T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

M U SIC A N D
V I RT UA L I T Y
The Oxford Handbook of

MUSIC AND
VIRTUALITY
Edited by
SHEILA WHITELEY
and
SHARA RAMBARRAN

1
 3
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The Oxford handbook of music and virtuality / edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–932128–5 (hardcover : alk. paper)  1.  Music and the Internet.  2.  Music—Computer network
resources.  I.  Whiteley, Sheila, 1941– editor.  II.  Rambarran, Shara, editor.
ML74.7.O94 2016
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Sheila Whiteley (1941–2015)

During a late stage of the preparation of this book, Sheila Whiteley, my co-editor,
passed away on Saturday, June 6, 2015, in Hove, East Sussex, UK.
Sheila leaves a special legacy.
She graduated from the Open University (UK) in music with First Class Honours,
and later earned a PGCE and Ph.D. at the same institution. She then became a music
advisory teacher in Birmingham, before returning to the Open University as a music
lecturer. Sheila is famously known for being associated with the University of Salford
in Greater Manchester, UK. She joined the university in 1991, and helped to develop
the degree in popular music and recording, the first program of its kind in the UK.
Sheila’s contribution and dedication to the degree and research was highly recognized
and applauded by the university, and she was awarded the UK’s first-ever Chair in
Popular Music in 2000. This outstanding recognition generated global media interest.
For example, she made appearances on broadcasting channels such as the BBC and
Channel 4 (UK), and Arte (France/Germany), as well as participating in interviews for
the press.
Sheila’s expertise and talents as an extraordinary lecturer, musicologist, writer, editor,
and researcher specializing in feminism, gender, sexuality, 1960s counterculture, and
popular music gained her an international reputation in the academia. She published
on women, gender, and sexuality in popular music; rock music and counterculture;
age and identity in popular music; and critically and musically analyzed the works of
Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Queen, and Björk. She also wrote articles and chapters on
Britpop, copyright, the music industry, and popular culture. Before she died, she was
working on a chapter on one of her much-loved music groups, the Rolling Stones.
Along with her various academic roles, Sheila was the general secretary of the
International Association for the Study of Popular Music (1999–2001), and served on
the organizing committee for the Biennial International Conferences in Finland (2001)
and Canada (2003). After retiring from the University of Salford in 2006, she went to
live in her hometown, Brighton. She became professor emerita (University of Salford)
as well as a visiting professor at the University of Åarhus (Denmark), the University of
Brighton (UK), University of Southampton Solent (UK), and Bader International Study
Centre, Queen’s University (Canada).
As well as attaining many exceptional achievements, Sheila had a passion for music
that exerted a lasting influence on undergraduate and postgraduate students at the
University of Salford and international institutions. She happily shared her love, knowl-
edge, and expertise in the subject with her students, and encouraged them to further
their skills in music. Her interest and dedication in music and in her job have also
inspired her colleagues at work and academics alike. Her intelligence, generosity, and
devotion in music drew in many friends from the international academia. She was a
well-loved and respected colleague, lecturer, writer, and friend, and her unique person-
ality, intellect, energy, and determination will forever be praised and treasured.
Sheila leaves behind her devoted husband, Graham, a beautiful family, and many
friends, among them the contributors to this book.
I will always cherish Sheila’s mentorship, support, joyfulness, kindness, and great
friendship. I am very grateful to have known her.
This book is dedicated to Sheila Whiteley.
Sweet dreams, my academic mother
Shara Rambarran, June 2015
 Contents

Figures and Tables  xi

Preface  xv
Foreword—Andy Bennett  xvii
Acknowledgments  xxi
Contributors  xxiii
About the Companion Website  xxxiii

Introduction  1
Sheila Whiteley

PA RT ON E   T H E P R E - DIG I TA L V I RT UA L
1. “Seventeenth Heaven”: Virtual Listening and Its Discontents  17
Christian Lloyd
2. “Nothing Is Real”: The Beatles as Virtual Performers  35
Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis
3. Tom, Jerry, and the Virtual Virtuoso  52
Sheila Whiteley
4. Bring That Beat Back: Sampling as Virtual Collaboration  65
Rowan Oliver
5. An Analysis of Virtuality in the Creation and Reception
of the Music of Frank Zappa 81
Paul Carr

PA RT T WO   VO C A L OI D S , HOL O G R A M S ,
A N D   V I RT UA L P OP   S TA R S
6. Vocaloids and Japanese Virtual Vocal Performance: The Cultural
Heritage and Technological Futures of Vocal Puppetry  101
Louise H. Jackson and Mike Dines
viii   Contents

7. Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols  111

Rafal Zaborowski
8. Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond: Rewinding and
Fast-Forwarding the Virtual Pop Star  129
Thomas Conner
9. “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”: The Fantasy
Worlds of the Virtual Group and Their Creators  148
Shara Rambarran

