Tomorrow’s Music Today

Discovering Creative Commons Sounds in Live Coding

“…A follow-up relates to the creative use of turntables and other devices in Jamaican dub in the late 1960s–early 1970s (Toop 1995: 115–18) and early hip hop in the 1970s–1980s (White 1996) to produce popular music. However, it was not until the dawn of affordable digital samplers in the 1980s that we find a popularisation of the use of sound samples as a common musical practice (Rodgers 2003; Harkins 2019). This was generally linked to the production of pop music and later electronic music.…”

“…Harkins provides a useful working definition of digital sampling as ‘the use of digital technologies to record, store, and reproduce any sound’ (Harkins 2019: 4). Tara Rodgers describes the processes involved in electronic music production as ‘selecting, recording, editing and processing sound pieces to be incorporated into a larger musical work’ (Rodgers 2003: 313).…”

Resource ecologies, political economies and the ethics of audio technologies in the Anthropocene

“…Technological origins are discussed to a limited extent within academic literature (Wurtzler 2007; Sterne 2012), but the geographical purview of these works rarely moves beyond the locale of design and final assembly. STS applications towards music studies, especially those using the SCOT (social construction of technology) paradigm, have been engaged in opening up the ‘black box’ of technology (Pinch 1992) predominantly by attending to its ‘social construction’ (Pinch and Bijker 1987; Harkins 2019) through recourse to the human mediators involved in the design, distribution, and use of the black boxes. However, the blatantly obvious black box that has not been opened up is the metal case of the black box itself (or, here, a red box).…”