Music Production in Practice: Technology and Emotion

• In Event: Technoscience, Aesthetics, and the Senses - I

Abstract

Technological innovations have drastically altered the way music is produced and consumed throughout the past five decades. As new instruments and technologies emerge, artists continually explore and re-define their usage, forming a dialectic relationship between music-technologies and music-practitioners. One result of this relationship is the rise of the individual music-producers who produce music to match the quality previously reserved for professional recording studios.

In this paper, I explore the practices of the individual music-producer. Using material from interviews and filmed recording sessions with five Copenhagen-based electronic musicians, I argue that as an ethnographic site, the recording studio holds insights into the creative potentials and the restraints of the human-technology relation.

In doing so, I consider how technologies bring about new subjects, as they can affect the role and position of the individual producer. These subjects can hold different values and be representative of different aesthetics. In my analysis, I explore how the use of different electronic musical artefacts - for example, analogue or digital synthesizers - influence how musicians evaluate the aesthetics of music, and which sensory modalities affect said judgment. Further, I incorporate the emotional relation to electronic instruments, and I discuss how such technologies become vehicles for emotional expression.

Author

• Katja Sara Pape de Neergaard, IT University of Copenhagen