Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity

Gerry Bloustien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351548250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity focuses on the new and emerging synergies of music and digital technology within the new knowledge economies. Eighteen scholars representing six international perspectives explore the global and local ramifications of rapidly changing new technologies on creative industries, local communities, music practitioners and consumers. Diverse areas are considered, such as production, consumption, historical and cultural context, legislation, globalization and the impact upon the individual. Drawing on a range of musical genres from jazz, heavy metal, hip-hop and trance, and through several detailed case studies reflecting on the work of professional and local amateur artists, this book offers an important discussion of the ways in which the face of music is changing. Approaching these areas from a cultural studies perspective, this text will be a valuable tool for anyone engaged in the study of popular culture, music or digital technologies.

Part 1
Shifting Contexts

Introduction To Part 1

Margaret Peters

The introduction of every major new technology, at least in the course of the twentieth century, has been accompanied by a complex mixture of wonderment and anxiety. Digital technology is no different. These anxieties have at bottom serious questions about humans and humanity. Two most salient of these questions are: to what extent does today’s technology diminish human agency? On a larger level, to what extent does technology have the capacity to turn human history into its own history? (Taylor 2001: 201)

In the quotation above, Timothy Taylor focuses on one of the changing contexts for the production and consumption of popular music. However, this is but one context considered in this collection of essays. As outlined in the Introduction, in the creative knowledge economy, of which popular music is a central part, the processes of production and consumption are increasingly shifted, blurred and fluid. These shifting contexts impact on music genres, practices, and systems of reception and distribution, affecting policies, programs and organizations. Consumers are not just ‘consuming’ in the increasingly globalized marketplace but are acting in it; exercising their tastes and cultures in ways that shape and produce commercial environments. Dynamic relationships are being negotiated and renegotiated in innovative forms and genres capable of hybridizing knowledge and practice, resulting in the need for new regulations dealing with copyright, production and intellectual property. These are the shifting contexts that this part explores through the work of five very different authors. They examine these issues across the interrelated themes of policy, technology and fandom.

Governments worldwide are increasingly adopting an interventionist role in ‘driving’ competitive advantage in the marketplace of ideas. This ‘drive’ dominates policy thinking and planning, the implication being that not enough is being done to mine the rich seams of creativity. Music, along with other creative forms, is being viewed as an exemplary form of the creative knowledge economy. As the writers throughout the book clearly demonstrate, the kinds of practices that are found in music production and consumption play a critical role in creating environments that stimulate enquiry, the sharing and diffusion of ideas, allowing for both recombination and synthesis. This synthesis is not always smoothly effected, however. The cultural dynamics of globalization bring with them jagged contradictions and turbulent patterns that demand new theories of flow and resistance of movement. This creates a challenge to develop new understandings of the creative knowledge economy and its drivers.

In his chapter ‘Music, Cities, and Cultural and Creative Industries Policy’, Terry Flew introduces the theme of transition, which underpins this part; transition(s) that shape our conception of aesthetic experience and ‘musical knowing’. Flew situates the current interests of policy makers in contemporary popular music within the context of global interests in the development of creative industries and creative cities. Tracing this culture shift, with its focus on ‘competitive advantage’, he delineates the significance, diversity and vibrancy of activities in the night-time economy’, which he describes as industries that cater to ‘the liminal zone” between work and home … [and] for those visiting a city’ (p.16). The city in this case is Brisbane, the capital of the state of Queensland, Australia. He analyses the role of policy in developing a ‘music industry value web’ through the Brisbane City Council’s development of the ‘Living in Brisbane 2010: A Creative City’ policy strategy (Brisbane City Council 2003). Flew explores its impact, concluding that understanding music as a creative industry has value, but also acknowledging the duality and fragility of sustaining this conceptualization.

Axel Bruns continues this theme of duality and fragility, tracing the transition of regulations in his chapter ‘Futures for Webcasting: Regulatory Approaches in Australia and the US. Online radio is a fledgling media form, which Bruns depicts as engaged in ‘trench warfare’ over sound recording royalties. In his closely delineated study, Bruns highlights the inherent tension that exists in webcasting when the emphasis shifts from the value of the creative activity and its significance for individual autonomy to the monetary value of the finished product.

In her chapter ‘Postmusics’, Jodi Berland continues the theme of transition, as she traces the history of human music performance and the emergence of technologically mediated performance. She introduces the ‘logic of simulation’ within its economic and institutional contexts but analyses it with a particular emphasis on body politics. Transformation is heavily inflected with historical ruptures in Berland’s account. Digital technology is delineated as allowing performers to free themselves ‘from the social regulation of feeling’ (p. 37). The reliance on technology transforms psychological and social relations, which Berland proposes raises ‘the standard of mimesis to new heights’ (p. 39). Berland argues that music ‘is not necessarily something made by musicians; it is post-music”’ (p. 41). This provides us with further opportunities to reflect on the foundational question of music knowing, challenging the readers to reflect on issues of performance that are overwhelmingly psychological, ontological, biographical and ethical. Musical utterance/performance can be seen as being inextricably tied into questions of value, meaning, purpose, personal identity and (em)power(ment). Berland writes of these possibilities as potent realities.