PA RT T H R E E   SE C ON D   L I F E
10. Avatar Rockstars: Constructing Musical Personae in Virtual Worlds  171
Trevor S. Harvey
11. Performing Live in Second Life  191
Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook
12. Live Opera Performance in Second Life: Challenging Producers,
Performers, and the Audience  210
Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

PA RT F OU R   AU T HOR SH I P, C R E AT I V I T Y,
A N D   M U SIC IA N SH I P
13. “We Are, The Colors”: Collaborative Narration and Experimental
Construction of a Nonexistent Band  233
Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild
14. Music in Perpetual Beta: Composition, Remediation,
and “Closure”  248
Paul Draper and Frank Millward
15. Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot: Consumption as Mode
of Production  266
Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen
16. Human After All: Understanding Negotiations of Artistic Identity
through the Music of Daft Punk  282
Cora S. Palfy
 Contents   ix

17. Virtual Bands: Recording Music under the Big Top  306

David Tough

PA RT F I V E   C OM M U N I T I E S
A N D T H E WOR L D  W I DE   W E B
18. “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall: The First YouTube Symphony
Orchestra  335
Shzr Ee Tan
19. The Listener as Remixer: Mix Stems in Online Fan Community
and Competition Contexts  355
Samantha Bennett
20. Sample Sharing: Virtual Laptop Ensemble Communities  377
Benjamin O’Brien
21. Stone Tapes: Ghost Box, Nostalgia, and Postwar Britain  392
David Pattie
22. From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings
of Personal Memory  409
Adam Trainer
23. Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity  428
Danijela Bogdanovic

PA RT SI X   S ON IC E N V I RON M E N T S
A N D M U SIC A L E X P E R I E N C E
24. From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment
Enhancing: Consuming Ambiance as Listening Practice  455
Thomas Brett
25. App Music  477
Jeremy Wade Morris
26. Alternative Virtuality: Independent Micro Labels Facing the
Ideological Challenge of Virtual Music Culture—The Case
of Finnish Ektro Records  495
Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso
x   Contents

27. Everybody Knows There Is Here: Surveying the Indexi-local

in CBC Radio 3  514
Michael Audette-Longo
28. Mind Usurps Program: Virtuality and the “New Machine
Aesthetic” of Electronic Dance Music  529
Benjamin Halligan

PA RT SE V E N   PA RT IC I PATORY C U LT U R E
A N D   F U N DR A I SI N G
29. Virtual Music, Virtual Money: The Impact of Crowdfunding
Models on Creativity, Authorship, and Identity  557
Mark Thorley
30. With a Little Help from My Friends, Family, and Fans: DIY,
Participatory Culture, and Social Capital in Music Crowdfunding  573
Francesco D’Amato
31. Music and Crowdfunded Websites: Digital Patronage and
Artist-Fan Interactivity  593
Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson
Authors’ Blog: Final Thoughts on Music and Virtuality  613
Edited by Paul Carr

Glossary  631
Edited by Shara Rambarran
Index  647
 Figures and Tables

Figures

9.1 Author’s own transcription of the descending bass line that concludes
the first verse in “Feel Good Inc.,” composed and produced by Gorillaz,
David Jolicoeur, and Danger Mouse (2005); excerpt.  155
10.1 Entrance to Moonshine’s Rockin’ Blues Club in the swamps of the
Owtagetcha Bayou (image).  173
10.2 Bluemonk Rau performing on the stage at Moonshine’s in September
2013 (image).  173
10.3 Don Houdyshell performing for a Second Life audience from his home
studio in Austin, Texas (image).  175
10.4 Pillowfish’s Thom Martinsyde (Tom Drinkwater) and Rowanna
Sideways (Helen Bell) performing on their own stage in September 2008
(image).  180
10.5 The author (Collyier Heberle) interviewing Ictus Belford and Carrie
Laysan in their home in August 2008 (image).  183
10.6 U2inSL’s “The Edge” performing on stage during a “Feed a Smile”
benefit concert in Montego Beach (image).  185
11.1 Frogg Marlowe performing at Destiny’s Pearl, Aug. 7, 2013 (image).  195
11.2 Redzone performing at the Atropine, Dec. 21, 2012 (image).  204
13.1 Flyer from the Colors Tribute Band gig, Melbourne, ca. 2010 (image).  240
16.1 The groove from “Steam Machine”, which represents textural
completion to the sixteenth-note level (excerpt).  291
16.2 The sample from “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” immediately
establishes an unambiguous 4/4 meter (excerpt).  292
16.3 The outrageous range in which the vocal line demands to be seen as
“Human” (excerpt).  293
16.4 Hocket between the robotic and human elements in “Better, Faster,
Harder, Stronger” (excerpt).  293
16.5 Hocketlike exchange before the full groove is restored (excerpt).  294
xii   Figures and Tables

