Music and Digital Media: A planetary anthropology /

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Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies.Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max.The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory.Introduction : music, digitisation and mediation--for a planetary antropology / Georgia Born -- Soundtracks in the silicon savannah : digital production, aesthetic entrepreneurship and the new recording industry in Nairobi, Kenya / Andrew J. Eisenberg -- 'In the waiting room': digitisation and post-neoliberalism in Buenos Aires' independent music sector / Geoff Baker -- Oral traditions in the aural public sphere : digital archiving of vernacular musics in North India / Aditi Deo -- Online music consumption and the formalisation of informality : exchange, labour and sociality in two music platforms / Blake Durham and Georgina Born -- Max, music software, and the mutual mediation of aesthetics and digital technologies / Joe Snape and Georgina Born -- Remediating modernism : on the digital ends of Montreal's electroacoustic tradition / Patrick Valiquet -- The dynamics of pluralism in contemporary digital art music / Georgina Born -- Music and intermediality after the internet : aesthetics, materialities and social forms / Christopher Haworth and Georgina Born -- Postlude : musical-anthropological comparativism--across scales / Georgina Born.