Events
Events section for archive purposes only
May 26, 2015
Transformations in Digital Music and Sound, MusDig @ MUTEK
MusDig Montreal Symposium in collaboration with MUTEK
11am-5pm, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, Centre Phi, Montreal
This day-long symposium brings together Montreal’s most innovative sound and music communities to discuss how digital technology has changed sonic thinking and what new developments may be coming. Electroacoustic composers, digital improvisers, hackers, and beat-makers speak from practical experience about the power and accessibility of digital tools, the changing politics of skill, and the transformation of musical institutions. Media theorists and musicologists respond to the way Montreal’s digital sonic arts movements relate to ongoing historical and social trends.
The gathering also celebrates the wrap up for the Montreal portion of a global anthropological research project looking at the profound transformation of music and musical practice by digital technologies. Presentations include researchers, consultants and respondents from the Oxford University-based European Research Council project Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Media Studies (MusDig). Led by Professor Georgina Born, the MusDig project has supported anthropologists and musicologists working with producers and audiences around the world to discover how digital mediation impacts musical knowledges, aesthetics and institutions.
Georgina Born, Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, musicologist Patrick Valiquet and journalist Laurent K. Blais will be in attendance to present results from the project. Local presenters and respondents include Will Straw, Jonathan Sterne, Ryan A. Diduck, Eldad Tsabary, Esther Bourdages, Darsha Hewitt, Poirier, CRi, Lexis, and more to be announced.
May 19, 2015
Georgina Born: Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology at the British Academy
Tuesday 19 May 2015, 6 – 7.15pm followed by a reception
The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Chaired by: Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern FBA, University of Cambridge
How can anthropology help us to understand the epochal social and cultural changes catalysed by the take up of digital media and the internet? This lecture readdresses classic anthropological concerns, among them the nature of time and, as befits the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture, of social relations, drawing on a global programme of ethnographic studies of art and popular digital music cultures in Argentina, Canada, Cuba, India, Kenya and the United Kingdom. The lecture indicates how doing anthropology through music can revitalize these fundamental concerns, opening up new conceptual directions, while reshaping what has been called an anthropology of the contemporary.
April 02, 2015
Georgina Born Lecture @ Yale University
Thursday 2nd April, 5pm: Yale University, Whitney Humanities Center, contact Prof. Brian Kane: ‘Music, Sound Art, and the Contemporary: From Interdisciplinarity to Ontology’
April 01, 2015
Georgina Born Workshop @ Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology
Wednesday 1st April, 4-6pm: Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology, workshop on the analysis of musical-social relations and on re-theorising music and genre: contact Prof. Chris Washburne: cjw5@columbia.edu, 212-854-9862
March 31, 2015
Georgina Born Seminar @ The New School
Tuesday 31st March, 6pm: The New School, contact Prof. Chris Stover: stoverc@newschool.edu, 206-669-3154
March 30, 2015
Georgina Born Anthropology & Archaeology seminar @ Columbia University
Monday 30th March, 5.10pm: Anthropology & Archaeology seminar, Columbia University, Columbia Room, 420 Pupin Hall: contact Prof. Brian Boyd: bb2305@columbia.edu, 212-854-1390
March 29, 2015
Georgina Born Keynote @ MACSEM Annual Conference
Sunday 29th March, 11am: Keynote to the Mid Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference, New York University: contact Prof. Andy McGraw and Prof. David Samuels:
March 28, 2015
Georgina Born Keynote @ Current Musicology 50th Anniversary Conference
Saturday 28th March, 4.15pm: Keynote to the Current Musicology 50th Anniversary Conference, Columbia University: contact Tom Smith
January 14, 2015 ― January 17, 2015
The Music Box and its Reverberations: Technology and Music in India
The conference aims to trace musical experiences in the Indian context as they are mediated by technologies of music production, circulation and consumption. Choosing to concentrate on the aural as against the audiovisual (following Ochoa Gautier 2006), we draw upon scholarship from several disciplinary orientations to focus on selected domains of the interfaces between sound socialities and musical technologies. Bringing together perspectives from academics and practitioners, papers, roundtable discussions and performances will address the following themes, without being limited to them:
- Sonic technologies, aesthetic regimes and the crafting of genres/categories
- Technologies, digitization and film music industries
- Individuals, institutes and processes of collecting, storing and archiving music
- Amplification, circulation and the creation of musical/sonic publics
- Enmeshed technologies of the object and listening subject/s and practices
- Musical livelihoods, economies and sonic technologies
Each conference evening will culminate in a concert which speaks to a different Indian musical practice.