16.6 The rhythmic variation at 2’23”. The word stronger is omitted in the
second measure, and the words better and us are clipped off at the end
(excerpt).  294
16.7 An example of glitch taken from 2’49” (excerpt).  295
16.8 The pattern of outer Voice 1 and Voice 3 from “Technologic” (excerpt).  296
16.9 The invasion of the “Technologic” motives into “Emotion” (excerpt).  297
16.10 The unchanging groove from “Make Love” (excerpt).  298
17.1 Ryan States, producer, songwriter, mixer  307
17.2 Ryan States, Strange Town, album cover  309
17.3 States recording keyboards for Strange Town in his train room  311
17.4 States’s wall cable organizer in his train room  313
17.5 States recording bass guitar for Strange Town in his train room  314
17.6 States’s vocal setup for Strange Town in his train room  316
17.7 States in the hallway of his train car  321
17.8 States at mix console  323
17.9 Ryan States cover for the Mike Ator Club Remix of “How Do You Know
(You’re in Love?)”  324
19.1 Eight individual tracks of a multitrack recording bounced into a master.  359
19.2 Eight individual tracks of a multitrack recording bounced into four mix
stems, then processed again into a master.  359
19.3 The organization of mix stems in William Orbit’s “Orbitmixer.”  361
19.4 Mix Stem Numbering for Radiohead’s “Nude.”  362
19.5 Mix Stem numbering in Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown.”  364
19.6 Stem organization in Nine Inch Nails’ “The Hand That Feeds.”  366
24.1 Syntonic Research’s Environments series of soundscape recordings, disc
9 (image).  458
24.2 The freesound project (www.freesound.org) (image).  459
24.3 Ambiance app home screen (image).  460
24.4 Lilith’s “Close your eyes” mix of binaural tones and Thai jungle sounds
(image).  462
24.5 Jackson’s “Thinking” mix of birdsong, outdoor fountain, wind chimes,
and ambient electronic music sounds (image).  463
24.6 Adam’s “Sleeper Car” mix of snoring and train sounds (image).  464
28.1–28.4  Beauty as in the (electronic) eye of the beholder: promo video for
Layo & Bushwacka!’s “Love Story [vs Finally]” (2002) (images).  535
 Figures and Tables   xiii

28.5–28.8  DJ as technician: K-Klass DJ at the Venus Club

(Manchester, UK), Sept. 21, 2013 (images).  540
28.9 The loop in action: shout outs and shout backs, across the mixing desk.
(“Revolution,” Venus Club, Manchester, UK, Aug. 10, 2013) (image).  543
30.1 Distribution of the total amount collected by Honeybird & the Birdies
among types of backers (graph).  583
30.2 Strong ties (graph).  584
30.3 Weak ties (graph).  584
30.4 Strangers (graph).  584
30.5 Distribution of the total amount collected by Cobol Pongide among
types of backers (graph).  585

Tables

30.1 Known and Exclusive Ties of Honeybird & the Birdies  582
31.1 Crowdfunding Websites  596
31.2 Maria Schneider’s 2012 Newport Jazz Festival Commission (“Home”)  600
31.3 Amanda Palmer Kickstarter Campaign  602
31.4 Sellaband Public Enemy Campaign  604
 Preface

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality is designed to offer scholars and
researchers a comprehensive review of this evolving and challenging area of research.
The editors have brought together experienced researchers and leading scholars in the
field, recent doctoral research, and established academics with a track record of writing
about music. They have also prioritized an international perspective, thus offering a
rich and varied insight into music and its relationship to virtuality.
 Foreword

