[ecrea] Registration open: Musical Materialities in the Digital Age

Registration is now open for the following conference:

Musical Materialities in the Digital Age
Conference, 27-28 June 2014, University of Sussex

Overview
Music, while summoning notions of intangibility, transience and loss, is 
also associated with material objects that serve to ground the musical, 
make the transient permanent and defer loss. Unearthing music’s 
association with materiality reveals a fascinating array of artefacts, 
including instruments, scores, transcribing devices, sound recordings 
and much more. Such artefacts provide vital reference points for 
historical research as well as inviting new creative uses, rediscoveries 
and (re)mediations. They also add to the ever-growing archives of past 
objects, whether stored in ‘physical’ or digital forms. Music’s material 
traces serve as vital ways of mediating memory, whether in private 
collections or public exhibitions. Furthermore, the use of musical 
‘ephemera’ such as record sleeves, programmes, flyers and posters as a 
primary means for putting the popular musical past on display in museums 
and galleries has highlighted the ways in which such objects are not so 
ephemeral after all.

The persistence of musical artefacts and musical materialities following 
the period of their initial use value poses interesting questions. What 
is the fate of musical artefacts once they become obsolescent? What 
becomes of music and its objects once relegated to archives? What is the 
role of musical artefacts in helping us to understand the past? What is 
the relationship between the physical and the digital in terms of 
music’s objects? To what extent does a focus on music’s objects 
challenge the idea of music as a social process? Conversely, what role 
does musical materiality play in the maintenance and development of 
rituals long associated with music? What rituals reformulate musical 
materiality? What does the remediation of the musical past via ‘media 
archaeology’ have to tell us about present desires, anxieties and needs? 
What is the role of museums, galleries, sound archives and libraries in 
these processes?

Working from the premise that musical materiality matters, the aim of 
this two-day interdisciplinary conference (welcoming speakers from media 
studies, music studies, cultural studies, museum studies, memory studies 
and other cognate disciplines) will be to reflect upon the materialities 
of music bjects and technologies in the digital age, with an emphasis on:

- Processes of remediation
- Residual media of ‘dead media’
- Cultural waste
- Media archaeology (and particular manifestations relating to sound and 
music, e.g. ‘vinyl archaeology’)
- The recycling of memory and material culture
- The digital archive
- The future of music creation and consumption
- Nostalgia and ‘retromania’
- Music as ‘thing’ and/or ‘process’
- Commodification

Programme
Scheduled papers cover a variety of topics, including contexts of 
reception, production and circulation of digital objects; analysis of 
residual media and formats (playback devices, vinyl records, cassettes, 
etc.); the meanings and implications of digitisation; archives, musueums 
and sound curating; musical materiality and digitality in education, the 
implications of streaming for producers and consumers of music; the 
evocative power and physicality of music objects. The full programme 
will be published on the conference wesbite later in May.

Keynotes will be provided by Professor Will Straw and Dr Noel Lobley.

Will Straw is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada 
and Professor within the Department of Art History and Communications 
Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Straw received his BA in 
Film Studies from Carleton University (Ottawa) and his Masters and PhD 
degrees from McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of Cyanide 
and Sin:  Visualizing Crime in 50s America, and co-editor of the 
Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock.  He has published widely on music 
scenes, the music industry and the relationship of music to media.

Noel Lobley is a sound curator who is currently working as an 
ethnomusicologist Research Associate at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 
University of Oxford, where he is developing the music and sound 
collections through a series of curated experiential sound events.  His 
interdisciplinary research in the anthropology of sound and music 
explores recorded heritage as a key method for understanding the 
relationships between archival field recordings, culture and environment.

The conference will include a specially convened panel featuring sound 
curators Andy Linehan and Cheryl Tipp of the Brisih Library. This 
session, convened by Professor David Hendy (University of Sussex), is in 
collaboration with the Brish Library and the Sussex-based Public Culture 
Hub.

Registration and Fees
Registration for the conference is now open. Please register as follows 
by completing the booking form at 
http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/musmat/conference/fees-registration/ and 
paying the appropriate fee using one of the payment methods listed on 
the registration page.

The conference fees for ‘Musical Materialities in the Digital Age’ are 
as follows:

Early bird rate (student): £50 *book by 21 May 2014 to benefit from this 
rate*
Early bird rate (non-student): £70 *book by 21 May 2014 to benefit from 
this rate*
Regular rate from 22 May 2014 (student): £60
Regular rate from 22 May 2014 (non-student): £80

The above fees cover conference registration, delegate fees, lunch and 
refreshments on both days of the conference (27th and 28th June). We are 
also arranging a conference dinner for the evening of the 27th, for 
which there will be an additional booking fee.

Conference organisers
Richard Elliott, University of Sussex
Elodie Roy, Newcastle University

Websites
http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/musmat/
https://www.facebook.com/musicalmaterialities



Dr Richard Elliott
Lecturer in Popular Music
School of Media, Film and Music
University of Sussex
Falmer
BN1 9RG

T: 01273 877271
E: (R.Elliott /at/ sussex.ac.uk)

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/music/people/list/person/307949
http://sussex.academia.edu/RichardElliott



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