This collection examines the multiple ways people listen to, consume, and produce music and sound in an increasingly digital world. Technologies such as social networks, recommendation algorithms, virtual cloud storage, and portable listening devices increasingly mediate both personal and communal experiences with music. While such technologies may be convenient, their unexamined use raises ethical, socio-political, and philosophical questions. This volume brings together multiple contributions which engage with these questions and others posed by emergent musical and social technologies. Drawing upon a range of different areas of inquiry, it provides a varied critical approach to the question of how people interact with music in the modern era and debates the universal themes of modern music consumption.
This collection examines the multiple ways people listen to, consume, and produce music and sound in an increasingly digital world. Technologies such as social networks, recommendation algorithms, virtual cloud storage, and portable listening devices increasingly mediate both personal and communal experiences with music. While such technologies may be convenient, their unexamined use raises ethical, socio-political, and philosophical questions. This volume brings together multiple contributions which engage with these questions and others posed by emergent musical and social technologies. Drawing upon a range of different areas of inquiry, it provides a varied critical approach to the question of how people interact with music in the modern era and debates the universal themes of modern music consumption.
Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century; Richard Randall and Richard Purcell
1. The Scream and Other Tales: Narrating Detroit Radio History with the Vertical File; Carleton Gholz
2. On Tape: Cassette Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow Now; Kieran Curran
3. Radio in Transit: Satellite Technology, Cars, and the Evolution of Musical Genre; Jeffrey Roessner
4. The Internet and the Death of Jazz: Race, Improvisation, and the Crisis of Community; Margret Grebowicz
5. A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic; Richard Purcell
6. Love Streams; Damon Krukowski
7. A Case for Musical Privacy; Richard Randall
8. Digital Music and Public Goods; Graham Hubbs
9. The Preservation Paradox; Jonathan Sterne
10. Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace in the Digital Age; Kathy Newman
11. Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone: Towards and Beyond The Ringtone Dialectic; Sumanth Gopinath
Richard Purcell is Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. He is author of Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture (Palgrave 2013).
Richard Randall is Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor of Music at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. His recent publications include Similarity Measures for Tonal Models (2006) and Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space Model and Associated Metric Spaces.