Epistemic shifts are also the subject of a fascinating study by Shuhei Hosokawa and Hideaki Matsuoka in their chapter, ‘On the Fetish Character of Sound and the Progression of Technology: Theorizing Japanese Audiophiles’. In a welcome break from the more usual western-centric music studies, Japanese audiophiles are presented historically, culturally, and within their own personal emotional investments. This study of intercultural praxis is important particularly as it highlights the impact of globalization on local Japanese practices, not always readily available when the lingua franca of international writing space is English.

In a different register, Douglas Kellner’s chapter reminds us of our own affective responses to music as consumers. He focuses on the rise of a local popular music phenomenon who became a global phenomenon, providing an intimate study of another form of musical knowing – that of fandom. In his carefully constructed study of the impact on production and consumption of the music and celebratory status of Elvis Presley, Kellner creates a grassroots approach to this framework of understanding. Spectacle, mimesis and the creation of (then) new forms of communities of practice are explored in this homage to ‘The King’. Spectacle and showmanship – production and consumption – aligned.

The anxiety about hybridization of knowledge, creativity and the economy, expressed in some of these chapters, is not new. It has accompanied all emergent forms of knowing precisely because we cannot predict what will emerge and how we will control it. Perhaps the point is that we all need to understand the role we play in such scenarios, in the creation of new forms of possibilities. The following chapters provide a way forward.

Chapter 1
Music, Cities, and Cultural and Creative Industries Policy

Terry Flew

Popular Music, Creative Cities and the Night-Time Economy

The current interest of policy makers in contemporary popular music is connected to the growing worldwide interest in development of the creative industries and creative cities.¹ In contrast to the move away from the inner cities that characterized the post-World War Two ‘Fordist’ era of capitalism, and the resultant separation of the city into zones of urban production and suburban consumption, the period since the 1980s has seen a growing worldwide interest in the development of cities as sites for creativity and consumption (Harvey 1989, 1991; Badcock 2002). While this has been driven in part by urban regeneration projects, it has also reflected a growing realisation that, in a creative economy, the wealth of a city or region resides not only in its physical and human capital, but also in the less tangible networks of knowledge, inter-personal ties and social capital that lead to the clustering of creativity and innovation in particular geographical locations (Landry 2000; Hall 2000; Porter 2001; Mommaas 2004; Venturelli 2005). Economic globalization, the rise of the knowledge-based economy, and the rapid growth of the internet have, perhaps paradoxically, placed a renewed focus upon why geographically mobile capital and skilled workers choose to locate in some cities and regions in preference to others. Foreign investment trends since the 1990s point to an economic premium being attached to sites where commercially valuable knowledge is locality-based and culturally specific (Storper 1997; Scott 2000; Dunning 2001). Culture, defined as both access to unique experiences and as quality of life, has come to be recognised as a key element of the competitive advantage of cities. In his well-known revisionist account of economic geography in relation to the rise of the ‘creative class’, Richard Florida (2002) has argued that new businesses seek to locate in places where clusters of creative people are, rather than assuming that skilled workers will seek to follow new business investment. In the context of new economy dynamics, culture is understood as central to wealth creation, and not just pleasurable consumption, and access to unique forms of culture has become the cake and not the icing.

The rise of the creative industries has been documented by a number of sources (for example, Howkins 2001; Mitchell, Inouye and Blumenthal 2003; Cunningham et al. 2004; Flew 2005). In creative industries ‘hot spots’ such as London, creative industries now rival business services as the key economic sector, and over half a million Londoners work directly in the creative industries or in creative occupations in other industries (Mayor of London 2003). Charles Landry (2000) has drawn attention to the significance of a creative milieu to the development of creativity in modern cities and regions, which he defined as a combination of ‘hard infrastructure’, or the network of buildings, institutions and communications and transport networks that constitute a city or a region, and ‘soft infrastructure. Landry defines soft infrastructure as the system of associative structures and social networks, connections and human interactions that underpins and encourages the flow of ideas between individuals and institutions (Landry 2000: 133). Landry and Wood (2003) have asserted the importance of cultural factors to the competitive advantage of cities in the global economy through their notion of the ‘drawing power’ of cities, which refers to ‘the dynamics of attraction, retention and leakage’, or ‘the contributing factors which encourage outsiders to come in [to cities] or existing populations to stay’ (Landry and Wood 2003: 23).

