To join, and/or for further information on the preconference symposium, send a message to the list moderators - Rene T. A. Lysloff (LYSLOFF@vms.cis.pitt.edu) or Randal Baier (REBAIER@umich.edu)
The term technoculture describes social groups and behaviors characterized by creative strategies of technological adaptation, avoidance, subversion, or resistance. It is formulated with the assumption that technology, rather than being separate from or outside of culture, is saturated with cultural meaning and, in turn, fully assimilated into the lived experiences of the humans that use it. Changing technologies thus also implicate cultural practices involving music - including musical creativity, production, reproduction, consumption (and reception), aesthetics, and even scholarship.
The purpose of TECHNOCULT is to discuss the implications of new media and information technologies in relation to musical experience (whether live or mediated). TECHNOCULT has been set up as an electronic forum in anticipation of the upcoming preconference symposium, "Music and Technoculture," at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California, on October 18, 1995 (preceding the 1995 Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, also at the Biltmore Hotel, October 19-22). Some of the questions to be addressed in the symposium will be: Can and should the individual tones, rhythms, or timbres of a musician or a musical style, even a whole musical culture, be protected through copyright laws? Where does ethnomusicology stand in regard to cross-cultural plunderphonics (the creative appropriation of musical sound), especially with the advent of digital sampling technology? How has such technology change musical creativity? Can even the most abstract stylistic elements of music, simply the "sound," "feel," or "groove" of a composition or performance be owned, or appropriated and commodified? Should digital sampling and recontextualization be regarded as audio-piracy or musical creativity, or rather, where along the continuum between audio-piracy and musical creativity does digital sampling operate?
Indeed, digital sampling is perhaps the most controversial form of musical technology in recent history: it blurs the line between musical production and schizophonic reproduction. In other words, samplers have a parasitic relationship with the past (since all sampled sounds are, after all, past sounds) and yet it has revolutionized musical creativity by liberating sound entirely from its source of production and allowing it to be completely malleable. Fields such as musicology, ethnomusicology, communications, anthropology, performance studies, etc., have yet to examine the broader implications of digital and other new technologies to the study of music and culture.
We hope that TECHNOCULT and the planned Symposium will, at the very least, raise important questions for further examination and discussion. To join TECHNOCULT and/or for further information on the preconference symposium, send a message to Rene T.A. Lysloff (LYSLOFF@vms.cis.pitt.edu) or Randal Baier (REBAIER@umich.edu).
Technical note: This is an X-500 groupname, not a LISTSERV type of email group, therefore some of the conveniences of email lists are not available, such as the DIGEST command or searching for previous messages. Each person needs to be responsible for keeping their own messages.