[Saturday @ 3:30pm – 5:00pm, Room 9]
Ian Hattwick
“Musicking on the Web: An Investigation into Current and Emerging Practices”
Abstract
The internet as a medium for musical performance has a long history, including the work of the foundational network music group the Hub [1], the development of telematic music performance [2], the rise of laptop orchestras [3], and the focus on remote musicking arising from the Covid sequestration. At the same time, the internet has profoundly affected the experience of professional musicians, displacing recorded audio as the primary validation of artistry, and challenging it with emerging practices in online multimedia documentation, physical and software interface design, and hypothetical interest in performance in XR or the Metaverse.
This paper presents a framework for examining internet-based musical experiences which contextualizes them within both their their technical and social infrastructures. The technical affordances of the internet have played an outsized role in the reshaping of musical practice. The widespread dissemination of knowledge regarding musical performance and production has created a broad base of technical literacy on existing conceptualizations of practice. At the same time there is a growing interest in alternative models of musicking, whether towards models of collage/assemblage/remix techniques, [4] or evolving practices in designing musical systems which leverage data-driven practices and algorithmic techniques such as artificial intelligence and deep learning.
Equally important is how we think and talk about music online, and how we identify with existing and emerging communities of practice. This affects many different aspects of our online identities. One way is how legitimacy or authority is created which doesn’t rely on traditional musical skills. Instead, legitimacy can be leveraged from sources such as high-prestige technical domains (coding or science), pedagogy-entertainment (analogous to infotainment), or personality-driven influencer models.
To develop this framework we present case-studies on contemporary musicking on the web, focusing both on widespread semi-professional experiences such as collaborative DAWs1 and telematic studio work, as well as smaller communities of dedicated internet musicians focused on live coding2, browser-based instruments3, and telematic music performance. Our goal throughout is to investigate how musicians are reinterpreting and reinventing musical experiences in order to identify opportunities for meaningful musical experiences in the Web.
Biography
Ian Hattwick is an artist, researcher, and technology developer whose work focuses on the creation and use of digital systems for professional artistic performance. He is particularly interested in collaborative performance and the creation of multimodal hardware systems to explore and facilitate social and embodied interaction. He teaches music technology at MIT, directs FaMLE, the MIT Laptop Ensemble, and is CTO for Heather Interactive, a music experience design startup.
Kate Galloway
“Instrumentality and the Digital Animal: Audiovisual Memes, Synthesized Animals, and the Timbral Treatment of the Nonhuman in Viral Media”
Abstract
On TikTok in August 2021, as I scrolled down through my recommendations, I encountered the slow reveal of cute puppies as watermelon rinds open on cue, choreographed to a stylistic cut in the remix mashup of Harry Styles’ “Watermelon Sugar” with “Seaside” by SEB, listened to the autotuned timbral manipulations of Haiku the Husky’s vocalizations, and observed the choreomusicalities of a tardigrade, a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals, where their movement in their environment was synched to a pulsing and wobbly soundtrack of synth timbres. Memes are a fascinating field of musical play. These are not just animal memes that happen to feature sound and music, rather they are short-form audiovisual internet objects that are intentionally exploring ideas of musicality, vocality, performance through timbre, practices of remix, internet interfaces, and stagings of the nonhuman. These creative and participatory digital environments where musicking animals are curated and dwell call into question the human desire to connect with, perform, and even control the nonhuman animal across digital spaces of reality and representation. And like Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s video installation The Substitute (2019), these internet cultural objects interrogate humanity’s “preoccupation with creating new life forms, while neglecting existing ones” (Ginsberg 2019). Drawing on the aforementioned case studies—the “Watermelon Sugar” TikTok remix challenge, the account of Pet Influencer Haiku the Husky (@haikuthehusky), and the social media and recording project Animals and Synthesizers (@animalsandsynthesizers), I offer an exploration of the concerns and discomforts, the interfaces and instrumentality, and the affordances and choreographies around the ways in which we treat animals for human use across audiovisual internet culture. This presentation engages the intersection of multispecies ethnography, digital culture, and platform and interface studies to interrogate how animals illuminate debates about instrumentality within sonic cultural phenomena of the internet and human conceptions of musicality and listening.
Biography
Kate Galloway is Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology and Games at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she is cross-appointed to the Music, Electronic Arts, and Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences programs. Her research and teaching address sonic responses to environmentalism, sound studies, digital culture and interactive media, posthuman and animal studies, and Indigenous musical modernities and ecological knowledge. Her work is published in American Music, The Soundtrack, Ethnomusicology, MUSICultures, Tourist Studies, Sound Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Popular Music, and Twentieth-Century Music. She has co-edited two special journal issues (American Music and Twentieth-Century Music) with K. E. Goldschmitt and Paula Harper that address the creative and social phenomena of internet music communities and practices of listening to the internet.
William O’Hara
“Solfeggio Tones: Digital Mythology and the History of Music Theory”
Abstract
“Solfeggio tones” are a recent online phenomenon based on a mélange of ancient ideas. Named for the practice of solfege but unrelated to it, they are a set of seemingly random frequencies that are claimed to have healing powers. Largely through direct copying, solfeggio tones have proliferated through music and social media platforms (Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, etc.). The websites that promote them trace several spurious origins—from ancient knowledge lost or suppressed by musical or ecclesiastical authorities, to more recent numerological “discoveries” by homeopathic healers—and assign specific frequencies to healing actions such as “liberating guilt and fear,” “awakening intuition,” and even “DNA repair.” Their advocates seek attention and profit by offering a new and passive approach to wellness and healing based on listening to specific long tones or music in certain tunings.
While they may resonate with a long tradition of medicalizing musical sound (Gouk 2005), solfeggio tones do not only fall therapeutically flat; they represent larger trends in contemporary society. As Hannah Gais (2019) has written, psychics and mystical healers tend to arise in moments of societal crisis, aided by mass communication technologies. Robin James (2020) argues that solfeggio tones are an updated version of Plato’s metaphors for music as the organizing principle of an ideal society, and a pernicious alignment of personal wellness with societal stratification and power.
Building on Ruth Emily Rosenberg’s (2021) account of the conspiracy theories that surround 432Hz vs. 440Hz tuning, this presentation traces how real concepts from the history of western music theory—including overtones, hexachord solfege, and the division of the monochord—are blended with ideas appropriated from both New Age wellness fads and traditional global spiritualities, in an ecosystem of social media channels, enthusiast websites, and online boutiques. Arguing that social media has itself become an instrument for both inventing and circulating theories about music, sound, listening, a healing, I show how music-theoretical facts are mixed with fabrications (echoing but distorting music theory’s own origin myths), and argue for continued public engagement in order to understand how musical misinformation filters contemporary aesthetic and political topics through stubbornly persistent historical myths.
Biography
William O’Hara is assistant professor of music theory at Gettysburg College. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and previously taught at Tufts University. His research interests include digital musicking, circulation, and reception (with essays on these topics published in Music Theory Online and Analtica: Rivista online di studi musicali); tonal analysis and the history of theory (Music Analysis, Music Theory & Analysis, The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, and Antoine Reicha and the Making of the Nineteenth Century Composer) and music in contemporary media (Oxford Handbook of Sound & Music in Video Games, Music and the Moving Image). He is currently drafting monographs on recomposition in the history of music theory, and borrowing, bricolage, and the metaphor of song in the music of American composer Amy Beach.