In recent years, the focus on popular music as a virtual medium has become somewhat
intense. Undoubtedly, there is some level of justification for this. In an incredibly short
space of time, various technologies and microtechnologies have emerged that offer new
ways of engaging with popular music at many levels, spanning creation, production,
dissemination, and consumption. Indeed, the extent of this technological develop-
ment is such that it has presented numerous questions concerning the authorship and,
perhaps equally significantly, ownership of music. Similarly, the dawn of the digital
age brought with it some difficult questions regarding the nature and impact of digital
technology on the relationship between popular music and consumer capitalism. In
an age where so much music is available to so many people through so any mediums,
there is a palpable sense that the era of popular music as primarily an industrial prod-
uct is now over. Thus, as Ian Rogers (2013) has cogently stated, those invested in music
making as a sustainable career, in either a full-time or, as is increasingly the norm, a
part-time sense no longer need to think in terms of recording and publishing deals as
the key to success (something that was, in any case, ever achieved by only a lucky hand-
ful) but see other pathways toward meaningful involvement in music. One often-cited
effect of digital technology in this context is the expanded opportunities it offers for
music making. Thus, although the amateur and semiprofessional musicians discussed
in Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians (1989) and Cohen’s Rock Culture in Liverpool (1991)
were reliant on the physical infrastructure and resources of their immediate local envi-
ronments for music making, today such musicians can write and record music with
musicians in other countries, and distribute their music and stream live performance
through the Internet.
Digital technology is also having a significant impact on popular music’s status as
a virtual medium in other ways too. One tantalizing example of this is the opportu-
nity it affords for artistic collaboration between the living and the dead in increas-
ingly seamless ways. A  pertinent case in point here is Celine Dion’s on-stage “duet”
with Frank Sinatra in the Sinatra favorite “All the Way.” In this performance, the image
of Sinatra (who died in 1998)  is projected onto a video screen and his voice routed
through the sound system with backing provided by the on-stage musicians. Similarly,
the 2008 tour by Queen and Paul Rodgers (the former Free and Bad Company singer)
included a performance of the track “Bijou” from Queen’s penultimate album with the
late Freddie Mercury Innuendo (released in 1991). The track featured live guitar playing
from Brian May with Mercury’s studio vocals being synced to live footage from Queen’s
1986 Wembley Stadium performance. Again, in such instances technological processes
xviii   Foreword

of mediation allow audiences—and in this case fellow artists and former bandmates as
well—to remember particular artists at the pinnacle of their career.
But this is perhaps going too far, too quickly. To be sure, the dawn of the “virtual age,”
as it is often called, has ushered in some large-scale changes in how we connect with
popular music. However, as Frith (1988) has observed, from the very point at which
popular music became an industrial product, it simultaneously became a cultural form
whose success relied heavily on mediation, thus giving popular music some distinctive
“virtual” qualities. Indeed, to cite one classic manifestation of this, highly influential
artists such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles did became commercially successful global
icons not merely because of their live performances (indeed, in the conventional sense
of the term, Elvis never performed “live” outside the United States aside from several
impromptu performances during his time in the military during which he was sta-
tioned in Germany) but because their music and their images were subject to global
circulation. Vinyl records, film, and television appearances by those and other artists
during the postwar era were what assured them global success. Moreover, as popular
music diversified and the industry supporting it became more sophisticated and com-
plex, the blurring of the flesh-and-blood and mediated aspects of popular music pro-
duction, performance, and consumption became increasingly seamless. The Beatles’
1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band combined real-time studio playing
with sound effects, orchestration, and other embellishments that were entirely reliant
on studio technology (see Martin and Hornsby 1979). Several years later, when progres-
sive rock groups such as Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Yes introduced such “Pepperesque”
arrangements into live performance contexts, this was achieved largely because tech-
nology had advanced to a point at which “studio music” could be reproduced live
through “new” inventions such as “tape loops,” early synthesizers, and other new musi-
cal instruments such as the Mellotron (an electronic keyboard instrument that gener-
ated “pre-programmed” sounds stored on tape loops). At the same time, demand for
progressive and other forms of rock music was becoming so large that performances
took place in stadium and area settings, which in turn gave rise to the need for large,
complex PA systems and also lent itself to the use of special audiovisual effects. Indeed,
by the late 1980s, the introduction of large video screens during live concerts to mag-
nify the performers on the stage for consumption by mass audiences further closed the
gap between the flesh-and-blood aspect of popular music performance and its media-
tion. Video itself, although often regarded as a product of the 1980s and the rise of
MTV (see Kaplan 1987), has its roots in the rock-and-roll films of the 1950s (Denisoff
and Romanowski 1991), the low-budget promotional films produced by artists such as
Pink Floyd during the late 1960s and Queen’s proto-video for the hit single “Bohemian
Rhapsody” in 1975.
This account is intended to demonstrate, with reference to some well-known, clas-
sic examples from the history of contemporary popular music, that the relationship
between the real and the virtual cannot be exclusively conceptualized and under-
stood in the context of digital technology. Rather, and as some of the chapters in this
Handbook will explore in further detail, the realization of the virtual in popular music
 Foreword   xix

is inextricably tied to the latter’s development as a technologically mediated form from