Speakers, discussants and practitioners/performers include: Aditi Deo; Amanda Weidman; Amlan Dasgupta; Anirudh Athreya; Ankush Gupta; Anubhuti Sharma; Arijit Dutta; Bhagwati Prasad; Bhaskar Kowshik; Bishwadeep Chatterjee; Bombay Jayashri Ramnath; Delhi Sairam; Georgina Born; Gopal Singh Chauhan; Gregory Booth; Ira Bhaskar; Jayson Beaster-Jones; Jonathan Sterne; Justin Scarimbolo; K. J. Dileep; Kunal Sharma; Lakshmi Subramanian; Lawrence Liang; Madhuja Mukherjee; Moushumi Bhowmik; Natalie Sarrazin; Neepa Majumdar; Partho Dutta; Pavithra Ramesh; Ranjani Mazumdar; Ratnakar Tripathy; Ravi Sundaram; Ravinder Randhawa; Ravi Vasudevan; Ravikant; Samhita Sunya; Satyaki Banerjee; Shikha Jhingan; Shrinkhala Sahai; Shubha Chaudhuri; Sneha Khanwalkar; Stefan Fiol; Stephen Hughes; Sukanta Majumdar; Suresh Chandvankar; Vebhuti Duggal; Vibodh Parthasarthy; Vidya Rao; Vijayashri Vittal; Vikram Sampath; Vinay Lobo; Yatindra Mishra
Conference committee: Prof Georgina Born (University of Oxford); Prof Ira Bhaskar (Jawaharlal Nehru University); Prof Bishnupriya Dutt (Jawaharlal Nehru University); Dr Kaushik Bhaumik (Jawaharlal Nehru University); Dr Aditi Deo (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune); Vebhuti Duggal (Jawaharlal Nehru University); Anubhuti Sharma (Jawaharlal Nehru University); Anugyan Nag (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
September 27, 2014 ― September 28, 2014
Music and Genre: New Directions
Location: Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada
MusDig is very pleased to announce its sponsorship of the upcoming conference ‘Music and Genre: New Directions’, sponsored and funded by the European Research Council research program ‘Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’ and the Schulich School of Music, McGill University. The conference arises directly out of themes stemming from the MusDig research, in conjunction with Prof. Born’s ongoing relations with McGill Music as Schulich Distinguished Visiting Chair from 2013 to 2016.
The conference aims to advance thinking and practice on two major and exciting challenges facing theories of musical genre. The first challenge is bringing music into productive alignment with wider shifts in genre theory beyond primarily formalist conceptions of genre, and towards theorizing genre with reference to its social, cultural and historical entailments. The second challenge concerns how genre today occupies a paradoxical position: both elusive, in the claims that certain new musics are ‘outside’ genre; and increasingly concrete, in the growing scientific and technological capacities to analyze, model and even predict the movement of genres associated with MIR and its application in services like Spotify.
As keynote speakers we are delighted to have three outstanding figures in the theorization of genre: anthropologist Karin Barber (University of Birmingham); literary and cultural theorist, John Frow (University of Sydney); and David Brackett (McGill University), a leading theorist of popular music and genre.
Other speakers include, from the MusDig research program, PI Georgina Born (Oxford University and McGill University), researcher Patrick Valiquet (Oxford University) and PhD student Blake Durham (Oxford University), as well as Eric Drott (University of Texas, Austin), Charles Kronengold (Stanford University) and Steve Waksman (Smith College). Glenn McDonald, a representative from leading algorithmic genre-analysts company The Echo Nest, will also participate in a roundtable discussion.
