Accountable artefacts: the case of the Carolan guitar

We explore how physical artefacts can be connected to digital records of where they have been, who they have encountered and what has happened to them, and how this can enhance their meaning and utility. We describe how a travelling technology probe in the form of an augmented acoustic guitar engaged users in a design conversation as it visited homes, studios, gigs, workshops and lessons, and how this revealed the diversity and utility of its digital record. We describe how this record was captured and flexibly mapped to the physical guitar and proxy artefacts. We contribute a conceptual framework for accountable artefacts that articulates how multiple and complex mappings between physical artefacts and their digital records may be created, appropriated, shared and interrogated to deliver accounts of provenance and use as well as methodological reflections on technology probes

Augmenting a guitar with its digital footprint

We explore how to digitally augment musical instruments by connecting them to their social histories. We describe the use of Internet of Things technologies to connect an acoustic guitar to its digital footprint – a record of how it was designed, built and played. We introduce the approach of crafting interactive decorative inlay into the body of an instrument that can then be scanned using mobile devices to reveal its digital footprint. We describe the design and construction of an augmented acoustic guitar called Carolan alongside activities to build its digital footprint through documented encounters with twenty-seven players in a variety of settings. We reveal the design challenge of mapping the different surfaces of the instrument to various facets of its footprint so as to afford appropriate experiences to players, audiences and technicians. We articulate an agenda for further research on the topic of connecting instruments to their social histories, including capturing and performing digital footprints and creating personalized and legacy experiences

Augmenting a guitar with its digital footprint

We explore how to digitally augment musical instruments by connecting them to their social histories. We describe the use of Internet of Things technologies to connect an acoustic guitar to its digital footprint – a record of how it was designed, built and played. We introduce the approach of crafting interactive decorative inlay into the body of an instrument that can then be scanned using mobile devices to reveal its digital footprint. We describe the design and construction of an augmented acoustic guitar called Carolan alongside activities to build its digital footprint through documented encounters with twenty-seven players in a variety of settings. We reveal the design challenge of mapping the different surfaces of the instrument to various facets of its footprint so as to afford appropriate experiences to players, audiences and technicians. We articulate an agenda for further research on the topic of connecting instruments to their social histories, including capturing and performing digital footprints and creating personalized and legacy experiences

Understanding the Cultural Value of 'In Harmony-Sistema England'

This research project on which this paper reports was designed to explore questions of cultural value in relation to the schools music project In Harmony-Sistema England. Our core research focus has been upon the ways in which children, their teachers and tutors, and their families understand the value of their participation in IHSE initiatives. The project engaged with three case studies of IHSE initiatives (based in Norwich, Telford and Newcastle) and qualitative data was gathered with primary school children, school staff, parents and IHSE musicians in all three cases

Indie Music in Post-bomb Bali: Participant Practices, Scene Subjectivities

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2015This dissertation focuses on music practices that have been largely uncharted in Balinese music studies. In the twelve years following the 2002 terrorist bombings, during which time an economic downturn and subsequent accelerated tourism development and urbanization transformed southern Bali, several rock bands rose to national and international acclaim and, alongside other music professionals committed to the creative, professional, and social vitality of local music making, built a thriving independent music scene. By 2014, Bali was home to some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful bands in the Indonesian recording industry's history--though industry accolades were often tangential achievements for many music producers. What did preoccupy them is key to understanding the scene's historic growth and staying power. Shared preoccupations with style and genre, creativity, professional ethics, activism, and belonging deepened social bonds by coalescing attention around core social, environmental, and musical issues. Based on six years of knowing Bali's indie music producers as research interlocutors, colleagues, and friends, this study examines scene practices including rehearsals, performances, album production, tours, music activism, and "hanging out" (nongkrong) as conduits by which core ideals were created and shared. Research methods, derived from anthropology and ethnomusicology, included participation in scene practices, recorded interviews, casual conversations, and attention to "material culture," including hard copy and digital albums, music videos, and band merchandise. By applying theories derived from sociological phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, this study argues that habitual, music-related activities, as social interaction, establish subjective preoccupations that, as they come to be mutually valued, strengthen social alliances, sustain otherwise untenable music professions, and influence broader social and environmental issues. In post-bomb Bali, music-related practices were strategies for defining social relationships and inspiring collective action to both make a music scene happen and safeguard an island's diverse artistic, societal, and natural ecology

