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“There can be no single, univocal account of the impact of digitisation on music; indeed, music productively decentres the digital.”
Georgina Born (p. 1)

1Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology is one result of a large-scale, multi-year project, funded by the European Research Council, which bore the title “Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies” (or MusDig). The project was directed by Georgina Born, a prominent scholar of music and the author of book-length ethnographic studies of the French Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

2The first thing to be noted about this impressive book is its scale. Music and Digital Media runs to more than 500 pages, with the result that each of its ten chapters (including the Introduction) is significantly longer than the contributions to most edited volumes. I felt, at various points in my reading, that each of these chapters was well on its way to assuming the dimensions of a small book. Each of them combines extensive theoretical development with several case studies and rich contextual background; each follows its own, distinct logic of analysis and argumentation rather than rushing to fill in the predictable template of social-sciences scholarship by marching us through context, methodology, analysis and conclusion. The chapters unfold in a unhurried fashion which gives them time to breathe, and while this is not a book whose style is deliberately “playful” or experimental, the chapters are lengthy and rich enough that each successfully immerses the reader in a world different from that encountered elsewhere in the volume.

3This is not a book centrally concerned with the “effects” of the digital upon music, but it nevertheless considers the ways in which music’s digitization has transformed the place of music within a broader cultural-technological landscape. The rendering digital of music, we might say, following Jacques Attali, has prefigured changes in other cultural sectors, by building technical expertise among users, spurring the sale of devices of all kinds, and nourishing subcultural, even illicit practices which have moved from music to encompass other realms of culture. Born follows Jonathan Sterne in noting that digital compression formats (like the MP3) have overcome the industrially-controlled sense of music as scarce. More broadly, digital music “stoked” (in Born’s wording) the global expansion of mobile telephony, one of many developments which (following Martin Stokes) Born sees as having spurred a sense of cosmopolitanism and global modernity around the globe.

4These wide-ranging changes are of less interest to the contributors to this volume than the local engagements with the digital which provide the focus to the individual chapters. The variety of these engagements constitutes the real richness of Music and Digital Culture. Andrew J. Eisenberg’s study of digital music production in Kenya examines the role of digital technologies in generating new business models and organizational forms within that nation’s musical culture. In these changes, musical genre becomes one of the key terms in the interweaving of aesthetic and entrepreneurial imperatives. Among other changes, the development of digital studios and use of MIDI technologies allowed DJs to move into musical composition and arrangement by “blackboxing” much of the technical knowledge which these practices required. In turn, these new roles spurred the development of musical recordings in which vernacular forms of long-standing, like the guitar-based sounds of benga or Kenyan Afro-fusion, were interwoven with the sounds of digital synthesis in an effort to reach longstanding audiences while contributing to an atmosphere of ongoing innovation.

5Geoff Baker’s article, “‘In the waiting room’: digitisation and post-neoliberalism in Buenos Aires’ independent music sector,” is in large part a study of the Argentinian label ZZK Records, which became known as one of the most active purveyors of a genre known as “digital cumbia”, fusing that traditional form with contemporary versions of hip-hop and techno. In what was perhaps a surprising turn, the take-up of cumbia among Argentina’s middle classes fostered a greater interest in more “authentic” versions of the genre, in particular those employing live musicians. As ZZK sought feasible revenue streams, it was increasingly pulled into the organization of international tours by musicians, the licensing of recordings for films and advertising, and the participation in festivals around the world. Baker sets all these changes amid efforts by a progressive Argentinian government’ to foster collective and independent forms of economic activity. One of the key insights of Baker’s article is his account of the fatigue encountered by ZZK’s owners and personnel as they were more and more forced to handle all aspects of musical production and dissemination, from the logistics of tours through the clearing of samples (which was made necessary by their new affiliation with US-based management.) In a political atmosphere which encouraged the formation of self-managed, digitally-savvy collectives, Baker finds a nostalgia for the era of the pre-digital record label in which different forms of labour were handled by institutionalized specialists.

6In the article “Oral traditions in the aural public sphere: digital archiving of vernacular musics in North India,” Aditi Deo talks about a number of digital archiving projects intended to preserve oral vernacular musics from New Delhi, Rajasthan and Gujarat in northern India. Such projects, Deo suggests, were caught between the imperatives of a “salvage anthropology” and the mission of “postcolonial self-representation.” As became clear in a study of these projects, digital tools may both preserve versions of musical forms considered “pure” and, by decentralizing the circulation of music, lead to the availability of versions which are hybrid and of variable technical quality. Deo sees this tension as one between what others have called epistemologies of purification’ which seek to establish authentic, localized versions of music as points of reference, and “epistemologies of transculturation” through which musical forms, in their movement through cultural spaces, assume a variety of impure forms. A further tension emerges in archival projects between a view of preservation as inherently virtuous and recognition of the fact that music participates, as an affective force, in forms of social division. Musics “not only possess symbolic meanings but also have the capacity to animate embodied memories and collective social and political imaginaries” (p. 168). As a result, the “aural public sphere” (a concept developed by Ana Maria Ochoa) emerges as a particularly intense incubator of discursive and political conflicts (p. 168).