Day 1, September 27:
“Digital Genre Machines: Between the Dissolution and the Reification of Genre”
Day 2, September 28:
“Genre is Social: From Intra-Musical to Sociological Theories of Genre”
Organizing committee: Georgina Born, David Brackett, and Mimi Haddon
July 04, 2014
Gender, Education, Creativity in Digital Music and Sound Art: NIME 2014
Gender, Education, Creativity in Digital Music and Sound Art was a workshop at the 14th International Conference on New Instruments for Musical Expression (NIME). The event featured MusDig PI Georgina Born and several other leading scholars and sound artists. It took place on 04 July 2014 and was open to the public.
We are pleased to say that the panel will become a special section within a special issue of the Leonardo Music Journal. The special issue is entitled “The Politics of Sonic Art” and will appear in 2015. An audio recording of the event can be found here: MusDig NIME panel audio.
The workshop included papers and presentations that examined issues of gender in both higher education and creative practices in the fields of electronic and computer music and sound art. Our starting point was the enormous growth of music technology degree provision in British Higher Education since the mid 1990s. This growth has been accompanied by a clear demographic bifurcation between music technology and traditional music degrees: We showed that the student make-up of British music technology degrees, in comparison to both traditional music degrees and the national average, is overwhelmingly male (more than 90%), from less advantaged social backgrounds, and (slightly) more ethnically diverse. At issue, then, is the emergence of a highly (male) gendered digital music scene.
We set these research findings into dialogue with other paper-givers and discussants concerned with issues of gender in relation to creative processes in terms of technological design and use as well as performance, installation and compositional practices. The workshop therefore offered a basis on which to reflect on questions of gender within the NIME community and beyond. What kinds of musical futures will take shape if such imbalances are allowed to persist? What steps might be taken to redress gender inequalities in educational, professional and academic settings as well as creative and curatorial practices in these fields going forward? How can we combat the tendency to focus exclusively on the ‘problem of women’ while ignoring the challenges posed by the styles of masculinity evident in these fields? Is the gendering of digital musics and sound art evident in certain aesthetic directions? Throughout, we adopt a constructive standpoint. As Sally-Jane Norman has commented: ‘If we want to account for the resilience of observed gendering and the reproduction of imbalanced musical literacies … then we need to come up with creative strategies for analysing, interpreting, and comparing current situations more deeply and more diversely’.
Overall, the session was well received and initiated an overdue and necessary debate about gender in this field. The discussion period was lively, dealing with a variety of issues in gender politics (including the establishment of gender norms in school-level music education). Additionally, the discussion broadened to encompass class-related issues in the computer music community. Georgina Born offered a novel critique of the ‘user testing’ paradigm in musical computer–human interaction (CHI), drawing on feminist science and technology studies scholars Madeleine Akrich and Nelly Oudshoorn. To our knowledge, this was the first ever panel on gender at one of the main electronic / computer music conferences, and we are grateful to our participants and to all those in attendance for making this such a dynamic and successful event.
Participants:
Freida Abtan, Goldsmiths, University of London
Georgina Born, University of Oxford
Kyle Devine, City University London
Holly Ingleton, City University London
Cathy Lane, CRiSAP, University of the Arts, London
Sally-Jane Norman, University of Sussex
John Richards, De Montfort University
Laetitia Sonami, sound artist
Mark Taylor, University of Manchester
Marie Thompson, Newcastle University
Simon Waters, Queen’s University Belfast
December 12, 2013 ― December 13, 2013
Los impactos de las tecnologias digitales sobre la música en Cuba
More than 50 people participated to the MusDig Cuban event on December 12-13 in Havana, Cuba. The event was called “Los impactos de las tecnologias digitales sobre la música en Cuba” and it took place in the beautiful Museum of the Bellas Artes in Old Havana.
July 11, 2013 ― July 13, 2013
Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies Conference
This international and interdisciplinary conference addresses the wide-ranging changes to music and musical practices afforded by digitisation and digital media in the developing and the developed world. It features an array of leading and younger scholars from music, anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology, sound studies and new/media studies. The aim is to forge a new interdisciplinary field of digital music studies, while feeding the benefits gained from the analysis of music today back into anthropological, media and social theory.
An additional goal of the conference is to present and discuss, with colleagues engaged in related work and those from relevant disciplines, the research findings of Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies (Musdig), a 5-year research programme based in the Faculty of Music at Oxford.
