DCMS://MUS211_Digital Rhythms and Dance Cultures/
Contact: John Scannell
Email: jscannell@scmp.mq.edu.au
Room:
Phone: 9850-6808
Credit points: 3
Offered: D1 Day; Offered in first half-year
Prerequisites: 12cp
Music's most compelling quality is its ongoing ability to situate itself
on the vanguard of profound cultural and technological change. This idea
is particularly pertinent to those musical genres that we might refer to
as “electronica”- a collective term embracing Hip-Hop, Techno and House,
but many other genres besides. To sufficiently evaluate how these
electronic musical technologies continue to affect our experience and
understanding of the world, requires an appropriate examination of the
historical, political and philosophical contexts from which these forms
of music have emerged. With this in mind, MUS211 will examine
the history and effects of these electronic music styles to examine the
way they might intersect with broader social and “existential” concerns
such as affect, cyborg subjectivities, theories of sensation and the
effect of musical technologies on the ongoing production of time and
space and territory.
For the very emergence of these electronic music practices implores us
to enquire what factors have compelled these new human-machine
relationships. By way of answering such questions, the MUS211 course
will evaluate the ongoing social-technical reconfigurations that have
been forged through electronic and digital instrumentation, an
examination that will take in inventions from the Theremin to the
synthesizer, the SL-1200 to MPC and beyond. From here we will attempt to
present these musical inventions within their specific social and
political contexts, ranging anywhere from Italian Futurism to
Afrofuturism, from B-Boying to raves to getting “crunk”.
Of particular significance to this course is electronica's socially and
politically enabling possibilities, demonstrated through its
inextricable relationship within the production techniques of “urban”
music's and perhaps reflecting how it has offered some of society’s most
disenfranchised populations the means to create new sonically driven
existences. Thus, whilst the MUS211 course will attend to the complex
histories of these electronic music styles (and more besides) it will
also spend equal amounts of time speculating on how such musical
invention might continue to affect the future. For electronic music
genres have always been distinguished by their superlative instigation
of human and technological convergence to the extent that they have
enabled a future of almost infinite musical possibility and most
importantly, and most importantly given us new means of musical expression.