convergence and dispersal, and how do musical materials travel through digital spaces? In other words, to return to the opening vignette, how should we proceed to examine objects such as digital microphones as they make their way through circuits of production, dissemination and use in the contemporary world?

FROM HARD DETERMINISM TO SOFT DETERMINISM For good reasons, the notion that technologies determine human activity in an unmediated fashion has been rejected by scholars sensitive to the entanglements of the social and the technical (Bauchspies et  al., 2006). Technological determinism, the idea that technology in isolation transforms what we do or how we do it, certainly has popular appeal. It is present in every advertising claim that a new product will improve or revolutionize our lives, often by dint of its mere existence. It is present, too, in broad characterizations of historical change as caused by technical changes: the invention of the printing press, steam engine or mass communications, for instance (Williams, 1983). As Bimber (1994) notes, while it is debateable that Marx’s views on the forces of production are tantamount to a straightforwardly determinist approach to history, Marx nevertheless imputes to technical forces considerable weight in the evolution of human societies and he is not alone in this assumption. Indeed, the idea that technologies shape the world has widespread currency and is integral to understanding not just the structure and formation of modern society, but the everyday existence (in the domains of work, home, leisure, family, education, health, culture, and so on) of the individuals who inhabit that society. What characterizes hard versions of determinism, however, is the assumption that technology is an independent change agent, an autonomous force that exerts itself on society from the outside. Two polarized assumptions tend to follow: that technology is either saving or enslaving. It can either, by itself, be a palliative to human problems and issues, such as solving illiteracy or poverty; or it locks us into dysfunctional patterns, intruding on our humanity or even transforming it into something no longer human (Virilio, 1997).

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POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

In the world of rock and popular music, while utopian positions are certainly present in claims around the innovative and democratic potentials of commercial music technologies, the dystopian position has ideological potency in discourses that ascribe corrupting power to music technology (Longhurst, 1995). From musicians’ unions to traditional rock journalism, binary logics of pure and impure are heavily imprinted in designations of pop, dance and electronic music as involving too much technology and not enough musicianship. To take a couple of examples, the influential rock star Iggy Pop was, in 2015, caught on video railing against dance music in no uncertain terms: ‘I fucking hate that techno shit … I will fight you till I die, you techno dogs. Fucking pushing buttons on your drum machines. It’s fake. Fake!’ (Incidentally, as a thought experiment, try replacing ‘techno’ with ‘classical’ and ‘drum machines’ with ‘pianos’ to see how ideology as the hidden grounds of common sense works in this utterance.) Frith (1986), meanwhile, notes, in an earlier context, that the UK’s Musicians’ Union (MU) often used its gatekeeping role to separate out music deemed authentic from that considered artificial, in one instance banning drum machines from an MU-sponsored battle of a bands competition. Historically, just as rock has slipped into narratives of quality and cultural depth, so popular music has been marked as a surface triviality – ‘dope for dupes’, as Middleton (2006: 200) puts it. Not that lines between these oppositions are immutable (Rojek, 2011). Indeed, that they are less marked than they used to be is a result of the very changes outlined in this book, including a blurring of musical genres and the crossover moves made by DJs, rock and electronic musicians. Yet, they are still manifest in routine indignations: against sampling musicians for putting ‘real’ musicians out of work; laptop musicians for lacking presence on stage; and DJs for reproducing rather than producing music. As for the MU, its orientations have evolved, of course, and nowadays even electronic music has its own discourses of authenticity (Prior, 2008a). But the MU’s campaign to ‘Keep Music Live’ is still influential, with the most recent manifestation being an ‘honesty code’ that petitions against miming and the use of recorded music on stage. Authenticity discourses, meanwhile, are ready to hand for rock critics and musicians looking to distinguish art and artifice, natural and unnatural, programmer and musician, muscularity and passivity. Such pairings are part of hierarchies of cultural value which act as structuring mechanisms in cultural fields in general (Bennett et al., 2009). But they also map onto judgements that distinguish commercial from artistic credibility and pop’s alignment with talent, trickery and disposability. As Théberge (1999) notes, these discursive oppositions are driven by two assumptions: firstly, that live music is the ideal locus of production, where

INTRODUCTION 7

talent and feeling reside; and, secondly, that technology is falsifying and corrupting, an argument that Frith (1986) traces back to critiques of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s. The upshot, from a determinist position, is that while some technologies, like synthesizers, drum machines and samplers, are seen as distorting, others, like the guitar and the microphone, barely appear to be technologies at all. And a good thing too, from this perspective, because the less technology in the way, the more direct and trustworthy the relationship between artist and audience – the paradox being, of course, that rock’s affirmations of authenticity are possible only because of modern technologies like microphones and guitars (Frith, 1986). Determinism, however, takes more than one form. Indeed, nearly all authors writing on music technology, even those purporting to reject determinism, still operate with some variation of it, namely what MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999) term ‘soft determinism’. This is the assumption that technologies shape and reshape human activities and is evident in narratives that take stock of the ‘impact’ of music technologies on genres, industry structures and consumer behaviours. Martin, for instance, writes of gramophones and phonographs as ‘creating’ a mass market for music and entertainment in the early twentieth century and of synthesizers as having ‘blurred the established distinctions between musicians, composers, engineers, and producers’ (1995: 257). Shuker highlights the role of the Fender Esquire guitar as changing ‘the range and variety of people who could play’ music in the 1950s, and of new recording technologies as opening up ‘creative possibilities [including] the emergence of new genres’ (2008: 34). Frith writes that ‘electronic technology undermines the idea of fixed objects on which copyright … rests’ (1986: 276), while Jones suggests that ‘it is the technology of popular music production, specifically the technology of sound recording, that organizes our experience of popular music’ (1992: 1). What unites these statements is the assumption that, while technology has a degree of agency (it disrupts, changes, makes possible, creates, produces, undermines), it is an agency that operates only in relation to complex and changing webs of production and use (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2004; Taylor, 2001). Technology is, to use contemporary parlance, ‘embedded’. For this reason, the most compelling studies in the burgeoning fields of popular music studies and sound studies are those that have avoided the kind of reductionism that treats technology as an essence defined by its mere propagation or technical functionality. Rather, they have taken seriously the cluster of social meanings and practices that surround it in historically specific settings. To take a few examples from these fields. Thompson’s (2002) study of modern architecture in early twentieth-century US cities demonstrates how

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POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

a new domain of acoustics was born as a result of a complex interplay between material processes, modern urban conditions and noise. Here, new architectural technologies designed to absorb sound were mobilized by key agents like noise abatement societies and acoustic scientists to shape the soundscapes of symphony halls and other physical spaces in US cities. Hence, for Thompson, the solidity of material objects and the emergence of human practices go hand in hand because ‘culture is much more than an interesting context in which to place technological accomplishments; it is inseparable from technology itself’ (2002: 9). Waksman’s (1999) study of the electric guitar, on the other hand, illustrates Langdon Winner’s classic dictum that ‘technical things have political qualities’ (Winner, 1980: 19). Here, Waksman locates the guitar’s history in a set of power relations which include the construction and performance of gendered and racialized bodies. Jimi Hendrix’s overtly phallic use of the guitar, for instance, is read by Waksman as part of a performance of African-American masculinity, but he also shows how Hendrix created new sonic worlds by manipulating the instrument in idiosyncratic ways. Indeed, this emphasis on power, context and the body is important because it shows how music technologies are sensed and experienced in the everyday lifeworlds of users and players (Ihde, 2002). Sterne’s (2003a) cultural history of the radio, telephone and phonograph extends this line of thought by mapping out the modern age of sound as an epistemic field of possibilities. Between 1750 and 1925, new modes of hearing and listening coalesced around the disciplinary practices of modern acoustics, physiology and physics. Reproductive sound technologies were, in this sense, part of a constellation of techniques and knowledges that spoke of large-scale changes in the organization of cultural life. Hence, something as seemingly trivial as the telephone’s vibrating diaphragm, when subject to critical contextual analysis, is an analytical route into a whole discursive corpus delineating the mechanics of sound and human hearing. This, in turn, tells us something about how sound was becoming an object and a problem, in the modern world.

USERS MATTER Just as the meaning of music technology is not reducible to its technical or functional content, however, neither can it be predicted on the basis of projections of that use by designers and engineers, the visions or ‘scripts’ inscribed into technologies by these influential actors (Akrich, 1992). We know this because of studies that describe what happens when music technology is used in practice. Pinch and Trocco’s (2002) study of the Moog

INTRODUCTION 9

synthesizer, for instance, applies Ludwig Wittgenstein’s axiom that to understand language one has to understand its use, to musical instruments. The authors delineate the socio-technical trajectories of the Moog as it shaped the sounds of rock and popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did users like Wendy Carlos, Stevie Wonder and Keith Emerson give the Moog the kind of visibility that competitor instruments like the Buchla 100 lacked (partly, the authors admit, because the Moog’s keyboard-based design was easier and more attractive to play), but also a whole host of additional actors like engineers, hobbyists and salespeople were intrinsic to its circulation and reputation. It was in localized practices, in other words, that the Moog came alive as an object. It was in basements, studios, shops and car boots that it accreted meaning and gained enthusiastic new players. Users matter, in this connection, because of the slippage between the design characteristics of music technologies and the spectrum of possibilities that are activated in their use by users who may themselves be from diverse backgrounds (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). We only have to look at the history of the turntable to see how an object meant for reproduction (playing records) was transformed into an instrument of production through the localized, tactile appropriations of Jamaican and black American hip-hop DJs in the 1970s. In fact, the history of popular music is littered with examples of users redefining technology’s functions and meanings, sometimes inadvertently, in the flow of everyday actions. The techniques of distortion, feedback, gated reverb, beatboxing and scratching can all be sighted through the prism of user contingencies, while the distinctive bass line ‘squelch’ of acid house in the mid 1980s is a case of what elsewhere I have termed the ‘extemporising bodies’ of musicians in Detroit and Chicago (Prior, 2007: n.p.). Here, at least according to members’ own accounts, the band Phuture had been messing around with a Roland TB-303 synthesizer in their bedrooms when one member of the band started twiddling the tone-shaping knobs in real time. This was against the recommendations in Roland’s description of the TB-303 as a ‘set and play’ device. Rather than setting the tone controls and leaving the device to generate bass lines, Phuture created a unique sound – what became the sound of acid house – by tweaking the filter settings as the device was playing. Hence, the signature sound of acid house was a result of small variations in the finger actions of users – small tweaks that, in turn, instigated a broader set of genre effects in wholly unexpected ways.3 Indeed, in Chapter 3, a more subtle version of these processes will be apparent in my description of young people’s uses of mobile digital audio devices, which are often more plural in action than implied by reductions of this use to social isolation and urban detachment (Bull, 2007).

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POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

Whether this all amounts to absolute ‘interpretive flexibility’, however, where users make almost limitless readings of technology to suit their purposes, is improbable (Grint and Woolgar, 1997; Hutchby, 2001a). Indeed, the concept of affordance, which is described later in the chapter, is one way that scholars have navigated between determinist and interpretivist accounts of technology: not dismissing the meanings that users bring to the encounter, but showing the material constraints and stabilizations placed on those meanings.

SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE RISE OF DIGITAL FORMATIONS: WHY 1983? In the book Any Sound You Can Imagine, Théberge (1997) lays out the various ways that digital technologies associate with shifts in the practices of making and consuming music. The knotty relations between digital technology and contemporary modes of production lead Théberge to examine not just key innovations in the industrial design and manufacture of instruments like personal computers, drum machines and home recording software, but also the development of markets and communities of practice catered for by consumer magazines. Both are implied in a third circuit of production, that of shifts in compositional practices and a reconfiguration of how music gets made. Here, Théberge utilizes a Weberian analytic to characterize these developments under the term ‘rationalization’ (modern society’s adherence to tenets of calculation, instrumentalism and quantification), though he is careful to show the specific ways computer-based modes of production imply a shift in relations to music as data, including its almost infinite transformation through digital editing programs. Again, the point for Théberge is that a properly embedded account of music technology cannot be one that begins and ends with the inventive virtuosity of musicians or the technical workings of their instruments. Rather, a sociology of these matters orients to the social, cultural and industrial contexts in which technical innovations in music production take shape. This guides us beyond kneejerk reactions of exuberance or paranoia with regards to new technology towards a description of what Durant calls the ‘precise ways in which any given technical device affects existing relations of musical practice’ (Durant, 1990: 183). Technology becomes a matrix point, from this perspective, because it is where the musical, the technical, the economic and the cultural intersect. And the hope is that by scrutinizing this intersection we are able to get at the myriad adjustments that take place in musical practices, such as how music is composed and listened to, while locating these practices within a shifting social context.

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Two questions then follow: the first relates to historical change, more particularly where and how we locate periods of far-reaching transformation. The second is how digital technologies are implicated in these changes and how we might characterize them in an era when the digital itself has become a designation, if not a synonym, for the contemporary (Peters, 2016). While stock histories of popular music often gravitate to a golden age of rock, usually located in the late 1950s or early 1960s – a period of rapid socio-economic change that begot a pantheon of rockers, from Elvis Presley to The Beatles – it would be disingenuous to assume that this represents its only decisive moment (Peterson, 1990).4 Popular music is a moving object and the challenge is to describe how it moves without resorting to hyperbole: to avoid ‘flip-flop’ analyses of the digital as if it constituted an opposite domain to the analogue without assuming that nothing has changed at all. As far as significant moments go, the early 1980s are a strong contender for what Théberge terms a ‘watershed moment’ (1997: 5) in music production. Without pre-empting the topic of the next chapter, we can nonetheless summarise four key developments.5 Firstly, some of the most influential styles and works of recent times were produced and disseminated in this period. Michael Jackson’s album Thriller, for instance, remains the biggest selling album in history and not only gave a much needed shot in the arm to the music industry (particularly the CD sector), but also turned Jackson into a global superstar, while New Order’s Blue Monday is widely perceived to have presaged a shift to dance-based pop in the 1980s. Musically, while the charts (at least in the UK) continued to feature disco, funk, R&B and rock, a much more elaborate electronic strand of music – a ‘new wave’ – became woven into the musical mix, with acts like OMD, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, Japan, The Art of Noise, Kraftwerk, Ultravox, John Foxx, Visage, Depeche Mode and The Human League. These were bands who were ‘connecting machines and funkiness’, as Goodwin puts it (1990: 263), combining an electro-futurist vision with studied indifference to US rock clichés and blues scales. Indeed, by 1982, according to Reynolds, synthpop had reached a zenith not least because it ‘seemed like virtually anybody wielding a synth could become a pop star’ (2005: 321). Secondly, then, within a year or two many of these bands had begun to experiment with a raft of new digital music technologies and processes, their presence emblematic of a fundamental shift in the global structure of the electronics industry towards East Asia, particularly Japan. Such devices included the first commercially successful digital synthesizer – the Yamaha DX7 – programmable drum machines, samplers, commercial audio software

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packages, and the first desktop computers with monitors and graphic user interfaces. These were the new inhabitants of the spaces of popular music production, nestling alongside and sometimes displacing established equipment such as organs and guitars. They activated and depended upon a set of new practices and knowledges, such as programming, shifting the definition of what it was to make music, and who was qualified to do so (Durant, 1990). Not only did music start to sound different – at turns gimmicky, distant and futuristic – but also recording studios looked different as musicians got used to device–practice–knowledge conjunctions that revolved around devices like the Fairlight sampler, the Linn drum computer and the DX7. What reinforced these transformations was the invention of MIDI, an industry-standard protocol set up in 1983 by a consortium of electronics corporations to enable digital instruments to communicate streams of algorithmic data with one another. As I will argue in the next chapter, MIDI unified what could have become a fragmented landscape of musical instruments, ‘locking in’ subsequent technological developments around a new paradigmatic frame of recording and performing. MIDI represented a fundamental change in how music information could be manipulated. As binary data, music could be copied and pasted non-destructively, without deterioration; hence, it no longer made sense to draw a distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copy’, putting into question all the ideological baggage associated with these terms (Middleton, 1990). MIDI also freed up musicians whose highly sequenced studio work could never have been reproduced in a ‘live’ context to take that work on tour, literally staging the abundant collisions between human and machine and putting into question hallowed ideas around ‘liveness’ and authorial presence (Auslander, 1999). Thirdly, CDs and CD players were introduced to the mass market in late 1982, another step in a long line of format shifts in the history of music that has changed how we listened to music, this time as digital bits. As Garofalo (2015) notes, in the early 1980s the international music industry was in the midst of a deep recession, with trade associations like the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) blaming a commercial downturn on piracy and home taping. But CD sales were one way record companies could recoup their losses, in acts of re-commodification of a back catalogue they already owned. By the mid 1980s, CD sales were booming, with consumers largely buying into the idea that, while smaller and lacking the accustomed visual accoutrements (lyric sheets, album art, sleeve notes), compact digital music constituted a more pristine, convenient and portable way to listen to music. Indeed, it was precisely this latter rationale that was to return just under 20 years later to haunt the industry,

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when digital music was unhooked from physical media completely, flowing freely through the circuits of peer-to-peer software. Finally, 1983 was the year that ARPANET (commonly seen as the first manifestation of digitally networked technologies) was switched over to the protocol technology TCP/IP, establishing networking capabilities across different and hitherto incompatible computers. Today, the Internet is largely based upon TCP/IP software that connects different networks of computers, a process that has reshaped not just how information circulates, but the operational logics of an increasingly global and interconnected late capitalism (Prior, 2010). From the shape of the music industry to how our musical tastes are formed, Internet protocols are now so heavily embedded in musical life that it has become difficult to disentangle exactly where the Internet actually is, as argued in Chapter 2. It has certainly become the main channel through which music now circulates, opening up huge questions about how to trace, track and study musical life. If era-defining characterisations are at all to be defended then it is surely in how the Internet, the networked beginnings of which can be traced back to the early 1980s, has reconfigured how music travels and, perhaps, what it is. And yet, it is important to remember that none of these four developments are socially disembodied processes, independently and autonomously responsible for creating (or determining) wholesale changes in popular music. In many respects, they replicated an already emergent series of global processes that ushered in high-tech, networked societies favouring a reordering of modes of cultural and economic production (Castells, 1996). Neither should we be tempted to romanticize the 1980s or selectively trace back our current predicament to a couple of years, as if these contained the blueprint for how the history of popular music turned out. Not only was this a period of immense political turmoil and social decay (in the UK, unemployment hit 3.25 million, with one in four under 24 year olds out of work, while the doomsday clock was officially moved one minute closer to annihilation), but also there are obviously dangers in teleological thinking (Beckett, 2015). Nevertheless, collectively, these developments did constitute a moment of immense importance, unsettling the grounds on which popular music was organized in ways that have reverberated in everything from how we listen to music and who owns it, to who produces it and what it sounds like. Indeed, it is surely not stretching things too much to counter Peterson’s (1990) argument in the essay ‘Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music’ with an upgrade that registers the years 1981–1983 as similarly consequential for the world of popular music. The digital is many things. Technically, it is a process whereby data is stored in binary forms as zeros and ones, rather than as continuously

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variable relationships. Hence, a digital photograph is composed of a grid of cells with specific addresses and attributes – ‘a series of steps rather than a continuous slope’, to quote Lunenfeld (1999: xv–xvi). It is also an ancient means of counting, of course, a handy mechanism to interact with the world of numbers (Peters, 2016). Indeed, this tactile aspect of the digital is a prominent strand of this book. It is given full auto-ethnographic treatment in the book’s ‘Afterword’, for instance. But what we are really talking about with the digital is a formation of discourses, artefacts and practices that revolve around an increasing reliance on complex computerized systems. Formations are loose configurations, less rigid than institutions but characterized by constituent material and non-material elements sharing enough properties in common to produce systemic effects (Williams, 1980). Digital formations are both myriad devices and commercial claims, often hyped in nature, regarding their function; they are both ways of talking, in the sense of established discursive repertoires that help constitute technological realities, and everyday routines that are engaged with the construction and consumption of binarized information. More a set of meanings, objects and practices than a technical ordering of information per se, the digital represents characteristic forms of organizing an increasingly interconnected and computerized world expressed in everyday behaviours, discourses and relations.6 So, while many of the technologies of the digital originate in the post-war climate of cybernetics and early information technologies, a distinctive digital formation is only possible with forms of communication and meanings associated with the late twentieth century, in a society that was becoming infatuated by and saturated with digital technology (Gere, 2002). It is hardly surprising, then, that authors like Peters have argued that the terms ‘analogue/digital’ are contingent and mutually constituting. Just as ‘the popularity of the analog could arise only after the invention of the digital’ (Peters, 2016: 93), so the digital can only exist as a category as a result of its construction as new and ‘other’ to the analogue (which is then marked as either outmoded, traditional or ‘warm’ in comparison). The challenge, then, is to extract from these reifications a detailed description of the complex folds of musical life and the everyday practices of those involved in music as producers or consumers or (increasingly) both. Not to assume, a priori, the era-defining qualities of a digital revolution, but to explore technology’s potential traces in ordinary practices of making and doing. In order to go some way to explaining the nature of these foldings, the remainder of this introduction outlines some of the main theoretical drivers for the book. It also attempts to provide some background to my

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biographical location and the problem of describing a technological present that appears to be in a constant state of disappearance. This is followed by a chapter-by-chapter summary.

ORIENTING CONCEPTS Regarding the role of theory and concepts, beyond the initial theoretical unpacking in this introduction, the book does not purport to be a densely theoretical text. Nor does it attempt to defend a particular theoretical perspective or tradition. Readers will not find much in the way of grand theorizing, or exegetical treatment of the theoretical heavyweights, here. It tries to be light and nimble with theory, selectively deploying ideas from a range of disciplinary fields and approaches when it seems appropriate to the material and beneficial to the interpretation. Theory is certainly not absent: on the contrary, it is present in every ontological claim and empirical observation. But it is used formally and explicitly only when it enriches our understanding in relatively accessible and (hopefully) interesting ways. Concepts are put to work, in other words: they are sunk into the text, pragmatically and instrumentally. Four concepts, in particular, have an influential presence in the text and the interpretations adopted are often informed by them. None are perfect, watertight, uncontested or self-evident, but are subject to ongoing refinements as a result of their application in empirical contexts and through the scholarly practice of theorizing. They have been chosen because they represent what I consider to be some of the best current thinking in debates around music, technology and society, and support the clearest explanation of the material. The concepts are assemblage, affordance, mediation and musicking, and while each has distinct origins and emphases they are all geared towards making full sense of relations between the social, technological and cultural. What follows is a brief overview of some of their key attributes before readers encounter them in the main text. This is in lieu of a more detailed treatment which can be found by exploring the work of the authors mentioned.

Musicking ‘Musicking’ is the term coined by musicologist Christopher Small (1998) to capture the activity of doing music which, he suggests, is part of the condition of being human, not least because it depends on social relationships. All the more surprising, then, that there is no verbal designation in English for this act beyond the term ‘playing’, which has more general applicability.

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For Small, to identify music as an activity is to depart from the notion that music’s essence is locatable in the score. The idea that the musical ‘work’ is a special thing, an idea particularly dominant in Western aesthetics, is unhelpful because it reifies and fetishes the act. Musical meaning is, more often than not, reduced to the single expression and intention of the great composer, rather than that which resides in the activities of performing it, listening to it, singing it and bringing it into being. The expansive idea of musicking is designed to get at the essential humanity of engaging in musical activities, whether that takes the form of a large-scale concert or singing in the shower. Indeed, for Small, to draw boundaries around music as the domain of the talented over, against and above the untalented is to rob people of their musicality. Musicking is ordinary, active and performative: To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance. (Small, 1998: 15)

If there is an obviousness to Small’s neologism, it still remains a necessary first step in depicting activities of making and consuming music. It shares much in common with Becker’s (1982) notion of ‘art world’ as a network of co-operative activities and draws attention to music as a set of ongoing practices, where practices are socially embedded actions (Reckwitz, 2002; Bourdieu, 1990). It therefore has descriptive power, inviting us to take stock of the full array of relations that have to gather for music to happen. Throughout the book, I will be using the term as a shorthand for musicrelated activities. That it is sometimes compounded with the term ‘digital’, however, hints at what I take to be the relative specificity of musical engagements with digital technologies. This, in turn, opens up the question of whether musicking itself is a purely human act at all, or is best seen as produced through multiple human–machine conjunctions. This is an assumption implied by the more expansive and, perhaps, sophisticated concepts that follow.

Affordance Affordance, for instance, is the conceptual third way posited by increasing numbers of scholars to determinist and interpretivist accounts of technology. The concept derives not from technology studies, but from James Gibson’s

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interventions in perceptual psychology, where the term was designed to get beyond the limits of cognitivist thinking that privileged perception as the foundations for the value of objects (Gibson, 1979; Hutchby, 2001b). Gibson noted how the affordances of an object did not change according to the needs or demands of a living being, but were unchanged despite them. Hence, the affordances of a rock to shelter an animal were dependent on the properties of the rock as related to the environment; and the affordances of a river defined it as a watering hole for some animals and a place to wallow for others. The point was that a rock and a river did not furnish the same results, but constrained the types of actions that were possible in relation to them. In the hands of technology scholars, affordance has become a tool to show how artefacts have specific properties that constrain their possibilities. Objects neither simply determine action in a vacuum, nor are they open to infinite flexibility as a result of users’ interpretations of them. Instead, they skew the likely conditions of possibility for action x to occur over action y. In other words, affordances are capabilities that inhere in objects beyond their discursive or socially constructed nature, and which both constrain and enable certain possibilities. They are, to quote Hutchby, part of the ‘material substratum which underpins the very possibility of different courses of action in relation to an artifact’ (2001a: 450). Here, Hutchby uses the example of the telephone. While being open to some interpretative flexibility (marketed as a business machine for men, it was appropriated, in the early days, by women to chat with each other), the telephone has certain capacities that allow it to function very differently from a fruit machine: ‘A telephone enables vocal signals to be transmitted along wires; a fruit machine does not. A fruit machine enables money to be won at specific moments of alignment of three barrels with pictures painted on them; a telephone does not’ (Hutchby, 2001a: 446). In short, the dice are loaded in terms of the possible uses of the telephone because of its affording properties, though Hutchby also notes the power of social conventions in shaping its everyday meanings. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the affordance concept, while attractive, needs to be divested of much of the baggage of environmental and animal studies which assume a singular relationship between an animal and an object. For Bloomfield et al., for instance, it is important to see affordances as part of a set of collective accomplishments between humans and non-humans: hence, the affordances of technological objects and the effectiveness of human action capabilities ‘should not be viewed as given but emerge as situated, and indeed ongoing accomplishments’ (2010: 422). It is the co-presence of diverse objects that encourages these authors to reference

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how ‘cascades of affordances’ function simultaneously and to note the manifold foldings of bodies and artefacts that characterize current socio-historical formations. My understanding and use of the affordance concept is sympathetic with these refinements, though it often reverts to the more pragmatic sense of affordance as action possibilities weighted as a result of an artefact’s properties – a guitar’s affordances are very different from a laptop’s, for instance. Moreover, in at least one chapter (Chapter 4 on the uses of mobile listening devices), affordance is found to be less useful than an account that emphasizes the plural and situated actions of users.

Mediation Like affordance, the concept of mediation is most productively seen as an object of discourse that allows us to address certain characteristics of the world of everyday cultural and socio-technical experience. It helps us to do a ‘rough identification’ as the social theorist Herbert Blumer (1954: 5) puts it, of how certain objects and materials are relayed or transacted through one another. In the tradition of media studies, mediation is a way of examining how particular media formations structure or frame social meanings and values. In the work of Marshall McLuhan (1966), for instance, this happens through the very nature of the medium itself. In more recent media theory, on the other hand, namely Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) concept of ‘re-mediation’, mediation gestures towards conditions of intertextuality and hyper-media where one type of medium is represented in and through another: say, re-mediations of old radio footage through the digital affordances of YouTube. Mediation, then, refers us to a process of conducting one thing through another and the resulting effects of that conduction. It follows that mediation refers to an active process of transformation of what is mediated. For its mediation, an object is changed. This may be no more than a shift in presence – from relative obscurity to a state of greater visibility – or something more dramatic like a transformation of the object’s intrinsic nature. When we talk about music’s mediation, for instance, we necessarily have to link this to music’s changing ontology. Music’s very essence changes as a result of its dissemination through the act of recording and reproduction. With the gramophone and radio, it is not just that conditions of reception for music change – listeners are no longer co-present with the musician, a ‘schizophonic’ moment according to Schafer (1969) – but what is meant by music, its properties, structure and organization, change as well. The birth

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of popular music is, as already argued, a function of the new conditions of mass dissemination, including what Frith calls the ‘industrialization of music’ (1988b). In this case, the act of mediation may be said to be a defining process for popular music itself. Here, it is useful to draw on Born’s work on mediation in the essay ‘On Musical Mediation’, in which she points to a ‘constellatory conception of music’s multiple mediations’ (2005: 13). Born develops a multi-part conception of mediation which includes historical and ontological co-ordinates. Historical mediation alerts us to music’s temporal dimension: for instance, pre-twentieth-century changes in conceptions of music bound up with the rationalization and autonomization of music, as well as the advent of romantic ideals of the composer, the rise of purpose-built venues for its performance, and so on. Ontological mediation, on the other hand, refers to music’s ‘emotive, symbolic, corporeal and material properties’, those inner properties that become a resource for the constitution of our social selves (Born, 2005: 13). Here, we are reminded of DeNora’s (2000) analysis of the co-productive relations between music and social life. Music is an index of, but also helps to constitute, ourselves because it is an active medium. Hence, the idea of ‘music in action’ suggests that music itself mediates our conduct, memories and emotional lives (Frith, 1996). It follows on from this that mediation must necessarily infer what the phenomenologist of technology Don Ihde calls ‘our motile, perceptual, and emotive being-in-the-world’ (Ihde, 2002: xi). For Ihde, when a technological artefact is used, it facilitates people’s involvement with reality, and in doing so it co-shapes how humans can be present in their world and their world for them. In this sense, things-in-use can be understood as mediators of human–world relationships. Technological artefacts, for instance, are not neutral intermediaries but actively shape people’s being in the world: their perceptions and actions, experience and existence. In the current context we might say that the increasing intersection of digital technologies like smartphones with human desires in both bodily and social dimensions reframes the understanding of perception as an always-on condition of embodiment. In other words, in order to understand humans’ lifeworlds, we need to get at the way we experience being a body in tandem with the situated interactions with non-human materials. From these comments, we can assume two things. Firstly, that mediation refers to something wider than processes involving media, towards a cluster of material and non-material transactions. This gives the concept greater coverage and leverage than that of ‘mediatization’, which as Couldry (2008) notes is somewhat limited in scope in its reference to ‘media logic’. Secondly, the mediation concept allows us to move beyond an explanation of human

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sociality and things where the things are either reduced to carriers of social status or tools that respond inertly to the intentions of users. Because we share our sociality with things, things and humans mediate each other. Hence, for Hennion, in understanding how baroque and rock music are made authentic, mediation can refer to a range of human and nonhuman actors that include ‘scores and texts, sound, instruments, repertoires, staging, concert venues, and media, and in a wider context the rites, ceremonies, prayer, religious, national and political celebrations’ (1997: 432). This is to recognize how meaning is collectively and relationally constructed through a range of mediating materials that do not have meaning by themselves but are products of an aggregation of these flexible elements. It is to extend our view of how cultural worlds are mediated by recognizing the force of non-human musical mediators, as well as to recognize a world of materialities and objects as new sites of affect and social order. But, if objects are always multiply mediated, how does one disentangle them for the purposes of analysis? If x mediates y, but y also mediates a cluster of other objects, does x also mediate these other clusters (a mediation of a mediation) until the category becomes recursive or emptied out? If music is, to quote Born, the ‘paradigmatic multiply mediated, immaterial and material, fluid quasi-object, in which subjects and objects collide and intermingle’ (2005: 7), where does this definition direct our analysis? Is everything not at one and the same time an object and a mediator of something else?

Assemblage The solution offered by some authors is to turn to actor network theory’s notion of assemblages. In some ways this is the most abstract of the four concepts and can sometimes obfuscate as much as clarify. Its purpose is to convey something essential about the complex processes involved in how objects come together and function: more specifically, a description that derives from a range of non-essentialist philosophers (Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda, Callon, Law, Haraway) of the messy and ongoing interrelationships between various kinds of materials and processes operating at myriad scales simultaneously. Assemblages are aggregates of heterogeneous elements: they are active, emergent, open and hybrid. If that all sounds opaque, think about how a city is assembled (Farías and Bender, 2010). At any one moment, there are potentially billions of transactions that traverse its internal and external bounds. These include the physical transfer of material goods; quicksilver flows of capital, information and commodities; the circulation of human bodies; the governance (and breakdown) of transport networks; the everyday

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interactions that lubricate street and domestic sociality; the digital striations of satellite systems and algorithms that govern entertainment and global finance; mundane acts like texting and talking; the construction and destruction of buildings; street protests; acts of violence; acts of love; local authority edicts; speed bumps; and so on. From this exercise, we can say that assemblages are clusters of material, non-material, human and non-human elements that are constantly ‘becoming’ – that is, constantly forming through active processes, rather than fixed or static. This emphasis on process and emergence allows us to show how things move (Urry, 2007). Components of assemblages never remain still: identity is located in movement, in how it changes, not what it is. Assemblage thinking also invites interrogation of multi-scalar dimensions of these processes, not least by showing how the tiny stuff (like shopping, driving or eating) is rolled into, rather than separable from, the larger stuff (like globalization): they imply each other. For Latour (2005), the act of ‘assembling’ implies how the social is made through associations between plural beings or ‘actants’. It is, in this sense, an ongoing accomplishment of hybrid forces rather than a substantive and singular entity ‘out there’. Or, as Canniford and Bajde (2015: 1) put it: What unites ideas of assemblages, actor-networks and figurations are conceptions of the world as constituted from more or less temporary amalgamations of heterogeneous material and semiotic elements, amongst which capabilities and actions emerge not as properties of individual elements, but through the relationships established between them.

While remaining relatively cautious about other parts of actor network theory’s flat ontology (particularly the relative backgrounding of vertical relations, like power, distinction and inequality), I believe that assemblage thinking offers some analytical leverage for understanding the complexity of musicking processes, bodies and materials as they articulate with one another. For instance, in Chapter 3, I use the concept to explore the image of digitally connected musicians making music on the move with their laptops, where it is difficult to locate just where production is. The concept is used to get at the complex relationships between music consumption and Internet technologies in Chapter 2, and it is deployed to describe the logics of musicking devices like apps, mixers and gaming engines. It also underpins some of the methodological quandaries around how one traces digital music production when many of the processes and materials remain profoundly tangled. Again, the objective has not been to start with the assemblage concept and then to look for exemplifying tendencies in the material; rather, assemblage is a sensitizing idea that seemed to work best in dialogue with that material.

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LOCATING THE AUTHOR, WRITING THE PRESENT, ASSEMBLING THE TEXT Before moving to a summary of the book chapters, a final note is in order on theory, topic selection and my own locatedness. The four concepts reviewed above are certainly not the only ones put to work, but are joined by a range of other orienting ideas, concepts and categories. These include concepts like field, network, habitus, scene, practices, cyborgs, authenticity, amateurs, performance and power. Again, each term has its own relative distinct history and meaning, and if they have not been explored with the theoretical rigour that one might find necessary, this is certainly no comment on the authors and traditions associated with them, but merely because of the practical constraints of a book like this, as well as the somewhat idiosyncratic selections of its author. Indeed, the book is clearly skewed and situated and is certainly not the final word on these matters. It presents an apparently coherent account out of the mess of the world, filtering immeasurable complexity into something that performs its claim to be an accurate and unitary statement. While often concealing doubts, hesitations and leanings, it nevertheless bears the traces of its author’s historicity and social position, the complex patches and threads woven into my habitus and which infuse my cultural orientations. If there is a relative coolness towards rock music in the book, for instance, it is not because of a personal distaste for that genre, but because my formative years were spent immersed in 1980s and early 1990s popular music, an era of flamboyant play, political ferment and the promise of a high-tech near future (though what era does not imagine this of itself?). Indeed, while earlier generations of musicologists, popular music scholars and sociologists of culture made massive strides in getting rock and popular music on the scholarly agenda, they often did so through acts of valorization for the genre that they grew up with and were fans of (Potter, 1998). Taking rock music seriously, both musically and sociologically, was an ideological, institutional and professional struggle for a generation of scholars and critics born in the 1940s and 1950s (Frith and Goodwin, 1990; Bennett et  al., 1993; Jones, 1992). These inclinations are reflected in key debates around authenticity, empowerment and resistance, for instance (Grossberg, 1984). But the pop I grew up with never claimed to be serious or resistant, it celebrated its own artifice and extravagance. It certainly was not following the drift of things to claim that Abba or The Human League were as credible as The Beatles or The Clash, although it is perhaps less of a stretch now. These years also straddled major upheavals in the geo-political landscape, from the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation to the

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advent of Western neo-liberal hegemons driven by Reaganism and Thatcherism. Years not just of global unrest and industrial decay, but of the advent of hyper-mediated cultural landscapes and the intensification of the commodity spectacle, embodied most vividly in MTV’s highly stylized aesthetics (Jones, 2005). Years, too, of the first domestic computer technologies, gaming consoles and CDs, socio-technical forms that are present throughout the book. Caught on the cusp of changes associated with the advent of digital technologies, I was part of the first generation of young people (in the ‘developed world’, at least) who straddled analogue and digital ways of knowing, talking and doing. We had to learn how to write anew with the advent of word processing. We were the first college and university students to use the World Wide Web and to be exposed to appellations like ‘surfing the Web’, ‘html’, ‘chat rooms’ and ‘browsers’. Young bedroom musicians like myself had to come to terms with new ways of organizing our production processes with the shift from four-track portastudios and guitars to digital synthesizers, MIDI and digital audio workstations. We had to acclimatize to new haptic routines afforded by digital interfaces: triggering a drum sound not by hitting a surface with a stick, but by loading up a sample with a mouse and pressing a series of buttons to change its parameters. It felt like we were caught up in a rapid moment of transition, promise and uncertainty, a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1961) that has undoubtedly continued to this day. It is these transitions, transactions and oscillations that are woven into the text and that inform, more or less unconsciously, my understanding of the field. As far as coverage of the field of popular music is concerned, the book is far from exhaustive but takes the digital as a kind of pinchpoint around which the chapter topics unfold. Imagine suspending a tissue from a single point. There is an obvious focal point, but the material that droops remains essential to the structure of the object. Other pinchpoints are entirely plausible and would undoubtedly result in different conclusions and emphases. For instance, the book does not take the long-view approach to music technology, tracing current trends back to much earlier modern forms and configurations, as Sterne (2003a) does, for instance. Its historical lens, with a few exceptions, is shallower as it homes in on specific developments since the early 1980s. It does not attempt to isolate genre and treat stylistic developments on a case-by-case basis, charting the evolution of particular styles like R&B, techno, post-rock, trance, electronica, etc. Nor does it focus on single national or regional examples, seek to understand sub-cultural styles or scrutinize cultural formations like ‘world music’. There are many other omissions, of course: the sensuous worlds of dancing bodies are absent; I have not taken a culture industries perspective or sought to highlight the

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spectacle of celebrity culture. Instead, it begins with technology (specifically digital technology) as a rough starting point for assessing current debates, claims and issues around the nature of popular music as a socially and technologically embedded practice. These debates and topics include: controversies around the so-called privatizing effect of personal audio devices and the social atomization of consumers; the role of gaming in transforming models of music consumption and the nature of digital play; the impact of Internet technologies on how music is sourced and accessed; the decline of the physical recording studio and widening participation in domains of production; the construction of meaning around singing voices when those voices are dramatically and mechanically transformed; and where the body goes in digital formations that hint at its disappearance. That the digital features so heavily in these debates illustrates three preliminary assumptions: firstly, that detailed and careful work on music and (digital) technology still needs to be done, despite eminent attempts like Théberge’s (1997) and, more recently, those of Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen (2016) and Nowak (2016); secondly, that, as pinchpoints go, the digital is not a bad place to start given its ubiquity, power and spread in current socio-cultural formations; thirdly, that these debates give us leverage in assessing precisely how technology and popular music interact in a late capitalist context characterized by technological speedup. These are, in other words, both interesting and informative ways to feel the pulse of the present, an optic on matters of digital musicking. That this is a present constantly disappearing over the horizon at some rate of knots poses one of the biggest challenges in the writing process. For, as soon as one sets down words for publication, particularly a book-length treatment of this type with a long lead-in time, the technological and cultural fields have moved on: the examples date quickly, the styles hybridize or evaporate, the language changes, and so on. MySpace, which at the beginning of the project seemed to be a permanent fixture in the social media landscape, disappeared almost completely off the map. Twitter, which was a minor player at the beginning of the writing process, achieved such massive global significance by the end that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, used his Twitter account as his main propaganda outlet. iPods and laptops became iPhones and iPads. A new generation of gaming consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4) were joined by virtual reality (VR) projects like Occulus Rift and Google VR. Genres like dubstep, grime, country dance music and vaporwave added to an already massive corpus of styles. Guitars went out of fashion. Guitars came back in fashion. Virtual Studio Technology plug-ins (VSTs), which at first attempted to simulate the look of hardware, developed their own distinct design aesthetics

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and layout. MIDI interfaces, which began as conventional keyboards, became touch-based, multi-modal surfaces that could respond to all sorts of sensory stimuli. Dialup became broadband became Wi-Fi. Floppy disks and diskettes were replaced by CDs and DVDs, which were in turn replaced by pen drives and cloud computing. New programming languages were developed. Napster threatened to undermine copyright, but in the end was neutered by the forces of a ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005). Live music, particularly in the form of music festivals, replaced recorded music as the most buoyant sector of the music industry. The Web diversified, diffused and became subject to urgent political controls. Mobile apps arrived. The Internet of Things arrived. Important rock and pop stars died. Ageing rock and pop bands reformed. Many record stores and recording studios shut down. Streaming and subscription services dominated listening and consumption. Vinyl made a small comeback, as did cassette culture. The ‘big five’ major record companies became the ‘big three’. The list is almost endless, the point being that unless one attempts to be faster than events and write something like social science fiction (an exercise not without intellectual merit but one that is perilous and potentially hubristic), one is always behind, chasing what seem like ever-accelerating developments (Gane, 2006). Despite book proposals claiming the contrary, books like this are far from ‘timely’ but temporally dislocated. The new becomes old, sometimes only to become new again, and the only logical way of dealing with this temporal skew is to accept it and hope one might extract something valuable from acts of contextualization and interpretation. The focus on key debates – many with long shelf lives – might also tap into some of the more enduring questions at the heart of these matters, even within rapidly changing contextual conditions. And what about the assembled nature of this text? If practices of musicking are heavily inflected by multiple spatial and temporal foldings characteristic of digitalization – where distinctions between here and there, now and then, production and consumption, body and machine, original and reproduced, live and recorded, are fuzzier than ever – then the same surely applies to the production of this very text. It is inscribed with similar technics of production, after all: laptops, keyboards, windows, folders, cut and paste commands, clicking, scrolling, data transfer, cloud storage, Wi-Fi, and so on. As I write, I am embedded in an assemblage of open-ended agents and materials. My laptop is both a substantive force that meets the flesh of my typing fingers and is utterly porous to the rapid flow of information as it connects to digital platforms and protocols (currently a Wi-Fi service at a café in a train station near Tokyo). Writing and research are in a constant state of forming and deforming, subject to the leaky logics of

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network informationalism. I have multiple tabs open in my browser, I am ‘in’ these virtual places but they also transit into my work: a tab is open to my university library where I have Christopher Small’s Musicking as an e-book; a website displays an interactive timeline for music genres; one tells me the correct spelling of ‘anime’, another feeds me news; a beep signifies a new Facebook message; two email clients vie for my attention; a Spotify application loaded with playlists informs and lubricates my writing; I am currently composing a song using two digital audio workstations (Cubase and Reason), and their project windows are also open. I find myself moving from word processor to song project, updating both when I can with similar overlapping movements and digital objects; my online calendar tells me when my appointments are; my smartphone flashes up texts from friends and families; Google and its algorithms are a constant presence. All the time the multiple flows of people, commodities and data are swilling around the text. It is a messy, kinetic and permanently ‘on’ business of circulation which I suspect is hardly unusual for a modern academic text. Just like popular music, in general, my writing is suffused with these conditions and is inextricable from them.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES The text comprises seven chapters, including this introduction and an afterword. Each chapter has been written to stand alone, so the chapters can be read in any order, depending on the reader’s interest. My hope is that the book will be a site around which discussion might be opened up and accommodated, so readers are encouraged to read with or against the text or to look for alternative pinchpoints. It is important to remain open to the possibility that the targets of enquiry might lead to alternative and unexpected levels of analysis. In that sense, I understand and expect that the text might, like the technologies it seeks to describe, be appropriated by users in unexpected ways. The next chapter, Chapter 2, turns the spotlight on the Internet and examines how forms of music consumption are agitated by the widespread availability of inter-networked digital technologies. The title, ‘After the Orgy: The Internet and Popular Music Consumption’, refers to how, in a post-Napster moment, the Internet is no longer strange, destabilizing or exotic. Its proliferation and diffusion mean that it is deeply embedded in the everyday lives of large swathes of the global population. It is weighty but mundane, important but ubiquitous. The chapter describes the various ways consumption is enmeshed with and structured by Internet protocols: from viral marketing to streaming services. When boundaries between offline and

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online are fuzzy, uncertain and shifting, it becomes difficult to measure impact, so the chapter illustrates how this pervasiveness poses a number of methodological and conceptual challenges. Where is the Internet when wireless protocols govern the logics of our digital devices? Where does one locate musical works, the objects of our tastes and attachments, when these works are stored in the digital cloud or as bits on our mobile devices? To what extent are algorithms and recommender systems transforming the grounds on which music tastes are formed? And what are the implications for the structure and priorities of the music industry itself? The chapter returns to the assemblage concept as a way of making sense of the multiple and varied ways that consumption practices are deeply entangled with Internet technologies after the peer-to-peer ‘revolution’, without falling back into discourses of panic or radical democratization. Chapter 3 is called ‘Apps, Laps and Infinite Tracks: Digital Music Production’ and focuses entirely on changing conditions in how music is made: the processes, practices and materials which gather around production. It asks how shifts in routines of composition, recording and editing are associated with the emergence of digital devices and processes from the early 1980s and the implications for the sounds of that era. If we focus on everyday routines and practices of musicking, what (if anything) is different about composing digitally, how do software studios favour certain routine practices like cut and paste, and how do these actions ‘get into’ the songs themselves? In short, how might we describe how popular musical forms materialize in digital environments which themselves seem to be increasingly mobile, diffuse and de-localized? The broad claim is that a focus on music production goes part way to answering the big questions about what popular music is, where it is made, who makes it and how, but this analysis must be oriented to digital production as a complex, open-ended and multifaceted assemblage. After a brief historical summary of three important developments, namely MIDI, sampling and personal computing, the chapter attends to shifts in how material conditions mix and mutate around digital technologies. It explores the digital logics and operations of materials such as software studios, plug-ins, mobile phone apps and laptops, and opens up questions around the affording dynamics of code when activated in a range of devices associated with production. It critically assesses the claim that the spread of digital technologies has led straightforwardly to the democratization of production, focusing on questions of cost, availability and technical capital. Finally, it illustrates the methodological difficulties in tracing what and where production happens and asks what kinds of research instruments should be deployed to study these developments, when musical materials are so diffuse, elusive and fluid.