Conference Programme and Additional Information
The booklet contains a variety of information, including the programme, abstracts and bios, details about the conference venue and our music events, how to get to Oxford, and some suggestions on what to do in Oxford. These booklets will also be printed in hardcopy and handed out to registered delegates on arrival.
Venue
St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
Keynotes
Anahid Kassabian is the James and Constance Alsop Chair of Music at the Institute of Popular Music and the School of Music at the University of Liverpool. Her most recent book is Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (University of California Press, 2013).
Jason Stanyek is University Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Oxford. He is currently completing an ethnographic monograph on Brazilian diasporic performance and is co-editing three volumes of collected essays (all forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2013): The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (2 volumes; co-edited with Sumanth Gopinath) and Brazil’s Northern Wave: Fifty Years of Bossa Nova in the United States (co-edited with Frederick Moehn).
Heather Horst is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre, and a Research Fellow in the MA programme in Digital Anthropology at University College London. Her research focuses upon new media, material culture, and transnational migration, and her most recent book, co-edited with Daniel Miller, is Digital Anthropology (Berg/Bloomsbury, 2012).
Speakers
Victoria Armstrong (St Mary’s), Geoff Baker (RHUL and Oxford), Andrew Barry (Oxford), Eliot Bates (Birmingham), Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research), Frauke Behrendt (Brighton), Georgina Born (Oxford), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Victoria), Michael Bull (Sussex), Mark J. Butler (Northwestern), Nicholas Cook (Cambridge), Aditi Deo (Oxford), Blake Durham (Oxford), Andrew Eisenberg (Oxford), Adrian Freed (UC Berkeley), Haidy Geismar (UCL), Andrew Goffey (Nottingham), Sumanth Gopinath (Minnesota), Christopher Haworth (ICASP), Steve Jones (Illinois at Chicago), Mark Katz (North Carolina), Cathy Lane (LCC), Eric Lewis (McGill), George Lewis (Columbia), Noel Lobley (Pitt Rivers), Sonia Livingstone (LSE), George Marcus (UC Irvine), Lee Marshall (Bristol), Frederick Moehn (KCL), Keith Negus (Goldsmiths), David Novak (UC Santa Barbara), Gascia Ouzounian (QUB), Alex Perullo (Bryant), Benjamin Piekut (Cornell), Trevor Pinch (Cornell), Marilou Polymeropoulou (Oxford), Nick Prior (Edinburgh), Katherine Schofield (KCL), Nick Seaver (UC Irvine), Joe Snape (Oxford), Jonathan Sterne (McGill), Martin Stokes (KCL), Paul Théberge (Carleton), Patrick Valiquet (Oxford)
May 13, 2013
Music, Digitisation and Mediation in British Higher Education
This workshop addressed the enormous growth of music technology provisions in British Higher Education since the mid 1990s (our figures indicate a 1400% increase) and took special note of certain demographic bifurcations of music technology and traditional music degrees. Using data obtained from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) on three main variables – gender, class, ethnicity – we were able to show that, compared to national averages, traditional music degrees tend to draw students with higher class profiles, fewer minority ethnicities, while the gender profile is balanced and parallels the wider student population. The demographic of music technology degrees, by contrast, and in comparison to both traditional music degrees and the national average, is overwhelmingly male, with a lower class profile and (slightly) more ethnically diverse. The findings were preliminary but striking nonetheless. And they raise questions for policy about the future of music in the university.
Our main goal was to present and discuss the results with those directly concerned with the landscape of music and music technology programmes in British HE. Guests included representatives from all our university samples, NAMHE, and other colleagues working on these issues.
