In Power / Out of Control Listening to the Margins
In Power / Out of Control Listening to the Margins
상세정보
- 자료유형
- 학위논문 서양
- 최종처리일시
- 20250211150950
- ISBN
- 9798342711081
- DDC
- 780
- 서명/저자
- In Power / Out of Control Listening to the Margins
- 발행사항
- [Sl] : New York University, 2024
- 발행사항
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2024
- 형태사항
- 241 p
- 주기사항
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-04, Section: A.
- 주기사항
- Advisor: Oliver La Rosa, Jaime.
- 학위논문주기
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2024.
- 초록/해제
- 요약This dissertation presents the work of a group of women in the contemporary experimental music scene who are modeling necessary alternative uses of audio technologies that challenge decades of presumptions around musicking, instrument design, and the sounds produced at the intersection of music and technology.Technology arrives in our hands heavily coded with our culture's social structures and power dynamics, with great potential to reinforce and perpetuate those structures as they are. Film cameras, and lighting gear work better on light-skinned subjects; face-recognition technology fails on darker-skinned and female faces; early radio broadcasting equipment was calibrated to cut off a portion of the female voice spectrum, rendering women's voices unintelligible; and the physical interfaces of most digital instruments are unsuited to non-normative bodies. These are just some examples from a long history of technological redlining that, as sociologist Madeleine Akrich reminds us, not only establishes relationships among people and technologies, but has the power to "generate and 'naturalize' new forms and orders of causality and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the world." By intersecting science and technology studies (STS), histories of technology, feminist theory, and critical race studies with historical examples of electronic and digital instrument design, I will speculate about how ideologies of control, efficiency, productivity, ableness, and disembodiment have made their way into the instrument marketplace for decades, determining what type of bodies have interacted with which technologies, and shaping the sounds they have generated. There is an urgent need to reformulate these musical tools but, unsurprisingly, the music technology industry continues to lack a critical organology approach, instead remaining primarily concerned with profitability, mass production, and the consumer appetite for novelty. Perhaps more surprisingly, even as academic institutions are increasingly concerned with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), we find that these institutions operate under the same industrialized spell; the mass-produced musical black-boxed artifacts filling music departments contain and transmit the conscious and unconscious biases of commercial device designers, who determine their affordances and constraints, mediating the interactions and sounds that musicians will generate. With academic studios full of mixing consoles, computers running the latest DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation), MIDI controllers, and VR systems, colleges and universities seem more focused on keeping pace with the music tech race than in challenging overwhelming orthodoxies encoded in these symbolic devices.However, against this seemingly intractable paradigm, Pinch and Trocco remind us that users can develop their own alternative scripts, transcending the limits of what these technologies were initially designed for. The artists on whom I have centered this study brilliantly rewire the performative capabilities of mass-produced audio devices, breaking open the black boxes to exorcise encoded scripts and make way for new sounds, and new stories, to emerge.At its core, this dissertation will explore the alternative futures that emerge from the work of artists Pamela Z, Laetitia Sonami, Cathy van Eck, Miya Masaoka, Bonnie Jones, Thessia Machado, and Cecilia Lopez. These composer/performer/instrument builders disrupt industrialized music ideas by rebelling against philosophies of control, precision, and mastery in technology. Instead, they perform stories of close encounters, collaboration, embodiment, failure, chaos, and - most of all - deep listening to and through the technological assemblages with which they build their sonic worlds. Through their custom-built gear and hacked devices, they short-circuit the prevailing, seemingly neutral technological order that our society has absorbed and naturalized.For each artist, I will select one or two instruments for close technological and musical analysis, examining ontological capacities of the new devices, how they carry their own creators' philosophies, and their socio-political implications in the musical scene. By incorporating theories of embodiment, agency, failure, and new materialism in my analysis, I seek to offer an alternative approach to that which we encounter in the majority of NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) literature, which tends to take a primarily engineering/computer science approach to new instruments, focusing on controllability, latency, ergonomics, pathways to expertise, etc.My study of the selected instruments will be informed by my interviews with each artist, probing their background, the origins of their critical making, and their technological education. I theorize that