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The Social Life of Sounds argues for the agency of sounds and music and the acceleration of their social lives in the Digital Age. Drawing upon research with composers, producers, record collectors, DJs and record labels, the book problematises the notion of artistic authorship as it is framed in Western systems of property. Acknowledging that 'things' - sounds, samples, and recorded music - and people are co-constituted and that personhood is distributed through things and their reuse, Maalsen makes a case for understanding sound as multibiographical and challenges the possessive individual that is the basis of artistic copyright.
List of contents
Chapter 1 Entroducing.- Chapter 2 Theories and Methodology.- Chapter 3 Not Just Rare but UBER RARE! Biography, Music, and Personhood in Yaraandoo.- Chapter 4 Sampling Genealogies of Sound.- Chapter 5 Sven Libaek and "Misty Canyon".- Chapter 6 Reissues: Collecting, Curating, Connoisseurship and Cultural Mass.- Chapter 7 Distributed Personhood and the Multiple Biography.- Chapter 8 Conclusion: Somebodies as Multibiographical Sound.
About the author
Sophia Maalsen is a lecturer in urbanism at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She specializes in the digital reconfiguration of the everyday across the fields of music, urbanism, material culture, housing and gender.
Summary
Provides a new and innovative angle on the controversies and conflicts generated with the emergence of cultures and practices of music-making associated with new music-making technologies
Theoretically and conceptually innovative, being the first work that applies an object biography and life history approach to reused musical sounds
Enlists a broad range of illustrative examples of interest to musical scholars and music enthusiasts. This includes record collecting; beat making and sampling; curating music at both an institutional level (Smithsonian Folkways), independent label level, and in personal collections; and, reissuing records
Offers broad appeal to a diverse audience – both academic and those interested in music cultures more broadly
