Digital Formations of Popular MusicProducers, Devices, Styles and Practices

Nick PriorIn Réseaux Volume 172, Issue 2, April 2012, pages 66 to 90

ISSN 0751-7971ISBN 9782707173249

Available online at:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-reseaux-2012-2-page-66.htm--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------How to cite this article:

Nick Prior, «Digital Formations of Popular Music», Réseaux 2012/2 (No 172) , p. 66-90

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DIGITAL FORMATIONS OF POPULAR MUSIC

Producers, Devices, Styles and Practices1

Nick PRIORUniversity of Edinburgh

1. This article draws on the groundwork covered in three previous articles published in New Formations (Prior, 2008a), Information, Communication and Society (2008b) and Handbook of Cultural Sociology, John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff and Ming-cheng Lo (eds), Routledge, 2010 (Prior, 2010). It is a version of a talk given at the ANR Seminar, Les Artistes et Régimes Numérique, L’Institut Sciences Sociales du Travail, Paris, June 2010 and at the ANR supported conference Artistic Work and Creativity in the Digital Era, University of Avignon, May 2011. I am grateful to the participants and organizers, and particularly to Philippe Le Guern, for the opportunity to present this material and to the two peer reviewers for their insightful comments on the article.

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INTRODUCTION

I n the following paper, I’d like to set out some potential avenues into what might be at stake in debates around the digitalisation of music, including some of the issues and challenges raised by close attention to chang-

ing practices of production. I want to pursue the shifting terrains of popular music as they are shaken by the movements, constructions, and uses of digi-tal technologies. Specifically, I want to outline how our understanding of the structure and culture of popular music needs to change if we are to analyze post-1980s developments in global hypermodern societies with precision. To this end, I will address some of the main challenges facing a thorough and rig-orous analysis of the digital in music and then move towards an exploration of four key areas where these changes are felt most keenly – in the overlapping domains of producers, devices, styles and practices.

The overall aim of the paper, then, is to orient the reader to what I will call digital formations as they implicate transformations, but also continuities, in the way music is produced, and introduce some of the key literatures and ideas that bear upon the question of digital processes and practices as they intersect with popular music. In particular, the paper attends to how (mainly U.K.-based) academics have dealt with the digital mediation of music pro-duction at a time when this domain has received less attention than academic work around piracy, file-sharing and digital downloading (Kretshmer, 2005; Marshall, 2004).

This is not a straightforward exercise, of course. Indeed, one confronts a series of obstacles in clearing the ground for analysis of the digital. Firstly, and especially in the UK and US, the study of popular music is somewhat hamstrung by a fetish for the 1950s and 1960s (Jones, 1992; Bennett et al, 1993; Peterson, 1990). In some respects, one goes against the grain in writing a contemporary account of popular music (digitalized or otherwise), partly because of the predominance of a particular, rock-based narrative obsessed with ideas of virtuosity, counter-cultural groupings and analogue instruments. Until recently, the domain of popular music studies has been skewed towards

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IV Réseaux n° 172/2012

the classic age of rock music and influential writings have set out the grounds accordingly (Frith, 1978). Drawing on this work can be problematic in that some of the available concepts are tailor-made for understanding guitar-based formations and rebellious youth sub-cultures (Hebdige, 1979). The challenge is, therefore, to move beyond the classic work in rock music studies and attempt something like a contemporary analysis of popular music sensitive to socio-technical change.

Secondly, there’s the problem of hype. How does one avoid the overly uto-pian embracing of all things digital as “revolutionary” without suggesting that nothing has changed at all? Diagnosing change is always haunted by hyper-bole and this is particularly apparent with new technologies, where the idea of transformation is often overplayed, as if digitalization is a “year zero” in pop-ular music’s history. Clearly, it’s incumbent on us to show how older indus-try structures of rights, media conglomerates and high-value capital remain largely intact, if only in adaptive form. On the other hand, to assume nothing has changed is exactly the mistake made by centralized corporations in the music industry overtaken by rapid changes in the ways digital technologies are used and misused by producers and consumers. In short, the problem is how to acknowledge transformation without resorting to over-exaggeration; to respect historical continuity whilst recognizing difference.

A third issue (one which afflicts all studies of technology) is to avoid deter-ministic arguments that assume that technology has a power independent of the social. This is not a particularly novel dilemma, of course. Indeed, social scientists of technology have for a long time departed from the assumption that technology is an autonomous force of change. Instead, important work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) has demonstrated how the social and the technological are always bound to each other (Mackenzie and Wajcman, 1999). The assumption, here, is that we cannot separate technology from the various social, political and economic interests that shape its presence in society and that fund, market and promote it (Bell, 2006; Kleinman, 2005). Neither can we assume that the meaning of technology rests with its technical functionality.

