This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “Music Research Seminars”
Abstract
Who determines how contemporary music, particularly music born and disseminated online, gathers and dissipates? Many have called hyperpop a “micro-genre”.
But is “genre”, even in its broadest usage, a useful frame for music that excists within the participatory affordances of new media?
Internet music troubles the Western insistence on originality, copyright, permanence and the commodification of musical ownership that have guided traditional forms of genre construction, aligning more meaningfully with the social transmission of oral and folk cultures.
Andrew Leyshon, Steve Jones, Steve Knopper, Jeremy Wade Morris, Vinícius de Aguiar and others have explored music industry and gatekeeping challenges in the face of music streaming, playlisting and algorithms.
Yet once music leaves the control of record labels and musicians to travel through the networked creativity of fan interaction, the gatekeeping capabilities of intermediaries traditionally tasked with the categorisation and dissemination of music are weakened.
Online remediation - the theory that new media forms recontextualise, adapt and borrow from older media to form a dynamic interaction between the past, present and future - can dissolve the parameters of a music text.
Fans can take an active role not only in how music travels through platforms, but also in how it becomes volatile, sonically, audiovisually, culturally and aesthetically, as it passes through multiple creative voices.
Here, it is suggested that the proliferation of digital media technologies and the accelerated participatory engagement with music they afford have destabilised genre as a coherent way of categorising and understanding certain new music.
While the constraints of genre as a mode of categorising music have been explored from a range of angles, generative internet music like hyperpop solicits a supple framework that can accommodate iterative creativity, and multiple voices and modes of cultural production in response to the ways in which music can be created, critiqued and circulated in the meta-connectivity of the current digital moment.
Using SOPHIE as a case study, these debates and resistance will be opened to see what an alternative might look and sound like.
About the speaker
Holly Rogers is Professor of Music and Director of Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she runs the MA Music (Audiovisual Cultures).
She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-author of Studying Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
She has edited several books on audiovisual culture, including Music and Sound in Documentary Film (Routledge, 2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (Oxford University Press, 2017),Transmedia Directors (Bloomsbury, 2019), Cybermedia (Bloomsbury 2021), YouTube and Music (Bloomsbury 2022) and Remediating Sound (Bloomsbury 2023).
She is also a founding editor for the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media and the journal “Sonic Scope: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture”.
The Music Research Seminars hosted by the Department of Performing Arts at City, University of London bring together world-leading artists, practitioners, and scholars in the broad fields of music and sound.
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