the 1950s onward. Indeed, recent research suggests that the everyday practices of music
audiences also tend to reflect a deeper engagement with and understanding of popu-
lar music as a mediated form. Thus, as Nowak and Bennett (2014) have discovered,
although aware of and familiar with digital retrieval and playback formats, audiences
tend to position the latter within a range of other technologies, including radio and
older analog sound carriers, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes. What has criti-
cally changed with the digital era, and again this is reflected significantly in some of
the chapters in this Handbook, is the level of interplay that is now possible between the
“real” and the “virtual,” to the extent that such a binary, if always problematic, would
now appear to have lost critical currency as a means of measuring value and “authentic-
ity” in music. Or, perhaps a better way of expressing this is to say that just as the myth
of acousticity, as Narváez (2001) terms it, has evaporated due to the broad acceptance
of acoustic music as a mediated form, reliant on the use of pick-ups, microphones, and
amplification, so accepting popular music performance overall as a blurring of real and
virtual qualities is now taken as a given.
Frith (1988) has noted that the logic of studio production has for a long time been
invested in the capturing of “ideal” rather than “real” musical performances, a quality
that was there from the beginning (see Beadle 1993) but more widely exploited with the
development of multitrack tape and something that has continued apace with digital
recording technology. Indeed, as Paul Draper observes in the authors’ blog that con-
cludes this Handbook, through digital technology this practice of weaving together
such ideal events in the recording has become ever more unified. At the same time,
what are considered to be the centrally defining tenets of music composition and the
“finished” text have also changed significantly. To some extent this is due to the broad-
ening influence of rap and dance music genres, where the notion of musical texts as
unfinished and therefore rife for appropriation and use in new assemblages of sound
has long been understood and creatively exploited (see Beadle 1993, Back 1996). Such
an approach to music making has slowly weaved a new presence into the popular music
soundscape. Much of the music that now permeates the urban soundscape, from the
background music heard in shops and cafes (Kassabian 2002) to contemporary street
music performances (Bennett and Rogers 2014), relies on digital tricks such as sam-
pling and looping to create rich textures of sound. Similarly, contemporary “electronic”
artists such as Fourtet and Boards of Canada have perfected an art begun with the early
experimental work of groups such as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, of blending
studio and live performances in a way that further contributes to how popular music is
now widely understood, by both musicians and audiences, as a form in which the real
and the virtual seamlessly combine.
The place of the virtual in the history of popular music is thus a long, complex and
ever-evolving story. The chapters presented in this Handbook collectively present a
timely intervention through the specific insights they offer as to the current state of
this evolutionary story and the historical circumstances that have assisted in the devel-
opment of popular music’s virtual qualities. Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran have
xx   Foreword

assembled here a series of highly incisive essays, with each featured essay contributing
important insights for those interested in the relationship between popular music and
virtuality. As such, the Handbook marks a very important point of departure in a field
of popular music studies where there is still much to consider, to explore, and to learn.
Andy Bennett

References
Back, Les. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives.
London: UCL Press.
Beadle, Jeremy J. 1993. Will Pop Eat Itself? Pop Music in the Sound Bite Era. London: Faber
and Faber.
Bennett, Andy, and Ian Rogers. 2014. “Street Music, Technology and the Urban Soundscape.”
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28(4):454–64.
Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool:  Popular Music in the Making.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Denisoff, R.  Serge, and William D.  Romanowski. 1991. Risky Business:  Rock in Film. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The Hidden Musicians:  Music-Making in an English Town.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frith, Simon. 1988. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Oxford: Polity Press.
Kaplan, E.  Ann. 1987. Rocking Around the Clock:  Music Television, Postmodernism and
Consumer Culture. London: Methuen.
Kassabian, Annahid. 2002. “Ubiquitous Listening.” In Popular Music Studies, ed. David
Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus, 131–142. London: Arnold.
Martin, George, and Jeremy Hornsby. 1979. All You Need Is Ears. London: Macmillan.
Narváez, Peter. 2001. “Unplugged: Blues Guitarists and the Myth of Authenticity.” In Guitar
Cultures, ed. A. Bennett and K. Dawe, 27–44. Oxford: Berg.
Nowak, Raphael, and Andy Bennett. 2014. “Analyzing Everyday Sound Environments: The
Space, Time and Corporality of Musical Listening.” Cultural Sociology: 1–17.
Rogers, Ian. 2013. “The Hobbyist Majority and the Mainstream Fringe:  The Pathways of
Independent Music-Making in Brisbane, Australia.” In Redefining Mainstream Popular
Music ed. S. Baker, A. Bennett, and J. Taylor, 162–174. London: Routledge.
 Acknowledgments

Our Handbook owes a great deal to many people, not least our authors, whose contri-
butions made it a truly collaborative venture. This is evidenced in our Authors’ Blog,
and we would like to thank Paul Carr for leading the discussions and the participants
for their lively debates on the nature of virtuality and its relationship to music. We also
thank colleagues for their informative feedback and our contributors for their patience
and speedy response to our comments and questions on their chapters. We also ben-
efited from the feedback given by peer reviewers on our initial proposal and chapters,
and from the professional advice and assistance given by Norman Hirschy, Lisbeth
Redfield, and Molly Davis at Oxford University Press. Their faith, guidance, and exper-
tise made a major contribution to the successful completion of the volume. Also, a
thank you goes to Thomas Finnegan the copyeditor, Eswari Maruthu and her col-
leagues at Newgen Knowledge Works, for their dedicated assistance in the final stages
of the Handbook. Finally, we wish to thank our friends and families for their support.
Our Handbook is the product of some two years’ work and we have both learned much
and enjoyed bringing this to fruition.
 Contributors