List of Participants
Prof Georgina Born – University of Oxford
Dr Kyle Devine – University of Oxford
Ms Emily Payne – University of Oxford
Mr Patrick Valiquet – University of Oxford
Mr Mark Taylor – University of Oxford and University of York
Dr Victoria Armstrong – St. Mary’s University College
Dr Bret Battey – De Montfort University
Prof Carola Boehm – Manchester Metropolitan University
Ms Anna Bull – Goldsmiths College
Prof Michael Clarke – University of Huddersfield
Prof Rachel Cowgill – Cardiff University
Dr Michael Edwards – University of Edinburgh
Prof Simon Emmerson – De Montfort University
Dr Ambrose Field – University of York
Prof Lucy Green – Institution of Education
Dr Paul Greene – University of Central Lancashire
Dr Christopher Harte – Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Cathy Lane – London College of Communication
Dr Andrew McPherson – Queen Mary, University of London
Dr Helen Minors – Kingston University
Mr Tom Mudd – Goldsmiths College
Dr Dominic Murcott – Trinity Laban
Dr Martin Parker – University of Edinburgh
Prof Roger Parker – King’s College London
Prof Thomas Schmidt – University of Manchester
Mr Emmanuel Spinelli – Goldsmiths College
Dr Jo Thomas – University of East London
Dr Salomé Voegelin – London College of Communication
Dr Jonathan Wakefield – University of Huddersfield
Dr Simon Waters – Queen’s University Belfast
Dr Jez Wells – University of York
Mr Stewart Worthy – University of Huddersfield
Dr Edward Wright – Bangor University
April 16, 2013
Music and Digitisation in Buenos Aires
Digital technology has brought about fundamental changes to musical practices and institutions in Argentina, as it has in most parts of the world. What is perhaps distinctive about Buenos Aires, however, is that its musical culture appears to be in a period of flux or transition, yet without a clear destination in sight. A variety of economic models and philosophies jostle up against one another as musicians try to make both art and a living. Some advocate for a strengthening of copyright laws, others for their relaxation or total abandonment. And now that the lustre of the new has worn off, digital music making and consumption find analogue technologies starting to inch back into lost territory.
This event brought together musicians, representatives of a range of organizations, and specialists in various fields to debate the changes that digital technology has wrought to music in the Argentinean capital and the possible paths that lie ahead. They considered broad questions such as:
* Has the advent of digital technology made life easier or harder for musicians?
* What are the pros and cons of producing and performing music with digital tools?
* Will digital technology force a complete rethink of copyright?
* What is Argentina’s relationship with wider movements over creative commons in Latin America, and in what ways, if any, do they affect musicians?
The event was co-organized with Luis Sanjurjo and the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, Av. Corrientes 1543, Buenos Aires, and took place on April 16, 2013. It was divided into four panels. Each panel began with an exposition of the key questions by Geoff Baker and the placing of these questions in the broader frame of MusDig and its other sub-projects by Georgina Born; several guest speakers were then invited to make opening statements, and finally the floor was opened for a lengthy period of questions and comments from the audience. It was open to the public and drew a young and enthusiastic audience of several dozen who participated extensively and expressed their satisfaction at having the opportunity to debate such questions.
Event report
The event began with opening remarks by Georgina Born and Geoff Baker. The first panel was entitled “The music industry ‘in the waiting room,’” and included Andrés May from Opción Música, the music department of the city government’s creative industries office; Silvana Contreras from Sony Music Argentina; Villa Diamante, co-director of the independent label ZZK Records; Tatu Estela from Taringa! Música (a new digital distribution platform); and Cabeza netlabel owner, DJ and musician Lucas Luisao. These figures addressed the current state of the music industry in Buenos Aires – described in an earlier event as “in the waiting room” – and the opportunities and challenges that musicians face today. There was heated debate around the role of multinational major labels in Argentina and the effects of the city government’s policies on the local independent music scene, and quite distinct degrees of optimism emerged with respect to the future under digital conditions.
The second panel, “Authors’ rights – copyright and copyleft,” provided critical perspectives on the issue of copyright and the institutions responsible for its enforcement, and debated some of the alternatives (such as Creative Commons) that have been proposed in Argentina. The speakers were Beatriz Busaniche (Fundación Via Libre), Hernán Kerlleñevich (University of Quilmes), Matías Lennie (Creative Commons, RedPanal), and Rama from the “hacker rock” group X. Rather than restaging a fixed battle between proponents of copyright and copyleft that has been played out many times before, the focus of the panel was firmly on the critique of current norms and institutions, possible reforms, and alternative visions for the future. The discussion ranged widely across the drawbacks of the current situation, focusing in particular on the collecting society SADAIC, and the prospects but also considerable obstacles that lie ahead due to the limited traction of progressive ideas at the political level. It also encompassed issues such as the nature and role of the author and the question of professionalism and amateurism.