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Chapter 4 focuses on a specific set of debates about the uses of mobile audio devices like iPods and smartphones in everyday urban settings. The title ‘From Iron Cage to Digital Bubble? Mobile Listening Devices and the City’ alludes to the Weberian flavour of these debates, where the modern secular self is locked into large-scale, technical and impersonal structures like cities. The chapter takes its leave of departure from what has become something of an orthodoxy in claims around the privatizing effect of these devices: the notion that such devices isolate urbanites from one another, huge swathes of the urban population having become solipsistic colonizers of space captured by the seductions of modern consumerism (Bull, 2007). Drawing on a mix of secondary sources and primary data collected on the uses of iPods and smartphones among students, the chapter shows that digital audio devices are often enrolled in complex and sometimes counterintuitive ways into the lifeworlds of users: not just to colour and control their environments with musical selections, but to engage in extended acts of sociality, to strategically ward off unwanted attention or even in intentional acts of non-use. The argument that consumers live in digital sonic enclaves or ‘bubbles’ is simplistic and one-sided, it is argued, because it fails to register the complex ways plural audiences actively engage with them. Hence, the image of the zoned-out, locked-in urbanite captures only a single dimension of what is a multi-faceted question of how users and non-users strategize, reflect on and interact with such devices. The voice is often said to be a special case: an index of personhood where our identity and self are stored. The singing voice is where expectations around talent, character and authenticity are heaped – characteristics that are often set against the incursions of technology. Yet singing voices are always mediated in popular music, always subject to the embalming qualities of non-human others. Chapter 5 is called ‘Vox Pop: Exploring Electronic and Digital Vocalities’ and sketches out a modern history of these transactions. It explores various modalities of vocal mediation through which the voice sounds out, showing how these modalities consciously play with the boundaries between human and machine. From the microphone, sampler and vocoder, to Auto-Tune, voice synthesis software and beatboxing, vocal ontologies can only be read as radically hybrid entities. With recent digital manipulations, for instance, these complex entanglements are not only radicalized, but also ironized and turned into innovative aesthetic forms that unsettle the foundations on which the voice sings and talks. Here, the voice becomes a pliable object of information, enmeshed in machinic vocalizations and subject to the microscopic transformations of digital technologies. In short, the voice becomes pure data. And yet, the chapter shows that even in conditions of simulation, with

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so-called ‘virtual’ singing idols like the Japanese singer Hatsune Miku, the index of the human is never fully displaced. Despite being seduced by machinic vocalities, we can never, it seems, quite let go of the fleshy. Chapter 6 is called ‘Playsumption: Music and Games’ and turns its attention to the world of video games. Revenue from games now outstrips that of music and film combined, registering the cultural and economic dynamism of a medium that is now well beyond the crass stereotypes of juvenile geeks in bedrooms. As the early twenty-first century’s most upwardly mobile and effervescent medium, games have significantly impacted on how models of music production, distribution and consumption play out. The chapter breaks down what is an enormously rich and varied set of connections into three categories: music with games, music from games, and music as games. The sound, production and history of music made with gaming technologies illustrates the close connections between the development of computer hardware (particularly sound chips) and music production. Here, the chapter focuses on the genre of ‘chiptunes’ as one aspect of this relationship, where discourses of techno-nostalgia have favoured a return to sonic textures associated with an era of 8-bit game music. As for music from games, recorded soundtracks from video games have been a significant source of attachment for game fans for a while, but they have recently been joined by a number of additional formats, including live re-enactments of game footage and live classical performances. The chapter explores the impact of these extensions on taste hierarchies and the configuration of digital distribution channels. Finally, the advent of rhythm–action games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution, as well as a range of music-based apps, shows the convergent nature of contemporary media. Here, music itself has become the basis to the game, shifting what it means to play and consume music. The chapter characterizes the games– music interface under the rubric of ‘playsumption’, a neologism that aims to get at play-based modes of digital music consumption. Chapter 7 is the concluding chapter and the book’s afterword. Subtitled ‘Digitus’, it aims to break frame with the mode of address hitherto taken in the text, where the author asserts a truth with references. Instead, the chapter draws on elements of auto-ethnography, storytelling and thick description in order to reconstruct a collaborative music project that emerged out of some teaching in this area. It is a personal account of the lived experience of writing, rehearsing and performing a musical work with a group of students, using digital technologies to explore the theme of musicking fingers, hence ‘digitus’. It is something of a self-exemplifying piece in that it illustrates how a piece of music emerged through many of the processes outlined in this book – musicking practices, digital ways of knowing, collaborative

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efforts, machine–human conjunctions and touch. It also demonstrates the epistemological challenges of reassembling the process when locating the patchy digital traces left from the project, where memory, archive and contingency intersect. It hopes, therefore, to be a located account of making and recounting music in action – one that draws together and draws to a close many of the themes of the text. Finally, a note on definitions. It might be obvious by now that I have avoided the temptation to pin down popular music to an absolute set of characteristics. The main point of this introduction has not been to delineate terms like ‘pop’, ‘rock’, ‘classical’ and how they intersect with processes of genre formation and the structure of cultural fields. Neither have I sought, as Rojek (2011) does, to recover ‘pop’ from its discredited past in order to demonstrate its ubiquity and genre-spanning properties in a digital world. This is not because definitional work is fruitless. Indeed, any definition of popular music must take into account, inter alia: (a) its widespread circulation and popularity; (b) its industrialization and commercialization; (c) its discursive and symbolic construction; (d) its distinction from ‘high’ and ‘elite’ culture; (e) its formal musical structures and properties; and (f) its imbrications with people’s identities and everyday lives. Rather, it is because the book seeks to maintain focus on the specific mechanisms of making and consuming music, the technological practices that activate them and the issues that arise from their mediation. In other words, it is to see popular music as emergent precisely through the kinds of ongoing processes, debates and issues identified as integral to its socio-technical life. Just like my chunky red and black microphone, the routes of popular music are always constitutive and in motion. How they are so is the main driving question of the book.

NOTES 1

2

This vignette is inspired by a passage in David Bell’s book Science, Technology and Culture, which describes the ‘countless technologies and technological systems’ implicated in the delivery of the author’s fridge. The passage is called ‘a fridge is being delivered’ (Bell, 2006: 39). The bulk of this text takes its disciplinary cues from the sociology of music, a fairly well-developed sub-field with its own canonical texts, debates and authors (Prior, 2011; Hennion, 1997; DeNora, 2000; Frith, 1996). According to Shepherd and Devine (2015), the intellectual strands of music sociology are historically fragmented and scattered, stretching back to disparate comments on Western art music in the works of Max Weber, Herbert Spencer and Georg Simmel through the more concentrated writings of Theodor Adorno, and the

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4

5

6

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take-off of popular music studies in the 1970s. Since the turn of this century, however, music sociology has achieved a stronger identity, with important contributions from a range of perspectives, topics and approaches, all addressed to the question of how best to understand the complex relations between the musical and the social. Key topics include music’s meanings, its industrial organization, its ideological impact, its interaction with everyday life, its imbrications with social identity, and its role in social inequalities and taste cultures (Shepherd and Devine, 2015). Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society draws on many of these debates, but it overlaps most closely with an emerging space in music sociology interested in mapping out the mutually constitutive relations of music, materiality and technology (Born, 2005). In addition to Phuture’s appropriations, it is said that musicians found the unit so hard to program that the sequenced patterns would sound nothing like how they intended them and workarounds were found to make programming easier. A common ‘hack’ was taking the batteries out for a certain period and reinserting them so that the patterns in the memory began to vary in somewhat arbitrary ways, giving rise to the quasi-random sounds associated with acid house. In his article ‘Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music’, Peterson pointed to that year as the year consolidating legal, technological and organizational developments conducive to the birth of rock music in the United States. These included the development of a ‘dual structure’ industry of small firms and oligopolies, the spread of network radio programming, and the development of 45rpm vinyl records (Peterson, 1990). Even if there is a whiff of nostalgia in this analysis, the point is sound: a unique confluence of occupational, technological and cultural elements in the mid-1950s instituted a system of production geared to the total transformation of the popular music industry. Though whether these years constitute what Taylor calls ‘the most fundamental change in the history of Western music since the invention of music notation in the ninth century’ is rather doubtful (2001: 4). Castells (1996) argues that the restructuring towards a global networked economy is dependent upon digital information technologies, such as the Internet, that integrate financial markets and allow capital to flow freely. The very mechanisms of an adaptive capitalism depend upon flows of non-material digital goods (capital, information, images, software) zipping around the globe at hyper-speed (Thrift, 2005).

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AFTER THE ORGY: THE INTERNET AND POPULAR MUSIC CONSUMPTION

‘

At first I was afraid, I was petrified Kept thinkin’ I could never live without you by my side Then I spent so many nights just thinking how you did me wrong And I grew strong And I learned how to get along (‘I Will Survive’, Gloria Gaynor, 1978) In the middle of the revelries, a man whispers into the woman’s ear: what are you doing after the orgy? (Baudrillard, 1990: 5)

’

INTRODUCTION Every year, the American trade magazine Billboard compiles a list of ‘executive excellence’ comprising the hundred most powerful figures in the music industry. In both 2015 and 2016 that accolade was given to the CEO of the Universal Music Group, Lucian Grainge, based on overall market share and ownership of a host of best-selling and Grammy award nominated releases. In 2017, however, the top spot was taken not by the CEO of a major label at all, but by Daniel Ek, Chairman of streaming service Spotify. Ek’s efforts, the magazine declared, were ‘nothing short of transformative’, not least because ‘in 2016, streaming accounted for 51% of music consumption in the United States, and Spotify dominated the category’ (Levine, 2017: n.p.). Digital streaming is clearly where the centre of gravity is shifting as far as the recording industry is concerned. On-demand services are widely perceived to have presided over a significant industrial recalibration and shift in consumption practices, from material ownership to a subscription model based on rent. Streaming is quickly becoming the dominant mode of consumption among inter-networked users with access to an ‘all-you-can-eat’

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service based not just on a vast and expanding catalogue of music, but on a raft of recommender functions, such as personally curated mixes and new releases. Mobile, flexible and always on, streaming services demonstrate the extent to which Internet companies have a stake in how, where and what music gets to consumers. Power, it seems, has shifted to the algorithm. This chapter explores changes in how music is consumed since the advent of the Internet and digital services like iTunes, Napster, Spotify and YouTube. It attempts to take stock of where we are in debates about how tastes and practices are constituted in online spaces, as well as the impact on retail networks and the music business. That the recording industry has adapted to the almost unfettered flow of music that accompanied digital piracy in the early to mid 2000s demonstrates a resilience that requires its own set of questions, namely: how should we characterize relations between what is a complex and rapidly changing system of digital distribution and consumption on the ground? To what extent are users embroiled in the frenetic circulation and sharing of music in digital spaces, such as social network sites, and what does this say about the balance between the ownership, control and generation of content? What are the implications for the ways in which people collect and manage their musical lives and the nature of their musical preferences, especially after the peer-to-peer ‘revolution’? To put it another way, in the wake of the Napster episode, what happens after the orgy? The chapter takes its cue from what has been termed a ‘third age’ of Internet scholarship and analysis (Wellman, 2013). This is a phase beyond an initial euphoria around the Internet’s renegade capabilities and a subsequent descriptive mapping of commercial and demographic expansion. The current phase is characterized, instead, by a more sober examination of the Internet as an increasingly diffuse but normalized presence: neither novel, liberatory nor radically autonomous, but sunk into everyday routines of consumption. Here, there is less to be gained from rehearsing polarized debates about whether the Internet is a domain of free and permissive culture (Lessig, 2004), or an engine of amateur mediocrity (Keen, 2007). Instead, it is more profitable to limn out how music is managed in a context where code is shaping an industry that has – notwithstanding a small resurgence in sales of vinyl – moved away from one-off unit payments to monetized access to the celestial jukebox (Burkart, 2014). We certainly need to know more about how digital infrastructures articulate with changes in music consumption practices mediated by mobile, cloud-based systems. Changes that have taken a few short years, too, for while Spotify was founded in 2006 and launched in 2008, it had of June 2016 something in the region of 100 million active monthly users, half of whom were paying subscribers.

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The chapter is split into three sections. In the first, I will attempt to summarize some of the main historical components of the Napster moment, a moment that continued a long-standing trend of panic, resistance and adaptation as far as industry struggles over technology and cultural content are concerned. In the second section, a single example – the release of Boards of Canada’s album Tomorrow’s Harvest – is used to explore the complexities of consumption in online and offline spaces. Here, the ‘guts’ of current Internet technologies are described as assemblages increasingly driven by the embedded power of algorithms that govern recommender systems, cloud storage processes and content sharing. Just as opportunities to connect, share and collaborate open up music to circulations of extraordinary speed and scale, so, it will be argued, this produces difficulties in tracing and locating music’s disparate and profuse trajectories. In the third section, I will explore the implications of web-based affordances for sociological debates around the formation of music tastes. Here, it is important to ask to what extent Bourdieu’s well-known argument positing homologies between social background, taste and cultural capital is sustainable in a context where consumption practices and styles are subject to the diversifying tendencies of digital technologies and participatory cultures. In narrowing down to just a few issues related to consumption – the ownership, distribution and control of music formats, the shaping of Internet assemblages and the formation of taste practices – I have necessarily had to omit other important considerations regarding the ways Internet technologies are implicated in changing landscapes of popular music. For the most part, I am bracketing off consumption from production even though the boundaries between them are blurred and nebulous: from the purchasing of virtual studio technologies (VSTs) to the promotion of music through sites like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. A related blurring is apparent between professional and amateur musicians amidst a general explosion of music-related digital content, and these processes have had to remain relatively untouched, at least in this chapter (they are covered, however, in Chapter 3). I will not be assessing emerging models of online or ‘e-celebrity’ and the rise of the Internet music star. Neither will I be looking at the advent of online radio, podcasting and music journalism, where the decline of print-based journalism runs parallel with the rise of a diffuse group of technologically literate intermediaries, commentators and taste makers, many of whom are non-institutionalized. I will not be attending to shifts in the nature of ‘live’ music, the establishment of a new species of online gigs, simulcasts and real-time digital relays, and the resulting ontological confusions between then and now, here and there, real and simulated (Duffet, 2003). Finally, I will not be touching on the advent and development of ‘virtual scenes’ – digitally enabled clusters of activity oriented to particular

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musical styles generated through the commitments of followers in online spaces (see Bennett and Peterson, 2004). Important as all of these topics are, they would require a much fuller treatment than is possible here. Indeed, the range of these omissions already demonstrates the difficulties of engaging with a topic that spans deep and wide transformations in the way popular music is circulated as both commercial entertainment and source of routine identification. For the Internet is bound up with restructurings of every conceivable component of music, including all the phenomena covered in any standard popular music textbook: style, genre, the body, memory, copyright, space, technique, consumption, distribution, performance, liveness, gender, and so on. This is not just about arcane legalese and the politics of copyright, in other words, but represents a significant shift in the value of music, how it is acquired and listened to. This, in turn, implies wider economic and technological changes wrought by the rise of an intensified modernity dependent on accelerated flows of labour, information, services and goods: what Castells terms the ‘space of flows’ (2000: 407). Here, the Internet constitutes a new paradigm for late capitalism (the maximal circulation of ones and zeros is the basis, if not the raison d’être, of global financial markets after all) and the technological form of life through which cultural exchange increasingly takes place. It is what Terranova calls a ‘multidimensional information milieu … a network of networks [and] set of interrelated protocols’ (2004: 41). The ultimate result is that music flows in increasingly liquefied units that express what it is to be an inhabitant of societies that are increasingly global, networked and saturated with information. But, to assume that this is a seamless electronic space devoid of contingencies and hierarchies is to get carried away with the idea of the Internet as a unifying network. As with capital, so with music.

PANIC, ADAPTATION AND REGENERATION: NAPSTER AND BEYOND It is impossible to examine the relationship between popular music and the Internet without considering the question of online piracy, despite the often lofty, belligerent and dated rhetoric that gathers around it. It certainly still grabs the most headlines and induces the most widespread panic among industry bodies. Although there were already networks in place that made it possible to distribute digital files across the Internet (IRC and Usenet, for instance), it was the peer-to-peer program Napster that spectacularly announced the era of online piracy in 1999. At its height Napster was hosting 26.4 million active users and its popularity represented the frontier spirit of

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the dot-com boom, a spirit associated with a strong anti-centralizing tendency rooted in a liberal vision of counter-culture (Wall, 2003). Napster worked by combining three functions: a search function for finding MP3 files; a file-sharing function that bypassed the need for a central server; and an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) function that allowed users to communicate with each other. The result, for many commentators, was nothing less than a new age for music. Not only was sound (as digital bits) subject to the ceaseless logics of flow, but also this open circulation heralded a new system of distribution that circumvented some of the institutional conditions set by media conglomerates. For Haupt, writing in 2006, for instance, file sharing was counter-hegemonic, not just because the proprietary integrity of the text was violated, but because agency had shifted to consumers who ‘were now able to bypass conventional retail outlets and access only those songs on specific albums that they preferred, as opposed to buying the whole album’ (Haupt, 2006: 216). For others, Napster was a disruptive technology because it demonstrated the hidden power of online communities working on the basis of a decentralized recruitment process. By the mid 2000s, it appeared that ‘nothing was as it was’ (Breen and Forde, 2004: 79). Reports indicated that the industry was in terminal decline and that sales were dwindling across all physical formats. The CD market contracted by 25% between 1995 and 2005, for instance, while revenue from total sales halved in the same period (Keen, 2007). Top-down business models were being outrun by quicksilver logics of circulation, with Kusek and Leonhard stating that music was ‘starting to flow into any and all digital networks, whether paid for or not, and whether authorized or not’ (2005: 13). The music industry could no longer assume to control the relationship between producers and consumers. It was behind the times, a lumbering dinosaur that miscalculated the power of technology and the inventiveness of its consumers. An industry not known for its innovative, forward-thinking practices was under threat of complete dissolution. In these respects, the response of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA, the trade organization that represents the industry in the United States) was blunt but predictable. Firstly, it issued copyright infringement lawsuits against Napster and those consumers defined as heavy downloaders. Secondly, it introduced anti-piracy measures designed to protect and control intellectual property, the most well known of which, Digital Rights Management (DRM), comprised a piece of embedded software that locked content down so that it could not be copied (Kretschmer and Pratt, 2009). Both strategies had limited effect, however, or, worse, backfired, primarily because criminalizing one’s core demographic makes bad business sense. By 2002, the UK music trade press was reporting that piracy was

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costing the business £49 million that year alone, with users stated to be downloading on average 19 tracks per month (Williams, 2002). Other research suggested that online piracy led to a 35–40% reduction in the global music market, although, as we shall see, statistics on online piracy are ambiguous to say the least (Wikström, 2009). Little wonder, then, that in the heady days of the mid 2000s, cyberutopians were celebrating the idea of an unrestricted regime of distribution that set music free. Sharing had triumphed over greed, rhizomes over hierarchies. The peer-to-peer revolution had destabilized copyright capitalism and democratized music consumption (McGee and Skågeby, 2004), leading Leyshon to channel Marx’s spirit of optimistic disruption in the Communist Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting capitalism’, he wrote, ‘the spectre of the gift’ (Leyshon, 2003: 533). The brave new world of a digital commons, in some senses, mirrored the visionary idea of the World Wide Web itself as ‘a decentralized technical architecture and a decentralized social architecture’ (Berners-Lee, 1999: 220). Peer-to-peer software represented a new ideal of unbridled creative expression and collective intelligence, one that erased the meddling of the corporate middlemen. So when Radiohead offered their album, In Rainbows, as a direct digital download for any price the consumer saw fit, the game, it seemed, was up. The nature of music had shifted from a relatively fixed material commodity, the exchange value of which was governed by corporate actors, to a freely circulating, de-materialized file, the value of which was determined by its distribution and use. From the perspective of the late 2010s, the story of a crumbling empire looks all rather different, however. As usual, when in crisis, capitalism turns to its best trick: it adapts (Thrift, 2005). Instead of a bloody overthrow, the recording industry co-opted its rivals. Instead of disintermediation, the industry learned to reintermediate. And instead of the demise of the ‘big five’ major labels, we now (at time of writing) have the consolidated form of the ‘big three’. Napster was initially acquired by the global media conglomerate Bertelsmann, only to be liquidated, rebranded and reopened as a subscription-only service. Other peer-to-peer sites suffered the same fate. Digital distribution models were steadily adopted by industry players, initially in the guise of iTunes, which showed how an increasingly powerful technology company could control and commodify digital content, but quickly joined by a host of other online portals including Amazon, eMusic, PlayNow and Zune Marketplace. It was Apple that quickly grew its slice of the market, however, and by 2010 sales on iTunes accounted for 27% of total music units sold in the United States (Burkart, 2014). As Arditi (2014) notes, the overall impact of iTunes was to entrench rather than undermine

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monopolies and to restrict rather than open up the means of distribution. Boasting an extensive library and feeding off Apple’s image of rebellious chic, iTunes was best placed to commandeer and reign in illicit consumer habits. It represented ‘the recording industry’s desperate need to compete with free music online’ (Arditi, 2014: 417), one that turned downloaders into customers and consolidated emergent new practices such as making playlists. Since musicians were not able to upload their music to iTunes for others to download without going through fee-charging intermediaries, Apple’s portal also maintained controls on distribution and therefore a re-entrenchment of the role of traditional gatekeepers. Since the mid to late 2000s, subscription services like Spotify, Tidal and Deezer have provided additional revenue streams for the recording industry, as have a more diverse set of digital resources such as ringtones, music apps and video games. Cloud-based services dispense digital content using virtual servers and while some (like My.mp3.com) were initially rejected by the major labels, licensing deals were eventually struck and something of a rapprochement reached between the majors and service providers once considered too closely associated with illegal downloading. Spotify, in particular, was, like iTunes, viewed by the majors as a potential solution to the challenge of transforming illicit file sharers into disciplined consumers. As if to demonstrate directly the somewhat ironic mechanics of co-option, the very peer-to-peer technologies that had once threatened to wreak havoc on the industry are now part of the infrastructures that are restoring it. Spotify’s digital platform partly runs on peer-to-peer technologies and its CEO, Daniel Ek, was formerly Head of uTorrent, a popular BitTorrent client that allows users to source and download content for free. Based on a two-tier subscription model (one free but laced with ads, the other an ad-free premium service), Spotify pays a slice of its subscription and advertising revenue to the majors, who have, in turn, invested equity in the service. Despite surface differences in the financial models of streaming services and the pre-digital industry, one of the main reasons for the major labels’ support of Spotify is precisely the latter’s continuation of a ‘consumption-based’ strategy, as Marshall argues: ‘to release lots of records in the knowledge that only a small number of them would be successful, but that the rewards from a small number of hits would outweigh the losses of the remaining releases’ (Marshall, 2015: 12–13). Business as usual, then. Meanwhile, what are claimed to be paltry returns flowing back to musicians from Spotify (resulting in some high-profile withdrawals of catalogue from the service by Thom Yorke and Taylor Swift) are justified by the company according to long-established logics of economies of scale.1 The more fee-paying subscribers it has, the bigger the pie and therefore the bigger the slice of the pie shared by artists (Marshall, 2015).

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Competing services also exist, of course. In the United States, Pandora bills itself more explicitly as an online radio service that streams music without a subscription and boasts 80 million active users. The continuing battle over copyright, though, is evident in the shutting down (under legal duress) of the streaming site Grooveshark in 2015, and other services have begun to fall in line to avoid further shutdowns. Even Napster survives, albeit as a rebranded online music store that merged with online service Rhapsody in 2011. As for YouTube, which in terms of sheer quantity is possibly the most significant site for uploading and listening to copyrighted music, its fate is in the balance as a music site. Industry and political representatives are putting pressure on the video streaming service to make good a perceived ‘value gap’ between what it makes from online advertising and what it gives back to artists and the industry. Interestingly, the response from YouTube (whose holding company is tech giant Google) is not dissimilar to that used by some to justify peer-to-peer downloading: it generates consumer demand among fans who would not otherwise have spent a dime on music. In any case, the ultimate result of these interdictions, alliances and adaptations is that reports now speak in upbeat terms of the reinvention of the industry and the opportunities for digital innovation. In 2013, the IFPI annual report, for instance, spoke of music’s ‘road to recovery’ as it fuelled the digital economy with new licensing deals and opened up new digital markets. By 2016 the equivalent report was lauding the buoyancy of digital commerce after a year when sales from digital formats had overtaken that of physical formats for the first time and streaming had witnessed a 45.2% uptick in revenue. In short, the recording industry did not disappear, it regenerated. Much had changed, of course, and we should not underestimate the far-reaching consequences of those changes. New pricing structures, the dominance of the single and the relative decline of the album are by-products, as are new contracts struck between artist and labels such as the rise of the so-called ‘360 deal’. This covers merchandizing, tours and publishing, and represents a further attempt to consolidate industry gains through a diversification strategy that spreads potential losses while tapping into what is still a lucrative live circuit for major acts. Furthermore, many brick-and-mortar record stores were liquidated after Napster, including both independent and large-scale outlets, such as Tower Records in San Francisco. But the temptation to see the Internet and the ‘digital revolution’ as an historical overthrow, or the stand-off between Napster and the recording industry as a victory of David over Goliath, is misplaced. Ceding to a corporate vs folk narrative of the Internet and popular music only gets one so far before the complex entanglements of history rear up.

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Here are three such entanglements. Firstly, as far back as the 1930s, what was then the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers, a powerful protectionist body for the global recording industry, was founded on the need to regulate changes in the uses of the gramophone, including the playing of discs in public. After intense lobbying, this resulted in changes to the copyright law that bundled rights into the performance of the recording (Frith, 1987). The tension between the commercial control of music and its demotic use is nearly always evident when a new media format is introduced: from pirate radio to home taping, bootlegging to burning CDs (Garofalo, 2015). In this respect, as Dowd (2001) argues, the Napster episode should be understood as the latest twist in a long historical narrative in which the recording industry has had to concoct new business models and lobby for a change in copyright laws to deal with new media technologies. Secondly, as Jones (2013) notes, as far as the peer-to-peer era is concerned, the industry was already undergoing dramatic shrinkage in the retail sector before the software was made available, mainly because the industry saw online-only retail as a cheaper alternative to paying expensive ground rent for shops. During the 1990s and 2000s online stores were able to operate with more flexible pricing structures than traditional stores, while a massive second-hand market for music online undercut independent and smaller outlets. In other words, it is possible to argue that the crisis over physical sales attributed to Napster actually preceded Napster. Thirdly, there is the matter of evidence and the performative nature of statistics. In the midst of the blame game and powerful lobbying campaigns, it is actually very difficult to find consistent and accurate data on the extent of online piracy. Competing discourses are an inevitable product of the hegemonic struggle over common sense, and just as the recording industry has tended to overestimate the hit taken to the business and the impact on artists’ revenues, so libertarians have underestimated it. In one study, researchers found that a good portion of the music files to be found on BitTorrent sites are fake or malware-infected files uploaded by record labels themselves to discourage piracy, a practice known as ‘spoofing’ (Owsinski, 2011). And, while some studies have shown piracy to have seriously undercut the income taken by musicians, others have shown that, at least as far as CD sales are concerned, the impact of the Internet ‘is statistically indistinguishable from zero’ (Oberholzer and Strumpf, 2005, in Wikström, 2009).2 Piracy, in other words, is both a set of practices and a discursive object mobilized by grassroots and powerful actors; in the latter case, to assert claims about the nature and extent of damage to markets and the need for stronger copyright laws. Empirical relativism notwithstanding, what goes missing in grand statistical gesturing is reference to the plural, situated and complex reasons that govern why users download music at all. Are users downloading music they

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already own on other formats but out of reach, stored in the loft or no longer playable? Are they downloading curiosities, rare tracks, B-sides and bootlegs or hit singles? How are their domestic, digital or mobile spaces configured to make room for downloading practices, what meanings do they attribute to their actions and how do they represent these actions to others? And lest we forget the materiality and meaning of music and its formats, how does downloading impact on the affective attachments that users have to particular songs, artists or media? As Sterne (2006) notes, there has been very little discussion around the aesthetic dimensions of MP3 files, including the meanings given by listeners to the file as a collectable object and how (by eliminating all superfluous data), it presupposes a particular mode of quick and easy listening in noisy, mobile environments. How these attachments are inflected by automated digital processes and machine learning systems is also a key question that brings together the social and technical: just how effective are recommender systems, how are they shaping people’s listening habits, and where does this take us in terms of the sociological analysis of music tastes? Here, we are back to the importance of detailed research on the everyday enrolments of technology into the lives of consumers in a context where the Internet, for many, is habitual and where the conjunctions between online and offline, digital and analogue, material and non-material, are increasingly complex. It is likely that this kind of research will ultimately prove to be more valuable than zero sum assessments of who wins and loses in the game of piracy.

INTERNET ASSEMBLAGES AND MUSIC CONSUMPTION In the spring of 2013 mysterious messages began to appear across various online and offline music sites. On Record Store Day, half-a-dozen visitors to record stores across the world discovered strings of numbers printed on the sleeves of previously unseen vinyl by the Scottish electronica band Boards of Canada. Reference to the numbers appeared in the middle of barely intelligible YouTube videos, along with arcane sequences of words and short bursts of ambient electronica. Within hours, websites like pitchfork.com and consequenceofsound.com, as well as the Twittersphere and blogosphere, were alight with speculation over the meaning of the numbers. The Guardian ran articles on the conundrum, generating further chatter and supposition. If you added ‘.ca’ to the title of one of the videos it sent you to a site for the ‘Canadian Society for Circumpolar Health’; if you enhanced a three-second video clip you could just make out a still from the American TV programme Little House on the Prairie; and if the

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ID tags of the .wav files uploaded to the band’s SoundCloud page were viewed, you could discover additional words, including ‘cosecha’, the Spanish word for ‘harvest’. Then, within days, the code was cracked. Visitors to the band’s official website were redirected to a login page that required a password comprising the existing numbers plus others that could be found by searching the source code of the page itself. On entering the password, it was revealed that the band were releasing a new album, Tomorrow’s Harvest, on 10 June 2013. But this was only the beginning. In a subsequent series of posts across Twitter and Facebook the game continued: cropped pictures of what looked like map locations, times and spaces appeared. Fans worked out the coordinates, found the locations and turned up in their scores to what turned out to be listening parties for the album. In Tokyo, they gathered at a busy intersection to hear snippets played on a nearby electronic billboard. In Southern California, around 50 fans navigated their way to a disused waterpark in the middle of the desert to hear the whole album played on a hastily erected PA. Almost instantaneously, streams of the events had been uploaded to video sites such as Ustream and a wiki of the campaign formed, generating additional evaluation and commentary. By the time of the album’s release, Boards of Canada and their record company, Warp, had presided over one of the most complex viral campaigns of modern times. Bands and their labels have been experimenting with word-of-mouth campaigns for a while, of course. Arguably, the music video was designed precisely to create a kind of infectious cross-media buzz to boost sales. Hidden missives are hardly new to popular music either, evident in those infamous messages embedded in records that were made intelligible only when played backwards, a practice used on The Beatles’ album Revolver. Bands also made use of the non-grooved space near the centre of the vinyl where one could often find little cryptic messages (The Smiths were particularly good for this). But there is something about digitally mediated promotional campaigns that warrants special attention, not least because it points to how the Internet and new media have thickened, quickened and intensified key aspects of the consumption of popular music. Three dimensions are particularly worth exploring: consumption practices as assembled, as participatory, and as performative.

Assembling Consumption Firstly, music consumption is best seen as a complex amalgam of disparate practices bound to a complex bundle of objects and processes. Indeed, it is hard to comprehend the sheer material, informational and multimedia

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complexity involved in what are often experienced as ordinary practices, such as buying and listening. Consumption practices are deeply embedded in intricate gatherings of digital and non-digital networks and devices, as well as the complex operations of clusters of human and non-human entities (Canniford and Bajde, 2015). This is not just about the affordances of increasingly ubiquitous, capacious and ‘smart’ devices connected to the Internet, such as iPods, smartphones, laptops and tablets. Rather, assemblages convey the coming together of bundled practices and objects, from mouse clicks to record store visits, Twitter feeds to oil generators, Google Maps locations to servers, point-of-sale terminals to warehouses, undersea cables to IP addresses. These constitute an intricate and mutable network of objects and transactions across a world of texts, spaces, algorithms and devices, what Terranova calls a ‘meshwork potentially connecting every point to every other point’ (2004: 41). Entangled meshes make it very hard to locate where music itself resides as it joins the fractal twists and turns of different scales of interaction and participation. Consumption works by folding these scales, media forms and histories, such that local practices are embedded in and imply global processes, while sound travels through the conjunctions and collisions of old and new, corporate and grassroots media. The very metaphor of the ‘stream’, for instance, implies an ephemerality where musical flows are elusive, mobile and restless. The Internet is one driving factor, then, in the establishment of convergent technological processes because it enables the circulation of music through multiple media platforms, while encouraging consumers to ‘seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content’ (Jenkins, 2008: 3). As the Internet becomes an increasingly diverse technology, so the kinds of music consumption practices that are favoured by it also proliferate: they range from the fairly traditional practices of promotion and discussion that were present early on in the Internet’s development (Usenet, bulletin boards, discussion forums, fansites, band and label websites, magazines), to the more elaborate practices associated with viral campaigns, remixes, mashups, and the like. Indeed, nowadays, just as music firms are increasingly willing to let music fans themselves take the lead in promoting music, so artists are forming new relationships with fans, allowing them to manage their websites or gain crowdsourced feedback on emerging projects. As Baym notes, for instance, ‘musicians now find themselves in a career where continuous online impression management and relationship building seem to be requirements’ (2012: 288); getting audiences involved is one way to manage the relational labour of connecting with others. In 2017 the band Depeche Mode even handed over their official Facebook page to fans for a whole year while they recorded

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their new album. Bennett’s (2012) study of fans’ use of Twitter in a ‘live’ context, on the other hand, demonstrates how the posting of live sets and other concert information opens up questions about who is ‘at’ the gig and what ‘liveness’ means in leaky, multi-mediated spaces. A different, though equally powerful, component of Internet assemblages relates to the embedded logics of algorithms and recommender systems, particularly so-called ‘collaborative filtering’ techniques. Collaborative filters are an increasingly dominant feature of digital commercial infrastructures that direct users to books, movies, music and information tagged as relevant to their tastes. They work by generating correspondences between consumers and items and by comparing customer ratings across the user base: for instance, the products browsed or purchased by those who have rated a product similarly to you will filter into your profile, ending with recommendations in the familiar form: ‘you liked item x, you might like item y’. By this filtering mechanism users are correlated and marked with certain tastes, allowing marketers to target more precisely or customise products to segmented markets: the larger and more detailed the information held, the more ‘accurate’ the recommendation. In the domain of music, both online music stores like iTunes and cloud-based services like Spotify rely on these techniques. Indeed, according to Erik Bernhardsson, former Machine Learning Officer at Spotify, the ‘Discover Weekly’ feature, which is described in wholly convergent terms as a ‘weekly mixtape of fresh music’, is entirely based on collaborative filters (Forbes Magazine, 20 February 2017). Algorithms simultaneously construct and observe consumer behaviour. They do not just mediate consumer habits, but make automated decisions that constitute those habits. In this sense, as Beer (2009) notes, algorithms live a somewhat invisible life, but they nevertheless help structure and classify users in important ways while allowing commercial agents to harvest massive amounts of data. This opens up the question of the corporate management of this information and we have yet fully to understand (partly because corporations are so secretive about it) how algorithmic processes contribute to the overall accumulation and exploitation of big data analytics. But it is likely that the exponential accumulation of digital information allows companies like Amazon, Facebook and Spotify to access, collect and potentially control consumer behaviours in ways unimaginable to previous media providers. Google, for instance, accounts for around 25% of North American Internet traffic and in 2012 it announced it would be gathering information from across its services to construct a 3D profile comprising a ‘knowledge person’ (based on search queries and click stream data), a ‘social person’ (based on email and social media networks) and an ‘embodied person’ (based on physical location and whereabouts). The resulting data effigy is an advertiser’s dream as it

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makes real-time analytics possible, opening up further possibilities for moulding consumer behaviours (Bickerton, 2014). We are still a long way from having a detailed and robust understanding of how filtering algorithms shape tastes and behaviours, let alone the meanings fans give to these recommendations. After all, no one likes to think their personal tastes are subject to impersonal determinants, or what some might consider to be the mechanical rationalization of the ineffable. It was once said that fans of Nirvana despised being recommended songs by Green Day because, while early algorithms calculated the two groups as musical neighbours (based on tempo, voice and other sonic characteristics), they just did not understand the differences in meanings, spiced by ideologies of authenticity, that placed the two bands in different parts of the field. The algorithm just ‘didn’t get it’. Yet, in seemingly innocuous acts like tagging content, making playlists and clicking ‘like’ buttons, consumers are generating data crucial to what returns as customized content with potential consequences for how music is discovered. And algorithms are getting better at it. One of Spotify’s most recent features is called ‘Your Daily Mix’ and comprises a machine-generated playlist that combines music you have heard before with new discoveries. The mix ‘grows with you’ as you populate Spotify’s data grids with your tastes, meaning the playlist is endless because the algorithm never sleeps; it just keeps adding tracks as you listen. At time of writing, I have six ‘Daily Mix’ playlists in my Spotify browser, all labelled ‘made for Nick’, while the right sidebar lists my ‘friend activity’ so I can see what my Facebook friends have just listened to, too. It is part infinite jukebox, part interactive game, part musical panopticon. If digital downloads posed challenges to scholars looking to understand practices of collecting and managing music – after all, where is one’s music collection when it takes the form of bits on a hard drive – streaming makes this even more difficult (Kibby, 2009). However, some research is starting to emerge that sheds light on some aspects of use. In a conference paper and summary report on a project on Norwegian streaming service WiMP/Tidal, for instance, Maasø (2014) identifies a number of important findings. Firstly, despite a huge database of songs only a tiny proportion are ever listened to, so that 1% of artists generate something like 77% of the site’s revenue and around 90% of artists never get streamed at all. Secondly, two out of every three streams originate from a mobile phone, which illustrates how listening predominantly takes place in mobile spaces, more often than not accompanied by headphones in various forms of solitary and social settings. Thirdly, almost every other song called up on a mobile phone is skipped, perhaps registering the way users are constantly, perhaps even casually, searching for appropriate music to suit a particular mood. Other

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findings indicate that the most listened to track on an album is the first track and with little variation across genres; that something like ‘event listening’ is evident in the way users choose particular artists before and after an album release, a concert or a festival; and that playlists have a shelf life, with most people listening avidly for a few weeks before the playlist falls into abeyance. Getting at this kind of data is clearly a challenge for social scientists and scholars of music consumption, but it is precisely this level of detail that will be needed if we are fully to understand how digital assemblages co-evolve with listening practices. This is particularly so as humans are, as Hayles (2006) argues, increasingly enmeshed in a ‘cognisphere’, co-habiting with machines that increasingly require no direct human involvement at all.

Consumption as Sharing Yet if assemblages are human–non-human hybrids, then we still need to explore how they are part human for all that. In relation to algorithms, for instance, MacKenzie notes that while humans are conscious beings, ‘the algorithm with consciousness is still science fiction. Humans write algorithms, literally; algorithms write humans only metaphorically’ (2015: 4). Music consumption still depends on characteristic forms of meaning, affect and expression, qualities that sociologists of music have been careful to describe as inherently social acts. For DeNora (2000), for instance, music is a prime lubricant for the production of personal affect and self-remembrance, a ‘technology of the self’ that shapes, affords and ‘gets into’ social agency. For Hesmondhalgh, on the other hand, music represents the meeting point of the intimate and the social, a means for the collective endeavour of fellow feeling and a way for people to share. Indeed, this sharedness ‘is one of the pleasures of pop music’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 2). We have known for a while that music consumers are far from docile recipients of preordained messages, of course, but are engaged in various ways with creating musical texts and meanings. We have also known the important role that music plays in the constitution of social identities, group affiliations and collective situations (Frith, 1996). What the Internet has done is bring these two tendencies together, intensified them and given them a global spin. Internet protocols have helped to lower the thresholds of engagement by accentuating processes of connectivity, not just in peer-topeer spaces where the client shares both MP3 files and resources on the network – sharing being both the means and ends of the network – but in myriad tiny acts of production.

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The rise of what has been termed the ‘prosumer’ – a combination of the words ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010) – links the active participatory element of consumption with the sense that some thing is being generated in an act of engagement: blog reviews of albums, video footage of gigs, micro-comments embedded in SoundCloud clips, remixed songs, parodied lyrics or guitar tablature, to take just a few examples. The sheer quantity of music-based content that is produced by participants in these spaces is quite staggering and underscores the methodological problems posed above – namely, how one traces this fluid corpus of cultural production. What is clear is that the Internet is an increasingly important site for defining and mediating one’s musical identity and aesthetic attachments. We do not have to accept that everyone is now suddenly producing their own songs, uploading their own videos or recycling existing recordings to recognize the heightened levels of possibility for ordinary people casually to source, share and disseminate their musical habits and tastes in ways that were impossible before. Indeed, it might be that what is being produced is as small as a playlist or a link to a YouTube video, but what is important is that the act of sharing is a resonant social practice that holds people together. Here, it is worth noting that the networked dimension of social network sites like Facebook does not replace previous conceptions of community. Rather, it superimposes the possibility of being connected in more fluid and extended ways. Neither does it invent a radically new form of behaviour from scratch, because people have always passed along media objects to others – fanzines and mixtapes, for example. Sharing is a long-established human practice, in other words, and music is one of a number of mediated currencies that help to cement and amplify people’s social circle. However, the affordances of digital media platforms provide a catalyst for what Jenkins et  al. (2013) call ‘spreadable practices’ that ramify logics of networked exchange. Spreadability is both the condition and result of social connections among groups and individuals whose interactions are increasingly about sharing information and collaborating with others. As they write: A spreadable mentality focuses on creating media texts that various audiences may circulate for different purposes, inviting people to shape the context of the material as they share it within their social circles. (Jenkins et al., 2013: 6)

Here, Jenkins et al. use the global success of the Scottish singer Susan Boyle as an example. In 2009 a clip of Boyle singing on the British TV show Britain’s Got Talent very quickly attracted more than 77 million views on YouTube and spawned a number of adaptations and variations made and uploaded by users across the globe. People passed along the clip as a gift of

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friendship, and as a result of its grassroots circulation through platforms such as Twitter and Facebook the clip outstripped the ratings of the original broadcast, turning Boyle into an international superstar in the process. At time of writing the clip has been viewed over 200 million times and spawned tens of thousands of mashups and augmentations, including spoofed overdubs. A similar process characterized the spread of the video for South Korean singer Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’. This time the video inspired a spate of parodies of the singer’s easily mimicked dance routines, including the then US President Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Clearly designed to be copied via the circuits of social media, the video was the first YouTube video to reach a billion views and inspired a bunch of trans-media events, including 30,000 strong flash mobs. This element of participatory culture is taken to its zenith with the Japanese virtual singer and idol Hatsune Miku. Here, networked interactions between fans, artists and designers actually constitute the idol’s very presence in that her songs (and there are over 100,000 of them) are entirely written in ‘Vocaloid’ software by her fan base. Dubbed the world’s first crowdsourced celebrity, Miku is less a conventional singer and more a media platform that enables audiences to gather their works into creative chains and connect to others under the Miku banner. In this sense, anybody can be a Hatsune Miku composer and publish under her name. For this reason, Miku has been claimed to point up a new way of organizing music production: collaboratively and non-hierarchically, from the bottom up, without the intervention of the big industry players. For Condry, for instance, in a digital context where media are not something we watch but something we do, Miku represents crowdsourced openness, the ‘energy of a large community of people’ and a ‘means for participation, sharing and community’ that ‘channel[s] that energy into unexpected forms of creative action’ (2011: 14). It is do-it-together fandom at its best. We should not, of course, ignore the top-down constraints on digital cultures, including the strategic corporate adoption of ‘free labour’ as a model of user-generated content (Terranova, 2000). In the case of Miku, while the company behind the idol, Crypton Future Media, has placed her under a Creative Commons licence, they still have an interest in the packaging of the content and provide the official portal where Miku songwriters upload their songs – the most popular of which end up being selected for her ‘live’ performances. We also know that corporate media organizations try to concoct viral media artificially. Indeed, in the case of Psy, the global entertainment company YT Entertainment had a carefully honed social media plan before the video caught on. Furthermore, the things that users share do not arrive out of nowhere,

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but are often themselves sorted and filtered through relational databases, as argued above. But what these examples show is that Internet memes and viral campaigns are also social accomplishments dependent on the interpersonal circuits of agential and plural audiences who remake content as it spreads, rather than one-dimensional objects of centralized broadcast media imprinting their vision of the world on a passive audience.3 To share is, in this sense, to generate, communicate and circulate content in an act of digitally mediated social interaction. It is a way of forging interests with others, where sharing is also about developing reciprocity and trust, and perhaps generating dialogue.

MUSIC CONSUMPTION AS A PERFORMANCE OF TASTE There is a final sociological point to add here, though, for not all people would feel it appropriate or tasteful to share links of Psy, Miku and Susan Boyle with their friends or family. Indeed, a key question is whether and how sharing discloses something about our social backgrounds and identities. For if ‘you are what you share’, as Leadbeater (2008: 1) puts it, then sharing is quite possibly also a performance of taste and the Internet another site where hierarchies of cultural knowledge and judgement are made manifest. The question of cultural legitimacy hinges on a number of debates about taste trajectories and dispositions in contexts that are increasingly circumscribed by digital technologies. One such debate revolves around the composition of individual tastes: that is, are tastes more pluralized as a result of the wide palette of genres and styles on offer in digital spaces, or are they more homogenized? Another raises the broader question of what this tells us about long-standing debates regarding the relationship between social stratification and listening preferences: are digital technologies supporting or undermining pre-existing social divisions? If Internet protocols have underpinned a shift in how, where and when people listen to music, there is still some uncertainty over whether it implies a shift in what people listen to. On the one hand, commentators have suggested that the digital proliferation of music-based content has democratized or levelled music tastes. Many sites and services are, as we have seen, predicated on the idea of enriching, if not expanding, users’ listening habits: extended markets are lucrative markets, after all. Stylistic expansion is also underscored by the global proliferation of genre landscapes and processes of stylistic hybridization, where new musics are produced by meshing together different styles and samples in the spaces of digital audio workstations and

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software studios (Appadurai, 1996; Maguadda, 2011; Kibby, 2009; Sandywell and Beer, 2005). There is just more music out there to be discovered and discovering it is, in principle, a quick and straightforward exercise that implies a potentially ‘omnivorous’ orientation to a perpetually changing genre landscape (Peterson and Kern, 1996). Here, consumers are inclined to graze across a plural diet of styles rather than to commit to a single stylistic family or cluster. The Web’s potential in broadening tastes is undeniable, here. The Internet provides users with an ever-expanding archive of current and historical content, opening them up to a range of musics that they might not have been exposed to otherwise. Notwithstanding the potential loss of the serendipity of discovering a new album or a group in a physical record store, the sheer range of digital music available implies the possibility of an ongoing process of experimentation and the acquisition of increasingly eclectic tastes. Indeed, digital services allow an abundance of niche tastes to be nourished and catered for in a ‘long tail’ of low-selling but meaningful online spaces (Anderson, 2009). Say you are a fan of the Scandinavian 8-bit music known as skweee: it takes a matter of seconds to source a range of Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud playlists, together with a plethora of informative blog posts on representative artists and links to other related genres. Very quickly you can build up a detailed knowledge of the genre, who the key players are and if any skweee bands are playing near you soon. You can even find out how to write your own skweee track, with a Reddit thread (‘how to skweee’) containing advice on arranging and sourcing the most appropriate instruments. By 2015, Spotify was using 1,371 such genre types to classify its catalogue, providing users with access to a world of diverse styles. This is cultural differentiation at its most extreme, a world where hierarchies of tastes are flattened and categorical distinctions perpetually dissolve under the weight of superabundance. Every style is as potentially significant as any other, every genre boundary under constant erasure, leaving consumers free to explore an open and perpetually morphing aesthetic cosmos. On the other hand, it is quite possible that listeners are merely collecting, listening to and passing on music that reinforces their pre-existing and socially acquired musical tastes. Far from being a fluid entity under digital reconstruction, taste can and does aggregate around similarity. Research on music-based social networking sites such as MySpace and Last.fm, for instance, suggests that users tend to ‘friend’ other users with similar tastes, who also tend to be those with similar social characteristics (Baym and Ledbetter, 2009). It is also possible that recommender systems do little more than shore up existing musical preferences by suggesting other music

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of the same type. An algorithm-generated discovery might throw up a few off-kilter recommendations outside a user’s region of taste, but it is just as likely to reinforce them. Indeed, the whole point of such algorithms is not to offer divergent recommendations lest customers no longer feel their personal identities to be recognized and indulged by the service. Last.fm does this by combining both friendship and taste, finding music from users (known as ‘neighbors’) who have similar taste profiles but whose music you have not listened to yet. Community-level homophily is also a function of specific musical genre interests and the apparent stickiness of subcultural affiliations increasingly made visible in online contexts (Bennett and Peterson, 2004). Indeed, people can and do spend a long time sculpting their online profiles to give off the right impression, deploying digital assets to show that they are hip, up with the latest genres or have a lively social life (Liu, 2007). It cannot be stretching things too much to say that the online posting of gig footage on Facebook or Instagram is a performance of taste meant to boost a person’s cultural cachet among friends doing the exactly the same. All of this links to the long-standing idea, explored most extensively by Bourdieu and his followers, that musical tastes are socially acquired cultural resources that reinforce distinctions between high and low constituencies. Taste is not a free-floating quality or indivisible choice but a socially sedimented disposition left by primary and secondary socialization processes, experienced by socially differentiated groups. It is an integral part of the system of unconscious dispositions which shape the broad behavioural trajectories and life chances of individuals. In short, music is an ‘infallible classifier’ (Bourdieu, 1984; Prior, 2013), though to what extent and how it classifies is still unclear. Despite a recent loosening of the links between social class and cultural preferences, research in the UK suggests the continued existence of social communities of music taste revolving around divisions between classical music/jazz and popular music/rock (Bennett et  al., 2009). One important finding from this research is that those with high levels of cultural capital prefer to attend live performances of opera or classical music in person, than access music through contemporary media. It is in the act of attendance that cultural legitimacy is most visibly performed and where connections with others of similar taste dispositions can be cemented. For lower class audiences, however, at least according to Atkinson, classical music represents a ‘terra incognita, knowable only through the visible performers whose function is analogous to popular artists (e.g., Katherine Jenkins) rather than composers’ (2011: 181). Here, classical music is perceived as an alien world by subordinated

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groups because it demands a mastery (such as the ability to recognize classical terminologies) that these groups do not possess, though its ultimate legitimacy as ‘high culture’ is still retained. But even within the field of popular music, taste hierarchies can be discerned. One line of distinction is between music considered ‘authentic’, ‘independent’ or ‘experimental’ and that considered ‘mainstream’, ‘trashy’ or ‘undemanding’. Distinctions in aesthetic value map onto a spectrum of genre-specific categories pulled between artistic and commercial poles, the former associated with the large-scale production of cheap, disposable and superficial chart pop (Justin Bieber, for instance), the latter with a more innovative and serious engagement with the form of music based on pushing boundaries and experimenting with sound (avant-garde electronic music, such as Boards of Canada, for instance) (Prior, 2008a). Indeed, while people are often inclined to declare their tastes to be wide, eclectic and varied (how many times have you heard people say that they ‘listen to everything’?), when researchers drill down into the qualitative details of these tastes, the variations are often limited in nature and scope, often clustering around the hierarchical distinctions identified above. One might argue that these hierarchies of taste are, in fact, reinforced by the judgements and discourses of online critics and gatekeepers at influential taste-making sites such as pitchfork.com, where symbolic power resides in thinking and writing about popular music using categories gleaned from legitimate cultural discourses like musicology, literary theory and art history. The discovery of new music is also a powerful means to accumulate status and prestige, a way of signalling belonging to those ‘in the know’ at the cutting edge of cultural innovation. Hence, as Tepper and Hargittai (2009) argue, social advantages can accrue to people who emerge as opinion leaders, early adopters and trend setters, especially in a culture that values being ahead of the curve. In this sense, keeping up with the latest bands (the more obscure, the better in some respects), as well as sharing and introducing others to new music, are sources of symbolic capital. ‘Discovery and social status appear to be linked’, as Tepper and Hargittai put it (2009: 229; see also Nowak, 2016). And, of course, we should not isolate music from the means and mechanisms by which it is played, which are arguably also shot through with logics of cultural and economic distinction: the cost of an iPhone and its alignment with an aesthetics of purity, for instance, or the bit rates one downloads music at, both of which might be conceived as differentiating choices which position audiences in certain ways as high-status experts and audiophiles. These considerations tap into wider discussions around the ‘digital divide’ and differentials in access, ownership and distribution of

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skills among user and non-user populations across the globe. As Wellman (2013: 21) puts it: ‘there are non-economic factors of social inequality – linked to skill and cultural capital – that strongly affect the structure of increasingly computerized societies and the life chances of their members’. Sharing, networking and linking are, after all, also about the rewards that flow back to those who are well connected and well positioned – offline as well as online. Finally, as for omnivorousness, if a new cultural openness to a range of genres is now much more prevalent among some online consumers, the possibility remains that this merely articulates a form of quantitative mastery, a disposition predicated on time and leisure to be more cosmopolitan and knowledgeable about a range of musics: Beethoven and Beyoncé, for instance. To put it another way, the field of popular music, even under digital conditions, is still stratified and people’s tastes and modes of listening are still expressions of social characteristics, notably education, ethnicity, gender and age. These are intersectional lines of social distinction that should not be jettisoned in any full and proper analysis of how taste cultures work in digital domains. The Internet is not the flat, open and indiscriminate domain cyber-utopians once thought it to be – a Gibsonian cyberspace where disembodied agents leave their flesh behind. In many ways, it imports, replicates and reinforces existing divisions as well as produces new ones – between information haves and have-nots, for instance. It is a place of immense circulation, discovery and difference, but it also is a meshwork where surveillance, censorship, harassment and social pathologies are magnified and where music is subject to logics of distinction, conflict and recuperation.

