ABOUT THIS BOOK

The first comparative ethnographic study on the impact of digital media on worldwide music.

Offering a radically new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, this volume redresses anthropology’s frequent oversight of music as a topic of study. By positioning music as an expansive subject for digital anthropology, Georgina Born demonstrates how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media includes five original ethnographies spanning pop, folk, and crossover musical genres throughout Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada, and the UK. A further three chapters engage experimentally with the platforms of music-making and distribution, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max MSP.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Georgina Born is professor of anthropology and music at UCL.

REVIEWS

‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ - Marina Peterson, University of Texas, Austin

The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' - David Toop, London College of Communication

‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ - Eric Drott, University of Texas, Austin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Music, Digitisation and Mediation - For a Planetary Antropology
Georgia Born
2. Soundtracks in the Silicon Savannah: Digital Production and Aesthetic Entrepreneurship in Nairobi, Kenya.
Andrew J. Eisenberg
3. ‘In the Waiting Room’: Digitisation and Post-Neoliberalism in the Independent Music Sector in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Geoff Baker
4. Orality in the Aural Public Sphere: Digital Archiving of Vernacular Musics in North India.
Aditi Deo
5. Online Music Consumption and the Formalisation of Informality: Exchange, Labour and Sociality in Two Music Platforms
Blake Durham and Georgina Born
6. Max, Music Software, and the Mutual Mediation of Aesthetics and Digital Technologies
Joe Snape and Georgina Born
7. Remediating Modernism: On the Digital Ends of Montreal’s Electroacoustic Tradition
Patrick Valiquet
8. The Dynamics of Pluralism in Contemporary Digital Art Music
Georgina Born
9. Music and Intermediality After the Internet: Aesthetics, Materialities and Social Forms
Christopher Haworth and Georgina Born
10. Postlude: Musical-Anthropological Comparativism – Across Scales
Georgina Born

References
Index