MCGSS Graduate Music Colloquium

• In-person event
• 503, MacOdrum Library, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

Robert Strachan, University of Liverpool, “Technology, Materiality and the Virtual in Contemporary Popular Music Cultures”

BY ZOOM: Friday, March 3, 2:00-3:00 pm, Jacob Siskind Music Resource Centre – 503 MacOdrum Library

Drawing from my current research this talk will explore facets of digitization as they relate to creativity and aesthetics. In particular, I will examine the dialectic relationship between the virtual and tangible in popular music culture and its creative contexts. As virtual studio technologies have become ubiquitous, converse musical cultures have emerged and proliferated with a renewed emphasis on musical hardware. In these cultures digital aesthetics have been hybridised with musical practices and stylistic conventions focused on materiality. I will argue that we must be cautious of understanding these developments in terms of binaries: analog versus digital, software versus hardware, tangibility versus intangibility. Rather, I will argue that in contemporary popular music cultures the analog and digital always overlap in significant and meaningful ways, informing and influencing one another.