CONCLUSION Raymond Williams greeted the growing ubiquity of television with a book proclaiming that ‘all technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices’. He added that a ‘technology, when it has been achieved, can be seen as a general human property, an extension of a general human capacity’ (Williams, 1974: 129). How does this sound almost 45 years later, when not only is television an ordinary domestic presence, but also the media landscape has shifted to comprise an ultra-complex assemblage of diffuse systems that characterize digital information infrastructures and media formations at every turn? What human practices are being served and extended by the rise of interconnected systems of digital communication? What issues are opened up for popular music when the Internet is as normal

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and embedded in everyday life as the television once was? And where does one start to ‘follow the actors’ when those actors are not just flesh-andblood bodies but all sorts of networked, acquisitive and ‘smart’ entities such as algorithms and recommender systems? To return to the idea of the assemblage outlined in the introduction, what this way of thinking does is open up an aperture on how to put all the relevant objects, processes, devices, actions and mechanisms on the table without discriminating on the basis of scale. It does not de facto privilege macro over micro processes or cut off the analytical frame at people in local situations. Instead, it seeks to describe how all the elements of the assemblage work and are connected to one another, such that the process of being connected is itself how things come alive. There are still many gaps to address and outstanding questions to be asked: what would ecological validity look like as a principle of methodological rigour in studying the way music moves as an assemblage? How should scholars conceptualize the scaling up of acts of sharing into big data and how should they manage their relationship to the corporate gatekeepers of this data without being complicit in people’s exploitation? More generally, is it possible to reconcile an ontology based on a flat version of the social, where one looks at associations between things, with an ontology that does not want to lose sight of how those things articulate with structural inequalities and social divisions? These are, at least, questions that might shape future research agendas and sharpen up our thinking on the entanglements of music consumption at the interface of industrial process, technological change and social practice. For now, we should remain cautious of accounts that slip too easily into determinist narratives or which assume all is flat and smooth in the digital world. Finally, it is prudent to acknowledge that all the hands have yet to be played as far as the interplay between the control, management and appropriation of music is concerned. There may well be unexpected twists in the tail. One potential development is worth briefly considering before closing: the emergence of direct democracy and grassroots actors, such as international pirate parties, spoiling for an intergenerational ‘copyfight’ (Burkart, 2014). These are part of a network of movements energized by current issues and events, such as the revelations of American whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Occupy movement and various legal protectionist acts tilted against piracy, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Many strands of these movements are achieving significant support and prominence in both mainstream and unofficial spaces. In Iceland, the Pirate Party gained 22.6% of the vote in the October 2016 election, for instance, while Sweden’s equivalent party had the third highest membership of any political party in 2009.

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While nascent, a cluster of young, digitally engaged and self-organized initiatives are gathering behind the idea of an alternative system of culture and socio-economic organization. This is what Mason (2015) terms ‘post-capitalism’, a system driven by the decentralizing tendencies of digital technology and the irresolvable tension between superabundant information and the increasingly outmoded mechanisms of private property that seek to control it. The emergence of alternative and non-market systems of exchange is one example, as is the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT), or ‘blockchain’ technologies associated with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. In this case, payments are conducted using a mesh structure of peer-to-peer networks that bypass the need for financial gatekeepers, but which recent reports suggest might balance a decentralized and transparent method of access to music with direct and proper remuneration to artists (O’Dair, 2016). Like processes of disintermediation, this would cut out the middleman and allow content creators to sell their work to fans more easily. That we cannot be sure whether these developments will turn out to be significant, or whether they will be confined to the practices of metropolitan hipsters and culture-capital rich geeks, tells us that nothing is predictable as far as music consumption is concerned. We would probably be on the right track, though, were we to suggest that any serious threats to the music industry (and capitalism) would be responded to with finely honed strategies, backed up by powerful corporate and political agents, to wrestle back control. For this has been the cat and mouse game between content controllers and consumers since the invention of the gramophone, fought out with and on the grounds of technology. For the time being, the industry seems to have settled on new hegemonic grounds: relinquishing some control (user-generated content), but gaining others (big data). This is why digital music consumption is so important beyond music: it gives us a glimpse into how the consumption juncture works, a meeting point between everyday routines and the raging tides of history. It is no wonder that commentators for both academic and non-academic publics are drawn to the field of music when looking for clues for where things might be heading or where the next big idea might come from. For the rapid and astonishing speed of change in the world of music sets the pace for other cultural forms and industries. As always, the difficulties will be in keeping up with and explaining how these assemblages assemble and disassemble. And not always before our very eyes either.

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NOTES 1

2

3

As for the independent sector, Burkart notes that: ‘for bands trying to break through to commercial viability, digital distribution introduces new challenges. Returns on digital distribution are meager … But since the major distributors for physical discs have mostly disappeared, one-stop publishing and distribution sites like Bandcamp, Bleep and Boomkat are supplying fresh talent to broad markets’ (2014: 401). It is also worth stating that piracy varies radically from region to region. For instance, in China, The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has said that the country has a piracy rate of virtually 100% (Kaiman, 2012). Or, perhaps more accurately, it is the co-production of human and non-human agency that is at work here, a perpetual dance of code and carbon.

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‘

I analyze and I verify and I quantify enough 100 percentile no errors no miss I synchronize and I specialize and I classify so much Don’t worry ’bout dreaming because I don’t sleep I wish I could at least 30 percent Maybe 50 for pleasure then skip all the rest (‘Be Human’, Yoko Kanno, 2004)

’

INTRODUCTION It’s 2012 and I’m at Musikmesse, an annual music trade fair in Frankfurt, Germany. I’m chatting to a representative from a software company best known for producing one of the world’s most popular digital audio workstations (DAWs), an integrated software application in which music can be produced, edited, mixed and mastered. In the midst of the conversation the rep confesses that his company (which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) plants cracked versions of its software onto BitTorrent and peer-to-peer sites, disguising them as pirated copies. It makes perfect sense. At an economic level, the company takes a short- to mid-term risk on the pretext that, when musicians can afford to, they will buy the software legitimately: a classic loss leader, in other words. But there’s another logic at work, a logic of practice (Bourdieu, 1990). The company understands that use of its software is predicated on the inculcation of certain ways of working, routines of production that the company hopes will become second nature to musicians and keep them ‘locked in’ to their program. A native file system means that projects devised within this DAW can only ever be opened with it, and that helps, too. Less brand loyalty and more technological habitus, in other words (Sterne, 2003b). As an amateur musician, I’ve followed precisely this trajectory, from pirate to long-term adopter, and my ‘feel for the game’ of music production meshes precisely with the affordances of this very piece of software.1

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This chapter examines the broad domain of music production, defined as the processes, practices and materials through which music is made. It asks how changing routines of recording, composing and editing are bound up with the advent of digital tools and instruments of music production from the early 1980s, an era when popular music just starts to sound different. What, then, is unique about composing digitally, and how might we describe the everyday practices through which musicians currently materialize and organize their musical worlds? How are relationships between work practices and socio-technical conditions inflected by digital protocols and how are they transforming the lived experiences of making music? What are the implications of the wholesale deployment of digital protocols for some of the big questions about what music is, where it is made, who makes it and how? And with what kinds of research instruments should we study these developments, when the digital is so apparently fuzzy, elusive and fluid? The broad argument is that while we can learn a lot about where we are in the history of popular music by looking at conditions of cultural production (rather than at discretely defined consumption practices or genres), this analysis has to be informed by a critical orientation to digital production as a leaky, open-ended and multi-scalar assemblage. This highlights the importance of attending to shifts in how material conditions coalesce and mutate around digital technologies, such as software studios, plug-ins, apps and laptops. It opens up questions around the affording dynamics of digital materials, such as code, when activated in a range of devices associated with production, as well as what changing compositional techniques means for how popular music sounds in the late modern era. The chapter is organized into five sections. In the first, digital production will be briefly historicized, located in key developments in the field of sound recording and music technology from the mid twentieth century. In the second section, I will turn to some of the distinctive practices and techniques associated with the advent of digital objects such as DAWs and VST plug-ins. Here, the point will be to show how techniques favoured by software, such as automation, cut and paste and micro-timing, nudge production aesthetics towards certain kinds of operations that are heard in much contemporary production. Indeed, the third section concentrates on the characteristic sounds of digital music itself – the tones and styles. One track from the contemporary British electronic musician, SOPHIE, will be examined in order to demonstrate how digital operations are the grounds for micro-manipulations of music. In the fourth section, questions of spatiality are flagged up as a way of demonstrating the radical extension of the recording studio as a de-localized nexus through which collaboration

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can happen. And in the fifth section, I will turn to the knotty question of democratization and ask to what extent the widening use and availability of the tools of digital production are redrawing boundaries around musical expertise and cultural participation, forcing us to rethink the meanings of terms like ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’. First, however, a heavy caveat. Contemporary music production is not all about the digital and neither has the digital slipped seamlessly into action. Despite the fact that digital technologies now dominate most recording situations – from composition and mixing to signal processing and mastering – analogue elements have not magically disappeared. Technically (though technicality is certainly not the only criterion) most microphones and speakers, as well as sound itself, remain analogue, while many rock, folk, jazz and classical musicians choose to use only analogue equipment for both practical and ideological reasons. Analogue processes have remained desirable precisely because the digital is claimed to be cold, thin and unnatural: the convenience factor of ‘being digital’ wholly disciplined by lack of perceived warmth and quality. I will not rehearse the somewhat stale ‘digital versus analogue’ debate here, beyond reiterating the point made in the introduction that no format can be considered transparent or unmediated. And yet, at the time of writing, influential champions of analogue in the rock world include musician Jack White and producer Steve Albini, both of whom characterize the analogue world as pure, while digital sounds are deemed to be ‘depthless’ and ‘soulless’ (Tingen, 2014).2 Powerful discourses of authenticity and techno-nostalgia continue to inform debates and practices, just as they valorize the existence of older devices such as classic synthesizers for being charmingly unpredictable and hands-on (Pinch and Reinecke, 2009). A return to analogue hardware in electronic music, similarly, hints at residual anxieties about the lack of tactility in digital composition, while the popularity of elaborate controllers and hardware interfaces, such as Yamaha’s hand-held matrix Tenori-On, Native Instruments’ pad controller Maschine, and Ableton Live’s touchbased Surface, is partly a reaction to the lack of spectacle and gesture in laptop performance. Even in the home recording studio, where everything can be done ‘in the box’, analogue hardware has (somewhat like vinyl) made something of a comeback of late with the emergence of an assortment of new and re-commodified synthesizers and modules. The upshot is the ongoing constitution of hybrid environments where it makes little sense to drive an absolute wedge between analogue and digital, but rather see how they fold into complex techno-musical forms, in practice. Having said this, I still want to maintain focus on digital and computerbased audio production and to get into the specifics of software. I do so for

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three reasons. Firstly, with some notable exceptions (Frith and ZagorskiThomas, 2013; Durant, 1990; Goodwin, 1988; Théberge, 1997; Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen, 2016; Born, 2012), there exists relatively little critical, as opposed to technical and historical, work on digital music production in contemporary scholarship. It is still the case that the headline-dominating domains of consumption and legality attract the most attention, so that questions around digital music quickly collapse into debates about the impact of piracy, streaming and MP3 files on the music industry. This leaves out important practices at the front end of production, namely how and where music is made in the first place. Secondly, software often slips under the radar, or is black boxed in popular and academic discourses, further mystifying the material infrastructures and processes that activate production. The vast majority of digital artefacts in the world of music are compiled using the programming language C in an integrated development environment and application framework, usually requiring a software development kit (SDK). SDKs comprise a collection of development tools that enable coders – in many ways the contemporary equivalent of music instrument makers – to compile software for a specific package and are often provided for free by the big developers like Steinberg and Apple. The point is, despite being somewhat intangible and hidden, we should not lose sight of software as a material accomplishment that has a specific texture and materiality (MacKenzie, 2006).3 Code, in other words, is a key agent in these assemblages, its logics driving whole musical infrastructures that are ordinarily backgrounded. Thirdly, there are undeniably significant shifts that accompany the advent of computers and software in music-making, not just in the speed and extent of audio manipulation but also how and where musicking happens, and it would be remiss not to register these. To take just one example: the non-destructive capabilities of DAW editing and storage mean that (unlike tape) whatever gets recorded can be modified and overwritten without any deterioration to the original material, and with microscopic precision. Indeed, in the age of ‘infinite undo’, any musical phrase or edit can be reversed at a keystroke. One does not have to evoke the ideas of every theorist in this area – from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Attali – to recognize that this significantly changes our relationship to music, not least in seeing musical materials as open to limitless edits, always potentially remade over and over in digital spaces. In this case, tentative and provisional distinctions can still be drawn around practices of production that accompany software-enabled hardware like laptops, tablets and smartphones, and it is certainly worth taking stock of how software infiltrates composition.

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Whether the sum effect of these shifts amounts to something like a ‘digital revolution’ in production, what Durant (1990) termed ‘a new day for music’, really depends on one’s definition of revolution, of course. No media ecologies get deposed or made from scratch, so it is often better to avoid sweeping epochal characterizations that have a tendency to cast the present in a state of perpetual revolution. Indeed, most of what digital technologies offer as discrete production processes are not new at all, though the combined effect of the speed, scale and extent of these processes is certainly unprecedented. Rather than engage in hyperbolic statements about digital eras and transformations that smack of ‘presentist’ advertising jargon (where novelty is the raison d’être of the whole industry), it is often safer to describe in detail the practices that accompany the advent of these technologies. From this position, it is possible to build up a detailed picture of the current situation, an archaeology of the present with its own distinct textures, but which unfold within and attach to broader trajectories and histories.

HISTORIES: SOUND BITS AND SOUND BYTES Indeed digital music – that is, music made using digital processes, devices and platforms – has a surprisingly long history. It is a history bound up with complex geo-political and economic forces gravitating around the funding of research labs, institutes and universities, predominantly in the United States, but also France and elsewhere (Chadabe, 1997). It is a history that maps out field developments in the semi-autonomous domain of avantgarde and electro-acoustic music, with its orientations to research. And it is a history that brings together the contingencies of technological invention (funding, institutional synergy, collective accomplishments) with experimental composition and happenstance (Holmes, 2002). The upshot is that from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, researchers working in the cossetted environments of scientific laboratories (notably Bell Labs in the United States) and state-backed institutions (notably IRCAM in France) laid the foundations for making music with computers, generating an array of digital artefacts in the process (Born, 1995). These include some of the first sound-generating computer programs, such as Music I, devised by the American engineer Max Matthews in 1957, and a subsequent series of programs that fashioned, shaped and notated music digitally.4 Early developments in computer-generated sound were defined as much by limitations as possibilities and researchers often had to wait hours, or even days, for their input specifications to end up as sound. In the 1960s, engineers dealt with hefty mainframe computers, the programs disseminated

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in boxes of punched cards, while the sounds themselves were recorded onto magnetic tape. Here, it is important to note that the field of computer music was deeply indebted to, and interwoven with, projects in the world of magnetic tape manipulation, loudspeakers and electronic signal processing, such as those originating from the movements of musique concrète in France and elektronische Musik in Germany (Manning, 2004). In fact, many of the techniques that became later associated with digital composition, such as cut and paste, originate with magnetic tape splicing in the mid twentieth century. By the mid 1970s, computer-based compositions could be played on a keyboard and visualized as a score on a terminal, while data conversion processes were making it more efficient for analogue sound to be represented as a series of numbers, each designating a value ‘sampled’ at a regular time interval – that is, as a binary system of ones and zeros. Analogue-to-digital converters (ADC) and digital-to-analogue converters (DAC) are, in many ways, the unsung heroes of digital formations in general, but they are essential to the digitization and playback of sound and to major techno-cultural developments, such as CDs and sampling. They work by cutting up and sampling the continuous information of a sound waveform at specific points, the rate of sampling determining the sound quality of the recording. With some variation, modern sound recording samples a sound signal at 44,100 times per second (44.1 kHz), while the number of intervals at which a device takes a sample, known as its bit depth, can vary. For CDs, this is 16 bits, or 65,536 intervals, though most modern recording equipment now works at 24 bits, or 16,777,216 intervals. The higher the bit depth, the more ‘accurate’ the recording. Maths and music have always been intrinsically connected, of course. According to Kittler (2006), number and numeral are intrinsic to the unfolding of occidental culture, so that where the ancient Greeks plucked their lyre strings was determined by a carefully designated ratio. But computer-based digitization embeds these numerical calculations into the design, form and function of the sonic object itself. Digitization transforms the whole process of sound generation into a binary logic that produces, governs and enrols a raft of new devices and processes. Historically, these include the advent of programming languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC and C, the invention of new techniques of sound synthesis, such as wavetable and additive synthesis, as well as an array of digital hardware devices like digital samplers, drum machines, synthesizers and sequencers. By the early 1980s, key agents in the field of popular music had already begun to appropriate these laboratory-based innovations for their own industrial and aesthetic purposes, taking music in new directions as they did

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so. In the following section, I want to highlight three developments: MIDI, sampling and personal computing. The point will be to show that, while individually constituting rather modest incremental shifts, in combination these three socio-technical elaborations signpost important changes in the history of popular music.

Digital Synergies: MIDI, Sampling and Personal Computing MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was an industrial-level solution to the problem of device integration in an increasingly diverse and unpredictable marketplace (Théberge, 1997). In the early 1980s, representatives from a handful of electronics companies, including Roland, Oberheim, Yamaha, Korg and Sequential Circuits, met to agree on a standardized protocol designed to integrate their separate devices. The protocol was swiftly taken up by other manufacturers and resulted in the construction of MIDI-compatible instruments that incorporated MIDI input, output and thru capabilities. To evoke the language of Science and Technology Studies, MIDI ‘locked in’ technical standards by stabilizing consumption and instilling routines of production that have remained remarkably robust ever since (Hackett et al., 2007).5 Like the QWERTY keyboard, in fact, developments in MIDI gathered enough momentum to make it difficult and costly to undo. Best seen as the lingua franca of the digital studio, MIDI allows digital devices to ‘talk’ to one another through a series of digital commands. For instance, a computer can send instructions to a drum machine dictating how, when and what it should play. Here, it is important to note that MIDI cables do not carry an audio signal as voltage. Instead, they carry a series of binarized instructions about how a device should generate a sound, including parameters such as the duration of the note, its velocity, attack, decay, and so on. Because MIDI data is editable, changes can be made to music by changing its parameters, rather than (as with tape) having to rerecord it. This is truly sound as numerical information, parsed in a series of on/ off states through a finite number of dynamic values: 128 positions for a synthesizer’s pitch wheel to be in for instance. While its presence is somewhat hidden, MIDI lubricates the transactions between human and non-human actors and can be heard most audibly in highly sequenced, multi-layered tracks from the 1980s and 1990s, by bands such as Depeche Mode, The Orb, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman (Warner, 2003). As with player pianos, in a MIDI setup the musician does not have to be physically contiguous with the instrument to play it. Instead, machines can trigger themselves,

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with the musician playing the role of remote programmer. This fuels suspicions around the digital musician’s lack of skill, of course, but it also gives much 1980s pop music its distinctive pulse and feel.6 In the studio, MIDI links with a medley of studio techniques and practices, such as the manipulation of musical information in the spaces of DAWs, as we shall see. In the live context, on the other hand, relatively portable MIDI systems can be taken on the road to execute musical sequences that could previously only have been reproduced in the studio. Goodwin (1992) notes, for instance, that the band Yes were able, in 1989, to play their earlier progressive rock pieces more accurately than ever because of the precision of MIDI. In a reversal of the orthodox value hierarchies of live and recorded music, musicians began to play live instruments in order to emulate the MIDI-sequenced machines heard on recorded tracks – their rhythms as repetitive, tight and mechanical as the recording that was once supposed to capture a live, rather than pre-programmed, moment. The advent of a slate of new MIDI-capable synthesizers gave further digital and harmonic lustre to the sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. The Yamaha DX7 in particular – one of the first available MIDI-enabled synthesizers – produced some of the bright signature timbres of the era, associated with the likes of Luther Vandross, U2, Foreigner, Phil Collins, Simply Red, Madonna and Tina Turner. In the case of the latter’s 1984 hit ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’, for instance, much of the mid- and high-range synth sounds, including the pitch-bent flute sounds and harmonica, are the sounds of presets from the DX7. Not only did the DX7 look and sound like an imagined digital future – its sleek, black styling a departure from the ostentatious knobs, patch cables and faders of older analogue synths – but also it operated differently, through FM synthesis, with a menu-based system displayed in a digital interface. Despite being notoriously difficult to program, the DX7 was marketed as a consumerlevel MIDI synthesizer and remains one of the best-selling and most familiar sounding synths of all time. One might, in fact, speculate that it was precisely because it was not user friendly that musicians tended to rely solely on the factory presets, in turn giving music of the time a certain recognizable quality. If MIDI had an integrative function, then sampling’s impact was all about disintegration and dislocation. Traceable to experiments with tape cut-ups, film editing and turntables, audio sampling can be defined as the technologies and practices whereby sonic fragments are extracted from one context and placed in another (Rodgers, 2003). In early experiments in the 1940s and 1950s, notably those of the musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, sounds would be taken from a range of sources (human voices,

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transport systems, the natural environment), recorded onto tape and placed alongside other sounds to form new ensembles (Chanan, 1995). Sampled tape loops and splicing techniques were also integral to the way synthesizers like the Mellotron worked. In this case, pressing a key triggered sampled notes from orchestral instruments like violins and flutes, an effect heard most recognizably on The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. Early hip-hop DJs like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, themselves drawing on dub reggae techniques of ‘versioning’, deployed sampling techniques to isolate the breaks on classic funk and soul records – those rhythmic parts of a track that could be looped on a turntable for extra groove.7 Meanwhile, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, musicians had begun to compose sound collages out of pre-existing fragments, assembling and juxtaposing samples using reel-to-reel tape and other analogue technologies. McLeod cites David Bryne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, as a particularly influential attempt to bring together a panoply of voices and sounds, ‘including a Lebanese mountain singer, an Egyptian pop singer, firebrand preachers recorded off the radio, and several other “exotic” voices’ (McLeod, 2015: 601). In each of these cases, sounds from one context are draped around, folded with and repositioned into new contexts, with acoustic and ideational pleasure deriving from the oscillations between the two. While certainly not a radical departure from these precursor techniques, digital sampling pivots towards a reconfigured set of modes, habits and compositional techniques afforded by the material and operational properties of samplers themselves. Commonly referred to as the first commercially available digital sampler, the Fairlight CMI was introduced in 1979 and comprised a central processing unit (CPU) with two microprocessors, a QWERTY keyboard, a monitor and a six-octave piano-style keyboard. Its interface was shaped by the emerging conventions of desktop computing, even down to the fact that users had to load samples via the device’s 8-inch diskettes, each containing a range of digitally sampled sounds lasting less than a second (Manning, 2004). Music could also be ‘drawn in’ as waveforms with a laser pen directly onto the monitor. Samples could then be mapped across a keyboard and triggered like a regular piano. Initially costing $25,000, ownership of the Fairlight was restricted to a small group of wealthy musicians, though it featured on a number of influential tracks by the likes of The Art of Noise, Kate Bush and Stevie Wonder. Typically, these musicians made use of the sampler’s capacity to reproduce pre-existing instrument sounds like drum hits as well as ‘found sounds’, such as breaking glass. In the case of The Art of Noise’s 1984 track ‘Close (to the edit)’, for instance, sampled noises from a car engine, synthesized orchestral stabs and

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spoken samples are layered over a sequenced bass line, the resulting montage looking backwards to avant-garde movements like the Italian Futurists in order to construct a digital future already on the cusp of arriving. Short, percussive sounds were also perfect for drum machine samplers, of course, and the early 1980s saw the advent of a range of devices like the Linn LM-1 that contained digital samples of an acoustic drum kit. Indeed, alongside MIDI, drum machines were crucial to the sounds of emerging genres like hip hop, house and techno, not just because they were a compact alternative to the drum kit (and avoided the hassle of finding a ‘real’ drummer), but because they suited what Durant calls a ‘specific urban aesthetic and cultural politics based on mixing and rapping’ (1990). Early samplers like the Emulator took the physical form of a keyboard, with the samples being triggered by a musician pressing the keys. With later samplers like the Akai S612, on the other hand, the device evolved into a rectangular, rack-mounted box, the front containing an array of buttons, sometimes a floppy disc slot and small LED display. All contained and depended on the existence of ADC and DAC converters, taking a ‘snapshot’ of sounds at precise moments and rendering them as malleable data. Typically, after sourcing a section from a vinyl record, the sampling musician would extract it and then manipulate it with tactile selections mediated by an interface that represented the numerical parameters of the sound. A significant element of sampling practice, therefore, comprised scrolling through a series of options and pages that digitally modified the sound. By the late 1980s, though still prohibitively expensive for most users, samplers had come down in price, newer models (notably the Casio FZ-1) could capture almost 30 seconds’ worth of sound, and some (notably the Akai range of samplers) were fast becoming synonymous with hip hop’s proclivity for looped and recycled sounds. As Harkins (2016) notes, while hip-hop acts like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys continued to use turntables, tape loops and analogue drum machines, producers like Marley Marl were using early digital samplers to extract short passages from vinyl recordings. With the comparatively swift operations of the sampler, hip hop opened up to a whole universe of sonic influences, incorporating and layering in previously authored segments such as funky drum breaks from the likes of Clyde Stubblefield, extracts from Kung Fu films, and vocal shouts from James Brown. The sampler also afforded musicians immediate digital control over basic sound parameters, such as where the sample would begin and end, its speed, pitch, attack, duration and decay. Musicians even found workarounds for extending sample duration by recording sounds at a lower bit rate or at the wrong speed, then pitching the sound back down when replayed – demonstrating, as Harkins (2016) notes, the importance of understanding

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not just the physical affordances of samplers, but users’ creative agency in sampling practices. The emergence of digital sampling brings into focus a number of questions that go to the heart of what popular music is, how it is mediated, where and how it moves. Like the phonograph, sampling detaches a fragment from one ‘here and now’ and puts it into another (De La Motte-Haber, 2000: 205). In this sense, it reprises Schaeffer’s ‘schizophonic’ moment, this time taking a pre-embedded sound from its recorded context, dis-embedding and re-embedding it in another recorded context. This means that all noises from all genres, styles and periods can be repurposed, potentially flattening sonic landscapes and divesting music of its spatial and temporal hierarchies. At least this was how postmodernists often characterized sampling’s impact on contemporary culture in the 1980s and 1990s. As Goodwin put it in 1988, for instance, ‘today’s pop musicians are busy blurring historical and cultural boundaries … new digital technologies are being used to deconstruct old texts’ (1988: 34–35). Indeed, for Goodwin, in the age of digital mass production, far from the original ‘aura’ of a cultural object being destroyed by sampling, it became infinitely reproducible without any deterioration in quality. Pop was eating itself and the result was a free-for-all, where old and new, local and global, high and low, were fused. One can certainly understand the rush of excitement that accompanied sampling among musicians and commentators in this period. On the one hand, it looked like sampling had initiated new possibilities of resistance, including the transgression of hallowed boundaries between original and copy, authentic and simulated, owned and stolen, while giving those who did not necessarily define themselves as musicians licence to make music (sampling practitioners still had to be skilled, of course, particularly in being able to hear and judge whether a sample would clash with or sound interesting in a new context). On the other hand, sampling appeared to reflect and instantiate a moment of historical flux wrought by the advent of high-tech late capitalism, where nothing less than a new state of consciousness was at stake (Taylor, 2001). Like avant-garde movements in painting (cubism in particular), sampling appeared to lend itself to temporal and spatial disruptions that broke down representation into particles, ushering in a new ontology of music based on a series of numerical transactions governed by logic gates and the conversion processes of circuits (Beadle, 1993). The pilfering world of sampling seemed to chip away at entrenched ideas of originality and authorship, transforming readers into writers. But it also seemed to index conditions of pastiche and unintelligibility in an accelerating world of images and sounds.

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After a process of normalization, however, sampling’s presence has become more pragmatic and mundane. In the hands of musicians, it is one more tool in the box of tricks that can be used to manipulate sound quickly and easily in order to produce interesting effects. It is also a way for musicians to incorporate their influences overtly, foregrounding what happens in all forms of music anyway: styles are mixed, genres are borrowed, quotations are rife, histories are layered and non-linear. In this sense, sampling performs musical fluidities and mobilities, but there is nothing essentially transgressive or resistant about this. Indeed, while certainly capable of being deployed to comment on social and political issues (evident, particularly, with bands like Public Enemy), sampling has just as easily become a tool of cultural appropriation, reproducing and reinstating extant hierarchies. As Katz notes, in this respect, the decontextualization of Camille Yarbrough’s signature gospel voice on Fat Boy Slim’s 1998 track ‘Praise You’ was a potential neutering of the complexities of gendered and racialized bodies because sampling had ‘eras[ed] her history, identity and vitality’ (Katz, 2004: 149).8 Indeed, the advent of a whole industry of exoticized sample CDs with titles like ‘Ethnic Music Chopz’, ‘Voices of Africa’ and ‘Arabic Vibez’ demonstrates how sampling can reinstate as much as flatten social and racial hierarchies (Théberge, 2003a). As for the notoriously heated legal climate around sampling, this has also cooled after a period of high-profile court cases, not just because criminalizing sampling appears not to be a gainful move by the big players like the RIAA, but because musicians have worked out how to get around legal barriers by choosing samples from obscure sources or disguising them beyond recognition (Demers, 2015). Indeed, nowadays, digital technologies have made this even easier because the obliteration of a sound is so easily accomplished with the latest software samplers. Which is to say that sampling (like other techniques that once seemed rebellious and thrilling) has become conventional in the sense implied by Becker (1982) – inhabiting a customary set of practices through which musicians collaborate and make their music. Completing this triumvirate of digital developments, the advent of microcomputers and their associated industries, practices and protocols, has further inflected practices of musicking in significant ways. As Manning (2004) notes, though a newer generation of computers drew on older analogue technologies like valves, the invention of the silicon chip was the catalyst for a series of important developments, notably the miniaturization of circuits and a redesign of the computer itself to something we would recognize today, with a CPU, memory bank, alphanumeric keyboard and visual display unit. By the late 1970s, a domestic market in fully integrated microcomputer systems was taking off, and by the early 1980s a number of

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manufacturers, including Apple and IBM, were orienting their products to home applications and entertainment, rather than the office and business transactions. The increasing memory and processing power of computers were matched by developments in the software industry as code ordered a new set of interface behaviours, such as clicking, selecting, cursor movement, scrolling, and so on (MacKenzie, 2005). For Turkle, the mainstreaming of personal computing from the mid 1980s ‘made the computer screen a world unto itself’ (1995: 35), one that encouraged play and manipulation on the surface of a digitally rendered graphic user interface. Hence, a new set of precepts were reconfiguring typical uses and users of PCs, replacing the command line interface that presupposed some knowledge of computer systems architecture with desktop and windows-type arrangements that required little in-depth knowledge of computing. The PC had truly become a consumer item, shaping and organizing the times and spaces of work, communication and play, as well as broader socio-economic conditions of mobility and informationalism. As Castells notes, in this regard, networked computers became widely diffused throughout the information-processing activities at the core of the services sector and ‘by the mid-1990s the new informational paradigm, associated with the emergence of the network enterprise, was well in place’ (2000: 255). While there was nothing particularly inevitable about the advent of DAWs, their emergence fitted neatly into an historical moment that drew together pre-existing innovations in keyboard-controlled performance programs (such as the Synclavier and Fairlight CMI), MIDI (the relatively open environment of version 1.0 being particularly beneficial, here), the lowering of manufacturing costs and the increasing domestication of the PC. By the late 1990s, DAW software packages like Cubase, Acid Pro and Octamed were being sold as professional-quality, fully integrated virtualizations of the recording studio. Meanwhile, ‘real’ recording studios were being populated with computers and their peripherals, with the signature keyboard and visual display unit (VDU) nestling prominently alongside the analogue mixing desk and outboard gear. Music production, in short, was softening, but how it was softening and the implications for music itself speak to one of the most striking developments in recent music history.

VSTS, DAWS AND THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY In December 2000, the Swedish software company Propellerhead launched Reason, an all-in-one virtual music production studio. Represented in a graphic user interface (GUI) as blocks of hardware racks, Reason is a software emulation of hardware devices such as drum machines, analogue synthesizers,

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distortion units, samplers and sequencers. Using Reason, musicians are able to compose whole songs by keying MIDI data into a sequencer window and organizing the digital units to generate drum patterns, orchestral sounds, synthesizer melodies and effects. Alternatively, they can make use of the software’s audio capabilities to record external analogue instruments, such as guitars, violins, vocals, and so on, for further digital processing and editing. It is possible to mix songs with the virtual mixing console and master the outcome as an audio file, or flip the units around to see how they are configured and re-patch the wires as if they were hardware. After a song is finished, Reason even allows musicians to upload songs to Internet forums for comment, fire them off to record companies or swap them with others for development. Now well into its ninth version (at time of writing, September 2017), Reason, like other convergent digital studios, represents software’s hold over independent and mainstream music-making. It is one of a host of software studios currently on the market, including ProTools – in some respects the industry standard – Cubase, Logic, Acid, FL Studio, Reaper and GarageBand (the latter returned to below). All DAWs are capable of professional ‘studio’-sounding music the likes of which would have been beyond the means of most amateur musicians before the turn of the century when access to studio time and hardware was limited and prohibitively expensive. The rise of industry-standard protocols like MIDI and VST corresponds to a phase of relatively new ways of making music that have taken hold since the early 2000s. Like Reason these are software studios, VSTs and plug-ins that have been designed to supplement and replace analogue gear. Tens of thousands of plug-ins have been manufactured, making it one of the biggest growth areas of the musical instruments industry. Some commercial reports show that by 2007 global sales for the computer-centric market were around $425 million, up from $125 million in 1998, and a significant portion of this growth is attributable to software packages and plug-ins (National Association of Music Merchants Annual Report, 2009). The figures are sketchy, however, and almost certainly reveal only part of the picture of software’s impact on the musical instruments industry. For a start, software is integrated into many musical devices not sold as software, such as drum machines and digital synthesizers, so it is difficult to disentangle its impact on the musical instruments industry as a whole. Secondly, in terms of actual use these figures do not take into account a significant market for pirated copies, including those uploaded by the companies themselves! Thirdly, the figures do not reflect subsidiary software markets for smartphone apps and video games, where newer generations of users are increasingly engaged in music-related activities that are difficult to dismiss merely as consumption,

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as will be argued in Chapter 6. Software is such a tricky thing to measure, not least because it integrates so silently into the workings of things. Even if we ignore these caveats, it is clear that software is making a significant dent on the instruments industry, shaping everything from R&D budgets and promotional activities to educational packages and server infrastructures. Like other high-tech commodities, music software undergoes processes of development, iteration and marketing that establish its presence in a networked global market driven by competition between developers and by the constant cycle of versions, upgrades and improved algorithms (Castells, 2000). In fact, the speed with which these new digital instruments have been manufactured, marketed and adopted is testament to the dynamism of digitally enabled economies and the loops of innovation that define late capitalism (Thrift, 2005; Terranova, 2004). In such a context, the commodity is not erased, but becomes more transitory and circulatory, less a finished article than an ongoing process that feeds a logic of ceaseless expansion (Straw, 2010). Software plug-ins and DAWs are marketed not just as space-saving instruments, but cutting-edge ways of making music in a market already saturated with devices claiming to do the same things. Dedicated software companies, such as Native Instruments, have been joined by older hardware manufacturers, such as Roland, Yamaha and Korg, to become key players in a largely networked economy of digital goods. But as the market has diversified, independent and small-scale software producers have taken advantage of software development kits to produce their own plug-ins, sometimes as freeware. A cursory look at consumer magazines like Sound on Sound, Computer Music, Future Music and Music Tech illustrates the sheer scale and range of music software, from traditional applications like notation programs to some of the more experimental multi-effects processors and vocal synthesis engines. The overall result is a vast and expanding ecology of hybrid goods and services that includes encryption algorithms, dongles, online tutorials, sample packs and university courses.9 Software is no longer the preserve of the sonic experimentalist but has become a staple of the industry itself, redrawing the techniques, sounds and spaces of musical life. Or to put it another way, software underwrites transformations in the field of popular music by making the algorithm a catalysing agent in the unfolding interactions between musicians, designers, coders and manufacturers. It sets limits to what flows between machines and humans, as well as machines and machines. And it shapes what the musicking body does when it engages in the spaces and times of these digital imbroglios.

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Musica Practica in Soft Spaces As Théberge (2013) notes, while software tools often digitally emulate the interface characteristics of ‘real’ studio gear, they are dependent on a very different set of practices and behaviours. In a sense, digital editing programs are to music what word processors are to writing; they imply a set of relations between humans and machines that inflects the practice of writing in significant ways. Routines of composition become shaped by the aesthetics of the layout and the conceptual processes they call upon.10 Hence, musicians who had previously composed and recorded using analogue tape (such as a portastudio) often speak of the leap of thought and habit needed to handle composition using a DAW (Perry, 2004; Théberge, 1997). ‘Thinking digitally’, as it were, requires a shift in the attachments, modes and haptic efforts needed to compose within techno-spaces comprising windows-type arrangements, menus, scroll bars and cursors that are controlled with a mouse, trackpad or MIDI controller. The recent advent of tablets and smartphone music-making applications (returned to below) has added scrolling, swiping and tapping to these engagements, as the user plays with and skims across coded surfaces. Far from being ‘disembodied’ (Ryan and Peterson, 2004), the digital has returned to the digit: the historical link being that fingers were used by the ancient Greeks for counting, of course. This partly fulfils Barthes’ ideal of ‘musica practica’, where ‘the body controls, conducts, co-ordinates, having itself to transcribe what it reads, making sound and meaning, the body as inscriber and not just transmitter, simple receiver’ (Barthes, 1977: 149), though it does not mean that these devices and their interfaces dictate the bodily actions of creators in a straightforward way. The histories of technology and music are histories of misappropriation, accident and contingency precisely because of the way objects are used and misused in practice. Even the most rigid software application can be open to misinterpretations, hacks, errors, bugs and incompatibilities that change its function or produce contingent outcomes – anything from rewritten code to a total system crash, a misaligned MIDI note to lost music data. The code and the interface do set significant limits, however, and users are configured to respond to the software in relatively appropriate ways.11 In the case of a DAW, cut and paste actions are fundamental to the way digital music data is shuffled around the space of the composition, as blocks of MIDI information are edited and repositioned in modular formations along a timeline, or chopped up and reassembled in ways that produce consciously designed artefacts such as clicks and glitches (Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen, 2016; Prior, 2008a). Writing music in this way constitutes a

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flexible practice, subject to the speed of a copy/paste key combination or undo stroke, while the interface represents the work as a malleable digital landscape. Certainly, the relative stasis of the needle and the nascent malleability of magnetic tape are superseded, here. Digitalized composition increasingly takes place as a conversation between visual representation and composer, as the simulations, icons and windows of the GUI beckon the writer into increasingly supple and mobile routines and spaces. How the music is visualized undergoes corresponding transformations, with accumulated MIDI data represented as building blocks, segments and regions that favour an interchangeable and multi-layered approach to arrangement. Indeed, with the advent of progressively faster processing speeds and memory capabilities, DAWs now boast a dramatically increased and potentially limitless track count, itself a key indicator of changes in and possibilities of studio work. For where tracks were once a valuable resource for high-end recording studios (primarily because the availability of 8-, 16and then 24-track studios was a key point of distinction from the 4-track portastudio, which could only be extended by bouncing 3 tracks to a vacant track at the cost of fidelity and hiss), current DAWs boast infinite track counts restricted only by hardware capabilities. Not that musicians are suddenly composing songs comprising endless tracks: in practice it is more usual for song projects to contain a relatively modest number, not least because hundreds of tracks are more likely to lead to muddy sounding mixes. But it does mean that digital musicians have considerable power over editing. This includes non-destructive ‘compositing’ – combining the best takes from numerous attempts, which is particularly useful for vocal tracks – as well as the production of dense and multi-layered pieces. There’s a general historical and methodological point to be made about software, too. If we treat code as more than a technical engine, but as a cultural artefact and aesthetic accomplishment, then recent audio programs have moved beyond the ‘realist’ aesthetic of hardware simulations and have taken on their own formalist credentials. In the case of the popular DAW Ableton Live, for instance, the whole working environment eschews hardware precursors, instead embracing a stylistic ‘flatness’ where the GUI is organized as a series of clips, scenes and MIDI data rendered in idioms of versatility and speed. This, we might argue, displaces the referent (the studio) further from its representation. Which is to say that DAWs themselves are surely significant cultural objects, equivalent to studios, guitars or synthesizers in the impact they have had on music and therefore appropriate for detailed studies on their design, use and marketing. As Manovich (2001) notes in this connection, the emerging symbolic representations of new media in general (buttons, cursors, desktops, browser bars) are an essential

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part of our everyday technoscapes and it is particularly important to register how they shape routines of cultural production before they slip unnoticed into convention. So far in this chapter, I have sketched out some of the background to the technological, cultural and historical take-off of digital processes and practices and how they link to shifts in popular music culture. But there are still some basic questions outstanding, not least: what does this music actually sound like, who makes it and where? In the next three sections I want to tackle these questions head on, unpacking in more detail how shifts in digital musicking parallel changes in musical sounds and spaces as well as who is making music and under what conditions.

WHAT: THE SOUNDS OF THE DIGITAL In their book Digital Signatures, Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen (2016) explore the impact of digital technologies on popular music sound from the early 1980s. They show how techniques of digital mediation – from MIDI, cut and paste and sampling to Auto-Tune, digital reverb and micro-rhythmic manipulation – generate possibilities for new sounds and manifest new musical meanings. Through close readings of a number of examples, the authors demonstrate how digital technologies associate with certain kinds of compositional techniques and treatments that give contemporary styles like electro pop, R&B, hip hop, and neo-soul their distinctive aesthetic. Here, digital technologies produce a new field of possibilities, signifying a quantitative escalation of available techniques with qualitative outcomes, including shifts in how time and space are organized sonically. In the case of Prince’s song ‘Kiss’ (1986), for instance, the digital conditions of possibility include pristine digital clarity in the vocals and a sonic lushness in the mid-range frequencies (a result of the Yamaha DX7), as well as the heavy presence of drum machines and MIDI sequencers that lock the song to a machine-like groove. In the case of Snoop Dogg’s ‘Rhythm and Gangsta’ (2004), on the other hand, the authors point to the exaggerated lag and shuffle of the beats as a result of the precise manipulations of MIDI data moved in millisecond increments adrift of the metrical location. This gives the song an idiosyncratic ‘seasick’ groove that is heard in much current R&B. In the case of Kate Bush’s ‘Get Out Of My House’ (1982), the use of digital reverb gives the song an eerie quality, for the authors, because of the way it transcends how sound occurs in natural environments. Indeed, prominent effects like gated reverb (heard most recognizably on Phil Collins’ 1981 hit ‘In the Air Tonight’) are relatively easy to create using digital reverb units and plug-ins. With the work of

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glitch musicians like Los Sampler’s, Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, on the other hand, non-destructive editing environments allow musicians to drill down into granular levels of manipulation to generate the clicks, cuts and microsounds of an aesthetics of failure (Cascone, 2002). Indeed, these days, software packages like Melodyne invite editing at a microscopic level, where changing a sound’s formant characteristics, timing and pitch are possible to an unprecedented level. There is something almost alchemic about taking a pre-existing waveform, isolating a polyphonic instrument and altering the pitch, length and timing of individual notes independently of one another to create a whole new melody. Such meticulous editing is only possible in DAWs that push what is possible beyond capacities of human ‘live’ playability and into the gestural logics of digital machines. Pleasure flows from the new sonic complexities of these musics because of the way they stage intimate exchanges between musicians and machines (though how black musicians engage with and deploy such machines also raises a number of extra-aesthetic factors around histories of humanism and slavery, as will be argued in Chapter 5).12 Just as we should not lose sight of situated differences in how human–machine entanglements play out, so we should not underestimate how digital technologies have opened up a new panoply of sounds in contemporary music, in general. Some, such as the highly sequenced melodies of bands like New Order, The Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode, are sonic signatures of MIDI and digital sequencers, while others such as DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2004) reflect the vast memory capacities of modern hardware and the resulting ability to sample two distinct songs in their entirety in order to produce a mashed-up third: in this case tracks from The Beatles’ White Album and Jay Z’s Black Album. Mashups, remixes and genre hybrids, while predating digital technologies, are nevertheless accentuated by them partly because of the inherent flexibility of digital files in software production environments. As Richardson (2005) demonstrates in relation to the band Gorillaz, for instance, the 2001 single ‘Clint Eastwood’ was composed almost entirely in software and lent itself to logics of interchangeability whereby song parts could reappear, via cut and paste commands, in other remixed songs. Sandywell and Beer, similarly, argue that digital music technologies have underwritten processes of what they call ‘stylistic morphing’ as styles are ‘openly manipulated, mixed, spliced and blended into one another’ (2005: 9). The hyper-proliferation of music genres in the current climate is surely part of a more open, global and flexible digital landscape in which styles are constantly brought together in always emerging combinations. In summary, just as multi-track recording gave impetus to rock, disco and funk aesthetics by splitting parts onto

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separate tracks and into multi-layered compositions, so being able to edit almost any parameter of sound with the click of a mouse helps furnish new treatments, styles and effects in the post-1980s context. To take one final example, SOPHIE is a contemporary British electronic musician closely associated with the sound of online label PC Music. SOPHIE’S output is mainly released on digital platforms, such as SoundCloud, while the PC Music name derives from founder A.G. Cook’s emphasis on the personal computer as his ‘natural’ production environment and modus operandi: ‘Most of the time I’m just clicking everything in one note at a time, though my brain’s really adapted to that way of thinking so it feels completely natural’, he says in an interview (Golsorkhi-Ainslie, n.d.). Embracing a striking visual aesthetic that combines the hyper-real imagery of 1990s’ virtual icons like Max Headroom with Japanese kawaii (cute) culture and slick corporate iconography, PC Music musicians such as Hannah Diamond, GFOTY and Lipgloss Twins are united by an exaggerated digital sound based on pitched-up vocals, sparkling FM-type synth lines and catchy melodies. There is no pretence to analogue authenticity or warmth here, only layers of a twinkling digital pop sensibility.13 SOPHIE’s track ‘Lemonade’ was released in 2014 and quickly became one of the tracks of the summer in London’s club scene, peaking at number 2 in the Billboard Trending 140 chart that year. The track comes in at just under two minutes and mixes elements of dance pop, hip hop and trance. It begins with a digitally designed bubbling texture, moving into a skittering and ascending synth line, layered with trance stabs and glitches. The jittering synth melodies are joined by a heavily swung, percussive boom and pitched-up vocals with the laconic refrain ‘lemonade … l … l … lemonade’ and later ‘candy boys, c … c … candy boys’. The overall effect is a highenergy burst of cartoonish glides, bounces and plonks that performs its own digitality. The musician behind SOPHIE, Glasgow-born Sophie (Samuel) Long, describes how she uses software synthesizers and digital hardware sequencers, notably the Elektron Monomachine, to create digital sound sculptures. The song’s bubbling textures derive from the manipulation of digital waveforms, while the massive variety of individual note timbres is a result of SOPHIE’S use of ‘parameter locks’. These are the Monomachine’s in-built capabilities to shape the characteristics of each individual note in a sequence. For SOPHIE, this means digital tracks inhabit sonic territories beyond traditional referents, such as kick drums and claps: It makes more sense in my mind to discard … ideas of polyphony and traditional roles of instrumentation. It seems wacky to me that most DAW software is still designed around having drums/bass/keyboard/vocal presets

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for production. That’s what I find liberating about the Monomachine. It’s just waveforms that can be pushed into shapes and materials and sequenced. Just like a sculpture machine. Not like a computer pretending to be a band from the 70’s or whatever. (https://www.elektronauts.com/talk/view/62)

That the song also blends with and diffuses into an expansive online ecology of sites, forums and platforms, such as Tumblr, Instagram, SoundCloud and YouTube, reinforces its digitality and raises further questions about where digital music can be located – if, indeed, it can be located.