The third panel, “Analogue, digital… post-digital?,” brought together DJ/producer/percussionist Patricio Smink (Pimentón, El Remolón y Su Conjunto), Luciano Choque Ramos (Todopoderoso Popular Marcial, Orquesta Popular San Bomba), Diego Pérez (Tonolec), and Adrián Arellano, of the vinyl club 33RPM. These musicians combine appreciation and skilled use of digital technology with interests in analogue, acoustic, and what might be termed “post-digital” musical practices. Participants discussed the motivations behind their changing technological and aesthetic approaches. Smink provided an impressive demonstration on his electronic percussion device, a Handsonic. A key part of the debate revolved around Pérez’s contention that a certain post-digital shift was related to broader social and political movements in Argentina, above all the painful transition from neoliberal to post-neoliberal conditions via the catastrophic economic crisis of 2001-2.
Finally, the fourth panel, curated by Luis Sanjurjo of the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, explored the conjunctures between digital technology, education, and social work in projects like Escuchate (a music program in a women’s prison) and the one-laptop-per-child scheme Conectar Igualdad. The speakers were Luis Sanjurjo, Federico Giuliani y Ezequiel Requejo (Escuchate), Carlos Sidoni (Trama, CCC and MICA), and Pedro Haedo (Conectar Igualdad).
March 01, 2013
Industry, Institutions and Livelihoods
This workshop discussed, in an informal setting, work-in-progress on how digital technologies and digitisation are transforming the industry and institutions of music, as well as musicians’ livelihoods, with a particular though not exclusive focus on the global South. We looked at a range of issues:
- The changing role of the ‘majors’ in developing countries
- The restructuring, adjustment and indeed potential replacement of ‘old’ music industry structures by new corporate players and networks based on digital distribution, media and telecommunications systems
- Old, new and emergent economic strategies on the part of organizations and individuals
- The apparent arrival in the global South – from the signs given by our fieldwork in Kenya, India and Argentina – of two as yet little discussed paradigms: 1) the ‘creative industries’ paradigm, and 2) notions of culture as development – that is, of models in which the cultural, media and specifically music industries are seen as having new importance as a general means of economic development
January 12, 2013
Intellectual Property, Cultural Commons and Ontological Politics
This conference addressed the transformations through digital technologies and digitisation of discourses and practices around musical propertisation around the world, offering ethnographic methods as a fruitful mode of research inquiry. Centred on theoretical and conceptual ideas arising from fieldwork, it aimed to generate dialogue between scholars working on the subject from a range of disciplines — anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, intellectual property law and legal theory. The papers shared an ‘ontological’ perspective in examining how the transposability of sound and data in the digital age is fostering new controversies over the nature of the music as art, commodity and heritage.
Speakers and discussants included: Geoff Baker (RHUL/Oxford), Jose Bellido (Birkbeck), Lionel Bently (Cambridge), Georgina Born (Oxford), Alexandrine Boudrealt-Fournier (University of Victoria), Aditi Deo (Oxford), Mireille van Eechoud (Amsterdam), Andrew Eisenberg (Oxford), Veit Erlmann (University of Texas, Austin), Haidy Gaismar (UCL/NYU), Mike Rowlands (UCL), Jason Stanyek (Oxford), Henry Stobart (RHUL).
October 27, 2012
Rethinking the Mutual Mediation of Technology and Aesthetics: The Case of Music
This event addressed the long-standing challenge of theorising the interrelations between technology and aesthetics, bringing a range of detailed ethnographic perspectives into dialogue with invited interlocutors from the fields of music theory, music psychology, sound art, media theory, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and electroacoustic composition. A sub-theme addressed by many of the contributors was the consideration of the question of the specificities of and the interrelations between digital and analogue technologies, with papers addressing a variety of manifestations in both production and consumption practices. The format of the conference highlighted the sharing of brief ethnographic papers and analysis in progress with a select but diverse scholarly audience in order to foster synergies from close mutual engagement.
Guests were selected to act as respondents to each of the MusDig group members’ papers, and three were asked to give short statements on their own research during the opening session. The day opened with an overview by Georgina Born which was followed by 3 guest presentations, 5 ethnographic papers with 2 respondents each, and an open plenary to end the day led by two guest speakers.