In some accounts, a central element of the cultural ‘competitive advantage’ of cities and regions in a global creative or knowledge-based economy is the significance, diversity and vibrancy of activities in the ‘night-time economy’. The night-time economy is a term that is used to describe the diverse range of service-related and creative industries associated with leisure, entertainment, hospitality and tourism, which cater to the ‘liminal zone’ between work and home for the local population, and activities related to travel and tourism for those visiting a city. Andy Lovatt and Justin O’Connor point to the importance of ‘the … nightlife of the city [as] a realm of play’, and its contradictory status in much urban planning as ‘primarily an object of attention for agencies concerned with licensing, health and safety, planning and policing … a heavily regulated zone of space and time; a location for transgression conceived in terms of social dysfunction’ (Lovatt and O’Connor 1995: 130). This appeal to both the cultural aspects of the city links to earlier work by critical urban theorists such as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, who saw the integration of both art and community as central to a human-centred vision of the modern city, that ‘promotes the full participation of citizens, both as performers in the urban drama and as spectators of it’ (Makeham 2005: 3).

Popular Music and Cultural Policy: The Odd Couple

Cultural policy developed in the post-World War Two period as both a means of directing public funding to the arts and cultural sectors, and a set of institutional investments to develop cultural citizenship and national identity in modern nation-states. In the English-speaking world it was largely associated, at least until the 1980s, with the promotion of artistic practice through public subsidy for ‘elite’ art forms such as opera, orchestras, live theatre, the visual arts, dance and literature. A strong policy divide has existed between those ‘culturally worthy’ sectors requiring public support, and commercial forms seen as neither requiring nor deserving public assistance.

Such models have never worked for the contemporary popular music sector. In Australia, the sector receives very little government funding. Total federal, state and local government funding to the music industry (excluding opera) sits at about 1 per cent of total cultural funding across all levels of government (MCA 2001). The music industry has not been well served by traditional forms of arts and cultural policy, finding itself trapped in binary oppositions between arts and commerce, elite arts and mass entertainment, and publicly subsidised creativity and free market economics. Popular music performers have struggled to receive support from state and federal arts funding bodies, as their work has either not been seen as sufficiently worthy or innovative, or they are perceived as being in a ‘free market’ sector, or they lack the skills and access to networks that assist in applying for public funding.

There was some attempt in the 1990s to use cultural policy as a vehicle for strategic interventions into the popular music industry that could promote its long-term sustainability. Graeme Turner (1992) argued that, given the inherent difficulties involved in claiming particular musical forms to be local and hence unique, ‘if we are going to deal with Australian music as a national form, the most defensible way to do so is through its industrial structures and practices’ (Turner 1992: 14). Marcus Breen (1999) proposed that cultural policy studies could strengthen advocacy for Australian popular music in a global industry dominated by multinational record companies, not through a sentimental cultural nationalism, but through an understanding of Australian music industry dynamics and the points through which policy leverage could be most effectively exercised. For Breen, cultural policy could act as a mediator between global commerce and local production, as well as between the commercial and industrial structures of production and distribution and the more unique and individually pleasurable elements of popular music.

The enlisting of the popular music industry to cultural policy, while a useful antidote to the ‘art versus commerce’ dichotomy, has in practice gained little traction for three reasons. First, music policy initiatives are limited by the fact that full-time musicians constitute only a fraction of those involved in music production and performance in some paid or unpaid capacity (Flew et al. 2001: 19, 49). Second, there remains little or no evidence, at least in the Australian context, of any relationship between policy initiatives and the types of music produced and distributed. Third, the problem is not only that the contemporary popular music sector has received little public funding, but those in the sector are deeply suspicious of it. Working in an archetypal ‘micro-business’ creative industries sector, musicians have been opposed to policy mechanisms that would involve supporting the ‘wrong’ artists, or making the sector too dependent upon bureaucratic decision making, that are remote from the music community.

Work at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia has sought to apply a creative industries perspective to the Queensland music industry (Cox et al. 2004; Rogers et al. 2004; Ninan, Oakley and Hearn 2004). Such work acknowledges the micro-business status of much of the industry, seeing the principal contributions that government can make as being to provide training and education opportunities to those working in the independent or ‘second-tier’ sectors. This work introduces the idea of a ‘music industry value web’, which sees the relationship between the artist/performer and the consuming public as being surrounded by a complex network of relationships, not just with distributors, but with training providers, accountants, solicitors, marketing, mass media, live venues and retail outlets (Rogers et al. 2004: 15). Even in this work, it was noted that what governments can do for the local music industry remains constrained in part by the values of those in the sector itself. It was noted that policy makers face the ‘suspicion of some in the sector than any public support will be too risk-averse for the music business … Given the anti-establishment attitude of musicians as a group, NGOs (non-government organizations) have been proposed as alternative liaisons between policy makers and the SME-based industry players’ (Ninan et al. 2004: 31). Such innate scepticism about the role of government in popular music echoes the well-known comments by the late Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the Haçienda night club in Manchester, and former manager of bands such as New Order and the Happy Mondays, about the involvemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Shifting Contexts
• Part 2 Placing Music
• Part 3 Creating Agency
• Bibliography
• Index