"THIS COUNTRY OF CHINA IS TOUGH": NIGERIAN IMMIGRANT MUSIC MAKING IN GUANGZHOU, CHINA

This article concerns Nigerian music making in Guangzhou, one of China’s leading manufacturing and trading centres, and where the largest groups of Africans in China, more generally, are concentrated. Nigerians are the largest community of Africans in Guangzhou and, like other Africans traders, practice what has been referred to as “low-end globalisation” (Mathews and Yang 2012). Beyond entertainment, music making among Nigerians, and Africans in China more generally, has a significant role in not only maintaining a sense of belonging but also in communicating key social concerns, aspirations and sentiments that stem from the experience of living and working in Guangzhou. This article describes how these experiences unfold in specific songs composed by two Igbo Nigerian immigrants whose aspirations and efforts to live and work in the city resulted in different outcomes

The Techne of YouTube Performance: Musical Structure, Extended Techniques, and Custom Instruments in Solo Pop Covers

They begin with a note, a chord, the tap of a button, or the triggering of a loop: through progressively layered textures, samples, and extended performance techniques, solo cover songs on YouTube often construct themselves piece by piece before the viewer’s eyes and ears. Combining virtuosity and novelty in a package ready-made for viral online popularity, this recent and rapidly growing internet phenomenon draws together traditions old and new, from the “one man band” of the nineteenth century, to the experimental live looping of 1980s performance art, to contemporary electronic music. Building on a number of recent studies that examine the affordances and restrictions of writing and performing music on various instruments, the case studies in this article explore how these YouTube performers use theoretical and instrumental expertise to convey complex textures through a minimal collection of musical materials. In each case, the instruments themselves are arranged, modified, or even created in order to make these performances possible. These videos often incorporate looped or layered elements, arranged to take advantage of a song’s harmonic or rhythmic structures; and they frequently feature customized, self-created, or otherwise unconventional instrumentation. Through their sparse, economic construction, these intricate arrangements are each the end product of a careful analysis of each song, and they have much to teach us about the harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic structures of popular music

Forming a Sonic Identity through the Integration of Transculturality and Technology

This paper investigates the ways in which new sonic identities begin to emerge through a dialogue between cultures, artistic disciplines and technology. Musicians worldwide commonly shape their identity and forms of musical expression through the lens of the environment they grow up in. Ideas about desirable sonic aesthetics vary drastically across musical traditions and cultures globally. Whilst one musician may strive for a sound that is clear, pure and unaltered, another may strive for a distorted, inharmonic sound, for example. The article examines what happens when a musician from a given sonic tradition is exposed to and interacts with a diversely different approach to producing sound. It puts forward the case of an Australian double bass player with a long immersion into Tanzanian musical culture, carving out a personal approach to double bass playing via a synthesis of traditional western techniques, extended techniques influenced by Tanzanian sonic aesthetics, as well as mechanical preparations and electronic augmentation of the instrument. The combination of these diverse elements allows for the emergence of a distinctive sonic identity, illustrated by excerpts from three pieces composed and performed within this specific aesthetic framework. The article’s discussion on sonic identity formation holds relevance as an example case of artistic creation within the current globalised context, where finding the distinct quality of one’s expression needs to be negotiated through layers of transcultural and technological elements

Actions towards freedom: Theoretical and practical perspectives on improvisation and composition

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.This thesis, and the accompanying portfolio of pieces, is concerned with investigating practical and theoretical meeting points between improvisation and composition. Such meeting points are evaluated alongside a consideration of ‘freedom’ in improvised music, for which a frame is drawn from George Lewis’s concepts of the ‘Afrological’ (placing emphasis on expression of the ‘self’) and ‘Eurological’ (in which the ‘self’ is explicitly avoided). It is suggested that a reconciliation of these two extremes might be found in a compositional ‘creative displacement’, which might change an improviser’s environment in unforeseen ways and thus stimulate explorations of expressive novelty. Three different compositional approaches to ‘creative displacement’ are investigated: through fixed notation, through electronic real-time notation, and through leadership in a workshop setting. In each case compositional experiments will be undertaken and documented, detailing the creation and realisation of the pieces included in the accompanying portfolio. A terminology for the theoretical consideration of these approaches will draw on theories of complex systems, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and various socio-musicological models such as those of Steven Feld and Charles Keil. Through an evaluation of the portfolio compositions in rehearsal and performance, this thesis will conclude that a reconciliation of Lewis’s ‘Afro’ and ‘Eurological’ can be found through the external application of limitations to improvisational creativity. Such constraints will be described as ‘creatively displacing’ if they provoke a performer towards an exploration of novel expressive approaches. In order to achieve this in practice, limitations must be carefully judged with regard to their degree of abstraction, the manner of their presentation and the nature of their notation; it will be suggested that the presence of a leader is vital in achieving this. These conclusions will lead to a questioning of conventional ideas of improvisation and leadership, and suggest a re-evaluation of indeterminacy within notation