Yet, in popular music studies the notion that technology impacts on music or transforms music is still a fairly common conception. Popular music text-books, for instance, still regularly adhere to a weak form of determinism, where technological inventions somehow just produce new styles or practices,

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Digital Formations of Popular Music V

without reflecting on how these transformations are always at the same time human deflections and adaptations. In fact, music history is full of interesting examples of how the use, function and meaning of technologies are twisted in practice.2

All this points to why we might deploy the term “digital formations”, because the digital is more than simply a technical term to designate formal systems. What we are really talking about with the digital is a constellation of dis-courses, artefacts, techniques and practices that revolve around an increasing reliance on complex, computerised systems. The term “formation” is used in the sense of a loose configuration of elements, less rigid than the terms “institution” or “epoch” but characterised by constituent material and non-material elements sharing enough properties in common to produce systemic effects (Prior, 2008a). Digital formations include both devices and commer-cial claims regarding their function; they include both ways of talking, in the sense of established discursive repertoires that help constitute technological realities, and everyday routines that are engaged with the construction and consumption of digital forms.

More a set of meanings, objects and practices than a technology tout court, the digital represents characteristic forms of organising an increasingly inter-connected and computerised world expressed in everyday behaviours and relations. Again, to abstract the technological artefact from these relations is to make the mistake of attaching to technology an independent power dis-embedded from human activity, knowledge and social structures. Indeed, we would have to recognize that the ubiquity of digital technology is inseparable from the rise of globalisation and the expansion of a free-market capitalism increasingly reliant on rapid modes of communication (Lash and Urry, 1994; Thrift, 2005).

The final challenge rests on the question of periodisation. One of the problems in writing a history of electronic and digital technologies is the temptation to align the digital with a definitively postmodern world and let the analysis unfold accordingly. Here, the sampler becomes the paradigmatic postmodern

2. We can merely note how the turntable was appropriated for scratching, how feedback and distortion were “invented” by accident and how the birth of acid house was contingent on a misappropriation of the Roland TB-303 bassline generator (Poschardt, 1998). In any case, to assume that music technologies determine behaviours in any straightforward sense is to assign to technology a power that floats over and above society.

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VI Réseaux n° 172/2012

device because it ushers in the aesthetics of reproduction and the sylistic elec-ticism of hip hop, where pop begins to “eat itself” (a process that reaches its apotheosis with a perpetual ransacking of the past in a mode of what Simon Reynolds (2011) calls “retromania”). As labels go, however, the term post-modern is enormously blunt and reductive not only in the way it posits a radical disjuncture from a rather one-dimensional version of the modern, but also in the imprecise way it collapses the specific properties of the economic, social and cultural.3

A more productive and precise way to focus on change is to classify the ways in which the practices of work and systems of production undergo transfor-mations whilst resisting totalizing caricatures of these shifts. Hence, both the studio and production undergo a shift from the 1980s, not in relation to the restless negation of a modern aesthetic, but a more subtle inflection in the cur-vature of production itself. For instance, I would like to argue that there was something fertile and interesting about the years 1982-83 in the way popular music traveled in the subsequent period, where developments in these years became crucial to how the auspices of pop were reconfigured in parallel with emergent digital technologies.

This is not to say that new technologies create music worlds from scratch; but such technologies have facilitated or afforded new possibilities. In the following section, I will point to how and why the early 1980s put in place a series of cultural and technical developments that established the foundations of digital formations in music, often in surprising ways – surprising not least because this period is not often thought to be a particularly propitious period for popular music at all. In short, what we hear, as well as when and how we hear it is partly traceable to an era often caricatured as one of kitschy excess and political despair.

3. Here, I follow the work of Terry Bloomfield (1991) and argue that music does not align with the contours of a postmodern configuration in expected ways. To assume that it is does would be to assume that punk (historically at least) belongs to the postmodern moment, when it surely belongs to an aesthetic of modernist negation. Equally, the co-mingling of analogue and digital technologies gives rise to all sorts of convergences in styles and practices, whilst the continued importance of discourses of (modern) authenticity play themselves out in the valorisation of rock, DJ culture and even highly-digitalised musics. Hardly, postmodern, then, if we are to take that term seriously as a departure from the conventions, practices and forms of the modern era.

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Digital Formations of Popular Music VII

WHY 1983?

So, why the early 1980s, more particularly the years 1982-83? Firstly, in pro-duction terms, 1983 saw the invention of several influential musical devices and processes—their presence emblematic of a shift in the global structure of the electronics industry towards East and Southeast Asia (Gregory, 1985). Such devices included the first commercially successful digital synthesizer—the Yamaha DX7—affordable drum machines and commercial audio software packages. Consumer-level domestic computers such as the Sinclair ZX81, the BBC Micro and Sinclair ZX Spectrum were introduced to the market around this time, establishing the popularity of the desktop computer with monitors and graphic user interfaces. It’s no accident that the world’s best selling com-puter model of all time, the Commodore 64, took off around this time, too. Containing the famous SID (Sound Interface Device) chip, the C64 generated the distinctive crunchy 8 bit sonic textures redolent of a burgeoning computer games industry (recently the inspiration for a comeback in the form of “chip-tunes” and home studio software emulations, incidentally).