Michael Audette-Longo is an instructor in communication studies at Carleton

University, in Ottawa, Ontario. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Institute
for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University. His dis-
sertation focuses on Canadian indie music and public broadcasting. He has published
articles in Critical Arts and the Journal of African Cinemas.
Philip Auslander is a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication
of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He writes on performance, popular music,
media, and visual art. His publications include Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism
and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (1992), From Acting to
Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (1997), and Liveness: Performance
in a Mediatized Culture (1999), for which he received the prestigious Callaway Prize for
the Best Book in Theatre or Drama. Most recently published books are Performing
Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006) and a second, updated
and expanded edition of Liveness in 2008. Auslander is the founding editor of The Art
Section: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary (www.theartsection.com)
and a working film actor.
Andy Bennett is professor of cultural sociology and director of the Griffith Centre for
Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He has authored and
edited numerous books, among them Music, Style and Aging; Popular Music and Youth
Culture; Cultures of Popular Music; Remembering Woodstock; and Music Scenes (with
Richard A. Peterson). He is also a faculty fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at
Yale University.
Samantha Bennett is a sound recordist and academic from London. She is senior
lecturer in music at the School of Music, Australian National University, where she
convenes the undergraduate courses Music Recording and Production Techniques,
Music and Digital Media, and Popular Music: In Culture and in Context. She studied
for her AHRC-funded Ph.D. in popular music recording and production techniques at
the University of Surrey under Allan Moore and is completing her first book, Modern
Records, Maverick Methods: Technology and Process in Contemporary Record Production.
She is editor of the Journal on the Art of Record Production and an active member of the
American Musicological Society, the International Association for the Study of Popular
Music, and the Audio Engineering Society.
xxiv   Contributors

Danijela Bogdanovic has completed a fellowship within the University of Salford team
of VOME (Visual and Other Methods of Expression) project, examining online pri-
vacy, and funded by EPSRC, ESRC, and the Technology Strategy Board. Coming from
an interdisciplinary background (B.A. in English studies; M.A. in gender, society, and
culture; Ph.D. in sociology), Bogdanovic’s research interests include social media, pop-
ular music, gender, ethnography, and visual and mobile research methods. In 2009 she
was awarded a Ph.D. for her thesis Men Doing Bands: Making, Shaping and Performing
Masculinities Through Popular Music. In addition to pursuing research, she has been
employed as an associate lecturer at the Open University since 2002, teaching on a
range of arts and humanities modules. She has coauthored the third edition of Popular
Music and Society book with Brian Longhurst. She is currently lecturing on UG and PG
popular music programs at the University of Liverpool.
Thomas Brett is a New York–based independent scholar and musician whose research
interests include electronic music, technoculture, and creativity. He earned his Ph.D. in
ethnomusicology from New  York University, and his work has appeared in Popular
Music and Society and The Grove Dictionary of American Music. His percussion com-
positions have been recorded on Eroica Records, and he has released four collections of
electronic music, the most recent of which is music for singing bowls. Brett has played
percussion with the Lion King Broadway musical since 1997 and blogs about music,
sound, and culture at brettworks.com.
Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen holds a Ph.D.  from the Department of Musicology,
University of Oslo. Her Ph.D. project, “Music in Bits and Bits of Music: Signatures of
Digital Mediation in Popular Music Recordings,” presents new insights into the impact
of the digitization of technology on the aesthetics of popular music. She is, together
with Anne Danielsen, the author of Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on
Popular Music Sound, which will be published during fall 2015. She has also published
in the journals Popular Music and Organised Sound and written several book chapters
on popular music and music production. Currently she is a member of the editorial
board for Music Theory Online. She is also a former producer, composer, and performer
for the band Linen Cox.
Paul Carr is reader in popular music analysis at the University of South Wales’ ATRiuM
campus in Cardiff. Prior to moving into academia full-time he was an established musi-
cian, recording with artists such as the James Taylor Quartet (Get Organised 1989), the
Jazz Renegades (Freedom Samba 1990) and the legendary American Jazz saxophonist
Bob Berg (A Certain Kind of Freedom 1990). His research interests are varied, with sub-
ject areas ranging from the impact of electric guitarists on the jazz canon (2008), ped-
agogical frameworks for work-based learning (Journal of Applied Research in Higher
Education 2010), Welsh national identity in music (Popular Music History 2010), and
the Welsh music industry (Higher Education Academy 2012). Much of his recent work
has focused on Frank Zappa, with publications ranging from Zappa’s interface with
musical theatre (Studies in Musical Theatre 2007), musical gesture (Popular Music
 Contributors   xxv

