Mapping Networks of Audio-Technical Discourse

Abstract

The technical language surrounding electronic music instruments (EMIs) is continually expanding with their increased popularity and use. The field’s prioritization of English, the most commonly used language among manufacturers, has established it as the lingua franca of interface labels and marketing materials. This presents a language barrier for non-native speakers and brings up questions of its effects on creativity and imagination. Recent scholarship surrounding EMIs has focused on the desired outcomes and motivations regarding their design, their role in performance and improvisation, or their evolution with regards to traditional music instruments. However, there is no research surrounding the effect of English as the de facto language of interfaces, labels, and marketing materials. New generations of independent electronic music instrument developers in countries like Mexico employ a mix of English and Spanish to label and describe the features and functions of their products. This is due to a lack of terminology in Spanish coupled with a desire to compete in the global market. The flexible way in which companies in Mexico engage with languages disrupts the hegemonic pervasiveness of English, allowing for a plurality of sonic imaginaries to emerge in a globalized market structure. My paper highlights current examples of electronic music instruments built and designed in Mexico by companies like Paradox Effects and how they engage with English while actively searching for creative ways to enrich audio jargon in Spanish. Using objects or artifacts as and marketing collateral hermeneutic, I delineate a methodology that considers perspectives from fields like critical linguistics and science and technology studies (STS) to highlight the role English plays in creativity and sonic imaginaries for the non-fluent.

Biography

Pablo Dodero is a musician, writer, and arts promoter from Tijuana, Mexico currently pursuing his PhD in Integrative Studies at the University of California San Diego. His professional background situated in the cross-border region working in the music retail industry as an instrument buyer and repairperson, as well as a performer of experimental electronic music, led him to pursue graduate studies in the field of musicology and sound studies. His research focuses on electronic music instruments, specifically their interface and design along transnational circuits, as well as institutional histories of experimental and electronic musics within Mexico. Dodero is a DIY touring musician and has performed electronic music under the name Adiós Mundo Cruel and Les Temps Barbares in the underground rave scene in the U.S. and Mexico.

Abstract

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” This declaration opens every edition of the Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, founded by Stewart Brand and issued in the United States from 1968-1972 and then intermittently until 1998. With his catchy opener, Brand positioned his catalog as a tool for countercultural living that equipped readers with knowledge to shape their own environments and explore alternative ways of being. The Catalog’s emphases on holism, connectivity, and expanded consciousness were shared by many contemporary artists and musicians such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Gerd Stern. This is not a coincidence. Brand worked closely with artists throughout his career including members of USCO, The Grateful Dead,and Brian Eno.

While existing scholarship on the Whole Earth Catalog addresses its importance to the 1960s American counterculture and environmentalism, little work has been done on the relationship between the Catalog and its contemporaneous art scene. This paper addresses this lacuna. I have found that the Catalog is not only motivated by shared philosophical commitments with performance artists, but it’s physical structure and the way readers engage with it is very much like a musical or performance score: both make process visible, create space for possible outcomes, and inspire creative, active engagement with their audiences. When we bring the Whole Earth Catalog into the same discursive space as performance, we gain insight into the processes, structures, and cultural value of both the Catalog and experimental performance art. 

In this contribution, I will demonstrate that the Whole Earth Catalog’s structure, philosophical underpinnings, and cultural function mirror the goals of late twentieth century performance artists working in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, such as Meredith Monk and the multimedia group USCO. Drawing on archival materials and the work of Gregory Bateson, Lawrence Halprin, Fred Turner, and Erik Davis, I will show that the Whole Earth Catalog’sand experimental performance art’s shared project was to create opportunities for audiences to reframe their perception of reality and to become “as gods” in shaping their own worlds. 

Biography

Sarah Adele Kirkman McDonie is a PhD candidate in musicology at Indiana University Bloomington and has a minor in media studies. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, she studied music education at DePauw University and completed her Master of Arts in Musicology at Indiana University. Her research interests include exploring non-human agency, ecology, and the intersections of cybernetics and experimental art. Sarah is also co-owner of a custom music composition business, Opus One, LLC. When she is not doing professional work, Sarah enjoys scuba diving, good food, running, swimming, weightlifting, and going on adventures with her husband, Brian, and Manford, their charismatic Shetland sheepdog.

Abstract

The German record label ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) has, since its founding in 1969, developed a distinctive sonic and visual aesthetic, in which US critics and listeners have identified a European approach to jazz and record production. Charting ECM’s US reception in the 1970s, the paper examines how US critics and musicians paid particular attention to the recording process and positioned the label’s producer, Manfred Eicher, as a European “auteur” genius. This discourse foregrounded Eicher as one of the first jazz producers to employ—in the words of his contemporary, Brian Eno—“the studio as compositional tool.” Such discourses of technology and aesthetics framed ECM as bringing a particularly European artistic sensibility to record production, which even US musicians themselves contrasted with a commercialism supposedly endemic to the US music industry. In close readings of record reviews and interviews, the paper examines how US critics and musicians associated ECM and its Europeanness with Western art music, high-art cultural capital, and whiteness, often juxtaposing this with essentializing ideas of African American blues and improvisation. The ECM label’s European identity was not simply created in Germany and exported to the United States but was created via transnational infrastructures of record production and the US imagination of Europe. Indeed, ECM’s status as a European label played a significant part in its rise to prominence in the US and its continued status as, perhaps, the most prestigious record label in the global jazz industry today and Eicher as the genre’s most renowned producer. The paper also argues that focusing on music production and the auteurism of the record producer, allowed white, middle-class American listeners and musicians, to legitimize white jazz as viable alternative to interpretations of jazz as a strictly African American music. Tracing such histories of record production shows us the shifting understanding of music technology and the role of the record producer in 1970s jazz culture was mediated by longer histories of aesthetic value and hierarchies.

Biography

Mikkel Vad is visiting assistant professor of music at Bucknell University, where he teaches courses on jazz, popular music, and sound studies. His research and publications focus on questions of race, cultural memory, media, and cultural belonging. He teaches problem-based courses on music, cultural theory, historiography, and media where students learn to think critically about music and the arts across genres, time periods, and cultures.