WHERE: (DIS)LOCATING MUSIC PRODUCTION Much has been written about the importance of space and place in locating, representing and envisaging popular music culture. Authors have operationalized concepts like scene, field and world to map relations between musical practices and their socio-spatial contexts (Leyshon et  al., 1998; Whiteley et al., 2004; Born, 2013). As Connell and Gibson put it, ‘music in all eras is characterised by particular sets of networks, technologies and institutions that map out cultural connections at different geographical scales’ (2003: 10). Here, musicking bodies generate complex webs of interaction that are situated within enabling and constraining contexts with spatial co-ordinates (Crossley, 2015). Musical identities are also formed through attachments to local and national imaginaries expressed in genre groupings like ‘Britpop’, ‘Detroit Techno’, ‘Madchester’, ‘World Music’, ‘J-pop’, and so on. Where music happens, or is imagined to happen, then, is a crucial question that illustrates embodied and semiotic dimensions of practice. Now, if we entertain the idea that digital processes and protocols associate with relatively deep changes in popular music, then we need to trace where production presents itself and to draw out the implications, not just for musical spatialities, such as the city, bedroom or studio, but for what music production actually entails. This is far from a straightforward exercise of musical mapping, but poses complex methodological and ontological questions. What, after all, does it mean to make music on the move? Here is an instructive quote that gets at some of the difficulties: I did a lot of the vocal edits on a plane … I cut and pieced the vocal together. There’s something like 2,000 or 3,000 edits in that three-minute song, and I did that sitting on a plane. (Brian Transeau, quoted in McClusky, 2003: 1)

It refers to the fairly common image of musicians making music while they are travelling. Let’s imagine a related scenario: a musician on a train,

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with a laptop, using a DAW to shift MIDI data across their composition, using the train’s Wi-Fi to call up samples that are stored in the ‘cloud’ while speeding through stations on the way to their destination. Where is music production here? In the keystroke and the microscopic actions of a body that is itself being propelled through space? In the solid materiality of the laptop’s presence and how the musician’s lap moulds to it? In relations between musicking fingers and the software’s arrangement window? In the algorithms that mediate the musician’s connections to the software studio and which determine Wi-Fi protocols and Internet technologies like TCP/IP? In regional train networks and national transport systems? In global flows of information and satellite systems that govern information infrastructures? It is a dizzying set of questions, but if we follow recent work in actor network theory and recent literatures on mobilities then the answer is that all these scales are operating simultaneously – assembling, disassembling and reassembling in time and space as they mediate everyday practices. Inasmuch as musical ontologies can be located in this array, they surely only exist relationally in the extensible panoply of processes, materials and activities that are co-present in this particular assemblage (Born, 2005). In short, production is multi-scalar, endlessly open and part of infrastructures that govern the rapid circulation of information – better understood in its movements than its rootedness. Being volatile and open is arguably a feature of all cultural works, of course (Becker et al., 2006). And yet, circulation through multiple sites at the speed of light is very much a condition of the digital hypermodern in all its velocity and complexity (Virilio, 1997; Straw, 2010). Were we to be precise in our description of this scenario, we would need to attend to the logics and operations of all the various objects, practices and processes as they interweave with one another. Let’s take just one of these objects, the laptop. This device is one of the early twenty-first century’s most characteristic music-making devices and its insertion into production networks tells us a lot about the entanglements of mobile space. Elsewhere, I have depicted the laptop as a convergent meta-instrument that combines the functions of composition (including online access to histories of recorded sounds and samples) with dissemination (uploading, distributing and marketing songs) and consumption (listening to, streaming and downloading songs) (Prior, 2008b). It is, in many ways, the complete production unit, an archetypal nomadic device of late capitalism that joins a constellation of networks, from satellite systems and point-of-sale terminals, to smartphones and fibre optic cables, that ‘generate new fluidities of astonishing speed and scale’ (Urry, 2003: 56). Indeed, just as the laptop’s

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in-built digital connectivity expands its functions beyond bounded localities, so its portability underwrites a new technological paradigm organized around flexible work patterns in the ‘new economy’ (Castells, 2000). This is what links the governance of global financial markets with musicians writing their next album on tour. Let me highlight three additional points about the insertion of laptops into the circuits of production, however. Firstly, it is clear that the laptop itself functions as a space in which musicians compose, settle and interact. Like any space it renders experience by organizing leaky boundaries between inside and outside, the mundane and the sacred, public and private, work and play. Musicians like Björk have spoken in the past of the laptop as a ‘bubble’ that functions as a pseudo-private dwelling in which creativity (in this case, the whole of her 2001 album Verspetine) can blossom. Other musicians have acknowledged the intimate relationships they have formed with the device, to the extent that ‘they appear to inhabit the spaces implied by the words, images and sounds scrolling down and across the screen’ (Bach, 2003: 4). In this sense, the laptop transposes the personal and affective relationship musicians have with music into a techno-sphere presented as windows, racks, sequencing lanes, and so on. In many ways, this extends the idea of the recording studio as a cossetted microcosm of experimentation (Hennion, 1989), but twists it towards unprecedented levels of flexibility and portability. Secondly, if the recording studio is a technology and a means of production that encourages specific musical practices, then its fate is certainly worth some attention (Théberge, 2013). Some authors, notably Leyshon (2009) and Hepworth (2010), have been quick to tie the advent of mobile digital studios to the rapid decline of brick-and-mortar recording studios in the early twenty-first century. Many high-end studios associated with the ‘golden age’ of rock, for instance, have contracted, been liquidated or turned into museums. Though Abbey Road remains a working studio, it was put up for sale in 2010 and other iconic studios like the original Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama and The Hit Factory in New York have shut down.14 In the UK, the Eurythmics-owned Church Studios and Bob Marley’s Sarm Studios have both undergone full or partial revamps, while Maison Rouge (where Blur’s Parklife was recorded) and the Manor Studio (where Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was recorded) disappeared a while ago. At one level, it looks like the future of the recording studio mirrors that of the record shop, both undermined by the de-materializing properties of digital technologies. Indeed, for Leyshon (2009), studio software is a prime agent of these changes. DAWs have dislodged the privileged position of studios in the

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musical economy precisely because much of what studios had to sell (space, time and specialist equipment) is now being provided ‘in the box’ at lower costs. In other words, it is no longer necessary for musicians to hire an expensive studio because they can access professional-sounding software to make their own multi-track recordings on their laptops at home. The result is not just the decline of place-based studios with their historical resonances, but the passing of an associated (and somewhat romanticized) mode of cultural production, whereby talented musicians assembled in a studio to perform while an engineer sat in a separate room waiting for the magic to happen (Hepworth, 2010). The spectre of the digital is, unsurprisingly, a haunting too far for some, with sceptics inclined to cast the software studio as a technocratic endgame that takes creative power away from the musician and places it in the hands of studio ‘tricks’ like Auto-Tune, quantization and other automated processes: ‘essentially, technology has put the control firmly in the hands of the technocrats … you don’t have to sing in tune or play in time any more’, complains one (Brockbank, cited in Hepworth, 2010: 78). This reinstates the notion that some technologies are falsifying, designating the digital as fake, artificial and requiring no talent, while valorizing older technologies (the control room, mixing desk, tape and microphone) which were themselves once considered fake, as able to capture something unique and enduring (Frith, 1988b). And yet, at time of writing, the general prognosis for studios is less clear, with many studios reinventing themselves as post-production suites or start-up nests for convergent initiatives in the music tech industries, such as cloud-based mastering services (Daley, 2016). Some iconic studios have undergone a repositioning as places for one-off performances and special events, such as live re-enactments. In 2016, a simulation of The Beatles’ Abbey Road sessions even went on tour, and we should not forget that the majority of commercial hits are still recorded in the plush, high-end, wellstocked, commercial recording studios. In other words, it is certainly not the case that the physical studio has disappeared. Rather, it now co-exists with and expands into a plurality of supplementary spaces through which creative practices flourish. Notwithstanding techno-dystopian discourses of loss, in other words, laptops and Internet protocols have arguably accompanied a more diffuse model of collaboration and creativity. Thirdly, then, while one might identify a broad Weberian tendency in the history of music production towards rationalization and the shrinking spaces associated with individualization (from the public music hall to the bourgeois drawing room to the privatized laptop), there are important inversions of these processes that speak to extended notions of musicking. The laptop is not merely a detached and cocooned space, but is porous,

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potentially opening up new forms of communicative sociality and spatiality. Its insertion into mobile spaces supports a more agile set of work practices, sustaining jams, spontaneous gatherings and modes of composition, as well as the possibility of geographically dispersed musicians working together. One early manifestation of remote collaboration, as Théberge (2004) notes, was the relatively short-lived Rocket Network studio (1995–2003), an Internet and server-based technology that allowed musicians to work on and update audio files remotely, without ‘being’ in the studio. Typically, tracks would be recorded in separate localities, to be edited together in a different studio, slowly building up material through discrete iterations. By dialling in their contributions from anywhere in the world, musicians became co-participants in a new set of spatial logics – for Théberge, logics of digital flow that were transforming studios into ‘nodes’ through which local and global creative processes are articulated. Digital processes continue to disperse the idea of the studio (and, indeed, the band), allowing musicians to collaborate without having to meet face to face and collapsing spatial distinctions between here and there, local and global, inside and outside. In fact, remote collaboration has become something of a commonality and nearly all the major players in the sound recording industry have versions of this system. Steinberg’s is called VST Connect, an integrated virtual bridge that makes use of video technologies to allow remote musicians to see and talk to each other in ‘near real time’ as they jam, mix or compose together. In 2014 it was a remote connect system that enabled a young London-based band, Electric Litany, to record with musician and sound engineer, Alan Parsons, despite the fact he lived in Santa Barbara, California. While the band were setting up and performing in a studio in Wales, Parsons monitored the session from his home via a video link on his tablet computer – directing the session, tweaking the levels and advising the musicians on their sound: ‘It was like he was in the studio with us’, as one of the musicians put it (cited in Wall, 2014). In the case of the software studio Reason, on the other hand, longdistance collaboration takes the form of crowdsourced dynamics among ‘trans-local’ music-making communities (Bennett and Peterson, 2004). Currently embedded into the DAW is a button that uploads songs to a purpose-built web space for musicians to post unfinished songs for others to add, mix, edit and re-post. One section of the site contains a cappella tracks for musicians to add their instrumental music, while others are organized by genre. Such sites represent an ever-proliferating multitude of forums and spaces where musicians swap files, discuss techniques and remix each other’s work. Online collaboration has, in this sense, exploded the idea of the studio, sending it into a ‘network of technologies and relationships, where

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fragments of music flow through a series of multivalent exchanges’ (Théberge, 2013: 87). Indeed, in addition to email, instant messaging and video chat applications, cloud-based services like Dropbox are providing extra means for musicians to share and archive unfinished tracks, remix stems, MP3 drafts and native DAW project files with one another – in turn, stretching, diffusing and folding the spaces in which music takes place. Attending to these folds is crucial because they alert us to the fact that digital flows are neither pure nor seamless, but are run through with contingencies. In a study of the Turkish band Grup Yorum, for instance, Bates (2014) shows how the circulation of digitized audio files among remote members allowed the group to assemble their 20th-anniversary album, Yıldızlar Kuşandık. He notes how the musicians worked through a network of ‘distributed production’ whereby project work was accomplished in a parallel rather than serial configuration. Hence, the album emerged as a non-linear object constituted by the work of satellite nodes (musicians, editors, songwriters, lyricists and their various hardware and software devices) discretely contributing their evaluations and edits. But Bates also notes how the movement of files, including hard drives, CDs, email, pen drives, and so on, was always accompanied by physical transfer among members travelling between locales, such as prisons where some members of the group were incarcerated for political reasons. Musical mobilities were constantly managed through the shifting and sharing of physical objects. This made it very difficult to ‘document every moment when music, data, ideas, and people moved between spaces’ (Bates, 2014: 350), reinforcing the methodological difficulties of tracing and tracking where music is happening. Indeed, if the study of music is, among other things, a study of its recorded materials and inscriptions (from notation to audio stems, outtakes to live performances), it is important to ask what happens when that material is elusive, hidden or always on the move. What changes when music takes the form of data that is expansive, voluminous and possibly archived in arcane, or even encrypted, file structures? What research issues are raised when an examination of popular music depends on an understanding of objects that may not be recoverable or (as with music files stored in the ‘cloud’) raise complex legal questions about ownership? What kind of popular music history is possible under conditions where only a tiny fraction of material of the sum total is visible to the scholar, and where songs are always on the verge of disappearing, being deleted, pasted or recycled? Would we be better advised to engage in detailed ethnographies of hybrid digital–analogue practices to enrich our understandings of contemporary production? If so, what would a ‘thick description’ of distributed production look like and how would it help

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overcome the problem of studying non-linear processes outside of a placebased studio (Lysloff, 2003; Porcello, 2003)? While flow, mobility and flexibility are certainly not specific to latemodern music histories (in the late 1960s, The Rolling Stones had an eighttrack studio installed in their van to write and record on the move, for instance), the current interweaving of popular music with digital mobile technologies seems to dislocate, accelerate and circulate musicking to an unprecedented extent. DAWs are, after all, copyable, portable and archivable, and this favours dispersed modes of production based on sharing and movement. The most recent phase of these de-localized intensities concerns the advent of music-making ‘apps’ – powerful, self-contained, downloadable programs designed to run on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Location-aware and capable of generating content, receiving content and disseminating content anywhere and anytime, apps ‘have become synonymous with mobility, and with the ubiquity of computing – to a larger extent than the hardware devices that carry them’ (Matviyenko, 2014: xviii). The huge expansion of music-based apps – from drum machines, synths and guitar tuners to virtual ocarinas, pianos and theremins – has been impressive and registers three late capitalist trends: firstly, the advent of always-on protocols, infrastructures and networks, notably Wi-Fi and ubiquitous computing; secondly, the precise marketization of leisure time, where ‘slack’ moments, such as commuter time (or sitting on the toilet), can be filled with digitized consumer practices; and thirdly, the gamification of culture, including the convergence of video game culture with music, as argued in Chapter 6. Apps – which are themselves assemblages of code activated in wider assemblages – further intensify practices of music-making on the move by inserting software into a developed commercial ecology of micro digital transactions. Some of the most popular apps are sequencer programs that encourage users to string together and build up musical patterns, like drum loops or vocal phrases. In other cases, such as the app Kids on DSP, the user is able to deploy the smartphone’s microphone to sample their external sonic environment (the sound of footsteps or traffic for instance) and incorporate those sounds into an unfolding techno composition. It is a little unclear at this point what the impact of apps has been or will be on popular music production, not just because the scale and longevity of app culture has yet to be determined, but because it is not certain where the balance lies between music-making and casual play: that is, between users looking to kill a couple of minutes at the bus stop versus those wanting to compile music for dissemination or collaboration. But perhaps this line is too blurred to be of analytical use – is casual playing not just what musicians

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idly strumming their guitars at home are doing, after all? The emergence of a now extensive market in music-making apps is certainly lodging powerful production units, instruments and studios in the pockets of users (Wang, 2014). And this, coupled with the massive global uptake of smartphones, is potentially spreading hands-on musical resources to more users and user communities. The music section of Apple’s App Store, for instance, is one of the most popular markets, while two apps – Take (for vocals) and Figure (for beats) – are integrated into Reason’s web ecology, the latter combining with Ableton’s remote facility, Link, to allow musicians to collaborate remotely in ‘near real time’. It is also telling that established musicians have been getting in on the app scene, with the likes of Kraftwerk, Nine Inch Nails, Brian Eno, Björk and T-Pain flexing their avant-garde (and commercial) credentials by designing and supporting their own music-making apps. With T-Pain’s voice-altering app, users can approximate the musician’s trademark autotuned voice by singing into the phone’s microphone.15 In the case of Björk’s truly convergent app album Biophilia, on the other hand, users are encouraged to interact with the multi-modal interface to create new versions of the songs, manipulating on-screen parameters to reorder the sections or improvise bass lines, for instance. Not only does this represent a virtual collapse of the domains of production and consumption, but also it gives the songs a degree of open-endedness, as Dibben explains: the song becomes process rather than a fixed, single object that is remade in different performances according to available resources: not only are the versions of songs on the app suite and music album different, the versions of the song app, score, and animation also differ. (2013: 694)

All of which raises a final crucial question of whether and to what extent these developments constitute something like a ‘democratization’ of music-making. If digital technologies are helping to casualize, open up and diffuse musical practices – if they are associated with shifts from a single site to multiple nodes of shared production – are they also redrawing other boundaries, such as between professional and amateur, musician and non-musician, specialist and non-specialist?

WHO: DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION, GARAGEBAND AND THE RISE OF THE NEW AMATEURS The answer to this question depends on one’s definition of democratization, of course. We can say that, from a sheer capabilities point of view, the recent proliferation of digital audio programs and devices has placed tools of enormous power in the hands of producers. This has extended possibilities for

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making, distributing and sharing music with unprecedented speed and scope. As far as mobile telephony is concerned, for instance, the UK has been deemed a ‘smartphone society’, with Ofcom reporting 90% ownership among 16–24 year olds. In a global context, on the other hand, some evidence suggests that mobile phone use has even helped diminish the so-called ‘digital divide’, including between those with and without domestic computers and Internet access (Steenson and Donner, 2009).16 Like sales figures for apps, the equivalent uptake rates for DAWs are imprecise, though we can say that the digital liquidity of such programs (for instance, via peer-topeer and BitTorrent sites) has given them formidable spread and circulation to users who would not have had the means to hire a professional recording studio. Associated studio techniques are, as a result, diffusing beyond the spatial bounds of the physical studio. Multi-track production, compositing, auto-tuning, mastering, micro-timing, multi-effects processing, cut and paste editing – these are just a few standard functions now at the fingertips of anyone with a laptop or tablet. Apple’s GarageBand is an instructive example, here. Pre-installed on many of its devices, GarageBand is Apple’s entry-level DAW and was released in 2004. It sits in the same desktop environment as email and web browsing, its visibility already potentially reducing some of the arcane mystery around music production. The most recent version at time of writing (version 10) comprises a multi-track interface with a host of VST instruments, over a thousand pre-installed loops, a series of virtual guitar effects and a dedicated drum program with kits ordered by genre. For many, GarageBand is their first taste of a home recording studio and its simple interface acts as an encouraging affordance. For new and inexperienced users, the program can be used as a sketchpad for ideas or space in which to build up loops. But it can also be used as a professional-quality songwriting environment. Indeed, in the early 2010s, the program gained notoriety when Canadian producer Grimes wrote a successful breakout album using only this software. For Savage, GarageBand represents nothing less than a paradigm shift in the music consumer’s relationship to music production, because it ‘fosters a sense of cultural participation’ (2013: 155). Here, Savage evokes Attali’s historical examination of musical engagement, where the latest phase, ‘composition’, is a new period of demotic creativity in which people are practising music to the levels they did before the invention of recordings. For Savage, GarageBand not only places the ‘tools of contemporary composition in the hands of the consumer in the simplest possible manner’ (2013: 164), but also sits in a broader ecology of networked interactions comprising online sites and forums, where users swap music and production tips.

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‘Is’, Savage asks, ‘digital technology partially responsible for driving a greater quantity of individual musicking that encompasses composition?’ (2013: 157). If so, to what extent has technology enabled new forms of cultural democracy and raised possibilities for individual and collective expression (Taylor, 2001)? There are good reasons to be circumspect about discourses of digital democratization, particularly the assumption that there is something about the technologies themselves that have ushered in a new democratic era. It is certainly not the case that everyone is suddenly making music in a kind of DIY free-for-all merely because these technologies exist. Like the myth of the Internet as an open and participatory space of unbridled freedom, such claims autonomize technology, when what is called for is a precise and critical analysis that asks detailed questions about who is participating, how and under what socio-economic conditions. Democratization is, after all, a term loaded with Western political ideals, and needs to be used carefully (Théberge, 1997). At the very least we need to know what exactly is being ‘democratized’, for whom and with what consequences? Is it because the devices have become less expensive? If so, what does ‘expensive’ mean in relation to relative income and earnings among particular demographic groups? When scholars and commentators talk about the ‘first affordable’ devices, this is clearly a relative assessment. Affordable to whom? What kind of disposable income and socio-economic position are the benchmarks against which this is measured? GarageBand is free and accessible? Well, only if you purchase a piece of very expensive Apple hardware. Perhaps democratization refers to ‘know-how’, including the technical literacies that circulate as a result of the widespread availability of digital platforms such as YouTube and online discussion forums. Tuition videos uploaded by well-meaning amateurs are, after all, a flourishing part of these digital spaces and potentially open up esoteric knowledges to wider populations. And yet, how does self-tuition and sharing relate to basic questions around technological access, work–life balance and everyday commitments, where finding the time to understand and make music is itself a temporal resource? Moreover, if huge inequalities in participation and music education can be found between social groups, should we really be using the term ‘democratization’ at all? As Devine and Born (2015) have shown, entrance onto music technology degrees in the UK – which are primarily oriented to electronic and digital technologies – are deeply divided along gender lines, with 90% of the student population comprising male students. The identification of gadgets with ‘boys’ toys’ and hegemonic masculinity is a potent sociological force that marginalizes women’s presence and participation both in educational

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contexts (in science, technology and engineering subjects, especially) and in popular music fields. Gender inequalities are a structuring mechanism by which music is coded, played and presented across technological cultures – in the studio as well as in consumer magazines, in the instruments industry as well as Internet forums, in the classroom as well as the music shop. Through subtle and not so subtle mechanisms of symbolic violence, institutional and discursive boundary work, women are often positioned as strangers to the world of digital and electronic music – their experiences of associated spaces often felt to be intimidating and judgemental (Tavana, 2015). In other words, availability in itself is not a sufficient condition to encourage diverse populations to engage in digital music production. And neither is access to digital literacies which (like other forms of capital) are still predicated on processes of long-term inculcation in stratified societies based on an uneven social distribution of skills. If the term ‘democratization’ needs to be used with caution, it would nevertheless be short-sighted not to recognize shifting boundaries around participation associated with the adoption of digital audio technologies. Elsewhere, for instance, I have used the term ‘new amateur’ to describe a loosening of the (admittedly always leaky) regimes of professional and amateur since the advent of networked technologies (Prior, 2010). Disproportionately, but by no means exclusively, drawn from middle-class male demographic groups, new amateurs can be defined as ‘technologically literate, seriously engaged, and committed practitioners working to professional standards but often without the infrastructural support or conventional credentials of the professional’ (Prior, 2010: 401). They include the huge swathes of people engaged with music production to varying levels – from composing a ringtone with friends and casually making loops and beats, to uploading unfinished tracks to SoundCloud or Bandcamp and mixing other people’s work. While rarely able to make a living from their activities, these amateurs’ sense of purpose and identity are closely tied to the love of music creation. Their acts of love are often small scale in nature and take place in micrological worlds of production, but they are meeting top-down delivery of content head on, chipping away at the foundations of modern credentialism and the status of the modern professional.17 New amateurs are not compelled to use the mediating chains populated by conventional gatekeepers such as A&R (artists and repertoire) personnel, major record labels and marketers. Neither are they particularly interested in ‘making it’ (though of course some do graduate beyond the bedroom into the higher reaches of the industry). Instead, they are the tooled-up, globally connected equivalents of Finnegan’s (1989) amateur

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musicians in Milton Keynes: perfectly content to self-sustain their musical activities in whatever ways are convenient and meaningful; often collaborating with others in online and offline spaces; and sometimes sharing their works with friends and family via social media. While the twentieth-century professional was defined by a monopoly over a specialized field of knowledge and skills, these monopolies are certainly more fluid, and this is partly to do with the availability, take-up and appropriation of material and technological infrastructures. The production tools and knowledge acquisition mechanisms that once defined boundaries around professional and amateur now transit more fluidly between them, while financial barriers can sometimes be overcome with creative sourcing – including what is now a very developed domain of free music software. Tavana (2015) even notes the case of a young black musician who wrote a whole album by attending a nearby Apple store and using its display equipment! On the one hand, inasmuch as computers and smartphones have become ubiquitous artefacts used for cultural rather than business purposes, it has become a fairly simple exercise to make your own short movie, manipulate your photos, or produce your own music. On the other hand, these require an eclectic range of skills and therefore an occupational folding. Tasks that were discretely allocated in modes of production have collapsed, giving new amateurs the opportunity to become specialists in what were a range of separate occupational niches.18 Hence, to some extent, digital musicians have to become familiar with previously bounded off or unreachable skills such as mixing, sound engineering and mastering (Kealy, 1979).19 If this falls way short of democratization as a universal and inclusive process, then it surely makes for a denser and more pervasive cultural life. Arguably, the DIY system hyped by punk rockers has moved beyond an activist ideology to become a structurally embedded part of digital modes of cultural production. New amateurs are inhabiting commercial spaces in which to play and consume music, including in the interactive domains of video games, music distribution platforms and smartphone apps. As content generators their labours might be construed as driving a late capitalist grab for endless and free digital content, but they are also forming and materializing their own spaces, in ad hoc collectives, bedrooms and global networks. They are doing what amateur musicians have always done, which is to use whatever resources they have at their disposal to make music with others. But they now do so in denser, speedier and more globally connected ways. As for questions around quality, it surely matters less if the music itself is any ‘good’ (if we could ever agree on such a thing). Keen’s (2007) vilification of amateur production as a ‘dictatorship of idiots’ certainly misses the

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point about the wider benefits of participatory culture. For if we value the social good of creating culture with others, then digital musicking is part of what Hesmondhalgh terms the ‘life-enriching sociality people experience when they sing together, dance together, and play music together in modern societies’ (2013: 8) – even if the ‘together’ here does not conform to the imagined purity of a face-to-face situation. As for trenchant inequalities, we are certainly far from a situation where digital music technologies are levelling out disparities in participation. Yet, it is interesting to note that in terms of gender inequalities, at least, young women are beginning to discuss the ‘feminist implications’ of programs like GarageBand, particularly the claims that they might lessen some of the barriers to women’s involvement in music production. If the DAW and its associated practices are somewhat fluid, unhooked and mobile, then these characteristics can also be used to circumvent the discomfits of technomachismo often felt by women (and men) in the recording studio, music shop and classroom.20

CONCLUSION In a 2015 feature article to celebrate the magazine’s 30th birthday, Sound on Sound devised an experiment to reassemble a typical mid 1980s’ home recording studio (typical for an idealized, relatively wealthy, serious hobbyist with a huge bedroom, that is) (Inglis, 2015). Driven by more than a whiff of techno-nostalgia, the point was to reconstruct what it was ‘really’ like to work in a mid 1980s’ home studio, as well as to test whether current staff on the magazine could recreate an 1980s’-sounding track from scratch, using only equipment that might have populated such a studio. This included an Atari ST home computer, with MIDI capabilities, a software sequencer, 16-channel mixer, digital multi-effects unit, Yamaha DX7, Roland TR707 drum machine and Akai sampler. Many of these devices were sourced from the attics of the contributors or hired from specialist music shops. ‘Obsolete’ technologies never entirely disappear, it seems, but regularly return in further acts of memory, consumption and utility (Hetherington, 2004). That the SoS staff found it so difficult to create the track (at one point, one admits that he’d forgotten everything he ever knew about programming a sampler) tells us three important things about technological formations as they enter into complex historical relationships with musicking. Firstly, the so-called ‘digital era’ of music is far from smooth or universal, but is run through with lumpy contingencies: we forget how things work, bit rot sets in, technologies decay, habits move on, people

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have different levels of technical capital, software becomes outdated, cables no longer work, and so on. This gives the lie to the idea that the digital is somehow enduring and indestructible. Digital music technologies do not operate in a vacuum, they are relational, ripe for an analysis of the multiple mediations that swarm around, activate and deactivate them. Secondly, while technological change seems perpetually to materialize new gadgets, discourses and habits, there is a second level of time that suggests that not much has changed at all: people still make music, often together, sourcing whatever they have to hand, and in ways that demonstrate their shared histories (Hesmondhalgh, 2013). If we pay careful attention to these dual temporalities, while attempting something like a ‘thick description’ of these practices, we are perhaps closer to representing digital cultural production as an inflection in an historical curve, where new ways of doing things emerge, co-exist with and displace their antecedents. Which is to reprise the point that, while musicians do what they have always done, how they do it, where and with what kinds of non-human artefacts have profoundly shifted. Finally, technologies do not function autonomously, they fold into the practices and interventions of garlands of actors operating in specific temporal, spatial and social conditions. And yet such technologies do have shaping properties that skew the kinds of techniques and sounds redolent of particular styles, genres and perhaps even decades. As the contributors to the SoS experiment reflect, it would have been, in some respects, harder to have produced a track that did not sound like the 1980s, because of the ways emerging digital protocols, devices and practices of that decade favoured certain kinds of operations (though a number of qualifiers need to be added in, here, not least fundamental questions to do with the shaping properties of genre conventions, ideologies and histories). The current trend of producing VST plug-ins that emulate the distressed, lo-fi sounds of hiss, vinyl, 8-bit and tape saturation on brand-new computers is final testament to what complex, convergent and somewhat confusing times these are. So, too, the fact that the final SoS song was uploaded to SoundCloud as a pristine, 24-bit wav file rendered on a Mac to be listened to on a modern computer or smartphone.

NOTES 1 Let’s say I want to find a particular snare drum sound. I don’t strike a drum skin and record it in a studio but load up my software, including my favourite virtual drum machine, search through my sample libraries, rehearse hundreds of potential sounds until I find one that I like, and assign it to a pad in the sampler’s graphic user interface, to be triggered, filtered, edited, chopped to my liking.

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2 As White puts it in an interview with Sound on Sound: ‘the actual sound of analogue is 10 times better than that of digital. I think the reason why many people say they don’t like the way things sound on the radio or the television nowadays is because it’s all recorded digitally. Having said that, it’s not really digital recording as such that’s the problem. A band playing live in a room recorded straight into Pro Tools doesn’t sound bad. The problem is the multitude of plug-ins and clicks that are applied to the Pro Tools recording after that. In the analogue world you just don’t do all that stuff. You don’t mess with the recording that much. Because it’s on tape, you tend to leave it alone. But when it’s in Pro Tools, people keep clicking and editing and removing pops and buzzes and they place the drums on a grid to get it in perfect timing. All those moves just suck the soul and life out of a song’ (Tingen, 2014). 3 According to MacKenzie, for instance, ‘what is visible to a programmer working on a piece of software may be almost totally invisible to users, who only see code mediated through an interface or some change in their environment: the elevator arrives, the television changes channels, the telephone rings’ (2006: 13). Approaching technology and music through the lens of mediation reveals software to be a key mediator that helps usher in new practices and forms, replacing, for many, the experience of actually ‘being’ in a recording studio, for instance. 4 At time of writing, there is some debate about ‘firsts’, with speculation gathering around the claim that the earliest instance of computer-generated sounds was in 1951, when British computer scientist Alan Turing’s huge mainframe computer in Manchester was programmed to play ‘God Save the King’, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and Glen Miller’s ‘In the Mood’. Interestingly, the restored performance, which was recorded for a BBC outside broadcast, is accompanied by a good deal of laughter from those present, as if there was something ludicrous about a computer being able to mimic human expression. 5 This, in turn, shaped the contours of the music industry, as Holmes notes: ‘[MIDI] succeeded in providing genuine compatibility among different instruments and the computer and led to explosive growth in the making of software and hardware for the music industry. It was the evolutionary leap that led to widespread growth in the music technology industry’ (2002: 21). 6 A suspicion often mocked and exaggerated by musicians disappearing from the stage while their machines continue to play. It is a stage ‘trick’ employed by the likes of Orbital, The Pet Shop Boys and Daft Punk, for instance. 7 Curating as much as playing, hip-hop musicians embrace the new possibilities of paying homage to their heroes, performing their own tastes as they recontextualize a range of sonic fragments. 8 Others have likened the way male producers extract female voices to cosmetic surgery, cutting chunks out of a woman’s performance (Dickinson, 2001). 9 Change invariably generates mixed reactions in the world of popular music, and the rapid availability of software studios has also produced debate and uncertainty, one of which concerns how faithful the sounds of these emulations are, with sceptics pointing to a lack of ‘warmth’ in plug-ins compared with their

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POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY analogue precursors. Here, the digital algorithm is a crude emulation (a ‘not quite a copy’) of the somewhat more unpredictable characteristics of timbre, tuning and tone in analogue circuitry. During the early 2000s, soft synths were considered by many to be flat and intangible representations of the ‘real thing’ and therefore lacked the human tactility and interface of hardware, a fetish for which was reinforced by technostalgic discourses of the ‘original’. Such debates often tell us more about the discourses and ideological positions of the protagonists than they do about any essential qualities of the sound itself. They also reprise cycles of suspicion, innovation and acceptance of novel technologies (including the phonograph, of course) for undermining ideas of the unique performance and presence of the body across the history of music as a whole. Johnson writes of his relationship to word processing, as follows: ‘the computer had not only made it easier for me to write; it had also changed the very substance of what I was writing, and in that sense, I suspect, it had an enormous effect on my thinking as well’ (1997: 145). In the language of Science and Technology Studies (STS), users are only free to make what they will of software texts within certain interpretative contexts that restrict the range of possible uses (Grint and Woolgar, 1997). At this point it is worth saying that human–machine configurations are significantly inflected by powerful ideologies around Western humanism and the historical mode of slavery that cast black subjectivities as precisely lacking in this respect. The black body has already been marked, in other words, and so the pleasures of playing with human–machine fusions take on a different meaning. Cook admits that his grasp of pop is based on its potential to be both extravagant and banal. Instead of the worn-out tactics of combining ‘high’ and ‘pop’ culture, the attempt to do something over the top with kitsch imagery and catchy hooks hints, for Cook, at something dark, uncanny and ambiguous. It is an aesthetic of pop excess and consumption that borders on the creepy and which is perhaps reminiscent of Baudrillard’s ‘fatal strategies’. Many have reopened as heritage centres or museums, repurposed as luxury flats or have simply disappeared. See Hepworth (2010) for a review of some of the destinations of these studios. Not surprisingly, a number of tablet and smartphone orchestras also exist, including the Mobile Phone Orchestra, which stages live concerts using only iPhones (Wang, 2014). Ofcom (2015) The Communications Market Report, London: Ofcom. As Leyshon puts it: ‘Recording studios were once highly privileged sites that allowed only those with sufficient resources to gain access to their facilities; now, with the growing ubiquity of digital recording media, and the possibilities of open access distribution sites such as MySpace and YouTube, all manner of artists that might have been prevented from finding an audience through the normal narrow channels of the music industry at least now have the opportunity to do so’ (2009: 1317).

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18 As Théberge puts it: ‘in this sense the distinction between what can be considered a “professional” or “commercial” project studio and simply a “personal” or “home” studio has become increasingly difficult to make’ (2013: 83). 19 The skilling up of amateurs implies the aggregation of a wider base of tacit knowledge among populations that were previously (either by professional credentials or by knowledge acquisition) excluded from these skill sets (Kealy, 1979). 20 As Dee Dee from the band Dum Dum Girls recently put it: ‘The feminist implication of GarageBand definitely encouraged a lot of my female friends to explore something that had previously seemed out of reach’ (Tavana, 2015: n.p.).

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FROM IRON CAGE TO DIGITAL BUBBLE? MOBILE LISTENING DEVICES AND THE CITY

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Somewhere there’s a sound of distant living Welcome in high society It seems so artificial Why should I care? (‘Life in Tokyo’, Japan, 1982)

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INTRODUCTION This chapter begins with a simple image, one that will be familiar to urbanites across the developed world and which has come to signify an essential dimension of what it is to live in fast-paced, information-saturated, late capitalist societies. It is the image of an amorphous mass of urban dwellers crammed into commuter trains, a sizeable chunk of whom are plugged into their mobile listening devices, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings and fellow urbanites. Earbuds in, gaze averted, lost in streams of digital information, they invite quasi-serious apocalyptic parody. They are the zoned-out automatons of a dysfunctional society, detached from reality, unable or unwilling to engage with anything but their iPhones, tablets and laptops (Prior, 2014). In the spaces of cultural criticism and Internet gags, they inhabit half-human states: ‘Apple zombies. They’re remote controlled from Cupertino’, declares Kunzru (2009: 20). Breaking down reserve in a dense urban fabric is not an easy thing. I once took it upon myself to approach randomly (and somewhat naively) urbanites in Tokyo and, in the spirit of what was once said to be a practice of some early adopters of iPods in New York, invite strangers to exchange headphones, momentarily swapping music tastes, before going about their business. Suffice to say, the desire to engage ended in dismal failure, the invitations being met with a mix of embarrassment, mirth and suspicion. Granted, Tokyo is a unique case. It is a hypermodern global city fuelled by

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speedy technological innovation, but which remains infused with spatioaesthetic principles of Shintoism and Buddhism. It is what Barthes (1982), as far back as 1970, identified as a city of absences revolving around an empty centre, the Imperial Palace, the incumbent of which no citizen ever saw. It is also notable for the presence of relatively formal codes of conduct that structure daily interactions, including those governing meetings and greetings. It is remarkable for the apparently seamless co-existence of tradition and modernity, shrines and shopping malls, discipline and cultural experimentation, restraint and rampant consumerism. And yet the result of my trivial social experiment will be of no surprise to scholars of the modern city. From Weber, Engels, Tönnies and Simmel through to the Chicago School sociologists and contemporary urban geographers, metropolitan living has been depicted as utterly contradictory. On the one hand, we have never been as physically proximate with so much humanity in such a socially effervescent and intoxicating habitat (Benjamin, 1999). On the other hand, we have never been as detached from one another, seemingly unable to enter into meaningful social relations with people we rub shoulders with every day (Park, 1967). No wonder the city is, so the argument goes, the locus of manifold social pathologies: its overwhelming scale, rigid organization and sense-assaulting intensity responsible for everything from the death of community, intolerance of the other, and bystander behaviour, to anomic suicide, loneliness and the so-called ‘blasé attitude’, Simmel’s well-known term for the shutting down of the senses (Simmel, 1971). Weber’s description of secular modernity as an ‘iron cage’ was designed to get at the impact of intense rationalization on social order, of course. The metaphor implies an obdurate locking-in of modern sensibility to the increasingly pervasive dictates of instrumentalism manifest in large-scale bureaucratization.1 But it might readily be adapted to describe how modern social life, urbanism in particular, has evolved into a series of discrete, privatized shells cultivated by technologically enhanced urbanites. According to Michael Bull, the iPod and before it the Walkman are mediators of acoustic worlds that preside over a double effect. While such devices allow users to take unprecedented control over their environments by colouring their everyday routines with customized soundtracks, they simultaneously constitute ‘privatized auditory bubbles’ (Bull, 2005: 344) that conform to the seductive pleasures of mass consumer culture.2 In other words, huge swathes of the urban population have become solipsistic colonizers of space, captured by the exigencies of consumption, who move in their own sonic enclaves against the urban crowd. The iron shell, we might say, has morphed into a digital bubble.

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This chapter explores the multi-dimensional properties of digitally mediated urban worlds, partly in response to the powerful depiction of urbanites as detached monads (Sennett, 1977; Bull, 2002; 2005; Prato, 1984; Hosokawa, 1984). It takes its cue from long-standing debates about the atomizing nature of modern cities, but also current work on users from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective and some of my own empirical investigations into young peoples’ uses of mobile audio devices (Prior, 2014). The key proposition is that while claims around the role of digital devices as socially dissociating bring into sharp focus important questions about how urban subjectivity is structured socio-technically, such claims simultaneously ignore subtle complexities in lived practice that point to extended modalities of use that cannot be reduced to logics of detachment. In other words, the image of the tuned-out, technologically determined urbanite captures only one aspect of what is a multi-faceted question of how users and non-users strategize, reflect on and interact with such devices. Beyond appearances, when one drills down into actors’ perspectives and techniques, there is more going on than can be assumed from the popular image of the ‘i-zombie’. Multiple engagements with such devices point up the need to augment an analysis of the technics of seclusion with attention to how diverse populations engage with the devices in the flow of their everyday lives, where basic questions of global, demographic and utilitarian heterogeneity invite non-reductive descriptions of how people negotiate their subjectivities with technology. The chapter is split into four parts. After some necessarily brief reflections on urbanism and urban sound ecologies (taking stock of the benefits of listening to the city, in particular), the chapter focuses on the role of mobile listening devices and digital protocols as relatively novel forces that shape how urban life is lived and configured. In the third section, the chapter explores the question of digital detachment in more depth, outlining the important work of the sociologist Michael Bull and the idea of the digital ‘auditory bubble’. The fourth section introduces a supplementary perspective on digitality and urbanism. This is where I will be interrogating the metaphor of the bubble, searching for something more nuanced by way of an analysis of how these devices are often lightly, multiply and provisionally deployed in practice.

CITIES AND SOUND ECOLOGIES Cities are rousing and cacophonous places. They are sites of a clamorous humanity, where the rhythms of traffic meet the routines of commercial exchange, and where the hum of machinery meets the hubbub of everyday street interactions. They are also representative of the promise of modernity,

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where the desire for rationality and progress is etched into the order of the streets, where the mind is liberated and diverse forms of life are encouraged. This, at least, is how modern social commentators, from Engels and Tönnies to Simmel and Park, saw cities like Berlin, Manchester and Chicago. For these writers, urban environments were the site of multiple forces, both chaotic and fulfilling, dangerous and progressive, unjust and revolutionary. The image of creative destruction is at the core of these ambivalences (Berman, 1982). The metropolis swallows up traditional ways of life, but in doing so it sets urbanites free from the narrow constraints of ruralism. It destroys Gemeinschaft relations but encourages a new set of dynamic relations based on modern principles of law, commerce and innovation (Tönnies, 1955; Marinetti, 1909; Virilio, 1984). It is no wonder cities are perceived as noisy places, for the urbanization of modern society is literally an explosion of the textures of everyday life. There are epistemological and methodological avenues opened here. The dominant paradigm in urban studies has traditionally been ocularcentric – that is, scholarship has tended to focus on the city as the site of visual intensification, as the eye becomes the target for new commercial, cultural and industrial stimulations and seductions (Crary, 2001). And yet, if we listen to, rather than merely look at, modern cities, we develop a richer sense of how our urban environments work and how urbanites come to know one another and their place in the social world (Feld, 1982). To think about cities is to attend to the acoustic properties of streets and neighbourhoods, buildings and transport routes. It is to orient to how the city’s linear and cyclical rhythms overlay one another, and to register the changes in the urban soundscape through time and space (Lefebvre, 2004). Just as we associate particular places with particular sounds, so we locate our bodies in these sounds and register their sensuous properties: from football crowds to nightclub beats, police sirens to street protests (Back, 2007). Sound also provides a means of grasping the nature of power and conflicts over space. Disputes over volume often map out a politics of architecture and the delicate thresholds between machines and humans, nature and culture, sound and noise. Hence, as Thompson (2002) argues, sound issues were integral to the establishment of modern architecture and the rise of the noise abatement movement in early twentieth-century America. The material construction of urban spaces, concert halls in particular, articulated developments in how sound could be both optimized and contained in order to avoid spilling over into civil society. Indeed, according to the composer, musicologist and anti-urbanist Schafer, the noises wrought by urbanization, such as traffic, have coarsened our everyday soundworlds, spreading a lo-fi veil over our sonic space and masking the autonomy and abundance of

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individual sounds. For Arkette (2004), on the other hand, cities are complex aggregations of variant sonic events, both private and public, contemplative and effusive, hi-fi and lo-fi, tactile and ephemeral. Such events are perpetually contracting and expanding into everyday spaces and times. Taking a ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ position on urban sound is arguably less sensible than acknowledging the complex entanglements of sound, music and space through their social mediation as well as, to quote Georgina Born, ‘their capacity to engender modes of publicness and privacy, their constitution of forms of subjectivity and personhood, their affective resonance, or their embedding in capitalist dynamics of commodification and reification’ (2013: 7). The development of what Atkinson (2007) calls an ‘ecology of sound’ is useful, here, for setting the grounds for an examination of the social impact of the urban soundscape. For Atkinson, the ebb and flow of urban life is evident in the multiple and cross-cutting ways cities sound out. It is not simply that cities are louder than villages – Corbin (1998), for instance, examines how church bells were a resounding marker of community long before and indeed after the advent of urbanism – but that the urban environment is patterned and ordered according to a distribution of sonic qualities. Sound demarcates different zones (industrial, suburban, entertainment, business) and in doing so regulates and organizes appropriate social behaviours. According to ethnomusicologists, sound and music also help to demarcate place and people’s attachment to place by helping to fix locality, communicate indigeneity and manage social interaction (Connell and Gibson, 2003). We only have to think about how teenagers often use music to construct the semi-permeable boundaries of the bedroom against the incursions of parental authority. But sound is also judged and perceived by different groups in different ways. Hence, tinnitus sufferers experience the urban environment in ways that require the avoidance of certain spaces, where ‘a sonic ecology is made tangible, sometimes painfully so, by their physiological condition’ (Atkinson, 2007: 1914). Attending to the sonic qualities of cities, then, opens up fertile ways of interrogating and thinking about what we might call sonorous spatiality: how located experience is shaped by ubiquitous engagements (invited and uninvited) with sound. This necessarily implies attention to the various histories and structuring dynamics of a whole apparatus of production and listening, from gramophones to stethoscopes, transistor radios to loud hailers, microphones to telephones (Sterne, 2003a; Kittler, 1999). According to Jonathan Sterne, for instance, the advent of sound technologies in the late nineteenth century accompanied a huge transformation in how people experienced modern life, not least in their perceptual habits and engagements with public, private and civic domains. Hence, in modern society, he argues,

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‘sound becomes a problem: an object to be contemplated, re-constructed, and manipulated, something that can be fragmented, industrialized, and bought and sold’ (Sterne, 2003a: 9).

MOBILE LISTENING DEVICES AND THE CITY The recent explosion in mobile personal devices brings these relations up to date and their adoption raises a set of important issues around the technological mediation of urban life. The advent of increasingly ubiquitous digital networks and protocols, in particular, has reshaped the physical and informational metabolism of the urban environment. City streets are now suffused with movements of data and the development of a digital infrastructure – fibre optics, Internet cafés, mobile phone masts, advertising screens, satellite dishes, electronic bus timetables, Wi-Fi hotspots, and so on (Graham, 2001) – designed to accommodate and speed up these movements. Cities have always been places of mobility, of course. But digital processes have cranked up the intensity of urban mobilities, leading authors to emphasize the importance of flow as a paradigmatic function of urban systems (Sheller and Urry, 2006). In an increasingly globalized, mobile world, the city is repositioned as a hub of diverse material and dematerialized exchanges, leading authors to characterize the contemporary city as ‘informational’ (Castells, 1989), shaped as much by algorithms and software as it is by flows of migration, transportation and commerce (Mitchell, 1996; Crang, 2002). How these mobilities play out in the everyday lives of urbanites is a key question. For if urbanism is, following Wirth (1938) a ‘way of life’, then it is defined by the various practices through which these lives are given shape and meaning. With the advent of mobile information communication technologies urbanites are repositioned in relation to their urban environments in three ways. Firstly, their connections to space and place are reconfigured, as the very ‘stuff’ of the environment comprises material and non-material, physical and informational spaces – from geo-mapping technologies and satellite navigation systems to point-of-sale terminals and text messages (Graham, 2005; Burrows and Beer, 2013). Secondly, the abundant proximities that characterize relations between urbanites and digital systems raise significant questions about the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between human and non-human artefacts in increasingly technologized urban settings. Indeed, for some, the insertion of the urbanite into high-tech spaces is nothing less than the cyborgification of everyday life (Shaw, 2003). Thirdly, the communicative lifeworlds of urbanites, including the strategies and means of sociality and entertainment, are increasingly mediated by digital

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personal devices. Here, the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, PDAs, laptops and associated software protocols have raised questions about not only how we work with, access and relate to information, but also how we work with, access and relate to each other. For all of these reasons, the advent of mobile digital devices matters. It matters because such devices are implied in collapsing boundaries between work and home, where commuting, for many, is also part of leisure time. It matters because of what it shows about our attachments to technological devices, the adulation some people reserve for their gadgets, the uses they afford, and the personal and financial investments we make in them. It also matters at the level of production, not least because of the role digital audio devices have played in radicalizing the mobility of digital music files in general, including mobilities associated with illicit exchanges, streaming services and the resultant reconfiguration of the music industry (Kusek and Leonhard, 2005; Leyshon, 2009). Finally, it matters because examining digital mediations of urbanism forms a prism through which to assess contemporary debates around the shifting nature of community and the state of the city in advanced, highly technologized, societies. But if digitally mediated mobile listening is an increasingly prevalent mode of listening, then we need to know more about how these devices are enrolled in the specific practices of urban populations. This is particularly important in a climate of commentary where treatments of such devices (the iPod and smartphone in particular) tend to be characterized by either euphoric idealizations or damning castigations (Prior, 2014). While for many these are devices of prime efficiency that have made listening to music (and life in general) easier, anxieties have proliferated around the idea that they have made us anti-social (de Castella, 2011). Just as they filter out our sonic environment so, the argument goes, they filter out our social relationships by buffering relations to our urban environment and isolating urban beings from one another. ‘Atomisation by little white boxes and cell phones. Society without the social’, writes Sullivan of the Daily Telegraph (2005, quoted in Dubber, 2005), while Bertsch adds: ‘As anyone who has spent some time sitting in a Starbucks can tell you, the customers who work there use iPods to minimize the possibility for social interaction’ (2006: 2). From this perspective, the modern, alienated subject is not only possessed by mobile audio technologies, but also sequestered from the social world. Indeed, the charge that mobile digital audio devices have dissolved the existence of close, proximate and diverse public relations resonates with enduring claims about urban decline and the death of community. In its modern form, the idea that Gemeinschaft relations (Tönnies’ term for close-knit relations) are under threat or erasure accompanies strongly normative

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denunciations of a host of modern conditions, including the anonymous city itself, increased occupational mobility and the advent of modern telecommunications. For Putnam (2000), for instance, the very edifice of civic life and communal engagement has been chipped away by the privatizing tendencies of modern media systems, while for Sennett (1977), the technical rationalization of urban life results in nothing less than an urbanism of disconnected and narcissistic strangers. More broadly, the idea that technology and consumer culture have ravaged or infantilized social life chimes with Adorno’s by-now-infamous description of instrumental rationality and the seductions of the modern culture industry (Adorno, 2001). Here, the problem of social disintegration is bound to varied sensory and commercial distractions, including the pseudo-individualized products of the culture industry (Benjamin, 1999; Crary, 2001).

MOBILE PRIVATIZATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF WITHDRAWAL As far as the academic study of personal listening devices like the iPod and Walkman is concerned, the most influential voice in these debates belongs to Michael Bull. Drawing on interview-based research and classic sociological themes explored by the likes of Weber, Simmel, Adorno and Sennett, Bull (2002; 2005; 2006; 2014) draws out the implications for the take-up of mobile listening devices on how consumers construct the meaning of their urban spaces. This is a profoundly paradoxical construction for Bull because while users actively ‘warm up’ the city and its perceived monotonous rhythms by aestheticizing it, they also withdraw from it by holding the urban crowd and its contingencies at bay. Users of personal audio devices neutralize the external world of the city by turning it into a spectacle devoid of diversity and immediacy at the same time as they enhance it by inscribing their own sonically fuelled narratives onto its surface. They therefore attempt to transcend their spaces of habitation by building a pleasurable sonic barrier between themselves and the urban throng, choreographing their music collections to suit their moods as they do so (Bull, 2014). As one of Bull’s respondents puts it: For a start – and depending on what’s playing – it can feel like you’re in a film; your life acquires this literal ‘soundtrack’. Secondly, I feel more insulated from what’s going on around me. Other people appear to be extras in the film, rather than actors with whom I might end up interacting. (Adam, cited in Bull, 2005: 350)

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For Bull, this dialectic of aesthetic detachment articulates a long-term historical shrinkage of the acoustic worlds of modern, Western urbanites, replacing the resonant spaces of the public squares and Gothic cathedrals with the intractably private, non-resonant mobile devices of the twentieth century. During the 1980s, the Walkman, in particular, allowed users to compile and select their own tape cassettes to fashion their private sonic worlds, with users (like Adam in the above quote) reporting their resulting experiences of the city as ‘filmic’ in that objects, people and sights are reduced to on-screen characters sucked into users’ own imaginative scripts (Bull, 2002). By remaking space and place through sound, users undertake cognitive work that requires them to hike into deeply interior states, with consequences not just for people’s intimate relations to technology but for engagement with ‘others’ in the urban context at large (see also Chow, 1999). As for the iPod, the ‘first cultural consumer icon of the twenty-first century’ (Bull, 2006: 105), the very design of the device helps to redraw the ‘spaces of culture … into a largely private and mobile auditory worship’ (2006: 107). With its single jack socket (some versions of the Walkman had two), vast memory and speedy touch interface, users have the power, aesthetically and cognitively, to master their environments. Managing the interface is now a matter of calling on the user’s collections to soundtrack their movements and states of mind. Indeed, for iPod celebrants like Dylan Jones, there is a kind of semi-delirious attachment to the device, which takes on the sheen of a fetishized object – auratic and magical. Like Eisenberg’s utopian fantasy of a music machine, the iPod opens up consumers to the ‘infinite river of music’ (2005: 222), morphing to accommodate different mood states, physical activities and movements. The recent advent of streaming music services has made it easier than ever to choose from an ever-accumulating database of music to suit an emotion or occasion. At time of writing, for instance, Spotify has a ‘genre and mood’ option that arranges its catalogue according to a range of styles and dispositions, such as ‘sleep’, ‘romance’, ‘travel’, ‘chill’, ‘party’ and ‘punk’. Yet, through such customized selections and by retreating into their own ‘zone of immunity and security’, users are also seamlessly braided into a cloistered web of sound and space, for Bull (2007: 3). They liberate themselves from what they perceive as the mundane and oppressive rhythms of daily life by creating ‘islands of communicative warmth in oceans of urban chill’ (2007: 9). This is why the perceived independence of the user from the city is really a deep dependence on a mediated seclusion that accelerates the social decay of the privatized city. Urban subjects seek out solutions for mediated company at precisely the moment that their environments are increasingly empty of ‘real’ life.

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Two spatial and cognitive tendencies are therefore dialectically related, for Bull. Just as shared public space diminishes, so it is replaced with an internalized fantasy of privatized empowerment that heightens the users’ illusory relationship to that space. Just as users substitute an illusion of control for unmediated engagement with the city, so they are stripped of the desire to engage with the contingent multiplicity of that world. And just as users colonize space, they are at the same time colonized by the culture industry and its ultimately vacuous promises of fulfilment. They experience a heightened sense of their musically coloured environments, but it is an interiorized enhancement that reinforces the emptiness of a hypercommodified consumer capitalism. Bull, therefore, raises the frightening prospect that a form of ‘mobile solipsism’ is threatening the very idea of collective urban space, replacing diverse urban communities with an increasingly homogenized ‘dead urban space’ (2004: 255), a diagnosis he shares with Sennett, Bauman, Augé and others. How people travel is also implicated, of course, and many of these disengaging tendencies are reinforced by what Urry (2004) calls the ‘system’ of automobility. Here, the car emerges as a technology of control through which drivers construct their privatized soundworlds, immersing themselves in a perfect sound booth that keeps the contingencies of the city at arm’s length. With the advent of car radios, cassette decks, CD players and, most recently, MP3 facilities, drivers are cocooned in a ‘sonic envelope’ that heightens the sensorial pleasures of driving alone (Bull, 2004: 247). As with Simmel’s urban dweller, users maintain a kind of mobile cognitive privacy, dealing with the dense and overwhelming urban environment by retreating into their sonic enclaves. But, again, they do so by exerting a paradoxical and illusory control – the rich density and multiplicity of the city is effaced by drivers: ‘users feel empowered and safe but only as long as the sound of communication is turned up’ (Bull, 2004: 253).

URBAN PRACTICES AND MOBILE LISTENING Bull’s argument is certainly a rich and compelling one that opens up important questions about the increasingly powerful ways mobile technologies both mediate and efface the social. A cursory glance around a metropolitan commuter train, public park, library or café will immediately chime with his critical diagnosis of electronic and digital withdrawal. And yet there remains something rather partial and one-sided about his argument. It is certainly not clear that the dialectic of colonization–detachment encompasses the range of technically mediated possibilities that are evident in

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contemporary urban landscapes. At the very least, understanding how such devices are deployed in various ways in everyday situations by diverse populations points up the need for a fuller investigation. The following, then, explores additional dimensions of use that might supplement Bull’s argument in potentially interesting ways. It draws on a three-year research project carried out on the uses of MP3 players among undergraduate students at the University of Edinburgh (Prior, 2014). Between 2009 and 2012 I asked students to record the ways in which they used mobile digital audio devices in their everyday lives – in their commutes to university and in their domestic and social lives, for instance – and to write up their reflections in the form of blog entries. The sample (n 155), though limited in age and socio-economic range, contained some residual diversity, with just under half of respondents hailing from 26 countries across Europe, Asia and North America. The results of the study showed that in a good deal of cases, students did indeed use their MP3 players in ways that could broadly be defined as anti-social. They blocked out the perceived interruptions and nuisances of the urban environment by placing a sonic buffer against the world, letting their music selections colour and re-enchant what they considered to have become the stale routines of everyday life, such as the walk to university. As one student put it: What I find is that it creates a certain feeling of detachment from my surroundings, allowing me to feel like an observer. It creates a private ‘narrative’ to go with my journey, with less distractions from other people’s conversations and activities (essentially excluding myself from other people’s narratives). In this sense, it is a useful way of making a journey more personal to me, leaving me to my own thoughts. (Karen, 21)

Like Bull’s respondents, students described the intricate ways they personalized their place within the city by carefully selecting music to suit their cognitive states. They spoke of their musically managed selves in ways that echo DeNora’s (2000) findings on how people use music to amplify, extend or reverse their moods. Some compared using the device with the sense of separation implied in watching films, while others recorded the ways in which they purposely wore the device to signal that they did not wish to be bothered by others, including street vendors. Respondents found it useful to draw on spatial metaphors of containment and seclusion like ‘cocoon’, ‘bubble’ and ‘pod’ to explain how the device provided an inner sanctum, protecting what they took to be their private spaces. As one respondent put it: ‘what I get from it [the iPod] is detachment, life in my own world, where nobody else can get in’ (Stephan, 19).

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In other words, in constructing a soundtrack to urban life, many respondents showed how aesthetic calculations returned as somatic pleasures, the ultimate effect of which was to diminish their contact with the urban. And in this sense their behaviour coincided with the image of the disconnected consumer found in much cultural criticism. Interestingly, however, co-existent with these comments about detachment were a significant number of alternative formulations that described users’ relations with their devices – two of which are particularly noteworthy.

Techno-sociality Firstly, despite being designed – or ‘scripted’ to use Akrich’s (1992) phrase – to be used by single users with their own headphones, some respondents explained how they twisted the affordances of the device in order to share their music with others. In some cases, this meant sourcing a ‘Y adaptor’, essentially a cable that splits the audio signal in two, allowing two people to listen to the device simultaneously. More commonly it meant inserting only one earbud, the other given to a friend for placement in the opposite ear so that conversations could be maintained, often about the music that was being listened to: ‘feeling like we shared something important’, as one student (Francis, 20) put it. Further strategies of mediated sociality were evident. Students wrote of the times they docked their smartphones and MP3 players into speaker systems to share their music with flatmates during everyday routines such as washing up, working or cleaning. More than one student noted how this often led to a collective sing-a-long. One respondent described how she met a close friend at a party where they bonded over a shared taste for The Beatles after scrolling through their digital music collections. Another spoke of brief, but affective, moments of discussion sparked by swapping MP3 players with others, and the impact on their music tastes: The music you put on immediately creates a topic for conversation and raises comments. If everyone brings their iPods, it enables us to experience music we would not necessarily listen to. As such, it is a way of sharing music with people. (Chloe, 19)

We can extend this list further. MP3 players and smartphones are now fully integrated into diffuse media ecologies that feed into and off the desire to share, spread and interact (Jenkins et  al., 2013).3 Indeed, according to Jenkins et  al. the affordances of digital media and the sharing of online content require us to rethink how social relations, cultural and political participation happen. To take two examples: in the case of so-called ‘flash mobs’, participants are known to gather in public spaces (usually after

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information of the whereabouts of the site is shared online) to listen to music through headphones while dancing in groups. And, for Molnár (2010) at least, this demonstrates new ways of imagining collective action and sociability in highly technologized societies. In the case of ‘iPod nights’, on the other hand, boundaries between amateur/professional and producer/ consumer are blurred as non-specialist DJs are given anything from 5 to 15 minutes to wow crowds with their iPod selections. The advent of podcasting and silent discos as well as the seemingly trivial practices like sharing playlists with others shows how mobile digital devices are part of a complex socio-technical assemblage that has co-evolved with reconfigured practices of expression and communication. We certainly need not assume that some essential and untouched form of human communication is being distorted, suppressed or impoverished by the mobile digital audio device. Rather, we may see human communication as articulating with new forms of technology, just as we do with newspapers, books, telegraphs, television, telephones and email (Hutchby, 2001b; Silverstone, 2007). Indeed, while it is somewhat tempting to assume that new technologies are the cause of a major disturbance in how we live, the reality can often be more mundane or even counter to our assumptions. Connecting with others happens in multifarious ways and always in the presence of non-human objects, an insight provided by Latour and others. One student in the study noted, for instance, that using his MP3 player actually put him in a more responsive mode precisely because he was more likely to stop people and have random conversations with them: ‘after popping out an earbud and pausing the player, of course’ (Tomoji, 20). As far as the smartphone is concerned, these co-presences extend into and overlay an ever-proliferating range of online and offline spaces. The explosion of music-sharing ‘apps’, aftermarket accessories and third-party add-ons is now a key feature of digital formations, and their presence feeds a convergent model of media ecology shaped in part by the rise of participatory consumer practices (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010; Jenkins et  al., 2013). That smartphones now include a microphone, camera, web-surfing and instant messaging capabilities, an email client, social networking, and various location-specific services, expands the domains in which it sits. The point being that it is not entirely certain that the commuter who appears to be locked into their digital bubble is listening to music at all, as opposed to texting friends in order to arrange a meeting, learning a language, reading an online newspaper or writing a community newsletter. Indeed, while focusing on digital seclusion gets at the powerful (and, in some ways, seductive) image of the duped and sequestered consumer, it does so by flattening out what might be conceived instead as a more plural landscape of techno-sociality and use.

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Non-users Matter Assuming that our definition of ‘use’ is relevant, of course. Indeed, the second point of complexity relates to how respondents reported inconsistent, contingent and guarded uses of their devices in ways that point up the need to interrogate critically what these categories actually mean. For a start, conscious non-use was prevalent among a fairly significant proportion of respondents, with just under half the sample detailing the ways they regularly deactivated the device in response to the contingencies of specific times, places and circumstances. Monitoring the presence of the device in everyday situations was essential to maintaining a balance between what respondents took as being fully present and absent from social relations. In some cases, students reported that they forced themselves to leave their MP3 players at home in order to maintain a connection to the outside world and to keep their wits about them as they walked or cycled around the city. Others reported that they were sporadic in their use because wearing the device in public made them ‘feel awkward and antisocial simply because it limits contact with people and gives the image that I am not willing to talk to others’, to quote one student (Claire, 21). Some respondents were compelled to turn their devices off to allow the sounds of the city into their worlds, with one student reporting that urban sounds were actually more ‘comforting’ to him. Others said their devices had remained untouched for days, weeks or months because they were concerned about the potential damage it was doing to their ears. One student summed up her feeling as follows: I seldom bring my MP3 player with me. Not only because I bike everywhere and it’d be dangerous, but because I dislike alienating myself from the places I’m walking through, not being able to hear ‘hellos’, birds, happy greetings or, on my way to the library from the Meadows, the man shouting ‘can I interest you to buy the Big Issue’ with that particular tone that gets stuck in my head all day long. (Chris, 21)

This desire to switch in and out of device states and the enforcement of tactical forgetting already tells us much about the intricate ways these devices drift in and out of users’ lifeworlds. ‘Use’ is not a stable or monolithic category, here, but can only be understood as a practice contingent on calculations made by users about the gains and losses made in wearing the device. Many students were adeptly negotiating their device-mediated environments and balancing their love of music with their love of the city unplugged. Restraint and resistance were, therefore, part of the desire to respond to the city’s rhythms, routines and its unique characters in an

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unhindered state. Through various degrees of conscious distancing and disengagement, the ‘inner life’ of the mobile listening device was carefully managed to let the city breathe, enliven and enthral. All of this reinforces the point made by STS scholars (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003; Grint and Woolgar, 1997) that users are best seen as social actors who, in their engagements, disengagements and deliberations with technologies, are able to configure their meanings. The very idea of non-use has to be identified, therefore, as complex, ambiguous and fluid, as part and parcel of the continuum of use rather than its polar opposite. This is particularly clear when one listens to the well-thought-out reasons and motivations for not engaging with technologies, or doing so only partially, rather than dismissing these disengagements as ‘exclusion’ or ‘technological refusal’ (Verdegem and Verhoest, 2009). Attending to the bottom-up experiences, meanings and practices that define the emergent enrolments of humans and non-humans means listening carefully to how users and non-users process, articulate and reflect on their relations to their devices. Or as Selwyn puts it: People are more than simply ‘end users’ with no role to play in the technological process beyond accepting ready-made technological artefacts, but exploring the process underlying how technologies are consumed and used. (2003: 107)

Indeed, one striking finding from the study was that even when respondents reported that they used their mobile audio listening devices in ways congruent with Bull’s characterization of the ‘digital audio bubble’, there was clear insight into the implications and ethical character of doing so. Some routinely added caveats, reversals and conditional clauses to their reports that indicated something like a principled struggle with the device. Others agonized over the potential implications of ‘missing out’ on requests for help or invitations to chat: But I wonder, in making myself deaf to the world around me, how many times I may have ignored someone asking for directions, walked passed a friend or even missed a cry for help. (Sarah, 23)

Far from surrendering to a master pattern of withdrawal, many users actively confronted an ethics of space and community. They critically reflected on their use, working through the social implications of mediated withdrawal, including its impact on recognizing (in the broadest sense of ‘facing’) fellow urbanites (Levinas, 1999). In this sense, MP3 players acted not only as a device for playback, control and isolation, but also as a moral

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prism that prompted users to process and reflect on landscapes of responsibility – as seemingly trivial as whether to take off one’s headphones when entering a shop, for instance. The very act of use was haunted by diverse moral possibilities, pouring into respondents elements of doubt. And while there will inevitably have been a strong cohort effect at work – one might assume that university students, a good proportion from privileged backgrounds, are already disposed, in a Bourdieusian sense (Bourdieu, 1994), to think critically about these issues – it raises the distinct possibility that users are wrestling with the very same questions that academics pose in their research. Indeed, while Bull argues that iPod users ‘do not appear to be passive consumers of the products of the culture industry’ (2007: 120), he certainly does not credit them with much insight into the social implications of using these products, where the reflexive accounting of users’ worlds might actually have become a topic of analysis itself. At the very least, these reflections are a component of the cultural construction and unfolding of meanings that users attach to their routines and practices and must therefore be taken seriously (Kirkpatrick, 2008). For if we see the emergence of new technologies as generating parallel questions around the construction of subjectivity and morality (as involving new forms of etiquette, for instance), then our very definition of technology must imply a moral bridging between user and device around the latter’s place in our social worlds (Garvey, 2007). Indeed, as Hirschkind (2006) points out in his study of cassette use in Cairo, by playing tapes of the Qur’an and religious sermons in public, individuals can be construed as ‘ethical listeners’ who demonstrate and foster a fluid relationship between private/public life and selfhood. In this case, these are certainly not liberal bourgeois subjects self-cultivating their identities within a private bubble, but public-oriented listeners who, in their rejection of the autonomy of private life, shape the ‘moral architecture’ of the city and social space (Hirschkind, 2006: 124).

Plural Publics and Intra-individual Variations That diverse populations engage with and twist the meanings of mobile listening devices in various ways should not really surprise us. In many respects, the synthesis of transnational corporate technologies and distinct local practices mirrors trends mapped out by theorists of so-called ‘glocalization’ after all (Robertson, 1994). The sheer speed, scale and breadth of the take-up of mobile audio technologies across the world necessarily points to widespread processes of technological monopolization and the concentration of power among digital tech companies like Apple, Facebook,

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Amazon and Google.4 Although recent sales have diminished in line with the take-off of the smartphone (including its own iPhone), Apple’s iPod, by 2012, had sold around 350 million units, for instance (Costello, 2012). And yet, on the other hand, in attending to the situated nature of technologies-in-action it becomes clear how user populations do not comprise a homogeneous mass but are plural and located. They variously incorporate these devices into their everyday lives according to contingencies that define their local social worlds, needs, characteristics and identities. Even in my own study, the data of which was gleaned from a relatively small and homogeneous sample, diversity of use both within and across social groups was evident. Two dimensions of difference are worthy of particular attention. Firstly, cross-cutting issues of gender and power were apparent, confirming research on how cities and technologies are experienced differently by men and women (Wajcman, 1991). Personal safety issues, for instance, were highlighted by a number of female students as a key consideration in their calculations. As one student put it: I’m really wary of other people. I like to know if there’s someone close behind me and generally you cannot tell if there is when you’re listening to something so loud in your ears. (Chloe, 19)

Indeed, several women from the sample developed their own coping strategies in response to various levels of unwanted attention and harassment from men. Several students reported that they wore their headphones to signal unavailability while having the device switched off in order to keep their wits about them. In constructing a somewhat unexpected non-use for the device (that is, not listening while appearing to listen), these respondents responded to the patriarchal control of space with what de Certeau (1984) calls urban ‘tactics’ defined by a reflexive repositioning of the device. In the case of students with mental health problems and disabilities, on the other hand, how the MP3 player featured in their everyday lives was dependent on intricate calculations about how safe, intrusive or potentially salving it was (‘it helps me combat the fear of hallucinations’, stated one student). For a couple of mature students, their relationship to MP3 players was mediated by their children’s use of the device which, in turn, was mediated by local familial configurations and parental authority. Variations in use were also evident according to nationality, with students noting key cultural differences in how often and where they and their friends listened to their MP3 players. Some students noted (with some annoyance) the prevalence of distinctive phenomena like ‘sodcasting’ in the UK, where music is played through the device’s speakers in public spaces, rather than through headphones.

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The first point, then, is that we need to attend to how user populations inhabit diverse subject positions with varied social characteristics, bodies and needs: young and old, able-bodied and disabled, rural and urban, male and female, educated and non-educated, Western and Eastern, and so on. There is certainly no single, universal user as much as multiple and diverse users with different orientations and lived experiences (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). The second point, however, is that even with individual users, when one tracks use over time and in relation to personal biography, there are significant variations in how these devices are deployed and experienced. Intra-individual variations in use are bound up with changing orientations that actors experience in their life course. Here, what Lahire (2011) identifies as plural dispositions reflect the lumpy and uneven trajectories that characterize changes in actors’ situations. These include changes to socio-economic status and familial makeup, occupational and geographical mobility, changing partnerships and marital status, shifting values and political views, health, and so on. Actors are ‘plural’ for Lahire to the extent that they are multi-socialized and multi-determined and this leads, contra Bourdieu, to a non-unified stock of schemes of action which vary ‘according to the social context in which they are led to develop’ (Lahire, 2011: 26). If we follow Lahire, it becomes possible to identify how the uses of digital audio devices are inflected by the shifting dimensions of people’s lives. Hence, in the case of the current study, those acute transitions bound up with student life (leaving home, meeting new people, getting used to a new city, exploring identities) had an identifiable presence in the blog entries. The existence and density of friendship networks were a key determinant, for instance. Hence, whereas some students noticed that they used their MP3 players more frequently since leaving home as a way of coping with loneliness, others reported that they hardly used their devices because they were socializing more often. One student noted that in moving from a small town to a capital city they used the MP3 player less as a barrier against what was previously perceived as the stultifying nature of close rural social relations. Others noted that they felt uncomfortable using their devices at all in the first few weeks of arriving in the city because they were still adjusting to the routes, routines and rhythms of their new environment. Some students related transitions in use back to trajectories in their life course that were themselves tied to a change in urban environment, such as prevalent modes of transport. One student stated: Though I used to listen to music through my iPod all the time in Japan, I rarely bring out my iPod when walking in Edinburgh. I usually listened to my iPod just to segregate myself from distracting noises from the train. (Minami, 19)

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Another spoke about going through different ‘phases’ of use depending on the cycles of their moods, again reinforcing work on how music and playback technologies are tools for managing emotions and the aesthetic contours of the self (DeNora, 2000). Social biographies, group belonging and conflict are, as Frith (1996), Hesmondhalgh (2013) and DeNora (2000) have argued, partly constituted musically. We therefore need to underline the point that the meanings and uses made of the MP3 player cannot be disentangled from the undulations and contingencies of everyday life – some subtle, some less so – and the emplacement of the device in the changing rhythms of users’ lives. Finally, however, we must surely extend this point: musically mediated biographies are also made possible by the panoply of non-human actors, including playback devices and associated technologies, through which music becomes playable, present and active.

CONCLUSION Language scholars tell us that metaphors and analogies are uniquely powerful ways of enriching our understanding of the world (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003). They are linguistic expressions that help structure and give collective meaning to our experiences. Marx’s writings are pervaded with obstetric analogies of historical birthing and midwifery, for instance (Gray, 1947), while the metaphor of the organism has been key to understanding how society and its component parts grow, function and fit together (Levine, 1995). Weber’s metaphor of the stalhartes Gehäuse, translated by Talcott Parsons (himself inspired by Bunyan’s imagery in Pilgrim’s Progress) as the ‘iron cage’, remains one of the most evocative images in modern thought. Found in the final passages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a representation of the inexorable progress of modern rationality, the ‘iron cage’ metaphor is canonical and suggestive. It graphically conveys the predicament of the modern subject trapped in the industrial machine of modern capitalism. Yet metaphors can also be limiting. They can oversimplify our understandings of phenomena, constraining as much as enhancing the intelligibility of the world. Hence, as Peter Baehr notes, the ‘iron cage’ metaphor is problematic for a number of reasons, not least because Weber, who understood the difference between iron and steel, was trying to convey something more than the way agents were imprisoned by modernity. He was also attempting to capture how ‘modern capitalism created a new kind of being’ (Baehr, 2001: 153). Hence, for Baehr, it makes better sense to translate Weber’s metaphor more literally as a ‘shell as hard as steel’, signifying the potentially hard, flexible and sustaining qualities of steel and shells.

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Bull’s metaphor of the ‘privatized auditory bubble’ (2005: 344) must, equally, be subject to critical scrutiny. For while the bubble might (at a stretch) be interpreted as something permeable and nurturing, it more obviously stands for the locked-in character of people’s experiential worlds. Despite Bull’s operationalization of the metaphor within a dialectical model, there is a danger that it too readily connotes sequestration and bounded perception, mirroring its popular usage as a container for action and barrier to the outside world. When we speak of someone living in their own bubble, it is normally to suggest that they are cut off from reality, after all. To an extent, then, this chapter is a call to replace metaphors which imply hermetic containment with something more porous and dynamic when attempting to understand how urban social relations are mediated by mobile audio technologies: less thinking outside the box than against the very idea of the box, we might say. Users should certainly not be characterized, simply and universally, as sealed off against the world as a result of these technologies. To do so is to adhere to a very hard distinction between inner and outer, offline and online, private and public, engaged and disengaged, digital and analogue (Oldenburg, 2000). We should not forget that musical and technological mediations imply a bundle of complex actions, practices and agents that act together multi-directionally (Born, 2005); that users move through the social in active and dynamic ways, tuning in and out to use Beer’s (2007) phrase; and that how they do this is dependent on more than the co-optations of a monolithic culture industry (powerful as these forces are), but also bound up with people’s located and situated actions, identities and life trajectories. Users do not, it has been suggested, comprise a homogeneous group; they are plural, variably operating strategies within the affording constraints of the device itself and in complex webs of power. For these reasons, there is much to be said for starting with and observing how people mobilize and reflexively account for these devices in their everyday lives, in order to build up a broader picture of the interrelations between audio technologies, sound and urbanism, rather than starting with an imperfect metaphor and working down. In doing so we are likely to find mobile audio devices (digital as well as analogue) whose meanings are far from synonymous with a single condition, but which are dynamically and skilfully folded into multiple patterns of practice by diverse users: to withdraw from the urban, for sure, but also to enhance their social spheres, to reflect on their predicaments, to resist severance from the social. If, as Oudshoorn and Pinch argue, we need to know ‘whatever users do with technology’ (2003: 1), then we need to accept that while there may be

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a prescribed use for a technology, one that confirms the intentions of the designers or manufacturers, this is rarely reflected in a single or uniform deployment. This is because users themselves are variable, diverse and active. Not only do they ‘come in many different shapes and sizes’ (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003: 6), but they also cultivate diverse strategies to manage their environments. In some respects, they are cultural experts whose appropriations are novel and interesting for how they interfere with and modulate the affording properties of technological objects (Bloomfield et al., 2010). This is why, for Grint and Woolgar, a technological device is ‘an unstable and indeterminate artefact whose precise significance is negotiated and interpreted but never settled’ (Grint and Woolgar, 1997: 21). Moving beyond deterministic or essentialist readings of technology requires us to study how technologies are used in vivo and in situ. It is to take seriously the existence of different socio-economic, national, age and embodied differences, but also to register the creative agency of users and their often bumpy lifeworlds and trajectories. If we fail to sensitize to these issues, then we get a version of technology bereft of the everyday dissonances, disagreements and contingencies of practice and an urban subject who is emptied out of agency and the complexities of being engaged with technology. In showing how mobile audio devices circulate through varied and reflexive practices, it is hoped that this chapter has contributed a richer, additional dimension to the understanding of digital devices in action. As Beer notes, it is important that we conceive of new concepts and empirical agendas for a ‘subtle rethinking of how we might imagine and conduct further research into mobile listening’ (2007: 857). For, in the flow of everyday life, it is clear that these devices get ‘into action’ (DeNora, 2000), intimately folding into the lifeworlds of users, with implications for ontological ideas of action, technology, and so on (Latour, 2005). To assume that modern technologies like the smartphone negate or undermine urban relations is, after all, to assume that unmediated, face-to-face communication is the benchmark of all communicative activity (Sterne, 2003a). Treating communication in this way not only disavows the already existing mediators that traffic between humans (from clothes, jewellery and furniture to air-conditioning, buildings and ambient sound), but also short-circuits the analysis before it begins. We still need to know more about the social circumstances underlying people’s engagements and disengagements with mobile digital technologies: how and when they use these technologies, the rhythms of device-mediated spaces and temporalities, and how and under what circumstances particular tendencies of the device are made apparent in

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particular settings (Bloomfield et  al., 2010). We also need much more empirical research detailing the variety of reasons people negotiate, resist and reject mobile digital devices. But we will not get very far if we continue to adhere to essentialist, deterministic and undifferentiated readings of practices, not least because these very practices are always embedded in the lives of situated actors activating and interpreting their possibilities of use.

NOTES 1

2

3

4

It is worth noting that Weber fully recognized the equivocal and double-edged nature of modernity. Just as exact calculability and predictability were integral to the new modern social environment – in effect, reducing individuals to cogs in a machine – so formal rationalization dramatically enhanced individual freedom by helping individuals come to terms with and navigate the complex organization of institutions in order to realize their own ends. This is a theme taken up by Simmel in his characterization of the modern city as both curtailing and freeing individual conduct. Again, in Japan, commentators have been quick to make links between technology-obsessed young people (including the notorious otaku, male fans of anime and manga, and so-called ‘stay at home’ men) and the dissolution of close-knit relations and networks, leading to a shrinking population and an unsustainably ageing demographic profile. Indeed, according to Jenkins et al. (2013) the way audiences function on digital media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook follows principles of gifting, where the moral economy of reciprocity is engendered in the everyday mechanisms of swapping and forwarding links, files and other content. As Bickerton notes: ‘Google, which accounts for 25 per cent of North American consumer internet traffic, has swallowed up a hundred firms since 2010. With over a billion users, Facebook has enrolled more than a seventh of the world’s population. A third of global internet users access the Amazon cloud on a daily basis’ (2015: 148).

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VOX POP: EXPLORING ELECTRONIC AND DIGITAL VOCALITIES

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We’ll always be together, however far it seems. We’ll always be together, together in electric dreams. (‘Together in Electric Dreams’, Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder, 1985)

’

INTRODUCTION Where does the voice go in music’s modern era? How is it composed, decomposed, constructed, reconstructed and made apparent? What are its signs and dislocations, its logics and movements? Where are its grounds and ideologies located? What are the expectations and reasons for its presence as a particular kind of expression and information? In exploring how we might set out to answer these questions, this chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, it argues that the birth of modern popular music is also the birth of a permanent coalescence of the voice and technology. For the voice does not sing alone, it is always accompanied by, is implanted in and mediated by a cluster of artefacts. Paradoxically, just as it attains the status of a unique expressive carrier and index of untrammelled emotion and personhood, so it is accompanied by a whole plethora of machinery that reveals that carrier to be radically hybridized. The second part takes the form of five exploratory scenes assigned to five vocal modalities. It aims to show how the complex entanglements of human and non-human entities are not only radicalized in the digital period, but also played with, ironized and turned into innovative aesthetic forms that unsettle the foundations on which the voice sounds out. Here, the voice becomes a pliable object of information, enmeshed in machinic vocalizations and subject to the microscopic transformations of digital technologies. In short, the voice becomes pure data.

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The five modalities present as follows. Firstly, the voice is subject to the leaky boundaries between organic and inorganic, and here the microphone and vocoder are important devices in the pre-digital era. Secondly, the voice is subject to processes of infinitesimal analysis, deconstruction and dislocation in the spaces of software and digital samplers. Thirdly, a post-naturalistic space opens up new stylistic tropes and treatments apparent in the exaggerated use of Auto-Tune and other digital manipulations. Fourthly, the voice is subject to logics of simulation where, with the rise of voice synthesis and virtual pop icons like Hatsune Miku, the voice of the star is performed without any need for the flesh at all. Finally, the human voice returns as a simulation of the perceived authenticity not of humanity but of the digital machine. In other words, with phenomena like beatboxing, the voice becomes a simulation of a simulation. Although indicative categories rather than historical phases, these five modalities show how the voice strays from its anchors in permanence and immanence. Processed, chopped and simulated, Barthes’ (1977) infamous characterization of the grain of the voice becomes a ‘grainlet’, its presence under constant decomposition and reconstruction. In other words, just as the voice progressively loses its connotations of essence in the modern world, so it becomes an object of digital transactions, switches and duets. And yet, in this process of objectification, where pop hints at a new kind of transparency about its very artifice, the index of the human is never fully displaced. Despite being seduced by machinic vocalities, we can never, it seems, quite let go of the fleshy.

THE RESONANCE OF THE VOICE Every now and then, pop’s vocalities are implicated in acts of treachery that put moralizing TV presenters into overdrive. Popularly known as ‘Milli Vanilli’ moments (after the German pop act who spectacularly fell from grace when it was revealed that the duo did not sing on their records), these are vocal misdemeanours: moments when singers are caught out, exposed and publicly humiliated.1 Various phenomena are implied here, from the forgetting of words and microphone feedback to singing out of tune and the unexpected cracking of a soprano’s voice. The most scandal-inducing, however, is lip-syncing. Here, vocalists are revealed not to be singing at all, but relying on all sorts of behind-the-scenes supports and substitutes. Examples abound. In 2007, the singers of Scooch, the British Eurovision Song Contest entry, were exposed as relying on two vocalists (known as ‘ghost singers’) hidden backstage to hit the high notes during a performance of their song ‘Flying the Flag (For You)’. They were subsequently accused of

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conning the public and of miming their whole act. The American singer Ashley Simpson was similarly castigated as a fake when her backing track malfunctioned in a performance on Saturday Night Live in 2004, leaving her apparently still singing even though her lips were no longer moving. During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, a young Chinese girl, Lin Miaoke, was widely publicized as miming her rendition of Ode to the Motherland to a different girl’s voice. Meanwhile, the decision to allow Beyoncé to mime The Star Spangled Banner at Barack Obama’s second inaugural address in 2013 prompted a flurry of criticism and something of a national debate on the ethics of entertainment. Such examples show the special and contradictory place of the voice in the discourses of popular music. All mass-mediated forms work by dint of the careful orchestration of immediacy and presence. We only have to think of the way news readers and politicians routinely deploy autocues or how TV interviewers are primed with questions through their earpieces. Read in this light, miming and lip-syncing are just standard practices of the entertainment world inherent in the socio-technical construction of events staged as ‘live’. Doubling the voice so it sounds thicker, the use of support singers and singing over a guide vocal are all well-established technical conventions. And yet vocal-based slips are also conveyed as signs of various lamentable conditions, such as an over-reliance on falsifying technologies or lack of talent among the stars of contemporary pop. Even in forms that are already part of a manufactured star system, such as the TV programme X-Factor, having pre-recorded vocals is anathema and commentators are regularly incensed when performers are outed as ‘faking it’. In 2015, the Musicians’ Union in the UK even rolled out a campaign called the ‘honesty code’ which attacked the use of pre-recorded and digitized music devices as a ‘substitute for talent’ and argued for greater honesty in informing audiences exactly when playback and miming technologies were being used. So why the indignation? One reason relates to constructed categories of liveness and authenticity. For not only do we expect performers to be reaching into somewhere genuine in expressing their emotions – ‘dig deep into your existence’, advises the singer Ilia Darlin (cited in Computer Music Special, 46, 2011: 9) – but we gauge talent according to a transparent performance of technique. At the very least, musical credibility rests on being able to decipher a relationship between the presence of the performer and the presence of sound. And yet the voice is singled out, here, for few controversies are provoked in relation to other instruments of musical expression such as the guitar, synthesizer or drums. Weeping guitars notwithstanding, few people expect these instruments to personify or embody truth (Penman, 2002). The voice is different. It is the locale of something

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more sonorous, delicate and controversial. In popular music, the voice is central both on stage and in the stereo mix. It is where meaning emanates, where the song resides and where a band’s identity usually comes to be located. In short, the voice is a special case. But this still begs more fundamental questions about the status of the voice in modern culture. Why does the voice ‘poke out’, as it were? Why does it provoke such deep sentiments? For some, the voice has unique connections to biological processes. For instance, the voice of the mother is the first thing the foetus hears and gives it a kind of primal resonance (although, presumably, so is the mother’s heartbeat – so why, we might ask, are drums any less resonant?). Others note how the voice is the essential means of human communication and central to basic evolutionary processes of language (Tolbert, 2001). To ‘have a voice’ is, after all, to be assigned a recognizable position in a system of human communication. It is the sine qua non of communicative action. Derrida offers a supplement. Speech is loaded with special qualities in the Western tradition. It is governed by a metaphysics of presence, what he calls ‘logocentrism’, that marks the voice as closer to truth because of its proximity to thought. By a logic of natural resemblance, in other words, the voice is ‘closest to the signified’ – that is, the mind – whereas writing is part of a technical or representative apparatus and is mediated: This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning. (Derrida, 1997: 11–12)

In music, this translates into a privileging of the voice as the bearer of meaning, emotion and truth. It is assumed that the voice turns sound into a song. It captures something essential of the personhood of the speaker. It bears witness to and discloses the singer’s self. We listen to Nick Cave, Anthony Hegarty, Adele or Al Green and we believe that their voices offer a selfpresence. As the most ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ instrument, the voice is heard as the condition of the very idea of truth. Perhaps it even interpellates us qua humans in the Althusserian sense of ‘calling forth’ (Althusser, 1970). Like many others, I find it difficult to concentrate on work if the music playing in the background contains vocals. It’s as if I’m being hailed away from work and into the song. There is a kind of hermeneutic density to the voice that works by calling us forth. It indexes a certain truth of character, a marker of the ‘truly human’. Beyond Derrida’s deconstructionism, the best known attempt to grapple with the cultural resonance of the voice is Roland Barthes’ well-known essay

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‘The Grain of the Voice’ (Barthes, 1977).2 He argues that if we are to use language to explain music at all (language is, after all, an imperfect but inevitable vector), then we need to be sensitive to the particularities of our object, to meet it on its own terms. This is how he arrives at the term ‘grain’ to describe the voice, or at least certain voices. He opposes the technically perfect, but banal voice of the Lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to the corporeal and sonorous voice of the Swiss operatic baritone Charles Panzéra. The former is respected, but cold, the other seduces him. Indeed Panzéra’s voice leaves him with a sense of jouissance precisely because it expresses the form and physicality of the voice’s originator – the body. The voice is at its best, for Barthes, when it is a physical expression of the membranes, the muscles and mucous of the body, when it is a performance of the flesh. This means that it does not necessarily have to be intelligible (the words are not all that important) but it should enthral through its corporeality and the resultant friction between the language and its expressive vehicle. Within this grain we identify with the physicality of the singer, the relation of our body to theirs. That the voice communicates through an act of fantasy and identification is why Barthes’ essay has become a common reference point for scholars trying to explain the power and appeal of certain voices. For if the voice works by infusing memory with sentiment, then it provides a direct resource and channel for audiences to wrest into their own lives. Hence, the popular appeal of a range of ‘imperfect’ voices – from Billy Holiday and Tom Waits to Kurt Cobain and Mark E. Smith – is attributable to both their distinctive grains and the way they ambush us with emotive associations. According to Markowitz, the appeal of Sinatra’s voice is that it collapses the distance between both his voice and an emotional referent and between the singer and his audience. Hence Sinatra’s: rare genius is simply this: he embodied the grain of his voice, and it embodied him. His voice did not express or reflect his life, personality and the world; it was the world around him, and when embodied, when the sound waves travelled from his scarred throat to the ear of a listener who lived that world, it was the truest life of the listener. In the presence of the grain of his voice, the temporal and spatial distance between producer and listener does not exist. (Markowitz, 1998)

Frith (1996), similarly, assigns the unique appeal of Elvis Presley’s voice not to what he ‘stood for’ as a socially and politically located actor, but to the sensuous and plenteous character of his voice – a voice that is the physicality of his being. This is why Barthes riles against proper vocal training, which he suggests takes away the grain, leaving the voice too perfect, too pure, sounding ‘almost electronic’ he says (1977: 184).

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ELECTRONIC MEDIATIONS Barthes’ allusion to a mechanical other is crucial. For here’s the thing. In the beginning may have been the word, but as far as popular music is concerned that word was far from pure. There is something curiously one-sided about Barthes’ essay, for it assumes that the voice speaks on its own terms; that it operates in a space of unalloyed presence, solitary and unswerving; and that when we register the grain, we are hearing it unmediated. This is one of the great illusions of realism inherent in much anthropocentric and technical scholarship on the voice. For Pfleiderer for instance, the sound of the musical voice must be divided into two features of phonation, ‘the typical shape of the oscillations of the vocal folds, and peculiarities due to articulation according to specific resonances of the vocal tract’ (2010: 4). If mediation figures at all in such work, it is as a distinct, separate and back-ended volley of machines that shape the sound of the pure object. Indeed, in two authoritative collections on the voice (Clayton, 2008; Potter, 1998), technology barely figures at all. And yet, as the next section will argue, pop’s vocals are always less separable than this – they are always already made present and intelligible through complex webs and circuits.3 Of Edison’s ten potential applications for his phonograph written in 1878, eight of them are voice-centred: the dictation of letters, the teaching of elocution, a registry of reminiscences and the last words of the dying, a ‘speaking clock’, the preservation of languages, a record of the explanations of teachers and the recording of telephone conversations. Indeed, for much of the early part of the twentieth century, the phonograph was commonly referred to as the ‘talking machine’. Later, Edison would recount that the first words he uttered into the device were the nursery rhyme ‘Mary had a little lamb’ (Morton, 2004), which, having been etched onto wax paper, echoed back to him, feint and ghostly (Chanan, 1995). Thirty-eight years later a Diamond Disc Phonograph convinced a gathering of several hundred people in Montclair, New Jersey, that a recording of the voice was as good as the real thing. In a reversal of the withering assessments of modern-day lip-syncing, Edison’s audiences were wowed when vocalists who appeared to be singing were in fact revealed to be miming to a pre-recorded version of themselves (Milner, 2009). The point is that at the birth of modern recording there is the voice and the efforts to preserve, record and treasure it (even to experiment with vocal ‘tricks’) are the grounds for a new ontology: not human versus machine, not even human and machine, but the conjunctive form of human–machine. What recording or ‘phonography’ does is enact a double rupture. Firstly, it presides over a dislocation of the voice from the body, disconnecting it from

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the very corporeal registers so seductive to Barthes. It no longer resides in the diaphragm, the lungs, the throat and mouth, but in the media of recorded objects and distributed circuits. Secondly, it oversees a dispersal of the voice into the ether, separating the voice from its localized and geographically bounded location, sending it into multitudinous spaces: from teenage bedrooms and cars to night clubs and milk bars. This act of separation, what Schafer (1969) calls ‘schizophonia’, has multiple effects. For Eisenberg (2005), it turns music into a ‘thing’, an object of pleasure, consumption and production central to the functioning of the music industry itself. For Théberge (2003b), on the other hand, the separation of sound from its source comprises an act of decontextualization that leaves it open to processes of cultural appropriation. This leads to significant ethnic and political ramifications, as discussed later in the chapter. In establishing a distance between singer and audience, schizophonia is also the condition for the modern apparatus of fame. For celebrity rests on a real and imagined gap between referent and sign, or icon and reality, in which fantasy proliferates (Rojek, 2001). For Sterne, meanwhile, just as the voice is ‘embalmed’ in sound recording, so it attains a new cultural status, power and resonance (2003a: 298). Early vocal celebrities reportedly felt nervous at the prospect that their voices were to become indelibly etched in time and thereby accessible to listeners who had not yet been born. As well as diminishing the ephemerality of the voice, mechanical reproduction had poured into it a set of anxieties around mortality.