Secondly, the year 1983 witnessed the invention of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), an industry-standard protocol set up by Japanese electronics corporations to enable different instruments to communicate streams of algorith-mic data with one another (Kakehashi, 2002). For instance, synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers could be daisy-chained together in the studio to create tightly synchronized digital ensembles. As Théberge (1997) argues, like tradi-tional notation, MIDI separated the “language” of music from its resulting sound because the digital interface only provided somewhere to input data, the sounds of which were reproduced elsewhere. In other words, MIDI did not carry audio itself but was a means of transmitting information: note on/off, duration, pitch, and so on. This had implications for performance, too, not only because it sepa-rated the gesture from the triggered sound, but also because it made it permis-sible for bands to take their studio setups on tour and reproduce the sequenced sounds of the album in a live setting. Finally, as a technical standard, and like the spread of any universal language, MIDI unified what could have potentially become a fragmented landscape of musical instruments, locking in subsequent technological developments around a new paradigmatic frame of recording and performing. These days, most electronic and digital instruments, including some older analogue instruments like guitars and amplifiers, are MIDI-enabled and all recording studios and computer-based setups are by definition also MIDI setups, reducing music to flows and streams of binary data.

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VIII Réseaux n° 172/2012

Thirdly, 1982 was the year that CDs and CD players were introduced to the market — another step in a long line of format shifts in the history of music that changed how we listened to music. Led by the companies Sony and Philips, the CD could hold 74 minutes worth of music at 16 bit resolution (anecdotally, because this was the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony) and quickly became an industry standard, despite initial reticence from a music business that was undergoing a profound commercial slump. Like MIDI, the CD cemented the idea of the audio file as a unitary piece of digital information capable of being stored, catalogued, manipulated, and endlessly reproduced in chunks of binary data. Indeed, hardware companies promoting the CD and the CD player emphasized the eternal, if not immortal, status of the music – “per-fect sound forever” went the advertising slogan and by 1983, 800,000 CDs were shipped to retailers, whilst the number of CD players rose to 9 million in just a few years. On a consumer level, it was clear that music fans had started to replace their vinyl and cassettes with CDs – a changeover that, as Milner notes, kept the music industry expanding until 1997 (Milner, 2009).

Fourthly, if 1982-83 had set in place a raft of influential digital formats and standards, then what about the music itself? What did this period look and sound like? Well, for a start, two of the most influential musical works of recent times were produced and disseminated around this time. One, Michael Jackson’s album Thriller, remains the biggest selling album in history and turned Jackson into a global superstar. The other, New Order’s “Blue Monday”, is widely perceived to be the biggest selling UK 12-inch record of all time and presaged a shift to dance-based pop and an electronic mode of production. In commercial terms, Jackson’s Thriller is regularly thought to have reinvigorated (if not saved) a moribund music industry by shifting so many units (Inglis, 2006). “Blue Monday”, on the other hand, was notable for a less auspicious commercial fact: the printing costs for the cover outstripped revenue on sales and this almost bankrupted Manchester’s Factory records.

As for mainstream music, at least in the UK, whilst the backbone of the charts continued to comprise disco, funk, R&B, rock and “indie” bands, a much more overtly electronic strand of music had been woven into the mix, with the appearance of bands like OMD, Soft Cell, Kraftwerk and The Human League. The latter’s 1982 single “Being Boiled”, for instance was a futuristic-sound-ing groove driven by programmed drum beats and a synth-bass (Reynolds, 2005). Within a year or two, many of these “electro” bands began to experi-ment with digital samplers like the Fairlight CMI, as well as MIDI and digital synthesizers.

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Digital Formations of Popular Music IX

The music video also became a complex and visually intensified form of mar-keting around this time. MTV began broadcasting in August of 1981 and acted as a space through which the pop star was turned into a spectacle or celebrity event. With its fast edits and hip iconography MTV helped to routinise music as a set of elaborate visual forms and representations, establishing the music video as an influential commercial outlet at the same time. Indeed, at times it wasn’t clear if the video was promoting the song or vice versa as MTV con-fused boundaries between original and reproduced, authentic and fake, live and recorded (Auslander, 1996). Certainly, MTV exemplified an intensifica-tion of the process of mass mediation of popular music in a hyper-capitalist phase of production and dissemination. It also opened up pop to a new set of filmic repertoires and narrative structures amongst a mainly youthful group of increasingly voracious and skillful consumers.

Finally, 1983 was the year that ARPANET and its associated protocols (the first manifestation of internet technologies) were switched over to the TCP/IP protocol, establishing networking capabilities across different and hitherto incompatible computers. The new protocol adhered to the principles of con-nectivity and distribution, meaning that each network could connect to each and every other network. There would be no central administration or control unit and the design included capabilities for 32 Internet Protocol “addresses” with eight bits for identification of a network and 24 bits for an individual computer. Today, the world wide web is largely based upon TCP/IP software that connects different networks of computers with different IP addresses. In other words, the networking framework for the global Internet was put in place in 1983, with profound implications for how music is organized, distrib-uted and consumed.

Of course, none of these developments were independently responsible for creating the momentum necessary for wholesale changes in popular music. In many respects, they replicated and attended to an already emergent series of global processes that ushered in advanced, high-tech, networked societies favoring a re-ordering of modes of cultural production. But it does indicate how digitalization goes hand in hand with significant twists in the story of pop (from MIDI to MP3 files, SID chips to Spotify). All of which is to say that what we hear, where we hear it, how we listen to new music, who produces it have all traveled quite dramatically in a period that arguably folds around developments in 1982-83. In short, an archaeology of digital formations, of the digital infrastructure of contemporary musical life, must necessarily dig down to an era that is too often overlooked as creatively dubious or unremarkable.

