Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital

WHEN, WHERE, AND HOW IS DIGITAL SOUND?

This panel’s first author, in discussing podcast archiving, notes that internet archives like the Wayback Machine have had much more focus on preserving visual and text content than sound. Internet Research has similarly traditionally had less engagement with sound than with other forms of digital content. This panel seeks to contribute to ongoing work to bring Sound Studies and Internet Studies into better conversation with each other, taking digital sound as a common object and examining it in different cases and through different methods to provide a richer understanding of the role sound plays in shaping our online experiences. The papers coalesce around their common object of inquiry, digital sound, providing depth of understanding about the subject matter by approaching from different directions. Moreover, the papers help to illuminate each other by taking different approaches to common themes. The first and second papers raise key questions about who tends to be included and excluded in circuits of production as well as whose digital sound tends to be seen as valuable. Papers 1, 2, and 3 all ask about how, despite rhetorics of democratization and variety, forms of digital sound may be becoming standardized through technological and social means. The first and third papers call attention to the ways the specific affordances of given digital production technologies shape (though do not determine) the kinds of production that become prevalent in a given moment. There are also methodological convergences: papers 3 and 4 take as their object of inquiry technology makers, and papers 2 and 4 both use press coverage as the site of investigation. Finally, papers 2 and 4 ask questions about what people believe is socially proper or correct in the case of digital sound. In these ways, this panel represents both an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary issues in digital sound as well as relating to broader questions central to internet research

Popular music, digital technologies and data analysis: New methods and questions

This article explores how respondents to The Harkive Project (www.harkive.org) are enfolding streaming services and automated recommendation systems into their everyday music reception practices. Harkive is an online project running annually on a single day in July that invites people to provide detail and reflection on their experiences with music. Since the project first ran in 2013, it has gathered over 10,000 individual entries. It is conceived as an ongoing experiment in research methodology that attempts to produce an online social space that encourages reflection from respondents about the detail of their music reception practice, while simultaneously acting as a place able to replicate commercial practices around data collection and analysis. This article will demonstrate how such a research process can produce rich descriptive data from respondents who provide a useful snapshot of contemporary music reception practice. The article begins with an overview of how streaming services, data collection from numerous online channels and automated recommendation systems interrelate, and how together they raise questions around how people engage in acts of music reception. It then describes how Harkive is based on similar types of computational/algorithmic processing to those used by key players in the digital music space. The analysis that follows shows that although respondents are engaging in everyday use of streaming services and dynamic recommendations, this engagement tends to be spread across a variety of online channels used in differing combinations, and that it is often recommendations from ‘traditional’ routes, such as media outlets (newspapers, radio stations) and users’ own social groups, that feature prominently in respondent descriptions. Indeed, what Nowak (2016) calls the ‘affective’ element of recommendation appears to be rooted in existing practices that are still in the process of being transposed to the relatively recently emerged digital platforms, rather than – and sometimes in spite of – the rhetorical framing of those platforms as key sites for recommendation and discovery by the companies who operate them. Through a discussion of those findings, and based on an update of Michael Bull’s concept of ‘auditory nostalgia’ (2009), it is then suggested that examining how listeners are enfolding the new technologies of music reception into their everyday routines and routes to meaning making may be a useful direction for future research. The article then suggests that a mode of working where scholars attempt to reflexively harness data-derived processes may be useful in producing that work, and that experimental and practice-led approaches could enable popular music scholars and listeners alike to develop better epistemic responses to the data-related technologies that have recently helped bring about such huge changes in our everyday music reception practice

Historical approaches to AVT reception: Methods, issues and perspectives

Drawing on insights from historical film audience studies, this chapter aims to explore the role AVT has had in shaping the viewing experience of film audiences in the past, as well as the methods available to researchers for investigating AVT reception in a historical perspective. The chapter is organized into three main sections. Part 1 provides an overview of the range of studies on historical reception and AVT. It is argued that, although there has been wide and growing interest in the lived experiences of film audiences, little attention has been paid to translation and its implication for the reception of films and television products. In Part 2, selected studies conducted by film and AVT scholars are reported to explore how the issue of translation has affected the reception of films as well as the movie-going experience in different cultural contexts and in reference to different translation modes. Part 3 deals with theories, methods and research practices, looking at the vast array of empirical methods that have been employed in historical reception studies. Research methods based on classical sources such as press reviews, interviews, and articles are here illustrated, highlighting their potential and limitations compared to other methodologies. Studies dealing with different research approaches are reported to show how existing methods can be used in historical research and to consider whether new approaches can be devised