1st Edition

The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music: Reaching out with Technology

Edited By Simon Emmerson Copyright 2018
    374 Pages
    by Routledge

    374 Pages 112 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The theme of this Research Companion is 'connectivity and the global reach of electroacoustic music and sonic arts made with technology'. The possible scope of such a companion in the field of electronic music has changed radically over the last 30 years. The definitions of the field itself are now broader - there is no clear boundary between 'electronic music' and 'sound art'. Also, what was previously an apparently simple divide between 'art' and 'popular' practices is now not easy or helpful to make, and there is a rich cluster of streams of practice with many histories, including world music traditions. This leads in turn to a steady undermining of a primarily Euro-American enterprise in the second half of the twentieth century. Telecommunications technology, most importantly the development of the internet in the final years of the century, has made materials, practices and experiences ubiquitous and apparently universally available - though some contributions to this volume reassert the influence and importance of local cultural practice. Research in this field is now increasingly multi-disciplinary. Technological developments are embedded in practices which may be musical, social, individual and collective. The contributors to this companion embrace technological, scientific, aesthetic, historical and social approaches and a host of hybrids – but, most importantly, they try to show how these join up. Thus the intention has been to allow a wide variety of new practices to have voice – unified through ideas of 'reaching out' and 'connecting together' – and in effect showing that there is emerging a different kind of 'global music'.

    Part 1: Global reach – local identities [1] Ricardo Dal Farra (and others): ‘Research-Creation in Latin American’ [2] Marc Battier and Lin-Ni Liao: 'Electronic Music in East Asia' [3] Leigh Landy: ‘The Three Paths: Cultural retention in contemporary Chinese electroacoustic music’ [4] Patrick Valiquet: ‘Technologies of Genre: Digital distinctions in Montreal’ [5] Hillegonda Rietveld: ‘Dancing in the Technoculture’ Part 2: Awareness, consciousness, participation [6] Pedro Rebelo and Rodrigo Cicchelli Velloso: ‘Participatory Sonic Arts: the Som de Maré project - towards a socially engaged art of sound in the everyday’ [7] Atau Tanaka and Adam Parkinson: ‘The Problems with Participation’ [8] Leah Barclay: ‘The Agency of Sonic Art in Changing Climates’ [9] Sally-Jane Norman: ‘Tuning and Metagesture After New Natures’ [10] Eduardo Miranda and Joel Eaton: ‘Music Neurotechnology: a natural progression’ Part 3: Extending performance and interaction [11] Simon Emmerson and Kenneth Fields: ‘Where are we? Extended Music Practice on the Internet’’ [12] Jonty Harrison: ‘Rendering the Invisible: BEAST and the performance practice of acousmatic music’ [13] Mick Grierson: ‘Creative Coding for Audiovisual Art: The CodeCircle Platform’

    Biography

    Simon Emmerson studied at Cambridge University and City University London. He is a composer, writer and professor at De Montfort University, Leicester. He works mostly with live electronics and has published widely in electroacoustic music studies. Keynote addresses include ACMC (Auckland), ICMC (Huddersfield), WOCMAT (Taiwan), and the Edgard-Varèse Guest Professorship (Berlin).