July 10, 2012
Popular Expression in the ‘Silicon Savanna’: Perspectives on the Digitization of Art and Life in Kenya (Kenya Sub-Project, Local Conference)
Event Report (A. Eisenberg)
I organised a one-day conference in Nairobi on 10 July 2012, with invited speakers from the faculties of the humanities departments at my affiliating institution in Nairobi, Kenyatta University, and non-academics involved in the Kenyan music and media industries. The event was designed to provide a forum in which Professor Born and I could engage with local humanities scholars and music industry stakeholders, offer them an overview of the MusDig project, and foster empirical and theoretical discussions that might continue throughout the course of the project.
The theme of the conference, the digitization of popular expression in Kenya, encompasses the main concerns of the MusDig project while being broad enough to draw in participants and audience members from outside the field of music. This breadth of thematic scope emerged from my partnership with Dr Mbugua wa Mungai, a folklorist and popular culture scholar who holds a position within the Department of Literature at Kenyatta University. Dr. Mbugua, whom I first met at a conference at the Programme of African Studies Birmingham in 2010, facilitated my affiliation with Kenyatta University, and has been a valuable interlocutor for my research. He has written on popular music consumption in Nairobi, drawing on both ethnographic data and literary analysis, and has conducted in-depth research on Kikuyu popular music for Ketebul Music, a non-profit Afro-fusion label that I have examined closely.
Dr. Mbugua and I began planning the event in earnest in April 2012. We settled on a theme very quickly. I then drew up the blurb and began contacting potential participants. From the beginning, Dr. Mbugua and I were committed to making the conference one in which non-academic practitioners would present their ideas alongside scholars. We felt that this would lead to mutually beneficial discussions among the presenters while also drawing a diverse audience that would include stakeholders in the music and media industries. For me there was no question that we needed to do this, as it would be the best way to ensure that the event answered the task set out in our ethics protocol, which is ‘to foster dialogue on the research and findings’.
Dr. Mbugua confirmed all of the academic presenters. All except one were faculty members at Kenyatta University. Most of these are from Dr. Mbugua’s home department, the Department of Literature, but the Department of History and the Department of Music and Dance were also represented. As is clear from the programme, popular culture in the digital age has become a central research topic at Kenyatta University across the humanities.
The sole academic on our programme who was not affiliated with Kenyatta University was the African literature scholar Dr. Kimani Njogu, one of Kenya’s most well known public intellectuals. Dr. Njogu runs the academic publishing company Twaweza, which has put out a number of edited volumes on media and the arts in Kenya featuring Kenyan and international scholars.
I took up the task of bringing in non-academics who would be willing and able to speak in an academic setting. Two of the presenters I confirmed, June Gachui and Bill Odidi, were obvious choices. Gachui, who is a lawyer with an LL.M. in intellectual property law, has been a very important interlocutor for me with respect to issues of intellectual property. As the General Manager of the Kenya Association of Music Producers, she is deeply involved in local struggles over music licensing in the digital age. Odidi is a journalist, radio producer, and television news presenter for the national broadcaster, KBC. He is also a researcher, who, like Dr. Mbugua, has worked on Ketebul Music’s Ford Foundation-funded documentaries on the history Kenyan popular music.
The venue chosen for the event, the main auditorium of the Goethe Institut-Nairobi, was provided by the Institut at no charge. In addition, the Institut supplied a projector and sound system, and furnished MusDig with an audio recording of the event. The Institut is known both for presenting innovative academic workshops/conferences and for supporting Kenyan digital arts through their on-going patronage of the music and visual art of Kenyan electronic dance music group and art collective Just A Band. For Dr. Mbugua and me, the Goethe Institut-Nairobi seemed a very good choice, because it is centrally located in the city and well known to many in the music industry.
In addition to mixing academics and non-academics, Dr. Mbugua and I decided to try one other innovative move for our conference, one that we felt to be highly appropriate to the theme: we set the conditions for extending the discussions in the conference well beyond the walls of the Goethe Institut-Nairobi, by inviting experienced bloggers to engage in live tweeting and blogging during the proceedings. In consultation with Nanjira Sambuli, one of the invited presenters who is an active blogger, we extended a handful of invitations to local bloggers who are known for their writing on digital technologies, the arts, or both. We ended up with two bloggers, James Wamathai of Wamathai.com and Kennedy Kachwanya of Kachwanya.com. Nanjira Sambuli also live tweeted the event, and later created an archive of all the event tweets on Storify.com.
