Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society

Nick Prior

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781473934160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From shifts in format, through the effects on circulation and ownership, to the rise of digitally-produced genres, the ways we create, share and listen to music have changed fundamentally.In Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society, Nick Prior explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts in which these shifts have taken place. Both accessible and authoritative, the book:

• Clarifies key concepts such as assemblage, affordance, mediation and musicking and defines new concepts such as playsumption and digital vocalities
• Considers the impact of music production technologies such as MIDI, sampling, personal computing and smartphone apps
• Looks at the ways in which the internet shapes musical consumption, from viral marketing to streaming services
• Examines the effects of mobile audio devices on everyday social interactions
• Opens up new ways to think and write about the personal experience of making and performing digital music

This book is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand the place of popular music in contemporary culture and society. It will be fascinating reading for students and researchers across media and communication studies, sociology, cultural studies and the creative industries.

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 (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 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 non-material 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 non-human 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 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 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).

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, meanw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 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