Music | Digitisation | Mediation – Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies
Posted: April 18th, 2013 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Music | Digitisation | Mediation – Towards Interdisciplinary Music StudiesMusic is being fundamentally transformed by digitisation and digital media. With the growth of internet access across the developing and the developed world, and the accelerating appearance of mobile and new media platforms in which music plays a critical affective role in attaching users, digitisation is fostering a range of escalating changes that radically alter the environment for the creation, circulation and consumption of music. Not only creative and distributive practices, but the nature of music as a cultural object are evolving in far-reaching ways. Institutional and industrial reconfigurations are paralleled by the renegotiation of intellectual and cultural property regimes, by new musical literacies, and by the emergence of novel sonic materialities, new aesthetics and genres. Digitisation inflects longstanding musical subjectivities and gender dynamics; it demands new thinking about the periodisations and temporal assumptions that govern the historiography of late-20th- and 21st-century music. But these changes also have wider repercussions, since music is often held to be in the vanguard of the changes to contemporary cultures and cultural economies afforded by digitisation. The fate of digitised music is thus taken to portend what is to come for audio-visual media as, increasingly, they circulate through the internet and via sites such as YouTube.
This international and interdisciplinary conference addresses such changes. It features an array of leading and younger scholars from music, anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology, sound studies and new/media studies. The aim is to forge a new interdisciplinary field of digital music studies, while feeding the benefits gained from the analysis of music today back into anthropological, media and social theory.
An additional goal of the conference is to present and discuss, with colleagues engaged in related work and those from relevant disciplines, the research findings of Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies (MusDig), a 5-year research programme based in the Faculty of Music at Oxford.
Sessions: Music, Mediation, Actor-Network-Theory; Industry and Platforms; Gender; Materiality and Creative Practices; Digital Aesthetics/Fusion; Consumption; Circulation; Digital/Anthropology
Keynote speakers: Prof. Anahid Kassabian (University of Liverpool), Dr. Jason Stanyek (University of Oxford), and Dr. Heather Horst (Digital Ethnography Research Centre, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
Other speakers: Victoria Armstrong (St Mary’s), Geoff Baker (RHUL and Oxford), Andrew Barry (Oxford), Eliot Bates (Birmingham), Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research), Frauke Behrendt (Brighton), Georgina Born (Oxford), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Victoria), Michael Bull (Sussex), Mark Butler (Northwestern), Nicholas Cook (Cambridge), Aditi Deo (Oxford), Blake Durham (Oxford), Andrew Eisenberg (Oxford), Adrian Freed (UC Berkeley), Haidy Geismar (UCL), Andrew Goffey (Nottingham), Sumanth Gopinath (Minnesota), Christopher Haworth (ICASP), Steve Jones (Illinois at Chicago), Mark Katz (North Carolina), Cathy Lane (LCC), Eric Lewis (McGill), George Lewis (Columbia), Noel Lobley (Pitt Rivers), Sonia Livingstone (LSE), George Marcus (UC Irvine), Lee Marshall (Bristol), Frederick Moehn (KCL), Keith Negus (Goldsmiths), David Novak (UC Santa Barbara), Gascia Ouzounian (QUB), Alex Perullo (Bryant), Benjamin Piekut (Cornell), Trevor Pinch (Cornell), Marilou Polymeropoulou (Oxford), Nick Prior (Edinburgh), Katherine Schofield (KCL), Nick Seaver (UC Irvine), Joe Snape (Oxford), Jonathan Sterne (McGill), Martin Stokes (KCL), Will Straw (McGill), Paul Théberge (Carleton), Patrick Valiquet (Oxford)
Dates: 11-13 July 2013
Venue: St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
Registration: http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/research/musdig.html
We welcome proposals for poster presentations to be displayed at the conference. Please submit an abstract (ca. 200 words), linking your poster presentations to one of the conference session themes listed above, and a bio (ca. 100 words): [email protected]
Please direct any questions to Emily Payne: [email protected]
* Please note: it is advisable to book early, as spaces are limited.