The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking the History of Technology-Based Music
Monty Adkins editor Jøran Rudi editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:29th Dec '25
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This Handbook explores and critiques a new sonic reality – one which unearths new narratives that chart embryonic practices from the early twentieth century that have developed in parallel with accepted narratives of electronic music.
Today’s musical and artistic practices within technology-based music represent radical changes in production, engagement and dissemination of all sonic arts for composers, musicians, listeners, media content creators and casual music users. Constant everyday exposure to electronic or processed sounds influences our listening skills and listening intentionality, and our ideas of what constitutes valuable sound experiences have expanded radically. What are we listening to? How and why? This new reality is also more inclusive, and technology-borne music now appears as the new folk music – unwritten, improvised and finding its own relevance unfettered by the traditional hierarchies of taste. It is also where black and Asian technology-based experimental music is emerging with its own sonic genealogy, where music is no longer limited to sound only but can be more fruitfully seen as a branch of media arts, combining diverse materials, techniques and tools into more holistic experiences.
An incredibly comprehensive and much-needed addition to the conversation surrounding music technology, this volume is a profound and fascinating reframing of electronic and experimental music history through the lens of composers, performers, practices, concepts, instruments, and communities that have been completely ignored or otherwise severely overlooked in the traditional academic discourse. I highly recommend this for anyone who listens outside of the norm.
- Sarah Davachi, musicologist, composer and performer of technology-based music.
Histories calcify. This applies to experimental art forms and new technologies as much as it does to more conservative fields. Every so often ideas have to be refreshed, revised, returned to a state of fluidity. This well-curated book is one of those agents of change, dealing as it does with legacies of techno-mysticism, noise as disruption, ethnomusicological field recording, prototypes of net communication, technology as politics and overlooked figures whose significance has only recently been recognised. To apply a Pauline Oliveros maxim to the entire volume, the question is not 'what am I hearing' but 'how am I listening'?
- David Toop, musician, author, Emeritus professor, London College of Communication
ISBN: 9781032554204
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 960g
416 pages