MICROPHONE TALES Have you ever approached a microphone on stage? If you have, you might recognize that something happens. Your posture and comportment shift in readiness. Your body changes shape: it starts to turn outwards prepared for a public disclosure and performance. You start to feel a kind of raw exposure, tinged perhaps with either dread or enthrallment (if you’re lucky the latter). In an instant, it feels as if you’ve become the pure object of countless eyes and countless judgements. The microphone amplifies not just the voice but the delicate state of being human. It is technology’s ability to make us overtly present. After Bell Telephone Laboratories developed the condenser microphone in the 1920s, it became widely used in radio and disk recording (Morton, 2004). The vocal form most suited to these early developments was crooning, a style of singing dependent on creating a deep, smooth and undulating tone that responded to the limitations of early recording by ‘sliding up’ to

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the song’s notes rather than hitting them directly (Chanan, 1995). A by-product of techniques like close-miking was that singers like Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallée and Gene Austin appeared to be expressing their private loves and lives to listeners, caressing their ears with intimate thoughts and emotions. The construction of a mediated intimacy between singer and listener was, therefore, founded on the microphone’s paradoxical ability to reduce the perceived gap between addressor and addressee at the same time as the act of recording separated them. Like the close-up shot in film, the outcome was a new relationship to the star as knowable and desirable. What is interesting here is the way that singers adapted their techniques to the microphone itself. Crooners like Sinatra did not just sing into the microphone but for the microphone (Penman, 2002). They projected their voices into a broadcast world by bending their bodies and their techniques towards the microphone. They moved in and out of the device’s range to vary tone and amplitude, to produce fade-ins and fade-outs. Plosives (the compressed air caused by enunciating ‘bs’ and ‘ps’) had to be managed, distortion policed, clarity sought. Rather than belting out a song for public effect as opera and vaudeville singers had done, crooners delicately managed the vocal space as a space of one-to-one disclosure and filled it with acts of sensuous enunciation. What crooners learnt from their interchange with the microphone, in other words, was not just a different way of performing songs, but also a different way of singing, especially to young women (Taylor, 2005). Microphones were treated as instruments and they were played as such. In short, just as recording did not preserve a pre-existing sonic event but brought it into being, so the microphone did not just capture sound, but constituted it. Here, the decisions of emergent specialists such as sound engineers were equally formative to how the voice sounded and how audiences listened (Kealy, 1990). As agents of technical and aesthetic change, sound engineers were at the centre of important judgements in both the studio and live context, including deciding which microphones were suited to particular singers (some microphones being better at accentuating lower frequencies for thinner voices, for instance). Nowadays, all vocals are subject to multiple treatments by sound engineers. Conventionally, they will be put through a pre-amp, and compression will be added to smooth out peaks and troughs in volume, equalization will be tweaked, and reverb or delay added to give the impression that the singer is in a particular space like a bathroom or cathedral.4 And this is even before we mention vocal production techniques like double-tracking (duplicating a vocal line to make it sound bigger), ‘comping’ (selecting the best ‘takes’ of a vocal performance and compiling them into a single track) and the various studio effects associated with digital technologies covered in the next section.

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Here is a description of a fairly ordinary studio treatment of a vocal from a book on recording techniques. The vocal belongs to Jonathan Davies from the rock group Korn: The main thing is to know the singer’s voice … Learn what it sounds like and what makes it different. Some points to consider: What is the voice’s frequency range? Where are the harmonics grating? Where are the spots in the voice that may need a little help? Where are the things that add the harmonic content that make the voice distinctive? Look for ways to enhance areas that have unique harmonic content. Boost the frequency bands where the voice might not be as strong, and smooth out the areas where it may get a little harsh. Also, know what each microphone sounds like so it can enhance the voice; experiment with each and find out. Mix and match in your mind: Say, ‘Well, with this voice a Neumann U47 would be a good start.’ Then build from there. (Perry, 2004: 167)

When one lingers on this advice, one is forced to question anthropocentric assumptions about vocality. There is a voice, yes, with its character, its cadences, its tone and its grain. This is partly what attracts us to particular singers. But it is far from unfettered, direct or primal. It is made possible by all these other agents. This does not mean it is somehow ‘false’, ‘fake’ or ‘inauthentic’, merely that it is wholly mediated. It never speaks for itself but is supported by and resides in a socio-technical relationship. It follows that the assumed ‘truth’ of the voice is neither fixed nor immanent. For as Penman notes, ‘the voice is always now … Each song becomes a history of the making of song’ (2002: 27). Is it, then, unnecessarily promiscuous to counter the grain of the voice with the warmth of the circuit, the flush of the tube or the crunchiness of the transistor? Is it callow to insist on the grain of the microphone? Or to apply aesthetic descriptors to signal chains? Is this not, after all, what sound engineers and lovers of analogue filters, valves and circuitry do? It would certainly be problematic to neglect the existence of great and distinctive singers. It is just that we are never solely listening to their great voices. We are also listening to well-designed microphones and elaborate signal chains, high-end compressors, expensive mixing desks and reverb units. These are the unsung heroes in the ongoing pact between human and non-human actors. They are what Latour (1992) calls the ‘missing masses’ of society – the mundane, artificial and often despised non-humans that hold us together. Or at least missing until recently. For in a context where digital and electronic technologies are becoming increasingly obvious, a key question arises: are these technologies moving into plain sight? If so, what does this mean for the location of the voice in contemporary music, for how we listen to it and for the grounds on which it communicates?

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LEARNING TO BE A ROBOT: THE VOCODER As post-structuralists are fond of telling us, there is a transgressive thrill to be had in playing with the boundaries between human and non-human, between the comforts of the flesh and the exoticism of the machine (Hayles, 1999; Haraway, 1991). When I first started buying music, two albums were on heavy rotation, albums that I closely associate with the frisson of hearing the voice lose its earthly moorings. The first, with its florid sci-fi cover and rock–classical instrumentation, was ELO’s album Out of the Blue. In singing over the top of the standout single ‘Mister Blue Sky’ I genuinely believed that if I affected my voice to sound a little bit robotic I’d closely approximate the sound of the mechanized refrain. In joining in, I’d imagined myself a musical cyborg. The second album was Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine (the conjunctive form being all important). I claim no special musical judgement in listening to one of electronic music’s most celebrated albums at 9 years of age. If truth be told, I was probably just interested in the futurist aesthetics of the record sleeve and the promise of more robots. I wasn’t to be disappointed. For, this time, I could actually sing ‘we are the robots’ and imagine I was part of an army of furtive automatons come to wreak havoc on the world. Indeed, as I write this I’m listening to the album again and feel exactly the same.5 The difference is I now recognize these voices as subject to some of the most distinctive treatments of the vocoder in pop, an invention that was to begin a long history of the technological manipulation of the voice and its recalibration as information. The early life of the vocoder (short for ‘voice encoder’) was bound to the military–industrial complex because its ability to encode and analyse speech made it ideal for bandwidth-saving commercial applications and the secure transmission of information. Famously, it was used by Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War to communicate encrypted vocal gobbets. At one end, the bulky set of cabinets, capacitors and vacuum tubes would be used to record and encode the voice, and at the other end it would be decoded and resynthesized. Both Nixon and Reagan had vocoders, the former in his limo, the latter on his aeroplane, and Churchill’s was located in an underground bunker in London. In one version of the device, vocodered conversations had to be synced via two turntables, a transmitter and a receiver, in 12-minute spans that sampled and randomized the voice every 20 milliseconds (Tompkins, 2010). Later it became a less bulky solid-state box of dials and knobs attached to telephone receivers, and later still the more recognizable musical instrument we associate with its modern-day use.

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The most important and unique aspect of the vocoder was what it did to the material properties of speech.6 By dividing the voice into frequency bands, scrambling it and then synthesizing it, speech was turned into a mobile packet of information that could be decomposed, transmitted and reconstituted. Even before it had entered the domain of popular culture, in other words, the vocoder had sutured to the body. It extracted, fractured and reassembled human vocalities by encoding its harmonic content and transforming it into the language of the machine. In this moment, the voice’s presence as it materialized through the lungs, the glottis and the vocal chords was deconstructed and reconstructed. The resultant ‘robotic’ voice was arresting to listeners precisely because it appeared to be shrouded in a not-quite-human presence. By the time musicians and sound engineers began experimenting with the vocoder in the late 1970s, it had undergone some changes: compact and in some cases attached to a keyboard, the device was playable in much the same way as a synthesizer. Sun Ra, Afrika Bambaataa, the Jonzun Crew and numerous electro-funk bands of the early 1980s used one. So did composers at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, whose EMS 5000 vocoder produced many of the spaced-out sounds of the TV programme Dr Who. There was clear novelty and entertainment value in making people sound like robots. Incarnations of the vocoder were regularly showcased at world fairs and added an other-worldliness to Hollywood B-movies. Precisely because the vocoder produced what were imagined to be dehumanized sounds, however, it also allowed musicians to express the predicament of being alienated, altered or ‘othered’. In other words, cyborg sonorities could be heard as the mechanical embodiment of a subject negotiating its place in a system of stratified power relations. You treat us like non-humans, then we will sound like post-humans. On Cybotron’s classic album Enter, for instance (for many, the first Detroit techno record of all time), the black electro musician Rik Davies uses a Korg vocoder to help deal with post-traumatic stress after being enlisted to fight in Vietnam (Tompkins, 2010). The track ‘El Salvador’, in particular, synthetically approximates the sounds of helicopters and gunfire while a whispered vocodered refrain, ‘I don’t want to kill you but I have to’, haunts the song. The more recent use of the vocoder and other voice-altering technologies amongst R&B musicians such as Missy Elliott, Destiny’s Child, the Neptunes, Mary J. Blige and Timbaland can equally be read as realigning the ‘soul’ of the black singer with the more regimented structures of the machine. Indeed, what better way to engage with the constructed authenticity of black popular music than playing at the borders of its naturalization?

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Here, it is hard to disagree with Eshun’s and Weheliye’s assessment of the role of the vocoder in modulating the grounds on which black voices sing. For if the Enlightenment concept of human is already centred around an exclusionary white subjectivity, then the transition from human to posthuman has different connotations when black cultural practices are considered. Dehumanization was already the modus operandi of slavery, after all. Those strands of radical black posthumanism known as Afrofuturism are therefore read by Eshun as refusals to accept the grounds of Western humanism. By embracing hybridizing technologies such as the vocoder, these black popular musicians perform the virtual and hybridized nature of post-colonial subjectivities and recording practices. They heighten and make apparent the technological mediation of the recorded voice itself. The result, says Weheliye, is ‘a composite identity, a machine suspended between performer and producer that sounds the smooth flow between humans and machines’ (2002: 31).7 And yet, for all its dehumanizing tendencies, the vocoder still clings to a version of being human. This is because its mode of operation is synthesis. Eshun puts it thus: The vocoder turns the voice into a synthesizer. Electro crosses the threshold of synthetic vocalization, breaks out into the new spectrum of vocal synthesis. It synthesizes the voice into voltage, into an electrophonic charge that gets directly on your nerves. (1998: 80)

We may search in vain for Barthes’ grain of the voice, but it is not like the human disappears. Instead, it is combined with a smooth space of flattened sonic frequencies and machinic imaginaries. Its register is meshed with machines to produce a third entity – a cyborg voice (a synthesis, after all, of the ‘cybernetic’ and ‘organic’) that breaches certain expectations about where the human is or can be. As Frith writes: ‘it is in real, material, singing voices that the “real” person is to be heard … as listeners we assume that we can hear someone’s life in their voice … we hear singers as personally expressive’ (1996: 185–186). The container and inscriber of this expressiveness is, as Barthes suggested, the physical body as it represents the locus of personhood. When that body is perceived to be less than human (altered bodies, subjugated bodies, Daleks, Darth Vader, Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey), the detachment of the voice from the flesh is felt as a rupture, and in that gap pleasures, anxieties and confusions can proliferate. For we are never quite sure where the body is, how human it is or whence it speaks. It is no wonder that two of the most resonant vocoder tracks in the history of pop are Daft Punk’s ‘Human After All’ and Herbie Hancock’s ‘I Thought it was You’.8

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SAMPLING: DISLOCATING AND DECONSTRUCTING THE VOICE While the vocoder sampled the voice by dissecting it into frequency bands (the more bands, the more intelligible it was), it did not allow much flexibility when it came to altering the properties of the vocal material itself. Alternative forms of manipulation were attempted with analogue tape and a pair of scissors: the vocal cut-ups of Steve Reich, John Cage and William Burroughs are notable examples from the 1960s. But, for the most part, the impact of musique concrète remained limited to the domains of ‘serious art’ and avant-garde interventionism. A part exception is Brian Eno and David Byrne’s album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which used the ‘found vocals’ of a range of materials from radio phone-ins, ethnographic field recordings, Arabic pop and gospel recordings. But even here Byrne (2012: 154) recounts the various problems that synching two tape machines and aligning the voices to pre-recorded music posed. The sampler opened up sound to a different level of intensity, popular currency and manipulation. And, here, the voice is sent on another journey, this time into the looping, deconstructive spaces of the digital. At its most basic, digital sampling is the conversion of continuous information (sound) into a numerical representation (discrete data) by sampling the information at regular intervals. The frequency at which the sample is extracted is known as its sample rate, a common frequency being 44.1 kHz, which is 44,100 cycles per second. Once converted, the number of these digits allocated to store the sample determines its fidelity. The lower the bit rate, the less information the sample contains and therefore the more lo-fi it sounds, and vice versa. Most samplers today sample at a bit rate of at least 16 bits, although the sounds of 8-bit samples are still attractive to techno-nostalgic computer musicians, as argued in Chapter 6. As a musical practice, sampling involves the selection, recording and manipulation of these discrete units of sound and their recontextualization into new sonic ensembles. Closely associated with the recombinant aesthetics of hip hop, the practice is dependent on the creative ransacking of the history of sound. In some respects, Edison’s wax cylinder and the magnetic tape recorder can be considered the first samplers, but it is the convergence of computer technology and audio that underpins the advent of digital sampling as a widespread practice among musicians. In the form of the Fairlight CMI (generally seen as the first device of its kind and used in the early 1980s by musicians such as Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock), the sampler comprised a monitor, keyboard and light-pen interface run by a computer processor. Later, with the advent of the E-Mu

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Emulator I, Kurzweil K250 and Akai S900, the sampler’s form factor shrank to a keyboard or rectangular hardware unit with an interface, a series of buttons and MIDI capabilities. Nowadays, one is just as likely to find it in the form of a software plug-in, with a GUI nested inside a DAW. So, where does the voice go and what happens to it when it is sampled? How are its auspices disturbed, its functions altered and its status transformed? Well, as the following argues, sampling disrupts, extends and transforms the voice in two main ways. By dislocating it and by deconstructing it.

Digital Dislocation Firstly, the sampler amasses, disembodies and decontextualizes the voice in much the same way as the phonograph and gramophone did. Decades or continents may separate the original vocal event from its subsequent life in sampled music, but because any voice is potentially a sample – that is, any voice can find itself sucked into the binary manipulations of the machine to become ‘now’ – all the world is a voice for the sampling musician. This sonic promiscuity gives the sampler meta-characteristics: it is an instrument that is able potentially to extract and replicate all other voices regardless of the quality of the original source material. James Brown shouts, classical arias, lines from Kung Fu films, street talk and political speeches become bits of floating vocalized fragments (Middleton, 2006). Sometimes these fragments are selected and presented as little acts of homage to or quotation from the original. Other times they are selected merely because they fit with the tonal qualities of the song itself. But the effect is always the same: stripping the vocal of its bodily, regional, political and social context and transmuting into a new frame of reference (Reynolds, 1998: 366). Beyond the complex and multifarious copyright issues that this raises (Hesmondhalgh, 2006), decontextualization pulls vocal sampling practices in two directions. Firstly, it helps to articulate social positions, sound out political histories and give shape to cultural identities. In the hands of Afrodiasporic musicians, for instance, the sampler becomes one way to archive and rejuvenate a whole corpus of black music history that might otherwise have been forgotten by a new generation of musicians. Here, the sampler is the socio-technical condition for the selective maintenance of musical memory and its incorporation into the ongoing constructions of history. As the Stetsasonic rap in the song ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz’ puts it: Tell the truth, James Brown was old, ’Til Eric and Rak came out with ‘I Got Soul’. Rap brings back old R&B. And if we would not, people could have forgot. (Cited in Brewster and Broughton, 2006: 267)

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By extension, the sampler stands as a potential agent for the expression of subjugated voices and a weapon of refusal for marginalized social groups. Indeed, much writing on sampling practices emphasizes its ‘resistant’ qualities in the hands of groups like Public Enemy and the Wu Tang Clan. Here, the sampler is mobilized to layer songs with short political, cultural and religious statements derived from African-American and Asian history (Walser, 2008). For Rose (1994), for instance, while sampling continues the production practices of Caribbean, dub and reggae techniques of ‘versioning’ and ‘quoting’, in the hands of hip-hop musicians it helps (like rapping) to bring together, repeat and give a voice to the identities of urban black populations. For others, the sampler has a place at the heart of feminist and anarchist musical strategies that appropriate, in a kind of situationist détournement (termed ‘plunderphonics’ by John Oswald), the voices of political and sonic authority to deliver alternative messages (Oswald, 1985; Cutler, 1995). For Rodgers, for instance, the strategic placement of voices sampled from a feminist march in Le Tigre’s ‘Dyke March’ of 2001 is read as a feminist statement of ‘multivocality’ (Rodgers, 2003: 317). For Sanjek, on the other hand, sampling techniques are a disruptive ‘tactic’ (2003: 365) used, albeit with ambiguous results by the American group Negativland. Here, an assault on the consumer spectacle of late capitalism is attempted through acts of sonic appropriation. Hence, on the track ‘U2’, outtakes from a radio broadcast are satirically played over the Irish band’s single ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’. In all these cases, the sampler is said to position the voice as a battleground on which identity politics and subversion might take place. But, secondly, we have to be wary of conveying sampling as an inherently oppositional practice (Harkins, 2016). For vocal displacement strips the speech act from its origins, including all the complex social dynamics that gave it meaning in the first place. This raises important issues around the ethics of cultural appropriation, where a sampled voice’s complex historicity is potentially flattened, all the cultural mess thinned out and much of the linguistic indexicality erased. Nowadays, some of the most commercially successful sample CDs are those with names like Exotic Voices From Africa, Voices from the East and Ethnic Voices. These are driven by a largely Western indulgence for a certain form of exoticism, often Orientalist in nature, that disconnects the ‘other’ from its own signification (Sweeney-Turner, 1998). The result is troubling. For while many sampling musicians have become more conscious of the need to attribute vocal samples to their original sources (in liner notes, for instance), there is a kind of symbolic

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violence present in the dissection of the ‘other’s’ voice by Western musicians – a violence that is not, moreover, ameliorated by the postmodern claim that there is no one more or less ‘authentic’ vocal referent. In other words, vocal sampling takes place in a culturally and politically charged web of relations that mark certain voices as desirable precisely because they connote a ‘primitive’ soundscape. Vocal schizophonia therefore mediates what Théberge calls a ‘basic asymmetry … between the makers and those who are the objects of the sampling enterprise’ (2003b: 103). All of which maps onto an ethics of cultural globalization where the digitalized voice is disseminated into an ‘infoscape’ (Taylor, 2001: 135) that is itself cross-cut with discourses that position certain cultures (and voices) as central and others as peripheral, but exotic.

Digital Deconstruction Although the sampler dislocates the voice from its referent, once it is digitalized, it also places the voice in a space of multiple manipulations and this heightens the voice’s status as a disembodied, informational entity. Filtered, chopped, stuttered, looped, repeated, mashed, reversed, pitched up, pitched down, degraded, resampled, sliced, quantized, warped, garbled, glitched, bit reduced, time stretched, synced, mapped and tracked. These are just some of the actions and states that vocal samples undergo as a result of their transcription into binary code. The list shows how pliable the voice becomes, how utterly breakable it is, when deconstructed into bits. It also demonstrates the temporal and spatial dislocations that take place in the machine itself, as the voice is shifted hither and thither through the grids, circuits and values of the sampler. In this process, just as the voice becomes almost infinitely friable, so audiences get accustomed to a popular aesthetics of deconstruction. In the early 1980s the sampler’s processing capabilities were fairly limited. The Fairlight CMI had very little memory, so the duration of the sample had to be short and the quality limited to 8-bit mono. But even with early samplers it was possible for musicians to use workarounds to play with the affordances of the device, such as replaying the sample at a different rate to change its duration and pitch. Indeed, the effect of step-scaling the voice in this way became a recognizable digital aesthetic in the 1980s, apparent on tracks like the Stock–Aitken–Watermanproduced ‘Respectable’ by Mel and Kim. Here, the sampled refrain taken from the first syllable of the chorus, ‘tay’, is retriggered and pitch shifted up while its duration remains the same. At higher registers and in other

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musical contexts this pitched vocal is the sound of a children’s cartoon, The Chipmunks; at lower registers it is the drawling ‘oh yeahs’ of Yello’s 1985 hip-hop track ‘Oh Yeah’. A whole palette of sample-based compositional practices now proliferates and it would be impossible to do justice to them all here. A few are worth highlighting, however. Once it is sequenced and rapidly retriggered, the voice can appear to stutter in a series of electronic reiterations. This was used to great effect in 1985 on Paul Hardcastle’s Vietnam-themed ‘19’, which paired the staccato vocal (‘n-n-n-nineteen’) with the nervous mechanics of war (triggering crosses both military and musical domains after all). When looped or repeated, on the other hand, the vocal fragment can take on a percussive or phantasmagoric quality, evident in Laurie Anderson’s 1981 hit, ‘O Superman’. Here, Anderson doubles the overtly machinic mediation of her voice by layering a looped ‘ha’ with vocodered lyrics. The result, according to McClary (2006) at least, is a deconstruction of the voice’s ideal grounding in the naturalized female body, a point returned to below. By the 1990s, as samplers’ processing and memory capabilities increased, so vocal deconstruction became increasingly extreme. Time stretching extended whole vocal phrases and passages until they were ground down to almost indecipherable strings of speech, an effect that can be heard on AFX’s ‘Children Talking’ and Fat Boy Slim’s single ‘Praise You’. Indeed, for Katz (2004), while the latter raises complex issues of appropriation (apparent in the way that Camille Yarbrough’s sampled funk/soul lyric is thoroughly decontextualized), it also makes sampling an object of attention, as the device’s presence is made more transparent. ‘Look, I sampled this’, as Norman Cook, aka Fat Boy Slim, put it (cited in Katz, 2004: 147). Nowadays, time-stretched and chopped-up vocals are a common presence in pop, and the producers associated with acts like Madonna, Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga have conspicuously incorporated highly treated vocal samples into their songs. We have got used, it seems, to hearing the voice disintegrating. How far decomposition can go is up for grabs. One digital terminus is complete atomization: the voice reduced to a granular level, broken down to particles, rivulets or grainlets. After all, software now enables musicians to zoom into and alter sampled waveforms at a microscopic level (Roads, 2001). The advent of genres such as glitch and microhouse are, indeed, part of this molecular moment. Another is the processing of the ‘DNA’ of waveforms, their inspection and ‘auto-correlation’ (see below). Here, vocal deconstruction results in another reconstruction, this time as an aesthetic of pitch correction.

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AUTO-TUNE: DUETTING WITH THE DIGIT Loved and loathed in equal measure, Auto-Tune has become one of pop’s most recognizable and well-used audio processing effects. For many, it is the sound of the 2000s and its characteristic stepwise synthetic effect can be heard across genres and global sonic landscapes: from soul and R&B to Country and Western and Northwest African music. Released in 1997, it takes the form of a software plug-in, although it can also be purchased as a hardware unit for processing live vocals. Its origins are in seismic exploration, specifically as a mathematical formula that uses a process called ‘auto-correlation’ to target pockets of oil. By sending sound signals into the subsurface of the earth, its inventor, former Exxon engineer Andy Hildebrand, was able to produce an image map of oil-rich areas. But he also realized that the algorithm was able to detect vocal pitch. Auto-Tune works by detecting notes and aligning them to a scale. It corrects the incoming signal in real time by shifting sharps and flats up or down to the next nearest note. Used in the way intended, the software works in the background, subtly doing its job of pitch alignment so that singers are kept in tune. And for a while, it was the best-kept secret in the recording industry. Managers and labels were reticent to let the world know that their stars needed a ‘little help’. And even today, like lip-syncing, AutoTune is looked on by critics and purists as a gimmick – the latest box of tricks that fakes talent and diminishes innovation, a kind of Photoshop for the voice (Tyrangiel, 2009).9 But its presence as a studio tool has become increasingly normalized and, according to some engineers, it gets used in pretty much every session, regardless of genre (Frere-Jones, 2008). For Clayton, Auto-Tune is, in fact, ‘the most important piece of musical equipment of the last 10 years’, while its ubiquity in the studio ‘problematiz[es] the connection between voice and body along the way’ (Clayton, 2009). For sure, Auto-Tune adds the algorithmic to the intimate foldings between human and non-human. And not just in imperceptible ways, either, but in acts of sonic flamboyance. The more visible and transparent life of Auto-Tune, then, is its use in dramatizing the act of correction. This is the sound of the voice machine on the verge of breaking down, of the voice splintered and stepped up or down in quick succession, without glissandos. When the retune value is set to 0 rather than 400 (not, incidentally, something the inventor of Auto-Tune intended), Auto-Tune draws attention to itself. It begins to scale the voice instantaneously rather than humanizing its slide to the next note. The result has been likened to the vocodered voice, although the vocoder was unable to detect the pitch of a singer in order to shift it. Nor was it designed to

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perfect the voice. Like the vocoder, however, the result of an auto-tuned voice is a confusion as to where the identity of the singer lies and where the boundaries between organic and inorganic are. One of the first examples of this effect was Cher’s 1998 hit ‘Believe’, produced by Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling. During the first verse, Cher’s voice appears to leap unnaturally through the scale without transition. It announces itself as a stuttering, fluttering voice taking an angular journey through the vocal phrase, ‘I can’t break through’. Hinting at malfunction, but never totally breaking, Cher’s voice performs its disappearance into the machinic, an effect balanced by the less overtly effected vocal parts of the rest of the song. For Dickinson (who mistakenly attributes this effect to the vocoder on the basis of its misrepresentation in interviews), Cher’s voice unsettles naturalistic ideas of the female voice and its location in the body. Like the vocoder, we are again not sure where the voice emanates from, what kind of gender and body it resides in. Here, the blatant and intimate embrace of Auto-Tune’s digital operations works to vitiate the naturalism of the female voice, not by disavowing it, ‘but by creating the illusion of rummaging around inside it with an inorganic probe, confusing its listener as to its origin, its interior and its surface’ (Dickinson, 2001: 337). Here, AutoTune’s signature sound interposes an aural distance between the ideal, corporeal and unmediated version of femininity and its cyborgified version. And in this space, for Dickinson, a more hybridized or polysemic configuration of the feminine can exist. Again, the question of how potentially subversive or liberating certain technologies can be in the hands of subjugated groups is a complex one. For, on the one hand, songs like ‘Believe’ may well prompt new agential possibilities for women to imagine an empowered, hi-tech, denaturalized version of the posthuman. As Dickinson points out, ‘women are usually held to be more instinctive and pre-technological, further away from harnessing the powers of machinery (musically and elsewhere) than men, so performers such as Cher can help by putting spanners in these works’ (2001: 341). And yet, on the other hand, this is offset by contextual issues, including the song’s location in a largely male-dominated system of production (including Cher’s own producers) and her objectification in an industry that capitalizes on attractiveness and the slim, feminized body. Indeed, it is interesting to note these contradictions played out in the case of Britney Spears. On singles like ‘Piece of Me’, the singer’s objectification appears to be spectacularly performed through various vocal tricks (including Auto-Tune) that highlight her mass-mediated commodification and decapitation (a point played out satirically in an episode of South Park where the singer blows her own

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head off but still keeps singing).10 But the Britney object is still objectified for all that; her position is very much bound to a hyper-feminized version of the body, regardless of whether she sings through Auto-Tune or not. These complexities and contradictions aside, what is indisputable is that the universality of Auto-Tune and alternative software packages such as Melodyne (which allows for direct digital manipulation of waveforms, and has become a stalwart production tool for contemporary acts like Justin Bieber) has opened up the voice to both vast and miniscule stylings. What began as an algorithm for delving under the surface of the earth has become a means for delving under the surface of the voice. In this process, audiences across the globe are becoming acclimatized to the often gripping sound of the auto-correlated voice, duetting with the digit. Whether it is T-Pain’s R&B hits, Iranian techno-pop singer DJ Maryam’s hyperactive melisma, Kanye West’s heartbreaks, Jamaican dancehall DJ Demarco’s brisk quavers or Algerian star Chab Djenet’s rasping chirrups, audiences have got used to hearing the auto-correlated voice in this way. Indeed, these same audiences are even getting in on the act. As a hypermobile algorithm, Auto-Tune has found its way into the participatory circuits of ‘prosumption’ and Web 2.0 media. For £1.99 anyone can sing into their smartphone and have it spit back out as a T-Pain branded, autotuned digital fragment. Or see clips of the auto-tuned news. Or hear cats and babies turned into eerie malfunctioning hybrids on YouTube. Nowadays, it seems, everybody can be a robot.

VOCALOIDS, VIRTUALITY AND VOCALITY In 2003, Japanese electronics company Yamaha developed a vocal synthesis engine called Vocaloid. Designed to produce realistic singing voices, the system works by combining three separate blocks. Firstly, a score editor environment in which users input notes, lyrics and expressive values such as vibrato. Secondly, a singer library comprising samples of distinct speech segments covering all possible combinations of phonemes of the relevant language. And thirdly, a synthesis engine that processes the notes and lyrics from the editor, selects the appropriate samples from the singer library and concatenates them (Kenmochi, 2012). Part of a long history of attempts at vocal synthesis and the construction of speaking machines (as Sterne (2003a), notes, Erasmus Darwin built such a machine to approximate the shape and contours of the mouth), Vocaloid represents the virtualization of the voice. It is emblematic of the voice’s dislocation as it drifts further away from bodily referents.

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Seven years after Vocaloid is invented, a 16-year-old Japanese singer takes to the stage in Tokyo in front of 25,000 screaming fans waving glowsticks. Dressed in a bright cyan outfit, part-schoolgirl, part-cyberpunk, with hair almost as long as her body, she prances, skips and wiggles her way through a three-minute chunk of up-tempo J-pop. But neither the singer nor her voice are ‘real’: she is a hologram made of pixels and her voice belongs to a ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004), to Vocaloid. The phenomenon is Hatsune Miku, an anime-styled virtual idol whose popularity in Japan outstrips that of most singers with organs. In all its variations and fan-based iterations, her song ‘Tell Your World’ at time of writing has over 21 million hits on YouTube, more than Britney Spears’ ‘Piece of Me’ and Cher’s ‘Believe’ put together. Associated with a commercially successful franchise of video games, toys, phones, cosmetics, sweets and clothes, Hatsune Miku is the ultimate singing machine. She never sings out of tune or forgets her words, she can (at least in principle) perform in many different venues at once, and, unlike some of her flesh-and-blood counterparts, requires no entourage, Botox or expensive riders. Designed by Crypton Future Media in 2007, the character of Hatsune Miku is a spin-off from the Vocaloid application which, in its early days, paired different voice fonts with character concepts. For its first version there were just two voicebanks or Vocaloids – Leon and Lola – but neither took off. Hatsune Miku was different. Billed as ‘an android diva in the near-future world where songs are lost’ and part of the first Vocaloid for version 2.0 of the application, she was marketed as an expressive vocalist with human-like attributes. As well as attaining iconic status in otaku (‘geek’) culture, she soon topped the Japanese charts with a Vocaloid compilation that knocked another heavily mediated pop singer, Justin Bieber, from the number 1 spot. According to promotional materials, Miku is 158 cm tall, weighs 42 kg and has a musical range from A3 to E5. Her popularity is dependent on a combination of top-down and bottom-up models of media culture. Crypton’s strategy is to forgo its licensing restrictions over intellectual property to allow fans to use the software in order to create and sell songs featuring Miku’s voice. Japan’s tradition of dōjin culture (self-published works) is ideally placed to remix and re-mediate the hyper-mobile digital object that is Miku (Lessig, 2009; Bolter and Grusin, 1999). Fans have their own online spaces, including Japan’s most popular video portal Nico Nico Douga, and software tools, to develop and upload Miku-related dancing videos and songs. Those with the most ‘likes’ and ‘hits’ are appropriated to become commercial releases and Crypton has its own record label for such works.11

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From a new media perspective, Miku’s voice comes to life in the hyper-active circuits of participatory culture and fan sites. It is the ultimate mutable mobile, its tones and cadences digitally recomposed every time a fan or content creator embarks on a new song. Less ‘sung’ than crowdsourced, the voice’s destinations are shaped by the spaces and practices of Web 2.0 and open-source cultures – cultures, which as Jenkins notes, are defined by a blurring of the boundaries between producer and consumer, and thereby singer and listener. This suggests that Miku’s digitalized voice is in some senses ‘prosumed’ or ‘prodused’. It is the convergent product of the practices of young, usually male, tech-savvy content generators. From YouTube mashups to Internet memes, Miku’s voice is a collaborative digital artefact under constant construction and reconstruction: everywhere and nowhere at the same time, but always coming into being, always in gestation. What this means for the voice’s recent trajectories and its relations to the living body is a complex question. On the one hand, the Miku phenomenon suggests that we are beyond the logics of synthesis, sampling and auto-correlation and enter that of simulation and simulacra. As a hyper-real avatar (feminized but child-like, with impossibly large eyes, slim hips and implausible hair) with a hyper-real voice (pitch perfect, always in time and beyond the vocal range of any human), Miku is a perfect copy of something that does not exist. This does not mean she is non-material, merely that she exists in a different kind of materiality, one composed of absolute media and absolute representation. She is the ultimately mediated object without a referent; she only refers to herself and anime culture in general. Following Baudrillard’s (1988) logic, she is a sign without a signified, an utterance without an index. This means her voice and body are never found wanting, for they never have to adhere to or be compared with a living body. To charge Miku with lip-syncing would, after all, be absurd. As a virtual idol with a virtual voice she is already pure artifice, pure simulation, pure data (Black, 2012). Yet, on the other hand, it is worth remembering that the singer’s library that comprises one block of the Vocaloid application is composed of recorded human voices. In the case of Hatstune Miku her voice is based on samples of the well-known voice actress Saki Fujita. It is Fujita who made the individual phonetic sounds stored in the singer’s library and who sometimes joins Miku on stage, where she is also supported by a backing band playing ‘live’. Miku’s vocal dynamics are also designed to replicate human characteristics of vibrato, attack, dynamics and crescendo in order to create realistic vocal inflections. In other words, even under conditions of the digitalized hyper-real, where representation might supersede reality, there is an

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affective element translated from the human body that remains residually present in the chain of signification. In embracing the silicon we cannot, it seems, quite let go of the carbon (Gibson, 2010). We still hang onto the signs of humanity as the duet with the digit continues. Like the cyborg voice, the Vocaloid (a portmanteau word comprising ‘vocal’ and ‘android’) is still a concatenation of human and non-human for all that.

MACHINE MIMICRY: BEATBOXING While the trace of the human body is in danger of completely disappearing in the case of virtual vocality, no such displacement is evident in the case of our final vocal modality, that of beatboxing. Indeed, one might argue that the voice in all its corporeal solidity is recalled and reconstituted – that it makes a spectacular return to the stage (perhaps in an echo of Foucault’s ‘return of the subject’ after the excesses of post-structuralism), though this would be somewhat missing the point. Beatboxing refers to a technique of vocal dexterity that emulates the sounds of modern musical instruments, mainly percussion (Stowell and Plumbley, 2008). Typically, a beatboxer will exploit the affordances of the microphone, PA and mixer as well as use a combination of hand and mouth techniques to create drum-like sounds. Its origins are in hip hop, though it also has links with traditional singing styles in China and India, as well as modern styles such as barbershop and scat singing. Nowadays, beatboxers are as likely to be talent show contestants as they are members of hip-hop crews. There is something compelling about the human body approximating the sounds and movements of the machine, as a long history of entertainment (from the sonovox to body popping) shows. Beatboxing provokes three lines of thought around the fate of the voice. Firstly, and like previous modalities, it makes explicit that which was always the case – that we are in a perpetual dalliance with the machine. This time, however, it does so not through a digital simulation of the human voice, but its reversal, a human vocal simulation of a digital machine. In some respects, beatboxing is, therefore, a simulation of a simulation. The very term is derived from hip-hop’s attempts to mimic the sounds of the first generation of drum machines, known as ‘beatboxes’, in the 1980s. Such devices were designed to imitate loosely the sounds of ‘real’ drums, although very soon the sounds of the drum machines were heard as more appealing (and cost effective) to hip-hop musicians than their analogue referent. Barbados-born Doug E. Fresh, also known as the ‘human beat boxer’, was an early exponent of the beatboxing style, and on early hip-hop tracks like ‘The Show’, he duets with MC Ricky D, two turntables and a Roland

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TR-909 drum machine. The effect is less to humanize the de-humanized than to pay vocal homage to the mechanical mediations of the style itself, sometimes in the absence of associated devices. Indeed, one origin story is that beatboxing was born out of the necessity to embellish hip-hop performances with signature sounds because drum machines and samplers were too expensive for ordinary musicians. Secondly, beatboxing works at the intersection of impossibilism, mimicry and ventriloquism. A good beatboxer is able to astonish their audience by imitating the electronic sounds of signature machines. And part of the thrill of listening arises from the surprising disjuncture between what one sees or imagines (the human body with all its perceived limitations) and what one hears (a sound that is ‘beyond human’; that appears to be coming from elsewhere). The beatboxer channels the human imaginary of these devices just as they perform the plasticity of the voice itself. Hence, the appeal of beatboxers like Doug E. Fresh and Buffy, as well as modern beatboxers such as Kid Beyond and Beardyman, resides in a kind of circus-like astonishment associated with contortionism – the idea that the body can actually be made to do that. The open sonic possibilities of the machine (‘any sound you can imagine’ as Théberge’s book has it) are therefore met with the expansive possibilities of the voice. Like other bodily feats (from surgical implants and sword swallowing to extreme piercings and running ultra-marathons), beatboxing reminds us that the body is a pliable hybrid always under construction.12 We age, we get ill, we affect accents, we impersonate, we adapt to our surroundings. And as we do, our voice changes. Thirdly, the case of beatboxing shows how the voice travels through and becomes a vehicle for constantly shifting and provisional claims around authenticity, and there are two layers here. Firstly, the voices of beatboxers are themselves constructed as ‘real’ to the extent that they are performed as relatively unmediated by digital and electronic technologies. Like the lipsynced singers that began this chapter, beatboxers have to do enough to convince their audiences that their talent resides in the voice rather than in technological tricks. Here, it helps if the stage is uncluttered and that the signs of the real are intact (the vocalist only requires a microphone, for instance). But secondly, the beatboxed voice has to translate the sounds of machines that have themselves become part of the struggle for legitimation of certain kinds of musical genres, particularly black electronic dance musics. In other words, these are musical styles that once had to establish new ideas of authenticity and creativity after the age of rock ’n’ roll. In this doubling, the co-evolution of voice and technology is intimately bound up with shifting ideas of what music is, with a stretching of genre categories and the very grounds of human expression.

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In a sense, with beatboxing we reach a terminus. We arrive at a form, the pleasures of which are intimately bound up with over a century’s worth of electronic and digital mediations of the voice, where the pleasures of listening reside in multiple tensions and exchanges between organic and inorganic. For a black musician to vocalize the sound of a Roland TR-909 digital snare drum is to fold into the voice a whole complex, multi-layered history of racial, ethnic, technological, spatial, urban and economic developments. Beatboxing exists as a result of the accumulation of so many socio-technical conditions relating to the continual elaboration of human– machine assemblages. Like crooning, it is about microphone technique. It is predicated on listening publics who have become used to hearing the voice multiply mediated, chopped, stuttered and deconstructed. Like relations between hi-fi and lo-fi, it needs to be understood culturally in a system of similarities and differences. In other words, it works because we hear through the conditions of electronic and digital devices, practices and manipulations. It also resides in a history of black cultural practices and the appropriations of available technologies, where ‘being human’ and therefore ‘less than human’ is inflected by complex histories of racial and ethnic identity. Finally, it works because it is neither a fight with technology, nor a seamless and invisible slippage into it. Instead, it is a bridging of human and non-human, and the sounds that are sparked in the process of their conversations are heard as exhilarating though increasingly conventional, rather than uncanny (Dolar, 2006).

POSTSCRIPT In Perfecting Sound Forever, Milner (2009) suggests an experiment. Turn on the radio, he asks, and concentrate on the voice of the first singer you hear. Try to isolate its quality in the mix. Really focus on how it sounds. Then turn the radio down and imagine what that voice, with all its texture, grain and imperfection, would sound like if the singer were standing directly in front of you. Turn the volume of the radio up again and you might be surprised by how artificial the voice now sounds. If the song contained vocals that were conspicuous in their manipulation, perhaps through the techniques and technologies outlined in this chapter, then it might sound even more obvious. ‘All this time, you’ve been listening to distinctly inhuman voices and thinking them as human’, he says (Milner, 2009: 13). Which is partly true (for they are more hybrid than inhuman), but what this breaching experiment also demonstrates is how used we have got to hearing voices without bodies, as information, as pliable and playable. Despite the special status we assign to it as a vehicle of meaning and index of personhood, what popular music has

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done is itself to act as a huge breaching experiment in what the voice is, what it can be, where it can reside and who (and what) can speak. These five modalities – synthesis, deconstruction, auto-correlation, simulation and machine mimicry – are, therefore, more than trivial styles and effects, more than tricks in the sonic vocabulary of pop. They speak of nothing less than the conditions of our co-existence.

NOTES 1 In the case of Milli Vanilli, the band’s manager had in fact recruited the duo as dancers for branding purposes, and the vocals were always to be done by others. Suspicions were alerted when in 1989 during a live performance on MTV the band’s backing track jammed, revealing the singers to be miming. The band had their Grammy revoked the following year. 2 It is interesting to speculate about the imagined sound of divine vocalities here. Popular representations of the voice of God (Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, John Houston in The Bible and Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty come to mind) always seem to depict that voice as sonorous, booming and male. A version of benign but tremulous masculinity, in fact. In other words, the God of popular culture inhabits an original logocentric act that is both gendered and marked by a vocal authority that imparts wisdom and provokes fear. 3 The predilection in musicology for using spectrograms to analyse voice quality is, equally, an attempt to extract something exacting, indivisible and unaffiliated from vocal expression. The irony being, of course, that it does so by embedding, analysing and processing the voice in and through digital systems. 4 Indeed, in the latest form of convolution reverb, these spaces are ‘sampled’ in much the same way as audio samples are. 5 Florian Schneider from Kraftwerk is an avid collector of artificial voices and, as well as the vocoder, the band use a range of voice-based technologies and simulations including the children’s toy Speak ‘n’ Spell. 6 Competing vocal technologies such as the Sonovox (a hand-held device that could be held next to the throat to alter human speech for largely comic effect) did not encode the voice in this way but did vie with the vocoder for a place in Hollywood as a way of altering voices. 7 Not that white musicians were not using the vocoder. Apart from Kraftwerk, Neil Young’s 1982 album Trans featured heavy use of the device and marked a dramatic shift in the singer’s aesthetic – enough, in fact, for his record label, Geffen, to sue him on the grounds that it literally did not sound like Young. But even here there are relations of othering. For Young, the use of the vocoder stemmed from his inability to communicate with his son, a sufferer of cerebral palsy. In a sense, the vocoder was Young’s closest analogue to an imagined indecipherability: it spoke, but in a register that jumbled where language and

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self were located. It was through the vocoder, in other words, that he was able to empathize with his son’s inability to vocalize. Nowadays, vocoders and other speaking devices have become the means through which many disabled people communicate; most famously in the case of Stephen Hawking’s voice, it is a text-to-speech device called DECTalk that does the translation. Actually, like many other contemporary electronic acts, Daft Punk’s voices are put through a mix of devices, including the Talkbox, a tube-based contraption made famous by Peter Frampton. The American band Death Cab For Cutie even wore ribbons of protest against the software in 2009. This dramatic act, indeed, echoes Bell Laboratories’ attempt to improve voices by swapping vocal tracts via a process they termed ‘Digital Decapitation’ (Tompkins, 2010: 302). This is a reflection of the top-slicing dynamics of new media corporations in general where the digital labour of fans is purloined but not paid. Crypton, of course, also benefits from all the related commercial spin-offs, software development and advertising. And yet, unlike Bhabha’s (1994) definition of mimicry in the post-colonial context, the vocalist does not copy the object of imitation because they want to ‘be’ like the machine. It is the frisson between them, the constant friction in boundary confusions, that matters most.

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PLAYSUMPTION: MUSIC AND GAMES

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Watching all our friends fall In and out of Old Paul’s This is my idea of fun Playing video games (‘Video Games’, Lana Del Rey, 2011)

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INTRODUCTION I’ve made a list in my head. It’s a list of the top 10 most affective experiences I’ve had with art and culture. Unsurprisingly, music figures in the list. It includes an intensely visceral reaction to a My Bloody Valentine gig in the early 1990s. So does film, painting, literature and sport. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, some of the highest ranked positions are taken by video games: specifically, games like Portal, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Borderlands 2, Fallout 3, Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Bioshock that have opened myriad exotic worlds of deeply immersive luminosity, adventure and playfulness. With this admission comes a degree of contrition, although maybe I’m less contrite than I used to be. For most of the late twentieth century, video games were culture and civilization’s debased ‘other’.1 The latest in a long line of troubling youth-based media forms – from penny-dreadfuls and horror films to comic books and pinball – video games were culturally abject. For many, they signified the social inadequacy of a generation of nerdy pale-faced teenagers. And while they brought with them a certain fascination for the future – I still remember the giddy way that TV presenters in the early 1980s portrayed the first consoles as a transformational and magical world of entertainment – the worlds constructed by the games themselves were usually judged to be violent, addictive or infantile. The moral panic that still revolves around games manifests every time a gun-related massacre ends in a search for the video game that supposedly inspired it.2 Like the Walkman and the iPod, video games have come to stand for a high-tech, though somewhat dysfunctional, society: a society of lost childhoods in which idealized notions of play are degraded,

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violence banalized and distinctions between fantasy and reality irredeemably blurred (Lister et al., 2003). Yet gaming has undergone something of a reformation over the last decade or so. In 2008, it was widely publicized that revenue from the games industry overtook that of the music industry in the UK (Masson, 2008) and the global market for video games was reported to have reached $67 billion in 2012 (Gaudiosi, 2012). Statistics often tell us more about the lobbying powers and PR tactics of the trades associations who publish them than any uncontaminated reality, of course. This is why it is often better to look at comparisons with other industries. But here, too, the games industry fares well. The games Call of Duty: Black Ops II and FIFA 13 both outperformed the best-selling albums in the UK in 2012 in unit terms, despite the fact they cost four times more (Ingham, 2013). And while one of the fastest selling films of all time, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, clocked up $169 million at the box office in its first weekend, the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 registered $750 million worth of global sales in its first five days (Cross, 2011). The releases of what are known as AAA games (signature games with hefty budgets), like the franchises Call of Duty, Halo and Grand Theft Auto, are significant cultural events in themselves, as eagerly anticipated and hyped as Hollywood blockbusters. Like films, celebrities are increasingly willing to be associated with specific game products, ideally as in-game characters with their own avatars, but even, as in the case of the game Little Big Planet, level designers.3 According to Dovey and Kennedy, gaming comprises a ‘highly sophisticated, highly capitalized media industry’ (2006: 46) and its political and technological economy is geared towards a restless search for markets amidst a hugely competitive world of global media. Fiercely acquisitive and agile, the games industry is an increasingly dominant player in a system of global media entertainment. How, then, do we explain the reasons behind this expanding games sector? Well, the commercial and cultural buoyancy of games can be attributed to a number of factors, of which two are particularly noteworthy. Firstly, just as the consumer base for games has widened significantly, so have the platforms on which they are played. Gamers are now more likely than ever to be adult and female and the production of a new generation of familymarketed consoles like the Nintendo Wii has been instrumental in this regard (Jones, 2008). According to surveys, around half of gamers are women and this has impacted, albeit slowly and unevenly, on the way the industry has positioned itself (although the limited representational repertoire of female characters continues to be a big disappointment in this regard) (Hamilton, 2013). The advent of smartphone and tablet-based

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games and apps is a further aspect of this repositioning. What Juul (2009) calls the ‘casualization’ of games has stretched the times and spaces in which gaming takes place by unhooking it from singular domestic spaces and placing it within the mobile digital worlds of those who would not necessarily regard themselves as gamers. This is a world away from gauche teenagers in bedrooms, despite the residual symbolic presence of the stereotypical loner associated with the ‘hard-core’ gamer. Secondly, and relatedly, games have been subject to sustained processes of discursive and institutional valorization – meaning, games are not just increasingly ‘hip’ but also culturally respectable, or at least less degraded than they used to be. The idea that in their aesthetic qualities games had attained the status of art has circulated for a while, particularly since writers applied the narrative tropes of drama and literature to them. Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck was particularly formative in this respect (Murray, 1997). But nowadays at least parts of the gaming repertoire are in a state of ‘artification’ (Heinich and Shapiro, 2012), subject to the consecrating powers of cultural gatekeepers, agents and institutions. An emerging canon of games venerated for their stylistic qualities underpins the inventory of games to be preserved in official spaces such as the Library of Congress and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The list includes classic games such as Spacewar and Tetris, but also more contemporary examples such as Doom and World of Warcraft. Recent high-profile touring exhibitions such as Game On (2002) and Game Masters (2015) have taken this a step further and presented influential game designers as auteurs with singular visions who have opened up aesthetic vistas and ways of imagining new worlds. In the case of Game Masters, for instance, which originated with the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series of exhibitions and toured worldwide in 2014–2015, the name of the designer of each fully playable video game was prominently displayed above the game, with a label describing the life and works of each designer, their authorship and aesthetic intentions. Some of the concept art and scripts for the games were displayed in glass boxes and nearly all coverage and discussion around the exhibition was about games as an art form. Indeed, even the title of the exhibition alluded to a shift in the value connotations of gaming with its reference to the old masters. Scholarly validation, meanwhile, takes the form of ‘game studies’, an interdisciplinary field that follows in the footsteps of popular music studies in the struggle to grant a previously lowly form academic legitimacy (Nieborg and Hermes, 2008; Dixon, 2007). Certainly, if publishers’ catalogues and conference themes are anything to go by, games are one of the fastest growing areas of academic interest, with titles ranging from

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orthodox histories (Donovan, 2010) and ‘how to’ guides (Dille and Platten, 2006) to hermeneutic and humanities-based analyses of specific games like Grand Theft Auto (Garrelts, 2006). Despite its proximity to mass markets and alignment with moral panics, the cultural redemption of gaming is further evident in mainstream media ecologies. Broadsheet newspapers in the UK like the Guardian have had games review sections nestling alongside art and design, books, film and theatre for a while; and the aesthetic credentials of games like Bioshock are openly discussed in literary publications as venerable as the London Review of Books (Lanchester, 2009).4 Here, the application of the terminology of art history and film theory to games is further testament to the official approbation of a once-déclassé form of entertainment, particularly examples of the form that align with the cultural capital of curators, critics and academics (Melissinos and O’Rourke, 2012; Kirkpatrick, 2011).5 All of this suggests that video games have a strong claim to being the early twenty-first century’s most upwardly mobile and culturally effervescent art form. Increasingly diverse, ubiquitous and expansive, they truly are ‘the medium of our moment’ (Brown, cited in Collins, 2007: 15). With an eighth generation of games consoles – in the guise of the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 – marking the move towards a more convergent and haptic entertainment experience and the so-called ‘gamification’ of everyday life (from fitness apps and Angry Birds to Occulus Rift and Pokémon Go), games are now a prominent force in contemporary culture. But what about their impact on the field of popular music? To what extent are games implicated in shifts in how music is sold, organized and consumed? And what does this tell us about the shape and structural synergies of digitally mediated cultural worlds?