some core features of each artist's identity and technological education - most of them self-taught and infused with a DIY spirit - have greatly informed their need to redeploy, reconceptualize, and re-create technological instruments. By delving into the technological education and outsider spirit of these artists, I also seek to question a well-intentioned but perhaps misguided trend in multiple academic institutions, which attempts to expand access to technological tools for communities that have traditionally been excluded from the networks where such tools circulate: these educational environments seek to empower marginalized communities by instructing them in sophisticated music gear. However, in light of what we continue to discover about the biases scripted into such tools, it is not clear whether cycles of inequity can be interrupted by merely expanding access to the tools, without totally rethinking the processes through which they are designed. The work of the artists in my study illuminates a different, perhaps deeper, approach to leveling the field for all players.With this thesis, I want to circulate these artists' stories fairly and widely. To reach a broader audience inside and outside the academy, I plan to produce in parallel with my written text a series of video portraits of each artist. Existing anthologies of sound artists and pioneers in electronics feature a disproportionate number of white male artists, and rarely reference the work of the women I present in this dissertation. Beyond their artistic contributions, which in and of themselves would be worthy of a musical anthology, these creators show us new pathways to necessary futures of audio technology that include more diverse bodies, promote exploration and collaboration instead of power, and are environmentally more sustainable., Researching these creators is showing me radical new methodologies for teaching and working with music technologies that put DEI at the center of a new design philosophy. Although cultural change is always incremental, I believe the principles I am learning from this research can be applied directly to curricula, creating ripples that, over time, will bring a sea change in demand for more inclusive audio technologies from the institutions that buy them, and the manufacturers that design and produce them.
- 일반주제명
- Music
- 일반주제명
- Performing arts
- 일반주제명
- Design
- 일반주제명
- Gender studies
- 키워드
- Technology
- 키워드
- Music technology
- 기타저자
- New York University Music
- 기본자료저록
- Dissertations Abstracts International. 86-04A.
- 전자적 위치 및 접속
- 로그인 후 원문을 볼 수 있습니다.
MARC
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■007cr#unu||||||||
■020 ▼a9798342711081
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■040 ▼aMiAaPQ▼cMiAaPQ
■0820 ▼a780
■1001 ▼aBlasco Esparza, Mercedes.
■24510▼aIn Power / Out of Control Listening to the Margins
■260 ▼a[Sl]▼bNew York University▼c2024
■260 1▼aAnn Arbor▼bProQuest Dissertations & Theses▼c2024
■300 ▼a241 p
■500 ▼aSource: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-04, Section: A.
■500 ▼aAdvisor: Oliver La Rosa, Jaime.
■5021 ▼aThesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2024.
■520 ▼aThis dissertation presents the work of a group of women in the contemporary experimental music scene who are modeling necessary alternative uses of audio technologies that challenge decades of presumptions around musicking, instrument design, and the sounds produced at the intersection of music and technology.Technology arrives in our hands heavily coded with our culture's social structures and power dynamics, with great potential to reinforce and perpetuate those structures as they are. Film cameras, and lighting gear work better on light-skinned subjects; face-recognition technology fails on darker-skinned and female faces; early radio broadcasting equipment was calibrated to cut off a portion of the female voice spectrum, rendering women's voices unintelligible; and the physical interfaces of most digital instruments are unsuited to non-normative bodies. These are just some examples from a long history of technological redlining that, as sociologist Madeleine Akrich reminds us, not only establishes relationships among people and technologies, but has the power to "generate and 'naturalize' new forms and orders of causality and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the world." By intersecting science and technology studies (STS), histories of technology, feminist theory, and critical race studies with historical examples of electronic and digital instrument design, I will speculate about how ideologies of control, efficiency, productivity, ableness, and disembodiment have made their way into the instrument marketplace for decades, determining what type of bodies have interacted with which technologies, and shaping the sounds they have generated. There is an urgent need to reformulate these musical tools but, unsurprisingly, the music technology industry continues to lack a critical organology approach, instead remaining primarily concerned with profitability, mass production, and the consumer appetite for novelty. Perhaps more surprisingly, even as academic institutions are increasingly concerned with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), we find that these institutions operate under the same industrialized spell; the mass-produced musical black-boxed artifacts filling music departments contain and transmit the conscious and unconscious biases of commercial device designers, who determine their affordances and constraints, mediating the interactions and sounds that musicians will generate. With academic studios full of mixing consoles, computers running the latest DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation), MIDI controllers, and VR systems, colleges and universities seem more focused on keeping pace with the music tech race than in challenging overwhelming orthodoxies encoded in these symbolic devices.However, against this seemingly intractable paradigm, Pinch and Trocco remind us that users can develop their own alternative scripts, transcending the limits of what these technologies were initially designed for. The artists on whom I have centered this study brilliantly rewire the performative capabilities of mass-produced audio devices, breaking open the black boxes to exorcise encoded scripts and make way for new sounds, and new stories, to emerge.At its core, this dissertation will explore the alternative futures that emerge from the work of artists Pamela Z, Laetitia Sonami, Cathy van Eck, Miya Masaoka, Bonnie Jones, Thessia Machado, and Cecilia Lopez. These composer/performer/instrument builders disrupt industrialized music ideas by rebelling against philosophies of control, precision, and mastery in technology. Instead, they perform stories of close encounters, collaboration, embodiment, failure, chaos, and - most of all - deep listening to and through the technological assemblages with which they build their sonic worlds. Through their custom-built gear and hacked devices, they short-circuit the prevailing, seemingly neutral technological order that our society has absorbed and naturalized.For each artist, I will select one or two instruments for close technological and musical analysis, examining ontological capacities of the new devices, how they carry their own creators' philosophies, and their socio-political implications in the musical scene. By incorporating theories of embodiment, agency, failure, and new materialism in my analysis, I seek to offer an alternative approach to that which we encounter in the majority of NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) literature, which tends to take a primarily engineering/computer science approach to new instruments, focusing on controllability, latency, ergonomics, pathways to expertise, etc.My study of the selected instruments will be informed by my interviews with each artist, probing their background, the origins of their critical making, and their technological education. I theorize that some core features of each artist's identity and technological education - most of them self-taught and infused with a DIY spirit - have greatly informed their need to redeploy, reconceptualize, and re-create technological instruments. By delving into the technological education and outsider spirit of these artists, I also seek to question a well-intentioned but perhaps misguided trend in multiple academic institutions, which attempts to expand access to technological tools for communities that have traditionally been excluded from the networks where such tools circulate: these educational environments seek to empower marginalized communities by instructing them in sophisticated music gear. However, in light of what we continue to discover about the biases scripted into such tools, it is not clear whether cycles of inequity can be interrupted by merely expanding access to the tools, without totally rethinking the processes through which they are designed. The work of the artists in my study illuminates a different, perhaps deeper, approach to leveling the field for all players.With this thesis, I want to circulate these artists' stories fairly and widely. To reach a broader audience inside and outside the academy, I plan to produce in parallel with my written text a series of video portraits of each artist. Existing anthologies of sound artists and pioneers in electronics feature a disproportionate number of white male artists, and rarely reference the work of the women I present in this dissertation. Beyond their artistic contributions, which in and of themselves would be worthy of a musical anthology, these creators show us new pathways to necessary futures of audio technology that include more diverse bodies, promote exploration and collaboration instead of power, and are environmentally more sustainable., Researching these creators is showing me radical new methodologies for teaching and working with music technologies that put DEI at the center of a new design philosophy. Although cultural change is always incremental, I believe the principles I am learning from this research can be applied directly to curricula, creating ripples that, over time, will bring a sea change in demand for more inclusive audio technologies from the institutions that buy them, and the manufacturers that design and produce them.
■590 ▼aSchool code: 0146.
■650 4▼aMusic
■650 4▼aPerforming arts
■650 4▼aDesign
■650 4▼aGender studies
■653 ▼aTechnology
■653 ▼aExperimental music
■653 ▼aInstrument design
■653 ▼aMusic technology
■690 ▼a0413
■690 ▼a0641
■690 ▼a0389
■690 ▼a0733
■71020▼aNew York University▼bMusic.
■7730 ▼tDissertations Abstracts International▼g86-04A.
■790 ▼a0146
■791 ▼aPh.D.
■792 ▼a2024
■793 ▼aEnglish
■85640▼uhttp://www.riss.kr/pdu/ddodLink.do?id=T17160287▼nKERIS▼z이 자료의 원문은 한국교육학술정보원에서 제공합니다.