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X Réseaux n° 172/2012

Having set up a kind of historical snapshot of some of the foundational threads of digital formations, I’d like now to delve a little deeper into some of the resulting developments. In particular, I would like to assess how the rise of digital formations challenges us to rethink some of the core categories of production itself: those related to the status of musicians, their styles and practices as well the increasing normalization of the digital devices that they use. Whilst necessarily a selective summary of these domains, the point is to show that the rise of digital formations forces us to re-engage with some of the fundamental conceptual, empirical and substantive categories of analysis.

PRODUCERS

I’ve already mentioned that music technologies are inseparable from the people who make, market, distribute and use them: and these would include social groups and individuals, with bodies in the world, socialised in various ways, actively learning their skills, and interacting with other human and non-human agents. Clearly any analysis of this field has to account for the agency of these bodies as they intersect with each other in practice (Toynbee, 2000). Music is of course about shared sociality and the digital clearly helps to lubri-cate these forms of sociality in pleasure, play and practice (Ayers, 2006). This is particularly apparent amongst young people involved in digitally-enabled cultures of sharing – not just in terms of illegal file sharing, but also sharing iPod playlists, headphones and software (Bull, 2007). I want to leave aside the question of how cultures of sharing are re-shaping the circuits of music for now to focus on another question revolving around the category “producer” – in particular, the type of producer-hobbyist previously known as “amateur”.

Through a series of interviews with amateur musicians using digital based setups, I have become interested in finding out how musicians get to know their gear, how they use and misuse it, how they approach the compositional process and what bodily efforts are involved in everyday “musicking” (Small, 1998). One stark realization that has emerged from the interviews is that these people contribute to a huge swathe of cultural production and musicianship that has been relatively ignored in the scholarly field. I’m talking about so-called “amateur production” and the significance of what I’m calling the “new amateur” (Prior, 2010).

In the domain of music, the idea of the amateur has been given short shrift. Indeed, with the exception of Ruth Finnegan’s (1989) now classic ethnography

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Digital Formations of Popular Music XI

of music-making in a small English town, very few studies have tackled the amateur in any detail. Finnegan herself notes how musicological analysis has gravitated to the “best” or “highest” forms of music-making. In popular music studies this has meant skewed attention to the highly commodified and spec-tacular domains of the large-scale sub-field. But clearly this is only the tip of a very substantial iceberg when a careful stock-take of music-related activity reveals a diverse set of amateur networks, practices, and creative forms out-side the commercial domain: from choirs and brass bands to family gather-ings and karaoke (Finegan, 1989; Cohen, 1991).

In the UK, arts surveys suggest that around 9 percent of the population play musical instruments, 2 percent play to audiences, and 5 percent sing to audi-ences at least once a year (Leadbeater and Miller, 2004). Electronic and digital technologies have expanded these networks, not just by bringing like-minded musicians together (virtually and physically), but by establishing alternative modes of creativity through the complex circuits of digital and non-digital life (Ryan and Hughes, 2006).

There’s a whole corpus of producers or “prosumers” (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010) whose practices are starting to make a significant impact on how music is made, where and by what means. New amateurs are technologically literate, seriously engaged, and committed practitioners working to professional stan-dards but often without the infrastructural support or conventional credentials of the professional. Disproportionately, though not exclusively, drawn from the educated middle classes, these producers deploy their cultural capital in projects and self-organized cultural milieu. They are unlikely to earn much of their total income from their activities, but their sense of identity is firmly attached to the pursuit of what Stebbins (2007) calls “serious leisure”.

If the twentieth-century professional was defined partly by a monopoly over a specialized field of knowledge, objects, and esoteric skills, such monopolies are mutable and under erosion. This has partly to do with material and tech-nological processes and artefacts: the objects and tools that once separated amateur and professional now travel between them more readily. The com-plex machines and spaces that once imposed financial barriers to production are no longer the necessary prerequisites for quality. And boundaries around technical expertise are more permeable with the diffusion of “know-how” through formal and informal sites, including internet forums and databases. It is nowadays a fairly straightforward exercise to find out how to make your

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XII Réseaux n° 172/2012

own movie, add expressive filters to your photos, or publish your own news-letter. If only a decade ago we saw computers as esoteric business machines and word-processors, we now think of them as cultural devices for generating images, editing movies, and mixing tracks.

Here’s a case in point. In the summer of 2008, I interviewed a British Asian musician called Jyoti Mishra, otherwise known as the band White Town. For a short moment in the late 1990s, Mishra was the poster boy of musical geeks and bedroom musicians everywhere. In 1997, whilst studying for a film and sociology degree at the University of Derby, UK, Mishra produced a song, “Your Woman,” in a nine-foot-square spare bedroom, using an eight-track recorder, a £35 microphone, and some free computer software. The song, a 1980s-inspired chunk of electro-pop, was arranged around a catchy 1930s trumpet sample from a song by Lew Stone and the Monseigneur Band called “My Woman.”