MUSIC AND GAMES Far from being a funky, high-tech supplement to the bigger and more established field of music, games are a fundamental element of music’s commercial infrastructure and the cultural and economic threads that connect them are multiplying and thickening all the time. To take just one high-profile example, the release in 2009 of The Beatles: Rock Band game represented a key moment in the band’s repackaging as a digitally interactive rock experience. Featuring 45 remastered songs and launched with great fanfare, the karaoke-style game lets users play mocked-up instrument controllers modelled on the band’s iconic equipment from the 1960s. Its release marked the first time the music of The Beatles was franchised to a third party and could be downloaded digitally.

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Tie-ins of this type are now a regular feature of the gaming landscape, particularly as physical sales from music have fallen. According to the UK trade publication Music Week, publishers across the music industry are desperate to have their repertoire of music given a place in the biggest and best-selling game titles, and the launch of industry initiatives such as Play Together (www.tiga.org), as well as increasingly powerful lobbying groups, confirms this (Masson, 2008). According to Tessler (2008), games company giants like Electronic Arts (EA) have become so firmly integrated into the music industry that their efforts to promote and present music through gaming channels has turned them into de facto A&R (artists and repertoire) wings for both major and independent labels. The upshot, as she puts it, is that: it becomes difficult to determine if video games exist to promote popular music, or … if popular music exists to promote video games. (Tessler, 2008: 14)

Beyond formal connective channels, myriad links are already well established between music and games. At a platform level, it is far from unusual for consumers to stream music or watch music videos through their games consoles; and while the celebrity credentials of figures like Koji Kondo (best known for scoring the music to the Mario and Legend of Zelda series) hint at an emerging rock star status for games composers, the popularity of video game soundtracks has added a new outlet for already renowned composers across widely different styles, from Danny Elfman’s sweeping orchestral score for Fable (2004) to Trent Reznor’s industrial-flecked rock for the game Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012). The games sector has even developed a discursive, institutional and commercial split between ‘mainstream’ and ‘indie’ that echoes that of the music field, where the cultural credibility of the latter is closely bound to a spirit of creative autonomy and opposition to the predictable formulae of the mass market (Martin and Deuze, 2009; Parker, 2013). Here, indie games tend to follow a low-budget aesthetic reminiscent of early games and hobbyist identities, while indie developers often borrow a vocabulary of counter-cultural rebellion and creative spontaneity from music. This is evident not just in the cultural legitimation of games like Passage, Flow and Braid according to logics of auteurism, but also in the growing phenomena of ‘game jams’, where developers and designers gather over a short period of time to compose or prototype experimental ideas for games (Guevara, 2013). Indeed, just as with music, the boundaries between independent and corporate game development are more blurred than discourses of creative autonomy imply. Like music, the indie games sector often acts as an outsourcing and feeder

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stream for innovation in the large-scale sector and the larger publishers have carefully cultivated an interactive relationship between indie developers and the games industry for this reason (Parker, 2013; Hesmondhalgh, 1999; Guevara, 2013). The indie games section of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace serves just such a purpose. Clearly, then, the cultural worlds of games and music are increasingly gathered together and their fates are closely bound to what it is to produce, consume and be entertained in the early twenty-first century. But how should we categorize and investigate these links? One way is to divide the connections into three relational types: music with games; music from games; and music as games. These constitute a provisional and heuristic way of organizing the chapter rather than a watertight typology, but they also sensitize us to the active conjunctions that characterize the two forms. While music with games implies production-based aspects of music associated with the early history and subsequent development of gaming, music from games implies a more conventionally performative element bound up with the theatrical orchestration, marketing and selling of in-game music. The third category, music as games, highlights potent trajectories of convergence and will be the focus of attention later in the chapter. This is where the practices of play, participation and consumption – what at the end of the chapter I shall be calling ‘playsumption’ – are tightly coiled and point to significant shifts in what ‘playing music’ entails.

MUSIC WITH GAMES It is the first category that perhaps jumps out as the most obvious, however, particularly to consumers who grew up with video games in the 1980s and 1990s. This is the sound, production and history of music made with gaming technologies, where the distinctively crunchy 8-bit textures of early video game music like Super Mario Bros (1985) have given way to the more lush, orchestrated scores of composers like Nobuo Uematsu for the Final Fantasy series. Nowadays, the quality and sophistication of games audio is indistinguishable from professionally recorded music and the release of celebrity-featured games such as 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (2009) is supplemented by the release of CD-quality exclusive tracks in and through the game itself. The advent of high-fidelity game audio is closely bound to shifts in gaming technologies, of course. Indeed, one way of presenting the history of games music is as a series of incremental technical developments, driven by the so-called ‘console wars’, where the invention of evermore

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powerful processors and sound cards results in ever more complex and ‘realistic’ music. Collins (2005; 2008) cuts this narrative up into three stages: the 8-bit era, the 16-bit era and the advent of CD-ROM-capable machines. As she puts it: As sound technology improved through the last three decades, so did its role in games. Music quickly went from being a catchy gimmick designed to sucker quarters from unsuspecting passers-by in arcades, to being an integral part of the gaming experience. (Collins, 2005: 4)

Early video game music from the late 1970s and early 1980s was certainly limited by the processing power and storage capacities of machines like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Atari ST and Commodore 64. The latter’s infamous SID (Sound Interface Device) chip, for instance, was capable of making three tones selected from a range of waveforms as well as a noise generator that could produce various sound effects and drum tones.6 The arcade game Space Invaders (1978) relied on equally ‘primitive’ (at least from the current vantage point) technologies to generate a background soundtrack in the form of four foreboding bass notes that signified, via an escalating tempo, just how close the player’s base was to being annihilated. Later developments associated with 16-bit machines like the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) extended the memory and processing capabilities devoted to sound: in the case of the former, an on-board Yamaha FM synthesizer chip with sampling facilities and, in the latter, a bank of MIDI instruments.7 According to Collins (2008), this resulted in more advanced game audio, such as the J-pop influenced music for Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). The 16-bit era also witnessed the growth of a PC consumer industry and the production of dedicated sound cards that allowed music to be more prominent in the gaming experience. But, it was not until the advent of console-based CD-ROM in the mid to late 1990s that machines like the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 could exploit the immersive properties of surround sound and generate a more advanced interactive audio-visual gameplay experience. For instance, changes in the gaming environment such as a character’s entry into a different zone could be signified or enhanced by shifts in the mood, tempo and timbre of the music (although whether gamers of this era really felt themselves to be more immersed than their counterparts in the 1980s is debatable). Gamers could also personalize their gaming experiences by incorporating their own CD soundtracks into the game – in effect, generating their own in-game playlists. This was a feature exploited in the game Grand Theft Auto (1997).

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There are good reasons to emphasize the relatively (or soft) determining role of gaming technologies in this narrative. As commentators have observed, the games sector is locked into a tightly integrated cycle of console upgrades and software versions to an extent not witnessed in other culture industries (Gregory, 2014; Dovey and Kennedy, 2006). The game engine, for instance, is a hugely complex assemblage of code that creates the rules of the gameworld and its precise configuration (including its global music functions) partly conditions the aesthetic options available to designers. But there are two supplementary elements to this technologically deterministic narrative. The first is that games composers are not passive conduits for the technical capabilities of gaming consoles, but active agents who work within and push the affordances of these technologies. What is, for many, the ‘golden age’ of video game music, the mid to late 1980s, is notable precisely because games composers like Rob Hubbard found ways to work around the technological constraints of early consoles and programming languages to create some of the most memorable games audio (including, in Hubbard’s case, the score for Jet Set Willy from 1987) (Glantz, 2008). As Hubbard explains, experimentation was part of the process of dealing with the limitations of graphics and sound chips: There were no MIDI-sequencers … what I used to do was load up a machine code monitor and I would literally display the bits in real-time. The music was all working on, triggered on the raster interrupt, so I would start changing the numbers in real-time to alter the synths to alter musical notes and things. I would tend to work on like four-bar chunks, that I would get to repeat, let these four bars play, and I would just sit on that hex editor, monitoring the numbers and changing things. (Hubbard, in Glantz, 2008: 100)

The second is that a narrative of linear technological improvement is not best placed to grasp the often complex, non-linear lives and trajectories of technologies, in general, and how older audio technologies are reappropriated by new generations of consumers, in particular. A striking example is the current return to earlier gaming technologies and music cultures with the advent of what is known as ‘chiptune music’, ‘bit-pop’, or ‘8-bit music’ (Carlsson, 2008). Here, contemporary musicians deploy a variety of techniques such as hacking old Nintendo Gameboys and using soft synths, trackers and emulators, to evoke the age of early gaming consoles and devices (Mitchell and Clarke, 2007). A fully developed scene has grown up around these practices, expressed in CD collections, festivals, live performances and a thriving set of online forums. A collection of Kraftwerk covers performed entirely on

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hacked, vintage 8-bit machines, called 8-bit Operators, is a case in point, while bands such as YMCK, Nullsleep, Covox, 8bitpeoples and 4mat have carved out reputations for themselves in 8-bit independent scenes. Ex-punk impresario Malcolm McLaren even had his own chiptune label in the mid 2000s. What is particularly interesting, here, is how chiptune music works as a set of contemporary practices, filtered through discourses of techno-nostalgia, that evoke the sounds of largely obsolete hardware through a digital present. In other words, a complex set of technological foldings are inherent in this music whereby gaming technologies are constantly reimagined, remediated and recoded. At one level this is a familiar story of musical imbroglios wrapped in discourses of authenticity and nostalgia (Pinch and Reinecke, 2009). The current fetish for old analogue synthesizers, guitars, mixtapes and vinyl are obvious examples (Taylor, 2001). Even 8-bit music has its own internal hierarchies of distinction and authenticity, with musicians who circuit bend old hardware or who write their own software given symbolic credibility over those who purchase prepared sample CDs or pre-bent hardware. In this sense, it mirrors those in-field struggles and distinction strategies that characterize ‘avant-garde’ genres like glitch (Prior, 2008a). With chiptunes, however, this techno-nostalgia is directed towards an early digital age from within that age itself. With 8-bit sample sets and SID chip soft synths we have arrived at a point where digital devices that can perfectly reproduce any sound in pristine quality are being made to cater for a market based on the sounds of older digital equipment characterized by ‘degraded’-quality audio. In other words, the digital is now its own object of authenticity – nostalgia for an earlier ‘more innocent’ digital age is marked in current attempts to evoke that age through later digital developments.8 This has all happened at a time when games have become knowing and sophisticated in their musical references. Games designers and their musical advisers are increasingly adept at exploiting the crimps and creases of musical histories as they engineer their gameworlds. A case in point is Bioshock Infinite (2013), a steampunk first-person shooter set in the religious fervent of a post-apocalyptic 1920s America. The game incorporates a range of audio historical fusions and sonic reveries, reinventing Tears for Fears’ 1985 pop classic ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ as a 1930s jazz standard via a rupture in the game’s narrative universe, for instance. Early on in the game, the player even stumbles upon a gravity-defying gondola advertising ‘Tomorrow’s Music Today’ on which a barbershop quartet sing an arrangement of the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’.

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These sorts of intertextual musical references are increasingly effective because they play with (some of) the audience’s musical tastes and frames of reference. They also lend themselves to humour and mimicry. In the game Grand Theft Auto, players are able to select the music that gets played on their character’s car radio by dialling up a variety of fictional stations dedicated to different genres of music. In GTA IV these include Vladivostok FM, Self-Actualization FM and Jazz Nation Radio. For Annandale, this turns music into a parodic reference point that enriches the game experience for specific demographic constituencies: Certainly, these phony radio stations are very good imitations. The DJs sound very authentic (and in fact some of the voice actors are actual DJs), but this authenticity is in the service of caricature, given that the convincing voices are spouting outrageous dialogue. DJ Sage of Radio X, for example, is the personification of Generation X apathy and resentment of the Baby Boomers (‘Good morning San Andreas. The Baby Boom is officially over. You are all irrelevant. Now die.’). (2006: 96)

Clearly, then, the category of games with music implies much more than the generation of an underscore to support gameplay (Collins, 2008). Just as the memory and processing capabilities of games machines have increased, so the music composed for the game has become increasingly multi-faceted, interactive and expansive. Music is crucial to the overall aesthetic experience of the game, helping to colour, define and shape its moods and meanings in a similar way to film (Chion, 1994). But there are significant differences between films and games, not least in terms of temporal experience. It is not uncommon for a game to last for up to 100 hours or more, meaning the gamer might hear the music repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times in non-linear ways. Moreover, the distinction between ‘playing’ a game and ‘watching’ a film is crucial to the interface and continuum of participation. The attraction of many video games is that the player takes on, controls and is the character to an extent that is not possible with film. As Aarseth (1997) has noted, playing through a narrative is different to reading it, watching it or retelling it, not least because of the levels of agency the former requires. And this poses a number of challenges to games audio composers, such as avoiding audio fatigue, making the most of the interactive affordances of the medium, and negotiating the limits of the game’s engine. Nowadays, the holy grail of games composers is what has variously been termed ‘generative’, ‘dynamic’ or ‘aleatoric’ music, where a real-time, interactive score is produced in response to the player’s actions within the game (Kaae, 2008). As we shall see later in the chapter, one logical conclusion is that the idea of ‘playing’ music is itself extended, as boundaries between gaming, consumption and production become smudged.

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At this point, however, it is worth noting that even in the 1980s and 1990s when audio was typically allotted only 10% of what was already a limited store of game memory, gamers still identified music as fundamental to the pleasures of the gaming experience. As Belinkie noted in 1999, 66% of US college students could hum the theme tune to Super Mario Bros (1985), subverting the president of Arista’s Records’ sceptical dictum that ‘you can’t hum a video game’ (Belinkie, 1999).

MUSIC FROM GAMES It is little wonder that the cultural life of games music reverberates beyond the context of the game itself into the more conventional circuits of performance and recording. This is music from games and is an increasingly potent conjunction involving both classical and popular modes of orchestration, presentation and performance. As far as orchestral music is concerned, it is commonplace for the music scored for the biggest games to be given the full symphonic treatment in a professional recording studio and released in ‘Original Soundtrack’ (OST) form. Compilations of popular games music recorded by well-established ensembles such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra are now standard features of this landscape. Indeed, in Japan, orchestrated game soundtracks have been a major part of the music industry for many years and the releases of the most popular games regularly top the album charts. In a recent cultural articulation, the establishment of a global circuit of live concerts has provided a parallel channel of dissemination, courtesy of organizations such as Play! A Video Game Symphony, Distant Worlds and Video Games Live. These fully integrated, multi-media spectacles feature a combination of straight orchestral performances with live action flourishes, re-enactments of important scenes and video clips from the games themselves (Frisch, 2007). The staging of one-off concerts dedicated to particular games composers is another recent trend, with Nobuo Uematsu’s scores for Final Fantasy elaborately performed on the concert circuit. Uematsu’s catalogue has even generated a minor secondary industry in pop tribute albums. One issue raised by the popularity of these classical recordings and concerts concerns the nature of taste amidst shifting systems of cultural classification. The crossover phenomenon of classical games music maps onto current sociological debates around the stratification of taste and consumption amidst claims that symbolic boundaries between high and low culture are crumbling (Peterson and Kern, 1996; Bennett et al., 2009). Here,

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the popularity of orchestrated video game music might be read as representing a loosening of classical music from its anchors in class distinction and the symbolic power of a well-defined cultural elite. To take just two potential markers, in 2013 one of the UK’s most well-known classical radio stations, Classic FM, published its ‘Hall of Fame’ comprising the most popular classical scores of the year as voted by listeners. Two video game soundtracks, Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy series and Jeremy Soule’s Elder Scroll series, featured in the top five and polled higher than classical stalwarts like Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Allegri’s Miserere. Meanwhile, Austin Wintory’s score for the game Journey was nominated for a Grammy award in 2012 in the relatively new category ‘Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media’, itself an indication of a broadening of the categories of cultural legitimacy at some levels of the media system. And yet, for all the talk of widening tastes and flattened cultural hierarchies, video game music clearly does not have the same status as that of Western art music in broader systems of cultural classification. Indeed, the relatively subordinate field position of video game music continues to demarcate it from high art music. This is despite claims that games music has ‘artistic elements’ or that the popularization of orchestrated music opens up the esoteric realms of classical music to newcomers, especially young people. Even in Japan, where boundaries between high and low culture are fuzzy, orchestrated game music is considered to be less serious than classical music. It is filed under ‘pop music’ in record stores and is labelled as such in the charts, while its proximity to the market and commercial networks, in general, constitute it as devoid of the ‘purity’ of the autonomous art work as defined by Bourdieu (1996). It is certainly telling that the cultural spaces and conditions of reception associated with the performance of games music (billed as fun and where laughter and cheering are encouraged) are closer to those of a rock concert than the quiet, contemplative ideal of the European bourgeois concert goer.9 On the other hand, it is indisputably the case that both orchestral and non-orchestral music from games bring into play the changing cultural orientations of new audiences – those who grew up listening to game soundtracks alongside more conventional musical forms, for instance. Structurally, too, game soundtracks are making a difference to the way the music industry is configured, not just in relation to cross-promotional campaigns and the success of bands whose songs are featured in popular games, but also as fresh licensing deals are brokered (Kärjä, 2008). Nowadays, the music licensed specifically for use in games is often compiled into boxsets to provide additional revenue to offset the high development costs of the games themselves. A three-disc compilation of songs from Grand Theft

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Auto: San Andreas, for instance, was released through Interscope Records in 2004 and featured tracks by the likes of James Brown, Public Enemy and Willie Nelson, and the GTA franchise has spawned several subsequent albums from Epic/Sony Music Entertainment. By the early 2010s the move towards social and mobile gaming also opened up new direct-to-consumer deals where tracks within games could be downloaded immediately, mirroring the already established digital distribution channels available through games like Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Singstar (explored below). As for the agreement struck between Harmonix, MTV Games and Apple Corps for The Beatles: Rock Band game, licensing was complicated by the fact that minor variations in these songs had to be cleared as a result of the gameplay functions, such as slowing parts of the song down as the player failed to keep time with the music. When music itself is the game, there are clearly a number of new issues up for grabs.

MUSIC AS GAMES In 2002, the Japanese games company Sega released Rez for the PlayStation 2, with a high-definition (HD) rerelease in 2008 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game is set in a futuristic environment of simple, wire-framed graphics and polygonal objects that glow and pulse, recalling the luminescent gaming universe represented in the film Tron (1982). Gameplay-wise, Rez requires the elimination of incoming enemies as they defend an arcane computer system. In traversing this cyberspace network, players are tasked with negotiating five levels of increasing difficulty through which they are given clues as to the nature of the being that resides at the core of the system. To an extent, a fairly standard space shooter, then, but for one important factor: the music. Named after a track by the British electronica band Underworld, and inspired by the medical condition of synaesthesia (where one type of stimulation such as sound may elicit the sensation of another, such as colour), Rez is driven by five electronic music scores specially composed by wellknown electronic dance musicians such as Ken Ishii, Coldcut and Adam Freeland. A key element of the gameplay is that a palette of sonic events is triggered by the player’s actions. Hence, shooting an enemy synchronously generates percussive sounds aligned to the tempo of the background track. The overall effect is that of an evolving soundscape where the pace and tempo of the game are locked to the characteristics of the sound and where the player feels like they are co-producing the track and the visuals with the designers (Brown, 2008). Indeed, according to the game’s designer, Tetsuya Mitzuguchi, Rez aspired to the sensorial experiences of early 1990s rave

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culture, particularly its potent meshing of rhythm, dance and pleasure (Mizuguchi, 2007). To play Rez is to perform its music, and although the game inhabits a modern history of ‘rhythm action’ games that includes basic memory-response toys such as Simon (1978), it also highlights the pleasures that games can afford when the performance of musical events is incorporated into digital play (Svec, 2008). Video game scholars tell us that play is, indeed, fundamental to the experience of gaming: fundamental enough for a whole branch of ludology to develop in order to explain it (Frasca, 2003). Drawing upon the classical ideas of Huizinga and Callois, ludologists have long argued that video games are complex sets of computer-based activities that revolve around interaction with rules and obstacles, the overcoming of which engenders pleasure in the participant. Gratification is usually expressed in and through the body of the player, either as physiological effects associated with success, failure and excitement, or through participatory bodily engagements (Lahti, 2003). These range from the manipulation of gamepads and frantic button mashing to the waving of remote controllers and, with the rise of motion-sensing peripherals such as Xbox’s Kinect system, complete bodily movements and spoken commands.

Rhythm–Action Games A number of rhythm–action games have established themselves in the gaming landscape, predicated on musicking bodies being enrolled into the game in this way. Perhaps the most well-known example is Guitar Hero, which had a significant impact on gaming and music cultures between 2005 and 2012. In an increasingly overcrowded market, sales declined thereafter. The game takes place in the simulated space of a live gig in which players respond to on-screen icons that represent the song’s guitar score in a scrolling format by pressing buttons on a plastic guitar-shaped controller. This replicates the action of fretting and strumming strings to coincide with the soundtrack, which itself reacts by playing back more or less smoothly depending on the player’s skill. When the player misses a note or does not fret in time, the guitar’s sound falters and de-aligns with the rest of the track, a squeal of feedback signifying the mistake. If repeated the song comes to an abrupt halt and the crowd howls its derision. Conversely, if the player accompanies the band in perfect time the virtual crowd cheers its approval. Points are won by the unbroken and successful completion of the track, which can be converted into virtual capital to obtain further gigs and upgrades to the player’s avatar or equipment. Additional features include a whammy bar that can be activated for pitch bends and extra applause,

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in-game mixing consoles and download stores for additional tracks. A later edition of Guitar Hero added support for drums and vocals with appropriate controllers and instrument parts. Commercially, Guitar Hero, as well as related games such as Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution, Singstar and Lips, provided a significant boost to the music industry at a time of declining physical output, with the Guitar Hero franchise reputedly chalking up over $2 billion worth of sales in the period up to 2009 (Carless, 2009). Like CDs, in fact, the gains made by the recording sector were based primarily on the selling of repertoire it already owned, re-commodified through back-end royalties and sync rights, which allow the licence holder to synchronize the music with other visual media (Masson, 2008). As a result, by 2008, record companies were queuing up to have their artists’ back catalogues licensed for popular titles and deals were struck for special versions featuring artists like Aerosmith, Metallica, Lady Gaga and Green Day. The impact on these artists’ conventional record sales is not entirely clear, but as digital distribution became viable and lucrative in the early 2010s, record companies were more energetic in using games as both a supplementary form of cross-promotion and a means for the dissemination of fresh material. Hence, in 2008, Guns N’ Roses’ single ‘Shackler’s Revenge’ was released through Rock Band 2 a month before the album on which it featured. Tessler notes, in this connection, how gaming giants like Electronic Arts (EA) have continued to ‘exploit new distribution channels for music where the music industry itself has failed to uncover them’ (2008: 20). This she likens to the way Apple positioned iTunes as a legitimate alternative to piracy based on a convenience model of single-click purchasing.10 Indeed, by the late 2000s games companies were opening their own download stores to allow players to build playlists and purchase additional digital content, while spin-off games expanded the music genres covered by rhythm–action games beyond rock and heavy metal music. In the case of DJ Hero, players manipulate a mixer and two turntables to simulate scratching, cueing, mixing and crossfading of well-known tracks in the electronic dance music genre. With Virtual Maestro, on the other hand, players use the game controller as a baton to conduct a virtual orchestra. The cultural prominence of rhythm–action games has, somewhat unsurprisingly, led to a backlash in the form of attacks both on the credibility of the artists featured and on the whole notion of gaming as an impoverished façade of musicality. In an echo of earlier panic discourses around games, critics have argued that, far from enhancing musical competences, games like Guitar Hero are an infantile distraction that have undermined core musical literacies. Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, for instance,

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stated in 2009 that Guitar Hero was a disincentive for young people to engage with ‘real’ music, arguing: ‘if they [his children] spent as much time practising the guitar as learning how to press the buttons they’d be darn good by now’ (Masters, 2009: n.p.). Other commentators have channelled the precepts of mass culture critique in characterizing players as duped into indulging in an illusion of participation while pandering to the banality of mass consumption (Miller, 2012). Academic commentators such as Pichlmair and Kayali have offered additional support for a musical distinction between the restrictive linearity of games and the expressive conditions of ‘real’ composition because: Rhythm games offer little freedom of expression apart from the prerogative to perform while playing. They strictly force rules on the player on how she has to react to a specific stimulus displayed on screen or communicated by sound. Unlike active score music, players are not building their own environment of sound. Players achieve a score and beat the challenges of the game. All rhythm games are linear in their setup … They reduce the risk of experimenting … they also reduce the freedom of expression … the player indulges in the illusion of control while in fact the game controls most of the actions and their outcomes. (2007: 426, 429)

One problem, here, is that such characterizations rest on a very limited and dichotomous version of musicality and non-musicality, ignoring the relatively rule-bound nature of all forms of musical interaction and what the acquisition of musical skills (including performance) typically involves. For a start, as Shultz (2008) notes, while games like Guitar Hero do not formally employ traditional Western ideas of notation or instrumentation, they still demand of players a conceptual understanding and set of physical skills that correspond to musical attributes – timing, rhythm and sequential reading, for instance. Like formal musical learning processes, in general, rhythm–action games also encourage players to accrete bodily skills in myriad acts of repetition, adding in more and more complexity with the tasks as they progress through different levels. The gaming interface is critical here in two respects. Firstly, because it maps musical time to physical space, notes that appear longer on screen have to be interpreted as such in duration terms. This is not a convention in traditional Western notation, but it is one that chimes with modern digital composition techniques that use MIDI data and which structure musical learning in digital environments (see Chapter 3) (Shultz, 2008). With the latest developments in motion-sensitive hardware, it is interesting to note, here, the convergence of haptic peripherals with their ‘real’ counterparts,

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further blurring the distinction between gaming and orthodox musicality. In Rock Band 3, for instance, the ‘pro mode’ features a 17-fret guitar controller with pluckable strings, while games like Rocksmith have gone a step further and allowed players to plug in their own electric guitars to take the place of the peripheral – truly a case of the convergence of both technical interfaces and musical literacies. Secondly, players are prompted to engage in a number of performative acts, including tilting the guitar, fretting the buttons and activating the whammy bar, that are characteristic of popular music conventions in general, particularly those enacted in live rock settings. This performative element gives a clue as to why Guitar Hero has been such a popular franchise and why (at time of writing) it has been given a refresh and reboot by UK-based company Freestyle Games. In this latest iteration, the perceived live element is enhanced by first-person game mechanics that place the player on stage in front of filmed footage of an audience (rather than a digital rendering of the audience) and surrounded by filmed footage of band members (rather than avatars of band members). Play well and the audience joins in a sing-a-long, holding up adoring banners. Play badly and the audience will boo and the drummer will glare at the player accusingly.11 In being interpellated as a band member, the player’s actions become the object of evaluation and scrutiny by the game’s representations of an internal collective, as well as (potentially) flesh-and-blood friends, family and colleagues competing alongside the player or watching the gameplay in domestic or public settings. This is why performance in Guitar Hero is based upon a potent doubling. On the one hand, there are obvious pleasures in practices of identification and fantasy, where players try on the identities and avatars of accomplished musicians as they ‘rock out’. As one commentator puts it: ‘there are moments in the best songs, when you forget you’re playing a plastic guitar in front of a TV screen’ (Stuart, 2015: n.p.). Indeed, because the gaming self is also an overtly role-playing self, it is possible to inhabit what Juul (2005) calls the ‘half real’ spaces of play, where to ‘be’ a rock musician in the game is to be caught in an intermediary space, part fictional and part real. Players are invested in the gaming outcomes precisely because, while they understand gameplay as play, they are willing to collapse provisionally some of the boundaries between player and character, inside and outside, real and unreal, fantasy and reality. In these fusions, the joys of immersion shade into what Gee (2003) calls a ‘third being’, a new creation that sits between the player and the fictional character and over whose actions they have control.12

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On the other hand, and similar to karaoke, games like Guitar Hero intersect with the dynamics of collective experience and, in many respects, come to life when played in front of others. It is not unusual, at least in Europe, the United States and parts of East Asia, for social gatherings, office parties, conferences and pub outings to be centred around these games, while public gameplay also takes the form of tournaments and competitions. These are forms of ‘mediated commonality’ as understood by Hesmondhalgh (2013: 130), where the pleasures of playing and watching become the catalysing force for social group relations, experiences and identities. For many teenagers, dance games like Dance Dance Revolution, where players position their feet and bodies in response to on-screen directions, have become integral to everyday sociability, with friends gathering in private (bedrooms) and public (arcade) spaces to impress each other by perfecting their moves (Demers, 2006).13 Camaraderie is generated through music and movement in that the body is opened to sensorial immersion, registering the music through the dancing body, as well as to intersubjectively shared experiences. All of which is to say that even if there remains specific differences in the kinds of literacies and skills exercised in rhythm–action games compared with traditional forms of virtuosity, these play-based mediations of sociality certainly problematize assumptions about authentic musicality, opening up important questions about musical interaction when performing within digitally mediated environments (Collins, 2013). They also give the lie to the image of the gamer as a dysfunctional loner associated with first-person shooters. Indeed, a key development in gaming cultures, in general, over the last few years has been the advent of online gaming communities and the formation of gaming groups that play together synchronously (Taylor, 2014). Miller (2012) is right, in this context, to update the hard distinction between listening and playing in Barthes’ 1970 lament that ‘musica practica’ – the visceral and muscular engagements of the amateur musician – had been undermined by the passive action of listening to recorded music. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that the notions of playing and listening have themselves become extended into diffuse practices, many of them digitally mediated, that undermine normatively coded distinctions between production and consumption, real and authentic, live and mediated. In other words, inasmuch as players of games like Guitar Hero are performing, playing and listening to tracks at the same time, these games gesture towards new ways of doing music that destabilize the ideal of unmediated creative artistry associated with many of the rock genre clichés covered in the game itself (Frith, 1996).14

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Indeed, perhaps we need to take this a step further. To judge these games according to an original, seemingly straightforward referent – playing music – misses the point about the distinctive pleasures of ‘gaming’ music, the uniqueness of game logics and mechanics, and what it is to play (Taylor, 2014). This is what Juul calls ‘gameness’ (see Buckingham, 2006). For as video games begin to lead the way in contemporary media and leisure culture, they are developing their own characteristic forms of musical interaction that push production and consumption into new territories. Not just games as music, in other words, but music as games. The extraordinary growth of mobile music applications demonstrates this shift away from simulating what it is to play music towards the opening up of algorithmically driven musical objects with game-based interfaces unique to those games. Here, the development of music apps represents a fundamental twist in the story of digital music production, not just because apps potentially extend the historical process whereby powerful, relatively cheap, musicmaking capabilities are put in the hands of those who would not consider themselves musicians (albeit constrained by conditions of access, including leisure time, and the acquisition of digital hardware in the first place), but because they transform the very idea of the instrument, what is required to make music, and where it can happen. To take a few examples, Brian Eno’s touch-based trio of adaptive audio apps – Trope (2009), Scape (2012) and Bloom (2008) – run on mobile devices with Apple’s iOS and are marketed as part compositional tool, part experimental art experience. Typically, users select specific ‘scenes’ and ‘moods’ which they alter in real time by moving their fingers across the device surface or by tapping the screen to trigger and assemble various samples. With the interactive music video game Elektroplankton (2005), on the other hand, players use a stylus to select visual objects in order to generate ambient soundscapes via 10 mini-game interfaces. In the ‘volvoice’ mode, for instance, players are able to record up to eight seconds of sample material, which they can manipulate by interacting with the control pad. Meanwhile, at the higher reaches of the music industry, with Björk’s app Biophilia (2011), the digital convergence of gaming, listening, distributing, promoting and playing is complete. Heralded as the first ‘app album’, Biophilia takes the form of a series of in-built gaming interfaces and instrument designs for mobile platforms that encourage players to interact with the album’s songs through touch. In some cases, players rework the existing material and generate new compositions; in others they embark on a series of mini-games, the outcomes of which change the percussion, duration or sequence of the songs.15 In Biophilia’s ‘Hollow’ app, for instance, the interface is configured as an organic drum machine, where the triggering units are digital representations of DNA material. In each case, conventions of

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musicking have been reconfigured to meet the ever more intimate foldings of devices and bodies, where to play is also to recruit the body’s senses in order to game, consume and listen in newly rendered digital environments.16 Finally, as smartphones become increasingly ‘location-aware’ through Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and ubiquitous mobile technologies like Wi-Fi, these apps are attaching layers of digital information to the relationship between users and places. The advent of always-on networked protocols affords service providers immense power to collect increasingly precise data on where, who and how users are using their products, giving rise to concerns about privacy as well as a new set of terminologies around the ‘informatisation of space’ (Burrows and Beer, 2013: 75). But it also opens up diverse possibilities for users to shape their sonic environments as they react to events mediated through their devices (Hjorth, 2011). In the case of mobile music apps like Kids on DSP (2009), for instance, users are encouraged to use the built-in sensors of their phones to incorporate sounds from the outside world into minimal techno scores that react to the incoming audio. This takes us back to the themes of Chapter 2, where relations between urban space, digital protocols and users’ actions are transforming mediated subjectivities and experiences.

CONCLUSION: PLAYSUMPTION We are all players now in games, some or many of which the media make. They distract but they also provide a focus … While we can enter media spaces in other ways and for other purposes, for work or for information, for example, while they exist to persuade as well as to educate, the media are a principal site in and through which, in the securities and stimulation that they offer the viewers of the world, we play: subjunctively, freely, for pleasure. (Silverstone, 1999: 66)

If video games are, indeed, the medium of the moment then it is no wonder that they are implicated in transformations in contemporary music culture, in how consumers and musicians access and play with music, as well as how a late capitalist entertainment industry extends its increasingly agile tentacles into new markets. In many ways, games and music represent the current meeting point of a set of diffuse, digitally mediated channels that characterize new media ecologies and which span a whole range of music practices: from the bottom-up actions of users modding their controllers to the uploading of game footage to YouTube; and from fans seeking games as a way to form two-way relations with artists, to the exploitation of new

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distribution networks by the major labels (Newman, 2008).17 Games and gaming interfaces are no longer the poor relation in systems of cultural production, confined to the marginal corners of nerd culture. They are increasingly where the action is. The synergies between games and music are particularly striking in the domain of consumption, where an always-on model of digital culture animates developments in play-based modes of engagement (Molesworth and Denegri-Knott, 2007). Here, video games in their increasingly plural form (AAA console titles and web-based flash games, massively open online worlds and mobile casual games) are techno-cultural mediators that enrol customers into play-driven pleasures and commercial transactions. At the risk of adding in yet another neologism to an already crowded terminological scene – with conjunctive terms such as ‘playbour’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘produser’ (Jenkins et al., 2013) – this is what we might call ‘playsumption’: a play-based mode of consumption activated in the circuits of gaming, where the effusive and corporeal pleasures of participatory action are combined with new models of interaction made possible by the advent of digital technologies. As an increasingly prominent mode of musical engagement, playsumption constitutes a blurring of the lines of production and consumption, generating new revenue and marketing streams on the back of game-based models of content provision in the convergent spaces of new media. Playsumption exploits and enhances entrenched logics of what Castronova (2005: 170) calls an ‘economics of fun’, where acquiring desirable objects and experiences map onto macro-level systems and structures that support the economy (see also Campbell, 1987). In a sense, then, ‘playing music’ has come to mean something more than activating a playback device, forming a band, picking up an instrument or jamming. As the channels of popular music consumption have themselves become more nimble and pluralized, so our conventional notions of what it is to be musically engaged are also changing. Just as gaming changes what it means to be musical, so it changes what the act of consumption consists of. Hence, the advent of micro-payments for in-game goods, services and add-ons, such as the downloading of virtual costumes for avatars in the case of Guitar Hero, shows how new media consumption practices are potentiated when combined with play. As the industry deals with a relative decline in physical sales, quick-play portable music games represent a set of new exchanges that commodify play in the digitally soaked spaces and temporalities of everyday life, where gaming might be to fire up an app quickly in order to snatch a few minutes of pleasure during commuter time.

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As for where all this might be heading (with the caveat that futurology is always a perilous exercise), swift changes in the format of video games will likely accompany transitions in related practices of playing that will continue to reshape what musicking is, who participates and how. While the smartphone, laptop and tablet are still dominant hardware platforms, the advent of consumer-level ‘virtual reality’ headsets targeted at gamers opens up potential new ways of integrating spatialized audio into multi-sense environments that fulfil the utopian aspirations of games like Rez. Potential spin-offs including the live, 360 degree, streaming of concert footage, realtime interactions with musicians, gestural music-making using motion sensor feedback controllers, the integration of VR into music production software, and the possibility of working with other musicians within the VR environment, are all scenarios that could represent the next lurch forward for an industry still looking to monetize an increasingly convergent, multimedia entertainment experience. Whether the VR hype is yet another false dawn undermined by negative user experiences and practicalities (like motion sickness) remains to be seen. But the fact that the big digital players have acquired companies developing these VR systems – Facebook in the case of Occulus Rift – demonstrates the weight and expectation of capital behind the ‘next big thing’. The implications for how scholars will study games and music in the future are vast, not least in relation to how to get at music in action, what form an academic or ethnographic gaze might take and the continued analytical leverage of concepts like embodiment, identity, liveness, performance and authenticity. In the meantime, there are grounds to remain optimistic about the future of digital games and game-based interactions. For, on the one hand, as a relatively young media form (at least compared with movies and music) games are a long way from fulfilling their potential, not least because a huge part of the industry is risk averse, prone to misogynistic stereotypes and the churning out of violent, formulaic, testosterone-saturated franchises. On the other hand, as gaming cultures and gamers diversify, and as the technologies available to design games become cheaper and more accessible, so the possibilities for exploring the more innovative, progressive and experimental dimensions of games increase (Wilson, 2007).18 Despite resistance to demographic and formal diversification among a particularly regressive faction of privileged, white young males, the gaming field – particularly at the DIY, small-scale end – is opening up to new voices, visions and subject positions, including those from the LGBT communities (Keogh, 2013). The challenge, here, notwithstanding complex overlaps with the highly capitalized mainstream industry, will be for the independent games sector to maintain sufficient structural and aesthetic autonomy to nurture experimentation,

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diversity and inclusivity, and that is already paying dividends with so-called ‘art’ games like The Stanley Parable (2011), Flow (2006), Braid (2008), Dear Esther (2008) and even more mainstream games like The Last of Us (2013), a survival horror game where one of the main protagonists, through backstory and dialogue, is revealed to be gay. There is clearly a lot at stake in where games go next, but one thing is for sure: the fates of music and games have never been so closely bound and the nature of their relationship will define the shape of contemporary culture for years to come.

NOTES 1 The term ‘digital games’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘video games’, although, as Kerr (2006) notes, the term ‘video game’ tends to emphasize visuality at the expense of the cross-medial and computational elements inferred by ‘digital games’. The term ‘video games’ still has greater symbolic and historical resonance in popular discourses, however, as a shorthand for rule-based computational artefacts of a certain type, and it is for this reason that the chapter will be using this term more liberally. 2 This is, indeed, a burden that games have shared with ‘rebellious’ rock music, and it is interesting to note how official discourses have constructed the teenage bedroom as a highly charged space of secretive, corrupted and uncontrollable youth in this respect. 3 In this case, the British pop singer Lily Allen was involved in the design of parts of the game. 4 As the LRB critic John Lanchester wrote of the game Bioshock in 2009, it is ‘visually striking, verging on intermittently beautiful, also violent, dark, sleep-troubling, and perhaps, to some of its intended audience, thought-provoking’ (Lanchester, 2009: 18). Throughout this piece, Lanchester makes a claim for the aesthetic qualities of specific games, evoking romantic ideals of ‘genius’ for designers like Shigeru Miyamoto and the potential for the medium to offer users new forms of creativity and agency. 5 This is reflected in a spate of popular and academic publications with titles such as The Art of Video Games: From Pac-man to Mass Effect (Melissinos and O’Rourke, 2012). At recent games conferences I have noted the regular citations of the following games: Doom, Quake, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Civilization IV, Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid, the Final Fantasy series, Space Invaders, Pac-man, In the Shadow of Colossus, Portal, Half-Life, Mass Effect 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto IV. Clearly, like all canons this list translates the tastes of certain well-positioned social groups with high levels of cultural capital who are able to shape what is considered worthy of intellectual appreciation. And it is interesting that the grounds on which this canon is forming rests on similar principles (formalism, avant-garde aesthetics, challenging storylines) to that in other high art forms.

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6 Each tone could be shaped and processed using a variety of filters and primitive sampling capabilities and extended the palette of sounds available to composers (Collins, 2008). But such machines had limited storage and processing power and, in any case, throughout the 1980s, audio was often the lowest priority in the chain of coding tasks and was normally allocated only 10% of the game’s memory. 7 FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis was a form of synthesis developed by John Chowning at Stanford University between 1967 and 1968, where the sound of a waveform is modulated by the signal of another, resulting in a more complex tone. Its use in popular music was widespread, especially with the generation of new digital synthesizers in the mid 1980s such as the Yamaha DX7. 8 In other words, the romanticization of the early digital past only makes sense because of conditions in the late digital present in that an image of a techno-cultural past is used to comment on and criticize current developments: in this case, the overly perfect, cold and clinical qualities of the digital. Hence, in an ironic twist, new software plug-ins and software synths that run on brand-new computers are being coded to emulate the sounds of old sound chips. 9 Indeed, in this sense, orchestrated video game music is closer to middle-brow forms such as Broadway musicals: positionally homologous to the commercial logics of mass markets, despite its increasingly hybrid status. 10 It is also worth noting that Electronic Arts has, in the past, attempted to integrate vertically the business of music and gaming through corporate partnerships with publishing companies like Cherry Lane on the basis of producing new music and signing emerging talent (Tessler, 2008). 11 The game even attempts to generate stage fright with a build-up that includes the player walking backstage past stage hands and members of the band psyching themselves up for the big performance. 12 We certainly need to avoid those one-sided celebrations of ‘virtual identity’ that assume that offline traits and subject positions can be easily shed and remade. As Taylor puts it: ‘Work by scholars like Lori Kendall (2002), and Lisa Nakamura (1995) have [sic] made important contributions by highlighting the ways things like race, gender, class, and powerful offline inequalities continued to exert themselves in important ways in these new spaces’ (2010: 373). 13 Updating the historical form of dance manuals that showed where dancers should put their feet, these games develop bodily competences in the context of online and offline communities of practice, including young people’s social gatherings. Incidentally, Demers argues that choices map onto sub-cultural affiliations and strategies, particularly affirmation of underground tastes. 14 Or as Miller puts it: ‘A mass-market video game that simulates the performance of authentic rock music potentially undoes all that authenticating work, devaluing the repertoire’s subcultural capital. Musical works that formerly represented creative genius, technical mastery, and sincere commitment become “easy, hollow, and accessible”’ (2012: 99).

MUSIC AND GAMES 171 15 The Biophilia project has since expanded into wider educational spaces in the form of the Biophilia Educational Programme, an interactive learning programme drawing together music and science, which has recently been incorporated into Nordic curricula. Lest we assume that this is all about software, however, in the case of Yamaha’s hand-held hardware instrument, Tenori-On, a grid of buttons is programmed to light up and trigger various sounds in response to the musician’s inputs, again borrowing from the interactive dynamics and design interfaces associated with games. 16 The advent of iPhone-only performers like Stanford’s iPhone Orchestra is merely one outcome of these processes of convergence, and while many apps still approximate the look of their hardware analogues (such as drum machines), many are based on new imaginings of what a gamified musical interface could be and do. 17 Sometimes monetizing user-generated content associated with participatory culture, we might add. 18 These include Twine, a simple tool which allows designers to build text-based adventures on the Web and whose leading developers are gay or transgender and heavily engaged with minority social issues.

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‘

Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it, Cross it, crack it, switch – update it, Name it, rate it, tune it, print it, Scan it, send it, fax – rename it, Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it, Turn it, leave it, start – format it. Technologic, technologic, technologic, technologic. (‘Technologic’, Daft Punk, 2005)

’

The process starts with a vague and somewhat implausible idea. My honours course, ‘Popular Music, Technology and Society’, attempts to understand how digital technologies and popular music commute. What if we explored this theme in a piece of music and performed it? Would students be interested in making music, as opposed to subjecting it to sociological categories, theories and concepts that are essentially discursive? Would they be keen to engage in some actual musicking as opposed to talk about musicking? Sociologists are hardly well known for their engaging compositions (have you listened to any of Adorno’s works)? Some of my disciplinary colleagues still harbour the idea that they are hard scientists, that ways of knowing beyond quantitative measurement, even ‘pure theory’, are at best suspect, at worst frivolous and damaging. But the course has encouraged close scrutiny of musical forms on the understanding that they provide detailed insights into relations between cultural texts, technological change and social conditions. And, in any case, not only has cultural sociology undergone something of an aesthetic turn recently, but also we have collectively compiled a Spotify playlist. So, at least I know that the students are skilled curators and listeners. To my surprise, seven students sign up: seven eager participants grabbed by the idea that something interesting might flow from making some music. I’m all the more surprised because this dimension of the course is voluntary: making music is entirely unproductive as far as the formal course grade is concerned. Yet, as soon as I float the idea I worry that I’ve been seduced by ideals of music-making. That what will begin as inspiring – the romantic

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vision of composition – will soon turn out to be tedious and difficult or, worse, turn students off of music altogether. We’ve had the dizzy ‘let’s form a band’ moment, but there’s hard work to follow. We’ve barely 6 weeks to pull together a 15-minute composition and be prepared to perform it live in front of an audience at the School of Social and Political Science. I’ve already committed us to the event; it’s in the university calendar, so we will have to perform something. To make matters worse, none of us are trained for this. I’ve been in a few bands and make electronic music in my spare time, one of the group members (we discover later) is able to play the piano and took some lessons when she was younger, and another is classically trained. But we have no experience of anything on this scale, at this speed and in this form. Indeed, a couple of the students confess that they’ve never picked up an instrument, let alone performed music. I’m both terrified and enlivened by this idea: the category of musician is a pretty arbitrary construct isn’t it? In our first meeting, I confidently announce that while at this precise moment we have nothing but a blank page, that in six weeks we will have some thing, and that’s part of the wonders of the creative process. A thing will happen. We’ll share, collaborate, mess up, hone, sculpt, backtrack, argue, discuss, shape, browse, collect, discard, despair, and out of this mess will emerge a piece of music. It matters less at this point whether the music will be any good because the whole rationale of the exercise is to share the experience of making a musical work in a way that exemplifies something about the course. In conjunction with myriad non-humans, we’ll materialize a new work. And then we’ll rematerialize it, make it over with co-present others in a large room. We put our doubts aside. Yes, we’re all amateurs, but we’re also something akin to ‘new amateurs’ with powerful technologies and a whole history of popular music at our fingertips. We’re seven strangers, lumped together with nothing but a loose directive, a love of music and a fast-approaching deadline. And there’s nothing quite like a deadline (much more than inspiration) to turn a fuzzy proposition into something tangible. As soon as an objective beckons, action appears. So, in the early days we hold regular meetings, we fire emails back and forth and suppress our mild panic. We start a Facebook page, which has a discussion section, a place to upload files and scribble notes. ‘Digitus for the win!’ I post exuberantly. Two of the group members ‘like’ the post. A more sober follow-up post looks ahead to the next meeting: Aim of the session: to get some quality samples down and to start creating our score as well as source images, inspiring ideas, etc. Bring a laptop, iPad or whatever you have to hand.

