About

‘Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’ (MusDig) is a five-year research programme engaged in mapping and analysing the far-reaching changes to music and musical practices afforded by digitisation and digital media. Launched in 2010, the empirical element of the programme has entailed six ethnographic studies of about one year’s duration, most of them multi-sited, carried out in the developing and the developed world by the principal investigator, Professor Georgina Born, and five research associates: Dr. Aditi Deo, Dr. Andrew Eisenberg and Patrick Valiquet (all University of Oxford), Dr. Geoff Baker (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria, Canada). Based at the University of Oxford, MusDig is funded by the European Research Council’s Advanced Grants scheme. The programme has several additional graduate students affiliated with it who are extending its work through research on related topics: Blake Durham, Joe Snape and Christabel Stirling.

Overall, MusDig is attempting through the analysis of its empirical research to found a new interdisciplinary field of digital music studies. To this end, as well as the music disciplines, it brings anthropology, sociology, media studies and material culture studies into dialogue with the ethnographic material, addressing music’s digital transformation across the spectrum of practices – creative practices, production, circulation and consumption – and in relation to a range of popular, folk and art musics. Fieldwork (2010-12) has therefore been followed by interdisciplinary analysis of our fieldwork data (2012-13).

https://player.vimeo.com/video/69853324

The first two years of MusDig’s work centred on six ethnographic studies of music and digitisation. The six ethnographies are as follows:

1. Baker: the production of an evolving popular music genre, digital cumbia, in Buenos-Aires, Argentina, in relation to other cumbia genres, as well as its circulation in Colombia, Mexico, elsewhere in Latin America and the USA.
2. Eisenberg: the emergence of a new digital technology-based recording industry in Nairobi, Kenya in the wake of the digital revolution and the liberalisation of the Kenyan media, with particular attention to the role of copyright reform and an increase in patronage from NGOs and other transnational actors.
3. Deo: research on a series of North Indian initiatives, each with distinctive philosophy, digital materiality and institutional form, engaged in the digital recording and archiving of folk musics, and a supplementary study of the ‘grey economy’ in digital music.
4. Boudreault-Fournier: a comparative study of the digitally-mediated consumption of popular musics in contrasting urban environments in Montreal (a context of digital media plenty) and two Cuban cities (a context of digital media scarcity), as well as further study of the ‘grey economy’ in digital music.
5. Valiquet: the evolving aesthetics and novel materialities of a range of digital art music genres supported by universities, festivals and artist-run centres in Montreal in relation to the cultural policy context, as well as changing digital musical literacies and trainings; and
6. Born: the evolving institutional and policy conditions as well as variant aesthetics and ideologies of university-based digital art musics and sound art in the UK, as they relate to the circuit of conferences, festivals and other institutions sustaining the national and transnational production and circulation of these musics.

In the third year of the programme, 2012-13, following the generation of the six individual ethnographies, the resulting ethnographic material has been brought together in a phase of comparative and collaborative analysis. During 2012-13 the results of these efforts have been presented at a series of workshops and conferences at Oxford University and in our field locales (Nairobi, Buenos-Aires and Oxford, with events in Montreal, Havana and Kolkata planned for 2013-14) for discussion with academic and musician colleagues and with our field interlocutors. MusDig is now at its half-way point, and since comparative analysis of fieldwork data is very demanding of time, the research findings are at an initial and emerging stage. We are currently drafting and preparing both the individual ethnographies and the comparative dimension of our research for publication.

The comparative and collaborative work of MusDig has been guided by ten overarching (and incommensurable) research themes: aesthetics and genre; creative practices; circulation; consumption/‘prosumption’; industry and institutional restructuring; intellectual and cultural property; materialities and literacies; politics and the social; subjectification; and historical transition. The ten themes were addressed by the research group in preparation for fieldwork by reference to existing literatures and theoretical debates through intensive collective study (2010-11). They were then taken (deductively) to fieldwork, where it emerged – as expected – that they were variably relevant to, and unevenly represented by, each of the ethnographies. We therefore understand the ten research themes as vectors crossing between the individual ethnographies, enabling comparison in relation to a given theme or theory across the individual studies, some of them relevant to all of the ethnographies (for example, circulation, or intellectual and cultural property), while others are relevant to only one or two of the ethnographies (e.g. consumption/‘prosumption’). In the case of, for example, intellectual and cultural property, we are translating theories from anthropology, musico-legal and socio-legal studies into (ethno)musicology. At the same time, as might have been expected, a number of unforeseen analytical themes arose inductively across several of the ethnographies: for example, nationalism, post-nationalism, sectarianism and post-sectarianism. In the absence of a history of, or an established paradigm for, comparative ethnographic research, we consider the approach forged by MusDig to offer an experimental and innovative methodological model for comparative analysis between singular, rich ethnographies.

In the later years of the programme (2013-15), MusDig has two other research dimensions to be carried out by the principal investigator. First, on the basis of the three years of collective work, MusDig aims to develop a new interdisciplinary framework for contemporary music studies. And second, in a final phase, the principal investigator will bring the research into dialogue with anthropological, social and cultural theory, with the aim of ‘musicalising’ contemporary social theory.