In October 1996, Mishra sent a demo of this song to BBC Radio1 DJ Mark Radcliffe, who liked it so much he made it his “record of the week.” This meant it was played every day that week on Radcliffe’s evening show. A series of institutional contingencies followed. Radcliffe went on holiday, but his replacement continued to play the track. Chris Evans, a prime-time break-fast DJ, became ill and had to be replaced. Radcliffe replaced him, but kept plugging the song. Music journalists jumped on the homespun origins of the track and consumers became captivated by the catchy sample hook. Record companies queued up to sign White Town and in just a few short weeks, in January 1997, the record reached number one in the UK charts, eventually selling around 400,000 copies. It went gold in Canada, sold 250,000 copies in the United States, and proceeded to reach number one in eight different countries. “Bedroom to Big Time,” Wired magazine put it (Pemberton, 1997). Mishra signed to EMI/Chrysalis, went on to record an album, promptly fell out with the record company, but had made enough money on the basis of “Your Woman” to give up his studies and continue his life as an independent musician, self-producing, marketing, and distributing his own material.

Now if one can avoid the “never give up on your dreams” sentimentalism that Mishra’s label promoted at the time, then it is still remarkable that an unknown Asian man in his thirties could single-handedly write and produce a hit song without huge commercial backing or support. It shows how cheap, modern musical technologies can be used to make professional-sounding

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Digital Formations of Popular Music XIII

tracks, and it demonstrates the viability of a grassroots mode of production. One shouldn’t overplay this as a major historical transformation. Musicians have always sought ways to “make do” in the sense implied by Michel de Certeau (1984). In many respects, musicians are the consummate “creative consumers,” improvising resourcefully with whatever materials and channels are available to them. In the past, this has meant sourcing equipment from unusual places, financing the recording, designing the sleeve, pressing and distributing the record, or even setting up a micro label. In other words, this DIY system has always been a viable option.

The difference today is one of global reach, speed, ease of use, and abso-lute scale. One might even suggest that the DIY ethic so cherished by punk rock is no longer an activist ideology, but a systematic, structural condition of the production of music itself. And not just in the developed West either. For whilst the digital divide between rich and poor countries undoubtedly exists in a climate where “ethnic sounds” are sampled and fetishized by the likes of Missy Elliot and Madonna for their “exotic” qualities, impoverished musicians in places like the Dominican Republic are managing to find access to digital recording facilities in order to record and press CDs on very tight budgets (Hernandez, 2004).

If the “new amateur” is an emergent category, there’s clearly more work to be done in showing how this category intersects with a rapidly changing record industry (the so-called “disintermediation” of the industry in particular). There are also a series of questions that can be posed in relation to the nature of the digital spaces inhabited by these new amateurs - digitally-enabled remote col-laboration being just one aspect of the unhooking of practice from place. But there’s also the question of what kinds of devices are finding a home in cur-rent landscapes of digital cultural production.

DEVICES

Rather than trawling through the whole gamut of devices that constitute the digital, or exploring questions around digital democratization, access and commerce, I want to focus on just one device, the laptop, to see how it might act as an entry point into examining the role of digital devices in popular music (Prior, 2008b). Here, what I want to argue is that the laptop has an ambiguous status in popular music, partly because it is caught between conflicting values

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XIV Réseaux n° 172/2012

(of commerce and creativity, automation and authenticity, skill and fakery), but also because it gives rise to a set of anxieties about what belongs on the stage and the studio, and what is being left behind.

Making and playing music with laptops is becoming a regular feature of music fields, both classical, contemporary and popular. From the Kronos Quartet to local rock guitarists, the laptop is moving inexorably into the spaces of music. In its most visible guise, the laptop takes centre stage. Indeed, the glowing Apple logo has accrued enough symbolic value in electronic music to sig-nify a challenging set of electronic soundscapes. Famously, with Madonna’s live concerts in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was a cluster of computers, including Macintosh G5s, that coordinated the lights, video footage and pre-recorded audio sequences (Von Seggern, 2005). Today, computer-based set-ups are essential to the management of the blockbuster gig, holding together and locking in the various audio-visual elements. At a more lowly level, the laptop is the unsung mediator at the side of the stage, running the backing track or making a novelty appearance in one or two songs.

Outside of live environments, musicians are now composing straight onto their laptops, moving beyond its utilization as a quick sketchpad for ideas. At once a means for recording audio, generating drum patterns, hosting soft-ware synthesizers and mixing down to a single file, the laptop encapsulates technological convergence (Jenkins, 2006). Indeed, with the right software it replaces the function of a host of hardware devices, including multi-track portastudios, hardware synthesizers, mixing desks, samplers, channel strips, compressors, guitar amplifiers, effects units and sound modules. Add to this the in-built digital connectivity of the laptop and the possibility of uploading songs to the Internet after production, as well as promoting, circulating and listening to them, and one has an all-in-one production unit that meshes com-position with dissemination and consumption. One can’t overstate the impor-tance of this convergence: the computer is a profoundly meta-device.

