Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Digital Technology and Cultural Practice
- Personal Take: Whatever Happened to Tape-Trading?
- 2 Toward a History of Digital Music: New Technologies, Business Practices and Intellectual Property Regimes
- Personal Take: On Serving as an Expert Witness in the ‘Blurred Lines’ Case
- 3 Shaping the Stream: Techniques and Troubles of Algorithmic Recommendation
- Personal Take: Being a Curator
- Personal Take: Can Machines Have Taste?
- 4 Technologies of the Musical Selfie
- Personal Take: Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave!
- 5 Witnessing Race in the New Digital Cinema
- Personal Take: Giving History a Voice
- 6 Digital Devotion: Musical Multimedia in Online Ritual and Religious Practice
- Personal Take: Technicians of Ecstasy
- Personal Take: Live Coded Mashup with the Humming Wires
- Personal Take: Algorave: Dancing to Algorithms
- 7 Rethinking Liveness in the Digital Age
- Personal Take: Augmenting Musical Performance
- Personal Take: Digital Demons, Real and Imagined
- Personal Take: Composing with Sounds as Images
- Personal Take: Compositional Approaches to Film, TV and Video Games
- 8 Virtual Worlds from Recording to Video Games
- 9 Digital Voices: Posthumanism and the Generation of Empathy
- Personal Take: In the Wake of the Virtual
- 10 Digital Inequalities and Global Sounds
- 11 The Political Economy of Streaming
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
7 - Rethinking Liveness in the Digital Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2019
- The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Digital Technology and Cultural Practice
- Personal Take: Whatever Happened to Tape-Trading?
- 2 Toward a History of Digital Music: New Technologies, Business Practices and Intellectual Property Regimes
- Personal Take: On Serving as an Expert Witness in the ‘Blurred Lines’ Case
- 3 Shaping the Stream: Techniques and Troubles of Algorithmic Recommendation
- Personal Take: Being a Curator
- Personal Take: Can Machines Have Taste?
- 4 Technologies of the Musical Selfie
- Personal Take: Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave!
- 5 Witnessing Race in the New Digital Cinema
- Personal Take: Giving History a Voice
- 6 Digital Devotion: Musical Multimedia in Online Ritual and Religious Practice
- Personal Take: Technicians of Ecstasy
- Personal Take: Live Coded Mashup with the Humming Wires
- Personal Take: Algorave: Dancing to Algorithms
- 7 Rethinking Liveness in the Digital Age
- Personal Take: Augmenting Musical Performance
- Personal Take: Digital Demons, Real and Imagined
- Personal Take: Composing with Sounds as Images
- Personal Take: Compositional Approaches to Film, TV and Video Games
- 8 Virtual Worlds from Recording to Video Games
- 9 Digital Voices: Posthumanism and the Generation of Empathy
- Personal Take: In the Wake of the Virtual
- 10 Digital Inequalities and Global Sounds
- 11 The Political Economy of Streaming
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter reconsiders what liveness means in a musical culture saturated with digital technologies. Where once live performance was understood in simple opposition to recordings, the proliferation of electronic audio technologies throughout the second half of the twentieth century and their deployment in myriad performance settings has made the categorical separation of recording from performance impossible. Digital technologies have become even further intertwined with the creation of performative meaning than their analogue predecessors. After explaining the development of the liveness concept, the author emphasises the increasing variability of its configuration in the digital age, drawing on discourses around virtuality, posthuman subjectivity and intermediality. The chapter concludes with case studies in musical activity in Second Life and in the microtiming-based compositions of Richard Beaudoin, emphasising the extent to which liveness has become for some artists an actual element of aesthetic interrogation, rather than just a way of categorising a musical experience.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture , pp. 178 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019
References
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