Conference Description and Programme
Popular Expression in the ‘Silicon Savanna’: Perspectives on the Digitization of Art and Life in Kenya
Organized by Dr. Mbugua wa Mungai (Kenyatta University) and Dr. Andrew J. Eisenberg (University of Oxford), with support from the Goethe Institut-Nairobi and the ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation’ Research Programme at the University of Oxford, UK.
While it remains to be seen whether the digital revolution will bring Kenya’s ‘Vision 2030’ to fruition, digital technologies are clearly transforming the landscape of Kenyan popular culture. In Kenya today, popular music is being produced on computers and consumed on mobile phones; fiction is being published, read, and commented upon in blogs; poetry is being podcast; religious and political slogans are circulating on Twitter. This workshop brings together Kenyan and non-Kenyan scholars, intellectuals, and cultural practitioners for lively presentations and discussions on the ways in which digital technologies are transforming the production, consumption, reception, monetization, and politicization of popular expression in Kenya––all with a view toward developing a better understanding of Kenyan society in the digital age.
Participants
Chris Adwar (music producer and bandleader for The Villager’s Band)
Andrew J. Eisenberg, PhD (Faculty of Music, Oxford U)
June Gachui, LLM (General Manager, Kenya Assoc of Music Producers)
Murimi Gaita, PhD (Dept of Literature, Kenyatta U)
Felix Kiruthu, PhD (Dept of History, Kenyatta U)
Justus K. S. Makokha, PhD (Dept of Literature, Kenyatta U)
Mbugua wa Mungai, PhD (Dept of Literature, Kenyatta U)
Susan Mwangi, PhD (Dept of History, Kenyatta U)
Aggrey Nganyi, PhD (Dept of Music and Dance, Kenyatta U)
Kimani Njogu, PhD (Director, Twaweza Communications)
Bill Odidi (Chief Radio Producer, Kenya Broadcasting Corp)
Nanjira Sambuli (musician and blogger)
Invited Bloggers:
Kennedy Kachwanya, http://www.kachwanya.com/
James Wamathai, http://www.wamathai.com/
Programme
10am
Introductory Remarks, Dr. Andrew J. Eisenberg, Prof. Georgina Born
10:20am – 11:20am
Panel 1
‘Media Imperialism: Telenovelas, Cyberspace and the (Re)Construction of the Kenyan Youth’, Dr. Susan Mwangi
‘Speaking from the Informal Spaces: Political Hip Hop Music of Youth in the Slums of Nairobi’, Dr. Aggrey Nganyi
‘From Page 6 to Pullouts: Performing the Vaudevillian in Kenyan Newspapers’, Dr. Murimi Gaita
11:20am – 12:20pm
Panel 2
‘The Kenyan Music Industry in the Digital Age: Preliminary Notes and Findings from Ongoing Research in Nairobi’, Dr. Andrew J. Eisenberg
‘Think Global, Act Local: The Case of Music in the DIY and Digital Era’, Nanjira Sambuli
‘For Better or For Worse, a Marriage of Three: A Brief Overview of Intellectual Property, Digitization and the Musician’s Craft/Art’, June Gachui
[Break]
1:30pm – 2:30pm
Panel 3
‘Masculinities and Popular Culture in Central Kenya’, Dr. Felix Kiruthu
‘Social Media, The Youth And Creative Energy In Contemporary Africa: The Example Of Facebook Poetry Of Mbizo Chirasha And Wanjohi Wa Makokha’, Dr. Justus K. S. Makokha
‘Provisional Notes on SMS as Popular Culture in Kenya’, Dr. Mbugua wa Mungai
2:30pm – 3:30pm
Panel 4
‘The Producer is Dead: Co-Creating and User-Driven Content Generation’, Dr. Kimani Njogu
‘From Analogue to Digital: The Impact of the Changing Formats on Traditional Radio and TV Journalism’, Bill Odidi
‘On Creating New Genres of Music by Experimentation and Fusion’, Chris Adwar