The laptop has certainly not slipped seamlessly into music cultures, however. In fact, laptop-based music has intensified and radicalised anxieties around authenticity and skill because it is often seen to substitute and simulate human presence. For a start, during a laptop performance, the signs of corporeal involvement are subtle and minimal. Typically, the laptopist will stand, sit or crouch behind the open lid of the laptop, scarcely displaying any overt connection between the production of sound and the movements of the body.

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Digital Formations of Popular Music XV

This feeds the suspicion that, at best, the black or titanium box is doing most of the work, with the musician-technician having minimal input; at worst that they really are just pressing play and checking their emails. The ambiva-lence is evident in audience reactions to laptop sets, where there is often radi-cal uncertainty about dancing or clapping (Cascone, 2003). So much more creative agency is being attributed to the machine than the musician that it becomes difficult to hold together the hegemonic idea of music as having a founding human presence with an unambiguously positive relationship to the performance.

Critics regularly question the liveness of “musical cyborgs” despite the admis-sion that the laptop has become an instrument in its own right and despite the fact that laptop musicians are far more active than they look (Davis, 2002). The presence of automation and lack of physicality disturbs, nevertheless, precisely because music is so heavily coded with ideas of unrestrained human agency. This plays itself out both in the reactions of audiences, publics and reviewers and laptopists themselves. Many are responding to the ambiguity by giving the audience a peek at their craft, projecting live relays of their desktops onto large screens, displaying the frequency bands of their music in real time, placing webcams on the equipment to show the work in detail or deploying haptic devices and spectacular, hands-on MIDI controllers. In other cases, the tension between automation and human creativity is ironized, a strategy used by the bands Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, who “roboticise” their performances of high-tech craftsmanship (Bell, 2006). But these articulations take place amidst a potent mix of often contradictory attitudes swilling around the performance of laptop music sets. The computer is inanimate but is pow-erful enough to warrant critique; the musician becomes a technician (with connotations of desktop manual labour) but is still present as an authorial figurehead; the audience laments the lack of gesture but nevertheless is still interested in knowing what the laptopist is doing.

Perhaps the laptop is not entirely matter in its right place (Douglas, 1970). It is an object with qualities that interact with certain expectations regarding its place in a cultural field historically suspicious of artifice and automation. For this reason, it doesn’t immediately or entirely “belong” to the stage in the same way as other instruments because it retains a surplus of meaning as an amplifier of work. It is believed to perform a greater amount of work than the operator. In the majority of live performances it will be the only piece of visible kit not purpose-built for music, there being no onboard sounds in

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XVI Réseaux n° 172/2012

the usual sense. This reinforces the suspicion that it is an impostor tainted by its proximity to business and, hence, more a management device than an instrument. This is not to discount the fact that laptops are being popularly employed as multi-functional devices across entertainment, business and cre-ative spheres. It has clearly outgrown its genesis as a single-function word- processor for wealthy businessmen. But, at the very least, its position reveals a status ambivalence regarding its place in music culture largely because music has its own relatively autonomous set of ideals. This, I would argue, makes it a place-holder for conflicting meanings about what belongs in music: productivity and creation, reality and virtuality, play and work, the cybernetic and the organic.

There’s something to be said for using the laptop as a lens through which contemporary norms around cultural production are revealed, unsettled and dismantled. After all, conventions of listening and performing are not immu-table. A century’s worth of recording and experimentation has already trans-formed our expectations of the way music is created, how it sounds and the spaces and formats through which we hear it (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2003). Moreover, as younger more digitally-conversant audiences are emerging, so expectations regarding what belongs in music and what counts as music and the musician are also changing. Yet, these transformations are dependent on accumulative and subtle changes in values, including a gradual alignment between traditional norms and new practices. In short, as digital formations take shape over time, so the boundaries around what kinds of devices are acceptable get re-written: from drum machines to iphone applications, the digital device acts as a placeholder for changing ideas around what creativity, music and practice actually consist of.

Indeed, it is to this term, “practices”, that I now want to turn very briefly, as my third category.

DIGITAL PRACTICES

In many ways, the arrival of new devices necessarily parallels a transformation in how producers produce - the everyday habits and routines of “musicking” itself. This is certainly the case with the advent of computer-based windows systems and digital audio workstations. Indeed, one could argue that digital editing programmes are to music what word processors are to writing. They

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Digital Formations of Popular Music XVII

imply a set of relations between humans and machines that inflect the practice of writing in significant ways. Routines of composition become shaped by the aesthetics of the layout and the cognitive processes they call upon. Hence, musicians who had previously composed and recorded using analogue tape (such as a four-track portastudio) often speak of the leap of thought and prac-tice needed to handle composition using a digital audio workstation. Thinking digitally, as it were, requires a shift in the attachments, modes and haptic efforts needed to compose within technospaces comprising windows-type arrangements, menus, scroll bars and cursors.