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This turns out to be wildly optimistic, primarily because we’ve no idea what ‘creating our score’ actually means. Do we divide up different sections of the piece into seven, so that one section is written by each of us, and then lump them together, the sonic equivalent of the surrealist game exquisite corpse? The result would surely end up sounding random and fragmentary. Do we allocate people different tasks according to interest and expertise: someone to source images, write a melody, put together a few chords, find the equipment, record the audio, make the film, and so on? But that means only one person gets to do the actual music. Do we arrange a spontaneous jam, put us in a room with a bunch of gadgets and see what happens? It sounds very appealing, but we don’t have the luxury of weeks of long sessions to bounce ideas around: we have five sessions of, perhaps, one or two hours’ duration. In the end, we agree that we need something like a guiding idea to provide some shape to the project. Some ideas are considered but discarded, others stick. One that sticks has something to do with touch: touch and technology, to be more precise. What if we stripped the digital back down to the digit, reuniting fingers and technologies to the origins of counting? Various images flow, aided by frantic Google searches: fingers flipping beads across an abacus, for instance. Maths and music are close bedfellows, as we know. I immediately go online and order a toy abacus with the dim notion that we might somehow record or use it (we never do). The discussion widens and we have fun playing with the idea that the history of music, of humans and instruments of all kinds, is driven by the actions of musicking digits; that there is a contact zone between the digit and the machine in which a transference of energy takes place. Plucking, strumming, striking, clapping, bashing, stroking, slapping, fingering, fretting, mashing, sliding, opening, pressing, scrolling, flipping, pinching, holding, conducting – is the baton not an extension of the finger, after all? The voice might be a special case, but if the voice can be considered an instrument, is it not also mediated by the microphone, and therefore the holding of the microphone, or indeed the digital manipulation of those effects settings, mixer buttons, faders, and so on, that will change how the voice sounds? These actions all have digital lives in ways that move us from bodies to surfaces to moments. And while these are corporeal actions, they are also, increasingly, coded actions. The movement of our fingers when we press a keyboard or pluck a guitar string is likely to find a digital counterpoint as a series of ones and zeros somewhere in the signal

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chain, if not in the final act of listening. Digits and digits. Touch–not touch. Hard–soft. Long–short. On–Off. Or to evoke a binary terrifyingly pertinent to our current predicament: sound–not sound. To get things done in digits, there has to be a surface action that makes things tangible through mechanisms of abstraction. Then we broaden the idea: can’t the whole history of humanity be sighted (if that’s not to mix our sense metaphors) through the microcorporeal actions of the finger and the hand? Wasn’t the First World War touched off by the actions of a triggering finger? Aren’t wars waged not just at the level of political economy, territory and global conflict, but in the fleshy actions of button pushing, cannon loading, declaration signing, map drawing, and so on? We are suddenly infused with imagery: Michelangelo’s depiction of the deity’s finger in The Creation of Adam, the alien’s touch as an act of healing in ET, the primate striking the rock with a stick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is fingers and hands, in close conjunction with their non-human delegates and supporters, that execute, write, weave, hammer, invent, applaud, direct, shoot, punish, and so on. Nowadays, we surmise, our fingers have become enrolled not just into strategies of always-on communicative acts like scrolling, clicking, and so on, but massive acts of surveillance and scrutiny. As I write this, I learn that unwary Japanese tourists are being told to think twice before posing with their fingers in the customary ‘V sign’ position because HD cameras used by malevolent third parties might be able to ‘steal’ their fingerprints. But there’s a lighter side, too: the hand that steals can also be the hand that heals. The finger that accuses can also be the one that assures and offers hope; that pats, caresses and supports; that helps a stranger to their feet or leaves an unused train ticket at the gate for a stranger to use. The double meaning of touched is a potent reminder of what a helping hand can do. Can history not be read as a series of meeting points and frictions of localized touching that bring myriad things of diverse moral nature into being? Interesting as this is as an intellectual exercise, it is far too grandiloquent for a 15-minute score, of course. Aware of the need to reduce the scope somewhat, I compile a message in the note-taking app Evernote. Written on the fly, tapped out on my laptop and quickly uploaded to the ‘cloud’, it reads: Idea of haptic digital: hands on as opposed to idea of digital as ‘cold’. Musica Practica! Build around D chord (D for digit) (major, minor, diminished, seventh, augmented, accidental). A drone? Quadrophonic speakers: 5 musicians in each.

AFTERWORD 177 Motif of the finger: touch, middle finger, gesture, point, teach, victory sign, a-ok gesture, thumb in Iran/Iraq, China photo sign, etc. incorporate into visuals? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_finger. Use Native Instruments The Finger? Gestures with visuals and clips: communicating, scrolling, pointing, signing, finger clicking, cursing, cutting, punishing, typing, shaking, strumming, picking, etc. Close Encounters, culturally specific gestures with fingers, the 303 example (extemporising fingers), twisting, etc. Perhaps music made just using fingers? Clicking, clapping, etc.? Video footage: vidibox, source clips from relevant movies – matrix, etc.

Scraps like these are quickly assembled, left to foment and circulate. What begins as a slim thread starts to thicken and excite. We agree that in the next hour-long session we’ll attempt to record as much as we can using only the sounds of our fingers and hands. What follows is a fun and somewhat frenetic session held in a tiny room next to the school’s administrative offices (as good citizens we warn our neighbours that we’ll be making some noise). The course tutor, himself a generous volunteer on this project and an experienced film maker, brings his digital audio recorder. We clap, rub, click and do party tricks with our fingers; someone uses their fingernails to produce what sounds like the kind of micro-clicks one hears in electronic music. One of the group members types on his laptop and we record the ‘click clacking’ of the keys. I flick the outside of my cheeks while manipulating the size and shape of my mouth to make a watery ‘plop’. Then two of the women group members, one white British the other African American, provide spoken samples of relevant terms: ‘1’, ‘0’, ‘error’, ‘data’, ‘digit’, ‘click’, ‘flick’, ‘point’, ‘gesture’, ‘clap’, ‘flap’, ‘wave’, ‘faster’. These vocal snippets are delivered in something like the laconic style of an ’80s female pop singer and make for an interesting play of power, technology and emotion. They gesture, perhaps obliquely, towards gendered and racialized histories of marginalization and appropriation. The course tutor monitors our finger sounds in his headphones, adjusting levels, requesting a retake, placing the microphone in different locations for a cleaner recording. At the end of the session we have around 60 viable samples, all recorded as wav files. After the session I open a shared Dropbox account and call it ‘PMTS Performance Group’. It’s a digital repository in which we’re able to post images, sounds and other fragments, a bridge for members and storehouse of digital detritus. Some of the folders are still there today, a couple of years later. In the folder named ‘audio’ are samples called ‘bong’, ‘hiss-pop-crackle’ and ‘splash’, and a folder in which the fragments from the recording session are located. In that same session, we agree a broad arc to the piece that we hope might represent our idea: we

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work with contrasts, light and dark. A dystopian, almost apocalyptic, movement followed by something more positive and upbeat. While fully cognizant of the catastrophes wrought by nefarious machine–body alliances (nuclear, biological, chemical, and so on), we’d like to finish on a note of optimism for how these alliances might open up new and progressive ways of being. We brainstorm images that might be projected on the screen behind us as we perform. If done right, the visuals could produce a powerful accompaniment to the score. After a couple of weeks, while we have the backbone of the idea, we still have little sense of how we’ll make and perform the piece. At this point we start to make an inventory of our available instruments and gadgets. It’s an important moment because it gives us a sense of how our contact with devices might translate into sound, as well as how we might manage the on-stage logistics. The list includes the following: two iPads, seven smartphones, an 88-key digital piano, a laptop, a drum pad with sampling capabilities, a 66-key MIDI controller keyboard and a ‘Kaossillator’ (a hand-held, touch-based digital synthesizer) and a 12-input channel mixer with on-board 24-bit digital signal processing. The mixer is where we’ll gather all of our sounds, mix them to an appropriate level, tweak their frequencies and give them a spatial location in the mix. In many ways it’s one of the less glamorous devices in any setup but represents the essence of what we’re doing: merging, compressing, layering and positioning multiple sources in order to produce a coherent blend. It’s a hybrid device that combines analogue circuitry with software algorithms, and it’s one of the devices that holds the sounds (and therefore us) together. A true assemblage, in many respects, one that helps bring multiple things together and into being. Next, we add in the software: I possess various DAWs, soft synths and VSTs on my laptop, but the fact that we also possess smartphones gives us considerable latitude for downloading various apps for digital musicking. I post a list of free and cheap apps (all under £5), as if to illustrate that music production is at the same time an act of consumption, and we decide on three. The first is a sampling app called Samplr. Billed as a new kind of instrument for the iPad, Samplr allows users to cue up, alter, generate and mangle six tracks of samples on the fly, using only their fingers. The app combines methods of multi-track layering and sample manipulation with powerful effects and sound filtering algorithms. Individual samples can be combined in groups while the speed, tempo and length of each sample can be adjusted in real time. Very much a performance instrument, in other words. The second is Brian Eno’s app Air, another touch-based app that generates ambient sounds on the basis of Eno’s ideas of generative music.

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Air brings together vocal and piano samples, the parameters of which respond to the user’s gestures as they slide their fingers across a colourful interface. The app borrows some of its operations from the domain of gaming, not least in the way it offers a surface for play where objects can be manipulated within loosely defined parameters. One of the group members who used the app describes the haptic mechanisms needed for its operation: Depending on where the user touches, the sound is different, either higher or lower, and depending on how the user touches makes the sound louder, softer, short or held for a long time.

The third is Propellerhead’s synth app Thor, an iPad version of Reason’s flagship soft synth. Laid out like a hardware synthesizer, the app has an interface comprising rotary knobs, a pitch bend and modulation wheel as well as a routing section that allows sounds to be strung together in sequences. As far as touch dynamics are concerned, an interesting feature of the app is the strum section which cues up layers of synthesized notes to be activated by a stroke of the finger, the final effect being something like a guitar strum. One might imagine that learning to play these instruments will take a bit of time because they have specific interface conventions which govern how to select sounds, alter their parameters and move the various sliders, knobs and buttons. But the students are already equipped with corporeal habits inflected by conventions of touch screen devices; they’ve grown up with them. In two weeks, they’ve become comfortable enough with the basic operations to start generating sounds in our first full rehearsal. In the meantime, I draw a diagram of our setup as a circuit that maps out which cables we’ll need, how many inputs we’ll need for the mixer and how we’ll look ‘on stage’. On paper it looks like a tangled mess. In my own time I start to write some sound beds, or background stems. I open up my DAW of choice, Cubase, and spend around four hours rehearsing the sounds of plug-ins from a recent purchase, Native Instruments’ Komplete 10. It’s a massive suite of soft-synths, samplers, drum machines, effects and piano simulations, and I spend most of that time scrolling through presets, referring to YouTube tutorials and integrating the MIDI keyboard in such a way that it triggers and modifies various parameters of the VSTs in real time. When I finally get around to laying down some background tracks, I attempt to follow our arc by working with contrasts, although it seems harder to write positive material these days. For the darker beds I’ve been listening to the soundtrack to the film Under the Skin, and the lugubrious timbres of the musician, Mica Levi, find their way into the stems. Levi represents only a single item in a larger

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corpus of influences, of course, and I’m conscious that I’m expressing a whole host of intertwining threads that make up my musical habitus: European avant-garde electronic music and cinema, early Intelligent Dance Music (the very term gives away its field position), and the more obscure end of electronic pop. At one point I have about a dozen tabs open on my web browser, all with various music-related websites loaded: music clips, tutorials, discussion groups, and so on. In many respects, the Web has become an additional virtual instrument, as important in the generation of the backing track as the VSTs. By the end of this side-process, I have a number of short ambient soundscapes and a more developed piano piece that uses Native Instruments’ automatic capabilities devised for non-piano players like myself. The idea being that once a user chooses a dominant key the keyboard shows them, via a series of lights situated immediately above the keys, which notes are contained in that key. Alternatively, the same automatic function mutes the notes that are not part of the key, making it impossible to play a ‘wrong’ note. It also maps chord progressions by loading up ready-to-play chord sets which the user can trigger using only a single finger. It’s doubtless a function that many would consider ‘music by numbers’, the piano’s equivalent of Auto-Tune, though it’s a joy for a non-specialist. The piece itself is an ascending run of four chords followed by a descending run of four chords in D minor 7 with two variations meant to act as a determined statement on stepping forward despite dark conditions. We quickly discard the piece, however, when one of the group announces that she can actually play the piano. She’ll come with a sketched-out piece by the next session, so not only does this get me off the hook of looking like the one-finger pianist I am, but also it means we can play this movement live. The new piece is a bright, bouncy tune that works well within the framework of our idea and the student herself makes some suggestions, on Facebook, for how it will fit into the score: I was thinking what could sound quite cool would be for the piano ‘sound’ to start off fairly traditionally piano-like, and then could transform (with the melody staying the same) into more of a technological-sounding voice, before finally being remixed along with some of the sounds from the previous movements for, like, a grand harmony of technology, instruments and fingers!

In rehearsals, we develop this idea in what we think is an interesting way, getting the piano to glitch, bend and warp before returning to something more harmonious and mixed with some of the other instruments. It’ll require me, towards the end of the set, to reach over a cable and manipulate the pitch-bend wheel, which is easier said than done in total darkness, which is how we plan to perform the piece.

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Bands are always subject to relative degrees of contingency and instability and it’s unfortunate that two of the original seven members (members with whom we’ve formed a close bond) are unable to participate any longer. That reduces the student contingent to five, plus myself and the course tutor, who has during this time begun to compile the visual footage. We adapt our plans, make alterations to the setup and move forward. We extend the soundbeds into longer pieces and start to add layers of sound over the top, using our touch-based devices. Every rehearsal is different, every coming together has its own dynamic depending on the delicate dance of planned and unplanned actions. In one Saturday morning session we buy snacks and drinks, it’s a beautiful day and we can see The Pentland Hills from the rehearsal room. Things come together really well and we feel like we’ve moved the performance on significantly. In another, it takes a good hour to set up and our non-humans are pushing back: is that the right cable, why is there no sound, someone trips over a cable, mistakes flourish, batteries run out. On another, an experienced and respected French music sociologist joins us to listen to how we’re doing. Afterwards he tells me how difficult it is to do what we’re doing. Certainly, the piece appears to constantly wrestle control away from us, which means it never quite sounds the same twice in a row. Our touches come in early or late, the mixer is on the wrong setting, which means we can’t hear the Kaossillator, which itself has a tendency to add arbitrary volume or to jump patches. Beats are dropped or added, fingers move more or less quickly across the surface of things, and we hear notes and sounds that shouldn’t be there but have their own haunting quality. Over the course of the rehearsals, we learn to accept these contingencies as part of the process and even embrace them. Prompted by a recent group message, one member recalls it in the following way: Mistakes were seen as possible edits to the piece, and sometimes were even welcome additions. If we thought the piece was complete, another rehearsal could introduce another idea, and as a group we would have to rethink different sections of the piece. I believe if we had another month to continue creating the piece, it probably would have sounded completely different than how it was performed.

Simultaneously and imperceptibly, we learn to ‘friend’ our devices and accept our interdependency with them. As we unpack them, place them on tables, connect them with the various-sized cables and adapters, they no longer have the alien quality they once had. They have broken us in, and vice versa. We learn to live with them and their little quirks. One group member takes the Kaossillator home in order to get to know it and by the next session has found just the right patch and way of playing it. Another

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group member who’ll play the digital drum pad has worked out the precise angle with which to strike the rubber pads to maximum effect, triggering two massive toms and a crash. She also generates the sounds of the vocal samples and finger clicks with the drum pad and it’s interesting to reflect on the multiple foldings of this act: drum sticks, which might be seen as rigidified finger extensions, are used to trigger digital samples of the sounds of our digits. To prepare the samples for the pad, I add compression, a touch of reverb and move the start and end points. It takes a while to get all the samples at a consistent level and order them into kits. For added effect we’ve acquired some drum sticks that light up in the dark on impact. In the meantime, I fire up the Thor app and by manipulating the various parameters I write and save four patches, naming them Digitus 1, 2, 3 and 4. Digitus 4 is a modulating sound using three wavetable oscillators, a low-pass filter and LFO (low-frequency oscillator), with delay. It’s supposed to emulate the sound of a computer’s CPU and it’s the one we end up using. Next, Samplr (the iPad sampling app) is loaded up with six samples, including the ‘click clacks’ of the typing sample, and sounds from additional sources. These include, for added eeriness, a spoken sample recorded from a so-called ‘numbers station’, that is short-wave broadcasts of strings of numbers announced by anonymous sources – remnants of the Cold War believed to be designed for undercover intelligence officers in the field. It’s my job to see that the samples are triggered at the agreed time, though in many rehearsals I forget to trigger the right sample at the right time, so the wrong sample at the wrong time eventually becomes the right sample by default. It’s a careful balance of chaos and order, and too many inconsistencies might mean that the piece disintegrates. To keep us broadly on track the course tutor devises a colour-coded reference sheet in MS Word. Organized into quadrants, the sheet divides the score up into a series of one-line tasks. We joke that the descriptions of our parts (‘goblins, ‘dying computer’, ‘boomtesh’, ‘daisy enters’, ‘baby comes in’) will mean very little to anybody outside the group. We’ve developed our own Digitus project language, it seems, and if language does indeed constitute worlds, would it be a stretch to say that we’re also worlding – constructing a temporary set of boundaries, constraints and networks in which we collectively orient to a shared objective? At some point someone suggests that we might look a bit passive on stage. Despite being dark, there will be the light cast on us by the projection screen and our silhouettes will be visible. After some reflection we decide that for the middle track, which by this point has become a pretty full-on techno piece driven by a 4/4 kick drum and psychedelic synth lines,

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we might drop our instruments, face the audience and click our fingers in a rather stilted, ‘robotic’ style (but we resist the idea of ‘proper dancing’). We like this because the sounds of our ‘real’ fingers will accompany the recorded, digital sounds of our fingers that were up to this point triggered by our fingers. We rehearse this a few times and decide to incorporate this bit of choreography into the performance. It gives us a chance to change the pace a bit, as much of the instrumentation will necessarily drop out: a reminder, too, of the flesh embedded in the electronic circuits. As a final touch we decide to introduce the whole piece not with spoken words, but with one of the group members spelling out ‘DIGITUS’ on an iPad paint app that generates sound in response to touch. In the last week we gather ourselves, and on the night of the performance we meet in the room in which we’re performing a couple of hours before it begins. By this point there’s an almost serene smoothness to the unboxing and placing of the equipment. We’ve become a well-drilled team relatively at ease with where things go and how they connect. The course tutor and I have sourced two hefty PA speakers from the music department that will give the piece added ‘oomph’. I’ve devised a laminated poster to advertise the event – it depicts a cartoon finger pointing outwards from the surface of the poster itself. The video track has been assembled and provides just the kind of complementary backdrop we hoped for. It comprises a mix of chopped-up visual fragments that include street scenes, animated movements and footage from our rehearsals, as well as close-up shots of our fingers playing the instruments. As the course tutor reminds me, however, the video itself ‘is glitchy and freezes quite often’, so the flicker and sway of the visuals is always threatening towards asynchronicity. Last-minute emails, texts and tweets go out and the audience (a wholesome mix of students, staff and interested non-academics) gathers and we execute the piece smoothly, with few dramas or glitches. I do forget to trigger one of the samples at the rehearsed point, but that’s in keeping with how things have gone. A friend of the group records the whole thing on a mobile phone, we take questions from the audience about the piece and then it’s over. Weeks of rehearsals crystallized into a 15-minute performance; thousands of tiny acts of collaboration and sharing bundled into a short presentation. We succeeded in turning a blank page into something that, I think, had merit. It was never about slick performativity in any case, but about exploring what the process of making demands, while illustrating the abundant conjugations of humans and non-humans that must happen for a piece to materialize. I’m surprised that the constituent elements of this making were much more expansive than I’d anticipated, however. We had to care for the piece and allow it to come into being through gentle manipulations.

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We had to nurture the piece, be watchful in its growth. We had to open ourselves to what our devices would demand of us and be patient with them and each other. There was nothing mystical or opaque about this: we had a schedule, a bunch of instruments, an idea and a willingness to share. We made the most of the affordances of the devices in our possession, and we used the digital resources at our disposal: email, the Web, cloud computing, texts, apps, not just to supplement or support our practices, but to allow them to constitute these practices. It just so happens that the driving idea of the piece was an illustration of these very processes. The traces left by Digitus are neither stable nor permanent; they are fluid and elusive. Indeed, from this current moment as I try to reconstruct the process, I find a number of folders with the same title and I have to do some careful cataloguing according to ‘date modified’ and ‘date added’ file descriptors to find them. To open the Cubase files I have to activate the software with a dongle, which I have thankfully not misplaced. That means I can revisit some parts of the piece. Sadly, smartphone footage of the performance is now ‘404’ because the Dropbox group is no longer active: ‘we can’t find what you’re looking for’, Dropbox tells me. We did have plans to post the whole performance on YouTube and one group member even floated the idea of reconvening the band a few weeks later, without an audience, in order to film a better take, but at least one of the group would be back home in the United States by then and the idea is shelved. For a while the project group page remains fleetingly active, but no longer. My memory of the session has to be refreshed and mediated by the digital traces: opening files trigger particular moments, such as a joke, a voice or a personality. Much of the digital layers of our piece are buried deep in file structures that will never be retrieved. The Cubase project folders alone contain scores of support files the function of which I still don’t fully know. Methodologically, to reconstruct all the elements of the work would require an enormous effort of reconstruction that would demand multiple research instruments, among them visual and digital ethnographies, data scraping and textual analysis. But none of these will be able to relay the full complexities of the assembled project. To do so would require an omnipresent mapping exercise of the becoming of the piece and there is so much that would get compressed or elided in that exercise. One of the elisions is power: as the course co-ordinator, a university lecturer and originator of the idea, I’m aware of the power differentials and dynamics that worked themselves in and across the work. Despite all the apparent distributed agency, I can’t in good faith assume the existence of a horizontal model of decision making, an outcome of unbridled cultural democracy: that idea rarely holds true for bands of any shape or form. My

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status as first among equals was undoubtedly accentuated by the fact that I had something of a head start in terms of technical capital, as a part-time hobbyist familiar with the instruments. And then there were the multiple and cross-cutting lines of distinction across gender, race, class and age lines that come into play in social group situations like ours. At an early stage of the project, concerned about my role and the need to avoid any potential disasters, I ask a colleague based in the music department whether he had any advice on best practice in group work of this kind. His suggestion was to take total control like a conductor, to maintain enough coherence and structure in the proceedings to see it through. I consciously tried to avoid playing that role but I suspect my best intentions fell short. Assemblages are social for all that. Finally, I always wanted an afterword to this book to act like a jumpingoff point that would break frame: something more personal, perhaps auto-ethnographic or autobiographical. I considered ways of doing this, such as writing a track from scratch and recording a real-time log of the process, reflecting on a life-threatening illness that decimated many years of my life and the role of music in structuring those years (and not in always positive ways). The idea to reflect on and write up the Digitus project now seems obvious, though it certainly wasn’t the only contender at the beginning. I’m glad it worked out the way it did, though I suspect the account would look very different were it to be written by the students themselves. I write to the members of the group via Facebook to see if anyone has any reflections on the Digitus project that they would like to offer two years on. It’s a long shot, but I’m extremely grateful that one of the group members responds: ‘it seems like it was ages ago’, she says, her typing fingers reuniting us in global digital spaces in order, even temporarily, to share aspects of her experience. I hope, in time, others might also be prompted to return to the project, less to complete the circle than to re-enter it momentarily. Sharing and remembering are surely two of the best things about popular music, technology and society.

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INDEX

AAA games, 148 Aarseth, Espen, 156 Abbey Road, 81, 82 Ableton Live, 75, 86 Acid Pro, 71, 72 acoustics, 7–8 actor network theory, 20–21, 80 Adorno, Theodor, 30–31n2, 104 affordances, 10, 16–18 Afrika Bambaataa, 67, 129 AFX, 135 agency, 7 Air (app), 178–179 Aitken, Matt, 65–66, 134–135 Akai, 68, 91, 131–132 Akrich, Madeline, 108 Albini, Steve, 61 algorithms, 45–47, 51–52 Allen, Lily, 169n3 Althusser, Louis, 122 Amazon, 38 analogue-to-digital converters (ADC), 64, 68 Anderson, Laurie, 135 Angry Birds (video game), 150 Annandale, David, 156 anti-piracy measures, 37–38, 55–56, 59–60 Aphex Twin, 76–77 App Store, 86 Apple, 38–39, 71, 86, 159, 161, 165. See also GarageBand; iPad; iPhone; iPod apps digital music consumption and, 74, 109 digital music production and, 85–86 Digitus project and, 178–179, 182 video games and, 149, 165, 167 Arditi, David, 38–39 Arkette, Sophie, 101 ARPANET, 13 The Art of Noise, 67–68 assemblages definition and concept of, 20–21, 25–26 digital music consumption and, 35, 42–50, 55 digital music production and, 60, 62, 80, 85

Atari, 91, 153 Atkinson, Rowland, 101 Atkinson, Will, 52 Attali, Jacques, 62, 87 Austin, Gene, 125–126 authenticity, 6–7, 61, 121–123, 136 auto-correlation, 135 Auto-Tune, 120, 136–138 automobility, 106 Bach, Glenn, 81 Baehr, Peter, 115 Bajde, Domen, 21 Bandcamp, 35 Barthes, Roland, 74–75, 98, 120, 122–124, 130 Bates, Elliot, 84 Baudrillard, Jean, 140 Baym, Nancy, 44 BBC Radiophonic Workshop, 129 Beach Boys, 155 Beardyman, 142 Beastie Boys, 68 beatboxing, 120, 141–143 The Beatles, 43, 67, 77, 82 The Beatles: Rock Band (video game), 150–151, 159 Becker, Howard, 16, 70 Beer, David, 45, 77, 116 Belinkie, Matthew, 157 Bell, D., 30n1 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 63, 125–126, 145n10 Benjamin, Walter, 62 Bennett, Lucy, 45 Berners-Lee, Tim, 38 Bernhardsson, Erik, 45 Bertelsmann, 38 Bertsch, Charlie, 103 Beyoncé, 121, 135 Bhabha, Homi, 145n12 Bickerton, Emily, 118n4 Bieber, Justin, 53, 138 big data, 56

206

INDEX

Billboard (magazine), 33 Bimber, Bruce, 5 Biophilia (app), 165–166 Biophilia Educational Programme, 171n15 Bioshock Infinite (video game), 155, 169n4 bit-pop, 154–155 Bitcoin, 56 Björk, 81, 86, 165–166 black music, 77, 129–130, 132–133, 143 Blige, Mary J., 129 ‘blockchain’ technologies, 56 Bloom (app), 165 Bloomfield, Brian P., 17 Blumer, Herbert, 18 Blur, 81 Boards of Canada, 35, 42–44, 53 Bolter, David, 18 Born, Georgina, 19, 20, 88–89, 101 Bourdieu, Pierre, 35, 52, 59–60, 158 Boyle, Susan, 48–49 Braid (video game), 151, 168–169 Breen, Marcus, 37 Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, 24, 76 Brown, James, 159 Bryne, David, 67 Buffy, 142 Bull, Michael, 98, 99, 104–107, 111–112, 116 Burkart, Patrick, 57n1 Burroughs, William, 131 Bush, Kate, 67, 76, 131 Byrne, David, 131 C++ (programming language), 62 Cage, John, 131 Caillois, Roger, 160 Call of Duty series (video game), 148, 151 Canniford, Robin, 21 Casio FZ-1, 68 Castells, Manuel, 31n, 36, 71 Castronova, Edward, 167 CDs and CD players, 12–13, 25, 37 Certeau, Michel de, 113 Chab Djenet, 138 Cher, 137, 139 Cherry Lane, 170n10 China, 57n2 chiptune music, 154–155 Chowning, John, 170n7 Church Studios, 81 Classic FM, 158 classical music, 52–53, 157–158

Clayton, Jace, 136 Coldcut, 159 collaborative filtering, 45–47 Collins, Karen, 153 Collins, Phil, 66, 76 Commodore 64, 153 comping, 126 Condry, Ian, 49 Connell, John, 79 console wars, 152–153 Cook, A.G., 78 Cook, Norman. See Fat Boy Slim copyright, 132 Corbin, Alain, 101 Couldry, Nick, 19 Covox, 155 crooning, 125–126 Crosby, Bing, 125–126 crowdsourcing, 49–50 Crypton Future Media, 49, 139 Cubase, 71, 72, 179 Cybotron, 129 Daft Punk, 93n6, 130 Dance Dance Revolution (video game), 161, 164 Danger Mouse, 77 Danielsen, Anne, 24, 76 Darlin, Ilia, 121 Darwin, Erasmus, 138 Davies, Jonathan, 127 Davies, Rik, 129 Dear Esther (video game), 168–169 Death Cab For Cutie, 145n9 deconstructionism, 122–123 Deezer, 39 dehumanization, 77, 130 Demers, Joanna, 170n13 democratization, 61, 86–91 DeNora, Tia, 19, 47, 107, 115 Depeche Mode, 44–45, 65–66, 77 Derrida, Jacques, 122–123 Destiny’s Child, 129 Devine, Kyle, 30–31n2, 88–89 Diamond Disc Phonograph, 124 Diamond, Hannah, 78 Dibben, Nicola, 86 Dickinson, Kay, 137 digital audio workstations (DAWs), 59–60, 62–63, 71–76, 81–85 digital deconstruction, 134–135 digital dislocation, 132–134 digital divide, 53–54, 87

INDEX 207 digital formations, definition and concept of, 4–5, 10–15. See also digital music consumption; digital music production; music technology digital games, use of term, 169n1. See also video games digital music consumption assemblages and, 35, 42–50, 55 current trends in, 54–56 evolution of, 33–34 further topics in, 35–36 impact of Napster and online piracy on, 35, 36–42, 55–56 as performance of taste, 35, 50–54 sharing and, 47–50 See also mobile listening devices; voice and vocal modalities digital music production analogue elements in, 61 assemblages and, 60, 62, 80, 85 democratization and, 61, 86–91 digital music consumption and, 35 Digitus project and, 173–185 historical overview of, 60, 63–71 impact of digital technologies on sound, 60, 76–78 impact of VSTs and DAWs on, 60, 71–76 key issues in, 91–92 logic of practice in, 59–60 scholarship on, 62 spatiality and, 60–61, 79–86 See also voice and vocal modalities digital revolution, 63 Digital Rights Management (DRM), 37–38 digital streaming, 33–34 digital-to-analogue converters (DAC), 64, 68 Digitus project, 173–185 direct democracy, 55–56 distributed ledger technology (DLT), 56 divine vocalities, 144n2 DJ Demarco, 138 DJ Hero (video game), 161 DJ Maryam, 138 Doom (video game), 149 double-tracking, 126 Dovey, Jon, 148 Dowd, Tim, 41 Dr Who (TV programme), 129 Dum Dum Girls, 95n20 Durant, Alan, 10, 63 E-mu Emulator, 68, 131–132 Edison, Thomas, 124, 131

8-bit music, 154–155 8bitpeoples, 155 Eisenberg, Evan, 125 Ek, Daniel, 33, 39 Elder Scroll series (video game), 158 Electric Litany, 83 Electronic Arts (EA), 151, 161 Elektron Monomachine, 78–79 elektronische Musik, 64 Elektroplankton (video game), 165 Elfman, Danny, 151 Elliott, Missy, 129 ELO, 128 EMS, 129 Emulator, 68, 131–132 eMusic, 38 Eno, Brian, 67, 86, 131, 165, 178–179 Epic Records, 159 Eshun, Kodwo, 130 Eurythmics, 81 exoticism, 133 extemporising bodies, 9 Facebook digital music consumption and, 43, 44–45, 48–49 Digitus project and, 174–175, 180, 181, 185 virtual reality and, 168 Fairlight CMI, 67, 71, 131, 134–135 Fat Boy Slim, 70, 135 FIFA 13 (video game), 148 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (video game), 152 Figure, 86 file sharing. See Napster Final Fantasy series (video game), 152, 157, 158 Finnegan, Ruth, 89–90 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, 123 FL Studio, 72 flash mobs, 108–109 Flow (video game), 151, 168–169 FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis, 170n7 Forde, Eamonn, 37 Foreigner, 66 Foucault, Michel, 141 4mat, 155 Frampton, Peter, 145n8 Frankie Goes to Hollywood, 65–66 Freeland, Adam, 159 Freestyle Games, 163 Fresh, Doug E., 141–142

208

INDEX

Frith, Simon on digital music consumption, 115 on industrialization of music, 18–19 on music and technology, 4, 6–7 on Presley, 123 on voice, 130 Fujita, Saki, 140–141 Gabriel, Peter, 131 game jams, 151 game studies, 149–150, 160 gameness, 165 games industry, 148–149. See also video games gaming consoles, 24, 148–149, 150, 159. See also video games GarageBand, 72, 87–88 Garofalo, Reebee, 12 Gee, James P., 163 Gemeinschaft relations, 100, 103–104 gender inequalities, 88–89, 113 GFOTY, 78 Gibson, Chris, 79 Gibson, James, 16–17 Global Positioning Systems (GPS), 166 glocalization, 112 God, voice of, 144n2 Goodwin, Andrew, 11, 66, 69 Google, 40, 45–46 Gorillaz, 77 ‘The Grain of the Voice’ (Barthes), 122–123 Grainge, Lucian, 33 Grammy awards, 158 gramophone, 132 Grand Theft Auto (video game), 148, 149– 150, 153–154, 156, 159 Grandmaster Flash, 67 Green Day, 46 Grimes, 87 Grint, Keith, 116 Grooveshark, 40 Grup Yorum, 84 Grusin, Richard, 18 Guardian (newspaper), 42, 150 Guitar Hero (video game), 159, 160–162, 163–164, 167 Guns N’ Roses, 161 habitus, 59–60 Hackett, Edward J., 65 Halo (video game), 148 Hancock, Herbie, 130, 131 hard determinism, 5–7 Hardcastle, Paul, 135

Hargittai, Eszter, 53 Harkins, Paul, 68–69 Harmonix, 159 Haupt, Adam, 37 Hayles, N. Katherine, 47 Headroom, Max, 78 Hendrix, Jimi, 8 Hennion, Antoine, 20 Hepworth, David, 81 Hesmondhalgh, David, 47, 90–91, 115, 164 Hildebrand, Andy, 136 Hirschkind, Charles, 112 The Hit Factory, 81 Holmes, Thom, 93n5 homophily, 52 Hubbard, Rob, 154 Huizinga, Johan, 160 Hutchby, Ian, 17 IBM, 71 Iceland, 55–56 Iggy Pop, 6 Ihde, Don, 19 impossibilism, 142 indie games, 151–152 International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers, 41 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), 12, 40 Internet, 2, 13, 34, 36. See also digital music consumption Internet of Things, 25 Interscope Records, 159 intimacy, 126 iPad, 24 iPhone, 24, 53, 171n16 iPod, 24, 98, 105, 112, 113. See also mobile listening devices IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), 63 iron cage, 98, 115 Ishii, Ken, 159 iTunes, 38–39, 45, 161 Jackson, Michael, 11 Japan, 11–12, 97–98, 157, 158 Jay Z, 77 Jenkins, Henry, 44, 48–49, 108, 118n3 Jet Set Willy (video game), 154 Johnson, Steven, 94n10 Jones, Dylan, 105 Jones, Steve, 41 Jonzun Crew, 129 jouissance, 123

INDEX 209 Journey (video game), 158 Juul, Jesper, 149, 163, 165 karaoke, 164 Katz, Mark, 70, 135 Kayali, Fares, 162 Keen, Andrew, 90–91 ‘Keep Music Live’ campaign, 6 Kennedy, Helen W., 148 Kerr, Aphra, 169n1 Ki-moon, Ban, 49 Kid Beyond, 142 Kids on DSP (app), 85, 166 Kittler, Friedrich, 64 Kondo, Koji, 151 Kool Herc, 67 Korg, 73, 129 Kraftwerk, 86, 128, 144n5 Kunzru, Hari, 97 Kurzweil Music System, 131–132 Kusek, David, 37 Lady Gaga, 135 Lahire, Bernard, 114 Lanchester, John, 169n4 laptops, 24, 80–83, 168 The Last of Us (video game), 168–169 Last.fm, 51–52 late capitalism, 36 Latour, Bruno, 21, 109, 127 Le Tigre, 133 Leadbeater, Charles, 50 Legend of Zelda (video game), 151 Leonhard, Gerd, 37 Levi, Mica, 179–180 Leyshon, Andrew, 38, 81–82, 94n17 Lin Miaoke, 121 Linn LM-1, 68 lip-syncing, 120–121, 136, 142 Lipgloss Twins, 78 Lips (video game), 161 Little Big Planet (video game), 148 Logic, 72 logic of practice, 59–60 logocentrism, 122 London Philharmonic Orchestra, 157 London Review of Books (magazine), 150 Long, Sophie (Samuel). See SOPHIE Los Sampler’s, 76–77 ludology, 160 Lunenfeld, Peter, 14 Maasø, Arnt, 46–47 MacKenzie, Adrian, 47

MacKenzie, Donald, 3–4, 7, 93n3 Madonna, 66, 135 Maison Rouge, 81 Manning, Peter, 70–71 Manor Studio, 81 Manovich, Lev, 75–76 Mario (video game), 151 Markowitz, Robin, 123 Marl, Marley, 68 Marley, Bob, 81 Marshall, Lee, 39 Martin, Peter, 7 Marx, Karl, 5, 38, 115 masculinity, 88–89, 144n2 Mason, Paul, 56 maths, 64 Matthews, Max, 63 MC Ricky D, 141–142 McClary, Susan, 135 McLaren, Malcolm, 155 McLeod, Kembrew, 67 McLuhan, Marshall, 18 media logic, 19–20 mediated commonality, 164 mediation, 18–20 mediatization, 19–20 Mel and Kim, 134–135 Melodyne, 77, 138 metaphors, 114–116 microcomputers, 70–71 microphone, 1–3, 120, 125–127 Middleton, Richard, 6 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), 12, 24–25, 65–66, 71, 74–75, 162 Miku, Hatsune, 49, 120, 139–141 Miller, Kiri, 164, 170n14 Milli Vanilli, 120 Milner, Greg, 143 mimicry, 142 Miyamoto, Shigeru, 169n4 mobile listening devices additional dimensions of use of, 97–99, 106–114, 117–118 digital detachment and, 99, 104–106 impact on urban life of, 99, 102–104 metaphors and, 114–116 urban sound ecologies and, 99–102 Mobile Phone Orchestra, 94n15 modernity, 98–100, 115 Molnár, Virág, 109 MTV Games, 159 Murray, Janet, 149 Muscle Shoals, 81

210

INDEX

Music I (computer program), 63 music technology current debates on, 24–26 evolution of, 24–26 historical overview of, 10–13 key theoretical concepts in, 15–24 technological determinism and, 5–8, 10 users and, 8–10 See also digital music consumption; digital music production; video games; voice and vocal modalities Music Week (magazine), 151 musica practica, 74–75 Musicians’ Union (MU), 6, 121 musicking, 15–16. See also Digitus project Musikmesse, 59 musique concrète, 64, 66–67, 131 MySpace, 24, 51–52 Napster, 25, 35, 36–38, 40, 41 Native Instruments, 73, 179–180 Negativland, 133 Negus, Keith, 4 Nelson, Willie, 159 Neptunes, 129 new amateurs, 89–91, 174 New Order, 11, 77 Nico Nico Douga, 139 Nine Inch Nails, 86 Nintendo 64, 153 Nintendo Gameboys, 154 Nirvana, 46 Nowak, Raphaël, 24 Nullsleep, 155 Obama, Barack, 49 Oberholzer-Gee, Felix, 41 Occulus Rift, 168 Occupy movement, 55–56 Octamed, 71 Ofcom, 87 Oldfield, Mike, 81 online piracy, 36–42, 55–56, 59–60, 161. See also Napster The Orb, 65–66 Orbital, 93n6 Orientalism, 133 Oswald, John, 133 Oudshoorn, Nelly, 115–116 Owsinski, Bobby, 41 Pandora, 40 Panzéra, Charles, 123 Parsons, Alan, 83

Parsons, Talcott, 115 Passage (video game), 151 PC Music, 78 Penman, Ian, 127 perceptual psychology, 16–17 Perry, Megan, 127 The Pet Shop Boys, 77, 93n6 Peters, Benjamin, 14 Peterson, Richard A., 13 Pfleiderer, Martin, 124 phonograph, 124–125, 132 Phuture, 9 Pichlmair, Martin, 162 Pinch, Trevor, 8–9, 115–116 Pirate Party, 55–56 PlayNow, 38 PlayStation, 159 playsumption, 152, 166–169 plunderphonics, 133 podcasting, 109 Pokémon Go (video game), 150 popular music, definitions of, 3. See also digital music consumption; digital music production; music technology; video games post-capitalism, 56 postmodernism, 69 power, 184–185 Presley, Elvis, 123 Prince, 76 Propellerhead, 179. See also Reason prosumers, 48–50, 138, 140 Protect IP Act (PIPA), 55–56 ProTools, 72 Psy, 49–50 Public Enemy, 70, 133, 159 Putnam, Robert, 104 quoting, 133 Radiohead, 38 rationalization, 10 Rawling, Brian, 137 re-mediation, 18 Reaper, 72 Reason, 71–72, 83–84, 86 Record Store Day, 42–43 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 12, 37–38, 70 Reich, Steve, 131 remote collaboration, 83–84, 86 Reynolds, Simon, 11 Rez (video game), 159–160, 168 Reznor, Trent, 151

INDEX 211 Rhapsody, 40 rhythm–action games, 160–165 Richardson, John, 77 Rock Band series (video game), 159, 161, 163 Rocket Network, 83 Rocksmith (video game), 163 Rodgers, Tara, 133 Roland Corporation, 73, 91, 141–142, 143 The Rolling Stones, 85 Rose, Tricia, 133 Run DMC, 68 sampling, 66–70, 120, 131–135 Samplr (app), 178, 182 Sandywell, Barry, 77 Sanjek, David, 133 Sarm Studios, 81 Savage, Steve, 87–88 Scape (app), 165 Schaeffer, Pierre, 66–67, 69 Schafer, R. Murray, 18–19, 100–101, 125 schizophonia, 18–19, 69, 125, 134 Schneider, Florian, 144n5 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 3, 65, 94n11, 99 Scooch, 120–121 Sega, 159–160 Sega Mega Drive, 153 Selwyn, Neil, 111 Sennett, Richard, 104 sharing, 47–50 Shepherd, John, 30–31n2 Shuker, Roy, 7 Shultz, Peter, 162 silent discos, 109 Silverstone, Roger, 166 Simmel, Georg, 30–31n2, 118n1 Simon (game), 160 Simply Red, 66 Simpson, Ashley, 121 Sinatra, Frank, 123, 126 Sinclair, 153 Singstar (video game), 159, 161 slavery, 77, 130 Small, Christopher, 15–16 smartphones, 109, 149, 166, 168, 178–179. See also apps The Smiths, 43 Snoop Dogg, 76 Snowden, Edward, 55–56 social agency, 47 sodcasting, 113 soft determinism, 7–8

software development kits (SDKs), 62 Sonic the Hedgehog (video game), 153 Sonovox, 144n6 Sony PlayStation, 153 SOPHIE, 60, 78–79 Soule, Jeremy, 158 Sound on Sound (magazine), 91–92 SoundCloud, 35, 78 Space Invaders (video game), 153 Spacewar (video game), 149 Speak ‘n’ Spell, 144n5 Spears, Britney, 135, 137–138, 139 spectrograms, 144n3 Spencer, Herbert, 30–31n2 spoofing, 41 Spotify, 33–34, 39–40, 45, 46, 51, 105 spreadable practices, 48–49 Squarepusher, 76–77 The Stanley Parable (video game), 168–169 Steinberg, 83 Sterne, Jonathan, 8, 23, 42, 101–102, 125, 138 Stetsasonic, 132 Stock, Mike, 65–66, 134–135 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), 55–56 Strumpf, Koleman, 41 Stuart, Keith, 163 Sullivan, Andrew, 103 Sun Ra, 129 Super Mario Bros (video game), 152, 157 Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), 153 Sweden, 55–56 Swift, Taylor, 39 Synclavier, 71 T-Pain, 86, 138 tablets, 149, 168 Take, 86 Talkbox, 145n8 Tavana, Art, 90 Taylor, Mark, 137 Taylor, Timothy, 31n5 Taylor, T.L., 170n12 TCP/IP, 13 Tears for Fears, 155 techno-nostalgia, 61, 91–92, 131, 155 techno-sociality, 108–110 technological determinism, 5–8, 10 technology, 3–4, 54–55. See also music technology technology of the self, 47 television, 54 Tenori-On, 171n15

212

INDEX

Tepper, Steven J., 53 Terranova, Tiziana, 36, 44 Tessler, Holly, 151, 161 Tetris (video game), 149 Théberge, Paul on music and technology, 6–8, 10–11, 24, 74, 95n18 on remote collaboration, 83–84 on schizophonia, 125, 134 Thompson, Emily, 100 Thor (app), 179, 182 Tidal, 39 Timbaland, 129 Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, 157 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 103–104 Tower Records, 40 Transeau, Brian, 79 Trocco, Frank, 8–9 Tron (film), 159 Trope (app), 165 Turing, Alan, 93n4 Turkle, Sherry, 71 Turner, Tina, 66 Twine, 171n18 Twitter, 24, 42–43, 45, 48–49 U2, 66 Uematsu, Nobuo, 152, 157, 158 Underworld, 159 Universal Music Group, 33 urban sound ecologies, 99–102 Urry, John, 106 user-generated content, 49–50, 56 uTorrent, 39 Vallée, Rudy, 125–126 Vandross, Luther, 66 ventriloquism, 142 versioning, 133 video games evolution and cultural redemption of, 147–150 impact on music of, 150–152 music as games, 152, 159–166 music from games, 152, 157–159 music with games, 152–157 playsumption and, 152, 166–169 use of term, 169n1 Virtual Maestro (video game), 161 virtual reality (VR) projects, 24, 168 virtual studio technologies (VSTs), 24–25, 35, 71–76 Vocaloid, 138–141

vocoder (voice encoder), 120, 128–131, 137 voice and vocal modalities Auto-Tune and, 120, 136–138 beatboxing and, 120, 141–143 digital deconstruction and, 134–135 digital dislocation and, 132–134 impact of technology on, 119–120, 124–125, 143–144 microphone and, 120, 125–127 resonance of, 120–122 sampling and, 120, 131–135 virtualization of, 138–141 vocoder and, 120, 128–131, 137 VST Connect, 83 Wajcman, Judy, 3–4, 7 Waksman, Steve, 8 Walkman, 98, 104–105. See also mobile listening devices Warp, 43 Waterman, Pete, 65–66, 134–135 Weber, Max, 30–31n2, 98, 115, 118n1 Weheliye, Alexander G., 130 Wellman, Barry, 54 West, Kanye, 138 White, Jack, 61 Williams, Raymond, 54 WiMP/Tidal, 46–47 Wintory, Austin, 158 Wirth, Louis, 102 Wittgenstein, L., 8–9 women, 88–89, 113, 148–149 Wonder, Stevie, 67 Woolgar, Steve, 116 word-of-mouth campaigns, 42–43 World of Warcraft (video game), 149 Wu Tang Clan, 133 Wyman, Bill, 162 Xbox, 159, 160 Yamaha, 73, 138, 153, 171n15 Yamaha DX7, 66, 76, 91, 170n7 Yarbrough, Camille, 70, 135 Yes, 66 YMCK, 155 Yorke, Thom, 39 Young, Neil, 144–145n7 YouTube, 40, 42, 48–49, 88 YT Entertainment, 49–50 Zune Marketplace, 38 ZX Spectrum, 153