7Three chapters co-written by Georgina Born and collaborators take up the question of music’s fate in relation to digital platforms or software tools. A comparison of two file-sharing platforms, co-authored with Blake Durham, looks at Spotify and the illegal Bittorrent-based platform Jekyll. The differences of scale, purpose and sound file quality between these two platforms are obviously enormous, but Durham and Born are interested in the particular “socialities” which each permits and encourages. While sociality in Jekyll involves the ongoing creation of hierarchies of users, classified according to the extent of their sharing, responding to requests, and offering files of high quality, social processes on Spotify are largely a function of one’s engagement in playlist curation. Another article co-written by Born, with Joe Snape, is based on the latter’s fieldwork at University of California Berkeley’s (UCB) Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and the Tokyo Experimental Festival, contexts in which the music software package Max. The article casts itself in part as an effort to pursue the project of a “critical organology,” by employing some of the protocols through which musical instruments are studied. Taking up the question of whether Max favors certain kinds of musical expression – as a certain “design determinism” might suggest – Snape and Born emphasize the ways in which uses of Max cohere in part through their reliance on particular kinds of musical knowledge, forms of collaboration and institutional contexts for the production of music. In another instance of co-authorship, Christopher Haworth and Georgina Born look at five examples of what might be called “native” forms of internet music: microsound, hauntology, hypnagogic pop, chillwave and vaporwave. Making effective use of the software tool Issue Crawler, which traces patterns of hyper-linking across the internet, Haworth and Born show how each of these musical genres embodied particular moments in the unfolding history of internet-based connection. The story told is not just one of musical materials circulating from point to point, but of entire regimes of critical engagement, commentary, collection and preservation coalescing to constitute such genres.

8While the effects of public policy on musical culture are one focus of several of the articles gathered here, Patrick Valiquet’s “Remediating modernism: on the digital ends of Montreal’s electroacoustic tradition,” goes furthest, perhaps, in charting the challenges to policy brought by a digital turn. In Quebec (and in Montreal more specifically), a tradition of excellence in the field of electroacoustic composition and experimentation has been enshrined, in musical histories and government policies, as a key and distinctive feature of the province. Valiquet shows how the valorization of this tradition has figured within governmental responses to the collapse of Montreal’s longstanding reliance on industry and transportation as a source of its economic worth, with a corresponding turn to culture as a sector enshrined as a source of hope. This shift has led, among other things, to policies of university funding which emphasize interdisciplinarity, a shift evident in the rise of laboratory-based cultural production and the recognition of emergent fields like “sound art” as legitimate. All of these changes have bumped up against the massive decentralization and deinstitutionalization of digital musical production which came with the availability of inexpensive consumer devices like the smartphone and the laptop.

9In two solo-authored pieces, an article on digital art music and her extensive conclusion to the volume, Georgina Born offers both a longer historical framework for understanding digital music and a set of theoretical foundations upon which an anthropology of music’s relation to the digital might be built. The first of these pieces engages with a wide variety of questions. These include the ambivalent status of interdisciplinarity in the production of knowledge (something she sees both as progressive and as enshrined within neo-liberal policymaking). In another section, Born speaks in detail of the turn, in universities, towards a notion of “practice-based research” (or what, in Francophone territories like Quebec, is sometimes called “recherche-création.” While this turn might seem a positive opening, Born succinctly identifies two of the ways in which it is complicit with the worst tendencies of contemporary governance – in its emphasis on innovation as a key outcome of academic labour, and in the ways it has devalued (and justified the closing of) the traditional art schools which were once key instruments of class mobility and cultural ferment.

10From its Introduction through the case studies which follow, Music and Digital Media is bold in a variety of ways. Notably, in her introduction, Born argues against the tendency to carve off music from the discipline and traditions of anthropology through the development of the field called ethnomusicology. The contributions of ethnomusicology to the work gathered here are acknowledged throughout the book, but Born’s introduction also makes the forceful case for returning music to anthropology, so as to maintain music status “as a lens on wider sociocultural processes.” The study of music can do this, she suggests, by holding on to the key foundational concerns of anthropology: “the social and material, politics, temporality and ontology” (p. 17).

11This reclaiming of music by anthropology is one of the book’s key gestures. The other is the invocation of media studies, not simply as a set of tools for thinking through the digital and the technological, but as the basis for thinking about mediation. “Mediation” itself is part of a commitment to “middleness” which Born advances as a key orientation of the MusicDig project and of this volume. Designating her method as one of an “anthropology in the middle,” Born notes that the book was written in the middle of various kinds of technological and social change, that middleness describes the productive movement of the research team between ethnographic identification and distanciation, that middleness is mediation and that media studies its is an intermediary (a “middle” of sorts) between disciplines. Theories of mediation, Born insists in her conclusion to the book, must “foment an anti- essentialist analytical ontology of music, and (...) surpass the explanatory limits of notions of ‘context’” (p. 441).

12Finally, it should be said that one of this volume’s most striking characteristics is its generosity. Authors are given the space in which to explore the nuances of their cases and to test the validity of different understandings. Readers are provided with rich summaries of theoretical positions, of the sort which would make this a valuable resource for teaching at upper levels. In every respect, this is a significant, valuable contribution to the study of music in the present moment.