This doesn’t mean that the computer or its interface determines the actions of creators in a straightforward way. The history of technology and music are histories of misappropriation, accident and contingency precisely because of the way objects are used and misused in practice (Grint and Woolgar, 1997). Even the most rigid of software applications can be open to misinterpreta-tions, hacks, errors, bugs and incompatibilities that change its function or produce contingent outcomes - anything from re-written code to a total sys-tem crash, from a misaligned MIDI note to lost music data. The code and the interface do set significant limits, however, and users are configured to respond to the software in relatively appropriate ways. Cut-and-paste actions are fundamental to the way digital music data are shuffled around the space of the composition, as blocks of MIDI information are edited and re-positioned in modular formations along a timeline. This means that the act of composi-tion is as much a result of cursor movement, scrolling, and clicking as it is of playing notes on a keyboard or strumming a guitar. As code has become a visual representation of a studio, with its simulations and icons, so the user has been presented with a surface on which to skim and play. Writing music in this way constitutes a flexible practice, subject to the speed of a copy/paste key combination or undo stroke, while the interface represents the work as a malleable digital landscape.

What software applications such as Logic, Reason, Cubase and Ableton Live do is favour the instantaneous malleability of music on screen, as moveable chunks rather than as potentialities achieved through the employment of labo-rious tape edits or tools such as razor blades. The arrange window, in par-ticular, provides a digital space composed of individual parts that show the structural coordinates of the song as well as the infinitesimal transformations that are possible when parts are magnified and edited. To this extent, software permits greater speed and textual plasticity than ever because of the way the

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XVIII Réseaux n° 172/2012

composition is visually fragmented. Like other new media forms - as defined by Lev Manovich - software- produced music is neither something fixed nor is it merely reproducible in identical copies, as an orthodox Benjaminian read-ing would have it (Manovich, 2001). Instead, it offers itself up as potentially endless versions - both authorised and unauthorised.

There’s clearly more to say about practices in relation to how musicians and consumers engage with their digital environments, devices and each other. For instance, in combining the laptop, Internet and wi-fi, musicians are increas-ingly unhooking themselves from fixed locations in order to make music on the move or to collaborate with musicians from across the globe. As with iPod users, mobile musicians undergo a mutual entanglement of bodily rhythms and technological artefacts that play out in public-private forms of cogni-tion and consumption: from spontaneous jams in unusual places, to swapping song files for iteration. In other words, digital formations call forth and are dependent on users engaged in relatively different types of action in relatively different kinds of spaces. At the very least, this forces us to address the ortho-dox physical co-ordinates of the studio and attend to how our practices are both constituting and responding to digital formations – from the collecting of digital samples on hard drives to negotiating a gig via email, setting up a band’s website to firing up the laptop for the gig.

STYLES

Finally, all these developments have clear implications for musical styles, genres and forms. Some commentators have argued, for instance, that genre can no longer be seen as a relatively fixed, structural category, as processes of digitalisation have undermined generic categories. For Sandywell and Beer (2005), before the 1980s, genres were fairly solid and the stylistic codes that demarcated genres did not allow much room for deviation. Today, whilst musical genres continue to function as marketing categories and reference points for musicians and fans, stylistic landscapes of music have become more liquefied and populated by provisional styles under constant composition and decomposition within the digital spaces of samplers, sequencers and software studios. Hence, “what were previously regarded as formal and invariant cat-egories of popular culture become fluid repertoires, subject to further digital transformation and interpretation” (Sandywell and Beer, 2005: 113).

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Digital Formations of Popular Music XIX

In this digital genre soup no style is exempt from borrowings and hybridiza-tions, no genre is completely independent of any other. Genres are radically hybridized, bent and crossed over with others, the components of genre being reconstituted as radically dynamic forms. The advent of music-based software packages, digital sampling and MP3 players, in particular, have made it easier than ever to mix styles together, creating myriad micro genres and subgenres. For Sandywell and Beer, three different types of morphing can be identified, in particular. Intra-morphing occurs when a performer morphs within existing genre conventions (Jay-Z who morphs from “underground” to “mainstream” hip hop, for instance). Inter-morphing occurs between genres (an indie band that becomes an electronica band, for instance). Trans-morphing occurs when new genres or styles are created by combining lots of different styles (the cre-ation of pop/opera hybrid in the case of the Opera Babes, for instance).

Of course, talk of fluidity and hybridity belies the fact that overarching genres still seem to be residually present and enduringly popular, both as practices and categories within corporatized markets. It’s also the case that what we might call the “meta-genres”, the totalizing styles of rock, folk and jazz, retain a certain solidity on the map of popular music. We might further point out that popular music has always been defined by voracious practices of borrowings and splices: the constant interchanges between blues, gospel, rock, jazz, funk, soul and so on are well known. But, the extent and range of these interchanges today are unprecedented, as morphing between, within and across genres is pushed to the extreme. Current genre milieus are certainly less rigid and pre-dictable than they used to be and this can be attributed, in part, to a softening of production practices and associated technologies. Here, digitalisation has undoubtedly accompanied a blurring of genres and an erosion of boundar-ies between styles. Even a cursory review of on-line networking sites like Myspace reveals the extraordinary diversity of this genre soup: from anti-folk to zouglou.

