Remixing Music Studies

Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we ‘remix’ our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into subgroups of ‘musicologists’, ‘theorists’, and ‘ethnomusicologists’? These are some of the crucial issues that Nicholas Cook has raised since he emerged in the 1990s as one of the UK’s leading and most widely read voices in critical musicology. In this book, collaborators and former students of Cook pursue these questions and others raised by his work—from notation, historiography, and performance to the place of music in multimedia forms such as virtual reality and video games, analysing both how it can bring people together and the ways in which it has failed to do so.

Sampling and remixing are now common in art, music and new media. Assessing their aesthetic qualities by focusing on technical advances in 1970s and 80s music, and later in art and media, the author argues that 'Remix' punches above its deemed cultural weight.

Keywords in Remix Studies consists of twenty-four chapters authored by researchers who share interests in remix studies and remix culture throughout the arts and humanities. The essays reflect on the critical, historical and theoretical lineage of remix to the technological production that makes contemporary forms of communication and creativity possible. Remix enjoys international attention as it continues to become a paradigm of reference across many disciplines, due in part to its interdisciplinary nature as an unexpectedly fragmented approach and method useful in various fields to expand specific research interests. The focus on a specific keyword for each essay enables contributors to expose culture and society’s inconclusive relation with the creative process, and questions assumptions about authorship, plagiarism and originality. Keywords in Remix Studies is a resource for scholars, including researchers, practitioners, lecturers and students, interested in some or all aspects of remix studies. It can be a reference manual and introductory resource, as well as a teaching tool across the humanities and social sciences.

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies comprises contemporary texts by key authors and artists who are active in the emerging field of remix studies. As an organic international movement, remix culture originated in the popular music culture of the 1970s, and has since grown into a rich cultural activity encompassing numerous forms of media. The act of recombining pre-existing material brings up pressing questions of authenticity, reception, authorship, copyright, and the techno-politics of media activism. This book approaches remix studies from various angles, including sections on history, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and practice, and presents theoretical chapters alongside case studies of remix projects. The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies is a valuable resource for both researchers and remix practitioners, as well as a teaching tool for instructors using remix practices in the classroom.

In this comprehensive and highly interdisciplinary companion, contributors reflect on remix across the broad spectrum of media and culture, with each chapter offering in-depth reflections on the relationship between remix studies and the digital humanities. The anthology is organized into sections that explore remix studies and digital humanities in relation to topics such as archives, artificial intelligence, cinema, epistemology, gaming, generative art, hacking, pedagogy, sound, and VR, among other subjects of study. Selected chapters focus on practice-based projects produced by artists, designers, remix studies scholars, and digital humanists. With this mix of practical and theoretical chapters, editors Navas, Gallagher, and burrough offer a tapestry of critical reflection on the contemporary cultural and political implications of remix studies and the digital humanities, functioning as an ideal reference manual to these evolving areas of study across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of digital humanities, remix studies, media arts, information studies, interactive arts and technology, and digital media studies.

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies comprises contemporary texts by key authors and artists who are active in the emerging field of remix studies. As an organic international movement, remix culture originated in the popular music culture of the 1970s, and has since grown into a rich cultural activity encompassing numerous forms of media.The act of recombining pre-existing material brings up pressing questions of authenticity, reception, authorship, copyright, and the techno-politics of media activism. This book approaches remix studies from various angles, including sections on history,

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies comprises contemporary texts by key authors and artists who are active in the emerging field of remix studies. As an organic international movement, remix culture originated in the popular music culture of the 1970s, and has since grown into a rich cultural activity encompassing numerous forms of media. The act of recombining pre-existing material brings up pressing questions of authenticity, reception, authorship, copyright, and the techno-politics of media activism. This book approaches remix studies from various angles, including sections on history, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and practice, and presents theoretical chapters alongside case studies of remix projects. The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies is a valuable resource for both researchers and remix practitioners, as well as a teaching tool for instructors using remix practices in the classroom.

This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Drawing together contributions from a wide range of scholars, the book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology.