Information Overload? Music Studies in the Age of Abundance

A conference exploring the epistemological, methodological, ethical, and disciplinary problems that arise when studying music in the age of abundance.

Hans Haacke, News (1969/2008), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Keynote speakers 

• Robin James (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

No Genres, Just Vibes: perceiving ourselves how AI and finance perceive us

• Nick Seaver (Tufts University)

Too Much Music: Informatic Cosmology and the Myth of Overload

Guest respondents

• David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds)  
• Noortje Marres (University of Warwick)  
• Paula Harper (University of Nebraska)

Conference introduction

For those investigating any musical activity after about 1994, the main sources of research data will not be print archives or discrete media – they will be World Wide Web media. The Internet Archive, the web’s library, today holds over 525 billion archived web pages, while API and post-API archiving initiatives make social web platforms accessible as research databases.  At first glance, no other archive is more inclusive in terms of whose voices it represents, and none more comprehensive in terms of the insights it provides into the thoughts, desires and musical tastes of ordinary people. To paraphrase the web historian Ian Milligan, whose recent book provides the title and framing for this conference, we might suggest that in its scale, granularity and plurality, the web represents the music historian’s dream (Milligan 2019: 1). Many researchers are now using the abundance of musical opinion data online as way of examining the reception of musical works and performances (Cook 2013; Edgar 2016; Spencer 2017; Mangaoang 2019; Moore 2019; Bell 2020; Lamont et al. 2020), while others have introduced digital methods to analyse net-native music genres (Born & Haworth 2018) and harvested user-generated music videos with preservation and future research in mind (Smith-Sivertsen 2020).  

Yet there is good cause to be sceptical of claims to a more ‘democratic’ archive in an age of surveillance capitalism. Contrary to early hopes that the internet would bring about greater egalitarianism and democracy (Turner 2006), Shoshana Zuboff argues that the political economy of contemporary digital communications is characterised by ‘radical indifference’ in the service of maximising data flows (Zuboff 2019), and McKenzie Wark sees tech oligopolies as a ‘new ruling class’ (Wark 2019). The harms that algorithms perpetuate through biased and incomplete training data suggest that visibility within the archive remains strongly patterned according to race, gender, prosperity, ability and geography (Apprich et al. 2018; Noble 2018). Intersecting with these concerns is a question of how the superficial ‘abundance’ of stories to be told about music in the last twenty-five years impacts on questions of historical theory. If we accept the claims of cultural theorists of neoliberalism (cf. Beradi 2009, Gilbert 2015), then is it possible that a surfeit of available paths through the data compensates for a lack of meaningful historicity over the same period? 

With this conference we seek to gather researchers who are interested in epistemological, methodological, ethical, and disciplinary problems that arise when studying music in the age of abundance.

All papers and the two keynote talks are planned for days one and two (Wednesday 8th and Thursday 9th September), with participation via Zoom. Day three (Friday 10th September) will also be delivered through Zoom. The guest respondents will deliver responses to papers heard on days one and two, leading to open discussion of the themes, case studies, and issues encountered during the conference. 

• Full conference programme

Organising committee

• Christopher Haworth
• Danielle Sofer
• Edward Spencer

This conference is funded by the UKRI AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship, Music and the Internet: Towards a digital sociology of music.

Bibliography

• Apprich, C., Cramer, F., Chun, W. H. K., & Steyerl, H. (2018). Pattern Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press & Meson Press.
• Bell, E. (2020). Exploring time-coded comments on YouTube music videos: The past, present, and future of an emerging source for digital musicology. Like, Share and Subscribe: YouTube, music and cyberculture before and after the new decade. Lisbon: Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
• Beradi, F. (2009). The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Born, G. (2010). For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135(2), 205-243. doi:10.1080/02690403.2010.506265.
• Born, G., & Haworth, C. (2018). From microsound to vaporwave: Internet-mediated musics, online methods, and genre. Music and Letters, 98(4), 601-647. doi:10.1093/ml/gcx095.
• Bruns, A. (2019). After the ‘APIcalypse’: Social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research. Information, Communication & Society, 22(11), 1544-1566. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1637447.
• Cook, N. (2013). Beyond music: Mashup, multimedia mentality, and intellectual property. In  J. Richardson, C. Gorbman, & C. Vernallis (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (pp. 53-76). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Edgar, A. N. (2016). Commenting straight from the underground: N.W.A., police brutality, and YouTube as a space for neoliberal resistance. Southern Communication, 81(4), 223-236. doi:10.1080/1041794X.2016.1200123.
• Freelon, D. (2018). Computational research in the post-API age. Political Communication,35(4), 665-668. doi:10.1080/10584609.2018.1477506.
• Gilbert, J. (2015). Captive Creativity: Breaking Free from the Long 1990s. Capitalism, Culture and the Media. Leeds: University of Leeds.
• Lamont, A., Bannister, S., Coutinho, E., & Egermann, H. (2020). ‘Talking’ about music: the emotional content of comments on YouTube videos. Like, Share and Subscribe: YouTube, music and cyberculture before and after the new decade. Lisbon: Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
• Levitz, T., Drott, E., Cohen, B., Rodríguez, V. E., Dohoney, R., Dillon, E., & Morrison, M. D. (2012). Musicology beyond borders? [Colloquy]. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 65(3), 821-861. doi:10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.821.
• Mangaoang, A. (2019). Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Milburn, K. (2019). Generation Left. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Milligan, I. (2019). History in the age of abundance? How the web is transforming historical research. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Moore, A. F. (2019). Listening to the Sound Music Makes. In C. Scotto, K. M. Smith & J. Brackett (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches [legal deposit e-book edition]. London: Routledge.
• Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.
• Smith-Sivertsen, H. (2020). “Once I was 7 years old” – the many lives of songs in the YouTube age. Like, Share and Subscribe: YouTube, music and cyberculture before and after the new decade. Lisbon: Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
• Spencer, E. K. (2017). Re-orientating spectromorphology and space-form through a hybrid acoustemology. Organised Sound, 22(3), 324-335. doi:10.1017/S1355771817000486.
• Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Venturini, T., & Rogers, R. (2019). “API-based research” or How can Digital Sociology and Journalism Studies Learn from the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Data Breach. Digital Journalism, 7(4), 532-540. doi:10.1080/21670811.2019.1591927.
• Wark, M. (2019). Capital is dead: Is this something worse? London & New York: Verso.
• Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for the future at the new frontier of power. London: Profile Books.