The rise of the musical mashup is a case in point. The mashup involves the meshing of styles, songs and albums into a single text. Mashups are single compositions combined of elements of two or more songs from disparate genres or periods. They most often comprise the vocals of one song mixed or overlayed with the instrumentation from another. Deriving from the practices of DJs and hip-hop’s desire to sample across a range of styles, the mashup combines not just beats or short musical phrases but whole songs or albums thrown together. Famously, in 2004, The Beatles’ The White Album was

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XX Réseaux n° 172/2012

mashed with hip-hop artist, Jay-Z’s, The Black Album by Danger Mouse to produce The Grey Album. Using readily available audio software, Danger Mouse spliced unauthorised digital instrumental samples from The Beatles with a cappella phrases designed by Jay-Z. Though limited to just 3,000 cop-ies, The Grey Album circulated informally in Internet forums and peer-to-peer sites and became one of the year’s most popular and critically-acclaimed albums.

The mashup brings together unlikely bedfellows in the windows of digi-tal sequencing software. It takes sampling and remixing to another level. Tellingly, mashup beginners are advised to set aside some time to import as many songs as possible into their chosen software application, align the tem-pos and pitches and start to listen out for interesting combinations. Matching the tempos of two songs using turntables and vinyl was always possible, but software has unhooked tempo from pitch so that any two songs made in dif-ferent keys can be brought together in harmony. This makes all combinations possible as vertical limitations between styles are compressed into an endless series of folds, with each genre activating another. In short, as style takes the form of malleable information, it can be spliced, reconfigured and re-combined in almost infinite variations, allowing professional and amateur bricoleurs alike, the chance to construct their own genre worlds.

CONCLUSION

If we have entered a digital phase or formation, then the digital doesn’t over-haul cultural modernity but radicalises it and stretches its limits. It changes our expectations about what belongs in music, what music consists of, who is making music and how. Digital music technologies are not in themselves “revolutionary”, but they are unique in their combinatory potentials, in how they combine and re-purpose old analogue hardware, as well as in how they simulate new forms. The digital subtends entry into the hypermodern as a regime of cultural expansion, flexibility and global complexity (Thrift, 2005). In doing so, software-based technologies afford different kinds of phenom-enality, creativity and play. It is not that one can find a trace of the digital in contemporary music production, as if hunting for an occasional presence where the code pokes through is enough. It is much more than this. The digital is the condition of possibility for much that goes on in processes of produc-tion, whether in the composition, the editing, the mixing or the mastering.

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Digital Formations of Popular Music XXI

Using a digital audio workstation changes the way music is written and pro-duced not just because musicians, producers and engineers are employing new tools to do things they have always done, but also because the digital shifts the way these personnel conjure up musical forms and structures, as well as the thought processes that give rise to them. Seen in this way, the com-puter and its software are not tools, but mediators that act as part of the traffic between humans and non-humans in everyday life.

But the temptation to overplay these shifts, while it is understandable, should be resisted. Timothy Taylor, for instance, argues that the “advent of digital technology in the early 1980s marks the beginning of what may be the most fundamental change in the history of western music since the invention of music notation in the ninth century” (Taylor, 2001). Such claims are dra-matic but unhelpful, for they assume what they set out to assess, ignoring the long-term curvature of cultural history and reducing complex processes of reconfiguration to the terms of absolute revolution. Clearly, no techno-cultural form springs into existence fully formed. There is always a period when the divisions between different modes of operation are undefined, so that the co-existence of the analogue and digital is an inevitable product of complex histories of development. Moments of co-existence can also be disorienting to those societies engaged in them and some of that disorienta-tion takes a taxonomic form, a confusion of categories as well as a resis-tance to change.

The real challenge, then, will be to capture the shape and significance of digital technologies as they unfurl and to examine how they are enmesh-ing human agency in data flows, thereby shifting the routines and habits of music in expanded domains of cultural production and consumption. For our engagement with digital information technologies is one of the most stunning and rapidly-growing phenomena of recent times. It extends the possibilities of creative work into interesting new spaces, while reconfiguring collabora-tive practices and the means and relations of culture-making. It is these coali-tions, forces and realities that deserve our scholarly attention as the speed of contemporary culture is cranked up to hyperdrive and as popular culture takes another turn in an already convoluted historical journey.

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Abstract

The paper represents a broad attempt to take stock of some of the challenges, dilemmas and issues sparked by an engagement with digital formations in music, where formations are loosely configured amalgamations of discursive, technical and material practices. After navigating some of the problems of constructing a narrative of digitalisation sensitive to historical change and complexity in the post 1980s era, the paper seizes upon four overlapping areas of cultural production that require attention: producers, devices, styles and practices. If the rise of digitally-enabled non-professional musicians are rais-ing questions about open regimes of expertise (as folded into the figure of the “new amateur”), then it is important to show how an engagement with digital devices implies a shift both in the expectations around what belongs in music (in particular, processes of estrangement and normalisation in the case of the laptop) and the everyday practices, movements and routines of production in the spaces of digital audio software. All of this implies a corol-lary opening up of styles and a liquefication of genre categories, including the

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Digital Formations of Popular Music XXV

rise of the mashup. By operationalising these four themes, we can better see the territory of cultural production and creative work as nudged and shaken by developments in “hypermodern” societies, where the concerns of cultural modernity are stretched, extended and radicalised by digital formations. The paper, therefore, exercises caution in attributing to the digital a modality of revolution, when a more circumspect, material approach is much better able to capture changing practices and conditions of production as a complex co-existence of old and new.

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