Academic electroacoustic music, and specifically acousmatic music, the modernist lineage that came to prominence from the 1970s in universities in the UK, Canada and Europe, has been both hegemonic and waning for around twenty years.

In this presentation, based on a chapter from the book Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology, Georgina explores this state of affairs through an ethnography of British university trainings in digital art music and related scenes, trainings she gathers under the term 'music technology degrees'. The aim is to probe the burgeoning pluralism of digital art music in the UK as this presses on contemporary music writ large.

Her fieldwork focused on three leading British academic centres: the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University, Belfast, the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre (MTIRC) at De Montfort University, Leicester, and the Music and Music Technology groups at the University of Huddersfield. It also involved contacts with music departments at the universities of York, Edinburgh, East London and East Anglia, and the sound art research centre at London’s University of the Arts. She observed teaching and events, attended gigs and conferences, and made relationships with teaching staff, masters and PhD students. By analysing the music technology degrees the chapter narrates a heterogeneous field in motion, buffeted by larger historical processes.

A core premise is that educational change of this kind is both a barometer and a catalyst of wider musical, cultural, social and political changes. The net effect is the blossoming of an extraordinary but patterned diversity of idioms in digital art music, analysed in the final part of the chapter. This leads to a final discussion of how we should conceptualise pluralism in music today.

This seminar will cover field work Professor Born conducted at SARC over ten years ago.  Please read chapter 8 of this (free, open access) book in advance of the event

https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/187643

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