Online 2008), tribute artists (Contemporary Theatre Review 2011), and sex (Beitraege
zur Popularmusikforschung 2010). His most recent publication is an edited collection,
Frank Zappa and the And (2013). He also occasionally works as a forensic musicologist
for major record companies and is currently working on a monograph on Sting (2015).
Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo (Ph.D., University of Barcelona, Spain) is an aca-
demic with a multidisciplinary profile in social sciences and an artistic background
in music. He is currently undertaking a two-year postdoctorate at the University of
Guadalajara (Mexico), funded by the Mexican government. He has been a lecturer and
researcher at several universities in Mexico, Spain, and the UK. He has taught courses,
done research, given consultancy, and published work on various topics, ranging from
cultural management, cultural policy, and cultural law to social psychology, sexuality,
and education. He has a special interest in the application of new technologies, such as
virtual worlds. He is founder and director of the nonprofit cultural organization Ópera
Joven AC, with which he is developing various cultural projects inside and outside the
virtual worlds.
Thomas Conner has been an award-winning music journalist, critic, and editor for
more than twenty years. Formerly the pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times,
he served a professional fellowship with the National Arts Journalism Program at
Columbia University, contributed research to the Woody Guthrie Archives, and coau-
thored a record guide, Forever Lounge. He is currently a Ph.D. student in communica-
tion and science studies at the University of California–San Diego. His scholarly work
has examined digitality and virtuality, the eversion of cyberspace, and human-computer
interaction within the emerging models of simulated holographic performance (the
Tupac “hologram,” Vocaloid idol singers, etc.), as well as music criticism in media stud-
ies, uses and gratifications of background music, and the history of protest songs.
Nicholas Cook is 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge. Former
director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music
(CHARM), his books include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination,
and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition
(1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music:  A  Very Short Introduction
(1998), which has appeared in fifteen languages. The Schenker Project: Culture, Race,
and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna won the SMT’s 2010 Wallace Berry Award.
Recent publications include a collection of essays coedited with the dramaturge Richard
Pettengill, which brings together work in musicology and in interdisciplinary perfor-
mance studies; and a monograph entitled Beyond the Score:  Music as Performance,
which explores the implications of a performance-based musicology. His current proj-
ect, for which he was awarded a British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship, is
entitled “Music Encounters: Studies in Relational Musicology” and focuses on social
and intercultural dimensions of music. Former editor of Journal of the Royal Musical
Association and recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago,
Cook is a fellow of the British Academy and of Academia Europaea.
xxvi   Contributors

Francesco D’Amato is a sociologist and research professor in cultural and communi-

cative processes at the University of Rome’s La Sapienza. He is the conceiver and co-
head of the master course in Management, Marketing e Comunicazione della Musica.
D’Amato is the president of the Italian branch of IASPM (International Association for
the Study of Popular Music) and member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian
Crowdfunding Network. He writes about crowdfunding and music industry topics
in his blog Nuova Industria Musicale e Dintorni. His teaching and research interests
are mainly focused on cultural industries and music studies. His publications include
Musica e Industria (Carocci 2010); “Utenti, azionisti, mecenati. Analisi della partecipazi-
one alla produzione culturale attraverso il crowdfunding” (in Studi Culturali, il Mulino,
2011); and Investors and Patrons, Gatekeepers and Social Capital: Representations and
Experiences of Fans Participation in Fan Funding (in Ashgate Research Companion to
Fan Cultures, 2013).
Mike Dines , originally from a working-class, market-trading, punk rock background,
joined the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education in the early 1990s, studying music
and related arts. Although a performer throughout his degree (he is a classical pianist),
he decided that the road of musicology was for him and so embarked on a master’s
degree at the University of Sussex. Study at this level allowed the freedom to explore
popular musicology and, in particular, the anarcho-punk scene of the 1980s, a sub-
ject that has to date been a common thread throughout his academic career. Leaving
the University of Sussex, he received funding from the Economic and Social Research
Council to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Salford, continuing his research into
anarcho-punk. In particular his thesis raised questions over the role/position of the
musical object within the “scene,” focusing on how this later manifestation of punk
subsequently recontextualized the political/subversive characteristics of anarchism
from punk’s first wave in the late 1970s. He is cofounder of the Punk Scholars Network,
an international collection of scholars involved in the research of punk, and has a num-
ber of co-edited volumes in the pipeline: one on the anarcho-punk scene of the 1980s,
one on twenty-first-century global punk, and a third exploring the links between punk
and pedagogy. He also has a particular interest in Krishnacore, presenting his ideas at
numerous conferences.
Paul Draper holds a doctorate in education and is a professor of music technology at
the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, where he has held the university
chair in digital arts and served as Conservatorium research dean. With a twenty-five-
year track record as a professional musician and record producer, he designed and real-
ized the Conservatorium’s recording studios, computer laboratories, and networked
audiovisual environments. He has developed and led undergraduate and postgraduate
degree programs and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards in these areas.
Draper is a jazz musician, composer, and record producer who publishes widely on
practice-based research, web 2.0 culture, and record production. His current academic
responsibilities include convening the doctor of musical arts higher degree research
program.
 Contributors   xxvii

