Listening from within a Digital Music Archive : Metadata, Sensibilities, and Music Histories in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's Music Archive

This thesis examines how digital music archives can facilitate different versions of the history of recorded music. It argues that digital technologies and metadata enable coexisting historical narratives of recorded music that move across time and musical genre, and that can cross geographical and cultural space. The study sees a correlation between archival strategies and the presentation of recorded music. It exemplifies this by examining the development and structuration of the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). The thesis amplifies that the presentation of recorded music on DR’s in-house digital music platform /Diskoteket can impact how the music is perceived. It is asserted that music streaming experiences are directed by imaginaries of the history of recorded music, which can be guided by metadata. As this study is the first to have an explicit focus on DR’s music archive, it also offers a historical perspective alongside its more practical and technological analyses. The thesis traces the inner workings of DR’s digital music archive and assesses how its architecture makes for multiple and parallel histories of recorded music. It concludes that formations of metadata have the capability to deepen and change the perception and reception of music releases. The thesis argues that metadata give structure to DR’s digital music archive while also giving it meaning and purpose, and it suggests that this applies to all types of digital music archives

DIGITAL MUSIC USE AS ECOLOGICAL THINKING: METADATA AND HISTORICISED LISTENING

In claiming that metadata possess the power to put historical awareness into the act of listening, this article examines digital music use as an aesthetic situation driven by potentialities of becoming. Working from a theoretical foundation amalgamating digital music archives and metadata as environments the article discusses Georgina Born’s notion of musical assemblages alongside the concept of virtuality, and by letting these meet the article argues for a musical assemblage built from sensibilities of becoming rather than layers of mediation. The inner workings of digital music use constitute an ecology in which recorded music history moves and reconnects, and this makes the historicity of recorded music be fluid, thus turning listening into a historicised action. In exemplifying this, the article discusses some of the strategic programming of metadata on the digital music platform Diskoteket, and through an analysis of sampled music, the prospects of recorded music’s historicity are shown as affective capacities

Music History in the Deep Field of Digital Music Platforms

In this paper I want to examine whether the everyday distribution of music induces a mode of listening that modifies people’s relations to the history of music or not. It is indisputable that the diverse landscape of digital music platforms and music streaming services have an effect on how we perceive music as cultural texts, as commodities and as aesthetic objects. We listen on the go while at the same time using our playback devices for other things; we share playlists and comment on tracks on social media; and we continuously (re)discover and put attention to new connections in the music, thus recontextualizing the experience of, and meaning gathered from, the music. These kind of dealings with music have an impact on the ways our discourses of music, and of the history of music, are forming and producing knowledge. But, are they also challenging the ways we theorize music history? Through a critical examination of a dozen of qualitative interviews done with employees from the Danish Broadcast Corporation (DR) about their experiences of digital streaming services juxtaposed with their experiences of Diskoteket, which is a digital music platform accessible for employees of DR only, I will assess how we might track the influences from these types of platforms on how people talk about music and music history. The overarching aim of this paper is to ruminate on what music history in fact is, and whether there exists such a thing as a digital music history. If that is the case, how should the writing of a digital music history be done

Do digital music archives inform the history of recorded music?

In this paper I want to examine some consequences that archival strategies of mass digitized environments might have on people’s relations to the history of recorded music. Archival strategies can make user-listeners connect tracks in surprising ways due to recommendation systems; they can make user-listeners get lost in the abundance of music; they can give user-listeners the impression that there is only ever one song that will work for each consecutive instant in time; and they can make user-listeners listen alongside digital information merging them with data. These issues have an impact on the ways our discourses of music, and of the history of recorded music, are forming and producing knowledge.The first part of the paper will discuss digital music use as a pulsating structuration that cuts through the temporalities of the history of recorded music, which, I claim, should be thought ecologically to impose meaning for the user-listener. Engaging with a digital music platform puts one’s musical world picture together as a patchwork that continuously is ripped apart and recombined. The second part of the paper involves this ecological definition with a qualitative study conducted at the Danish Broadcast Corporation during Winter 2019/2020. In a dozen semi-structured interviews I engage my informants in contemplative conversations about conceptualizing “music history” after the so-called “digital turn”. Though different in their scopes, a commonality in all interviews turns out to be reflections on algorithmic control and measured opportunities for listening, which problematize digital music use as a political circuit creating sense of the historicity of music

Your Top Songs 2018 : An Imaginary of co-creating Music Histories

This paper seeks to engage in a speculative discussion of the relationship between body and technology in the digital consumption of music today. By deploying the notion of User coined by Benjamin Bratton in his all-encompassing theory of The Stack (Bratton 2015) the paper outlines the inner workings in the usage of a digital music archive as a unity both politically and ontologically fertile. Specifically, the construction of the “best of” playlist Your Top Songs 2018 distributed by Spotify to all of its users in the beginning of December 2018 is scrutinized. It is asserted that one has the possibility to continuously co-create music histories in and with the system behind the playlist by following Bratton’s User construction, which furthermore questions the contemporary state of music historiography as a discipline – should the discipline think with the digital consumption of music (and the digital music archives) and again and again dig into a genealogical examination of what it means to write music history here and now? These questions let the paper meander into connections with musical mediation and media archaeology, both of which are also being read as hinting at the genealogical method. Finally, the paper reflects on whether it is fruitful to set out an ethnography for the Internet, as described by Christine Hine (Hine 2015), in order to do a digital fieldwork backing up the assumptions about the co-creation of music histories – how do people in a User construction actually perceive the notion of music history and what role does the relationship between body and technology play for this perception

The digital archiving of music at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation : History, ideals, taxonomy

This article offers a history of the digital music archive at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). By looking into archival documents, reviewing interviews and analyzing interfaces, the article examines visions and strategies behind the digital music archive and its in-house platform, /Diskoteket, and based on this the article assesses whether or not DR’s archival strategies play an active role in creating an institutionalized understanding of music history. The article considers how music metadata are operationalized in the digital music archive’s database, and from this it casts light on the ways that /Diskoteket balances several, and somewhat opposing, music histories. The processes of music archiving at DR are viewed as a continuous production of a causal history side by side with non-linear chronologies that follow a relational perspective, and it is argued that the digital music archive hints at a promise of a thinking anew of recorded music’s pasts. In conclusion, the article speculates on DR’s options for carving out a position of relevance in the field of music communication in the future that relies on a strengthening of the operationalized metadata, which ought to be broadened to the public

Musical Singularity and the Case of Digital Music Archives

In the last decade the Internet as we know it has developed rapidly. With it music has been spread, consumed and absorbed in manners that ultimately questions both its status as well as its possibilities. In a digital age, does it make sense to think of music as progressing after certain inherent logics? Is music not enmeshed in our digital doings to such a degree that the entire foundation for how we perceive and understand music should be reevaluated and rethought? And if so, how are we to comprehend the notion of music history and music historical discourse? By posing a new concept, musical singularity, I aim to nurture a vocabulary for wording the uncertain properties between us and the digital means from which we approach music today. If we take musical assemblages (Born 2005) as a point of departure and leave the thought of musical works we can create a way of understanding the meeting between human (body), music and digital technology as a sort of world-making where humans and nonhumans merge chaotically and opaquely. In this paper I wish to conceptualize our contemporary digital music engagement as taking part of interfacial life (Bratton 2014), and when speaking of musical singularity I strive to be able to grasp all the intertwining layers of communication that are taking place within this engagement. By exemplifying with characteristics of the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcast Corporation (DR) I will (to echo Foucault) showcase how digital infrastructures work as communicators of music history making us aware of continuities and discontinuities of music historical formations. The system of DR is an enclosed system, but it is still spanning beyond its own boundaries working as a part of planetary computation (Bratton 2015) and it is mediating music in a way that is traversing time resembling the qualities of a hyperobject (Morton 2013). By letting the discipline of music historiography meet a media archaeological mindset I will claim that one oozes in and out of history when actively engaged with digital platforms of music; while listening, press on a hyperlink and follow the endless chain of inter-relational metadata and you are involved with history – not metaphorically, but literally. When thinking with, and from within, the digitally induced totality wherein music lies, historiography should be remodeled together with the contemporary contemporary (Lund 2019). Thus the act of music historiography will be a sensual act of becoming that codirects a planetary structure of the senses

Digital Music Use as Ecological Thinking : Metadata and Historicised Listening

In claiming that metadata possess the power to put historical awareness into the act of listening, this article examines digital music use as an aesthetic situation driven by potentialities of becoming. Working from a theoretical foundation amalgamating digital music archives and metadata as environments the article discusses Georgina Born’s notion of musical assemblages alongside the concept of virtuality, and by letting these meet the article argues for a musical assemblage built from sensibilities of becoming rather than layers of mediation. The inner workings of digital music use constitute an ecology in which recorded music history moves and reconnects, and this makes the historicity of recorded music be fluid, thus turning listening into a historicised action. In exemplifying this, the article discusses some of the strategic programming of metadata on the digital music platform Diskoteket, and through an analysis of sampled music, the prospects of recorded music’s historicity are shown as affective capacities

Om Spotify, bobler og aural nydelse

Hvorfor skal den vigtige debat om Spotifys indflydelse på musiklytning og musikoplevelse ende som et ufrugtbart møde mellem et personangreb og en forsvarstale? Er Seismografs læsere mon blevet klogere på, hvad Spotifys digitale infrastruktur kan gøre ved brugerens lytteoplevelse? Streaming-forskeren Andreas Helles Pedersen hiver et tredje øre ind i debatten