Charles Fairchild is an associate professor of popular music at the University of Sydney,

Australia. He is the author of DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (2014); Music, Radio
and the Public Sphere (2012); and Pop Idols and Pirates (2008).
Justin Gagen is a practicing musician and performer, and cofounder of Redzone. He
composes and performs on multiple instruments and is the producer and engineer for
the band. He developed the MIDI-control system utilized by Redzone in Second Life.
Justin holds a B.Sc. in computing from London South Bank University and an M.Sc.
in digital anthropology from University College London. He is currently the recipi-
ent of the AHRC-funded Ph.D. studentship in music and social media at Goldsmiths,
University of London, part of the Transforming Musicology project. He can be found
at www.virtualperformance.co.uk and www.redzone.co.uk.
Benjamin Halligan is the director of postgraduate research studies for the College
of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Salford. His publications include Michael
Reeves (2003); Mark E.  Smith and The Fall:  Art, Music and Politics (2010, co-edited
with Michael Goddard); Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise
(2012, co-edited with Michael Goddard and Paul Hegarty); Resonances:  Noise and
Contemporary Music (2013, co-edited with Michael Goddard and Nicola Spelman); and
The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (2013, co-edited with Robert Edgar
and Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs). The 1968 Cinema: Radicalism and Revolution in Western
European Film is forthcoming.
Trevor S.  Harvey is a lecturer in ethnomusicology/musicology at the University of
Iowa. His research investigates participatory musical cultures and community con-
struction through collaborative, recreational musical practices, particularly within
digitally mediated social environments. He recently published “Virtual Worlds:  An
Ethnomusicological Perspective” in the Oxford Handbook of Virtuality (2014) and is
working on a book project provisionally titled Virtual Garage Bands, an ethnographic
account of an Internet-based global community of independent, recreational musi-
cians. He currently serves as the podcast editor for the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Alon Ilsar is a composer, producer, sound and instrument designer, and percussion-
ist based in Sydney. He was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts grant to fund
the Colors Interactive Comeback Show, which has been performed at the Adelaide
Fringe Festival, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and the Sydney Comedy
Festival.
Ian Inglis is a visiting fellow in the School of Arts, Design and Social Sciences at the
University of Northumbria. He has written extensively on the performance, history
and representation of popular music. His recent books include Popular Music And
Television In Britain (2010) and The Beatles In Hamburg (2012).
Louise H.  Jackson joined Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in 2012
as head of learning enhancement. Previously she worked as a senior lecturer and aca-
demic development coordinator, teaching across music and musical theatre programs.
xxviii   Contributors

She is researching neoliberal politics, the fetishization of HE, and the impact of this
agenda on arts education. In 2013 she was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by
the Higher Education Academy, the most prestigious award for teaching excellence
in the UK. Her areas of research and teaching include gender theory and embedding
equality and diversity in curriculum; interdisciplinary collaboration in composition
teaching with a specialization in composition for contemporary dance; alternative
pedagogies in teaching histories of music; and widening participation and employer
engagement activities.
Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso was born in Tampere, Finland, in 1979. He graduated with an
M.A. (ethnomusicology) from the Department of Music Anthropology, the University
of Tampere, in 2005. After six years of various music-related jobs, Kaitajärvi-Tiekso
begun his postgraduate studies in the same university in the newly formed School of
Social Sciences and Humanities under the supervision of Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo.
He was accepted in the Finnish doctoral program in music research in 2012, and had
been conducting his Ph.D. project “Dynamics of Record Production in Finland in the
21st Century.” In this study in progress, Kaitajärvi-Tiekso examines the ideological
positions of Finnish micro labels and shifting power relations of Finnish record pro-
ducers in the middle of major structural changes in the digitalizing music industries.
Kaitajärvi-Tiekso has written about the subject for Finnish scientific music journals,
such as Etnomusikologian vuosikirja (The Yearbook of Ethnomusicology) and has pre-
sented his findings in English at many international conferences. He is also currently
a treasurer and secretary of the Nordic branch of the International Association of the
Study of Popular Music.
Christian Lloyd is the academic director at the Bader International Study Centre, UK
(Queen’s University, Canada), where he teaches cultural studies and cultural theory. He
is currently completing a book chapter, “The Beatles, ‘unfinalisability’, and Bakhtin.”
He is also coauthoring a book on Jimi Hendrix’s London life (with Sheila Whiteley) to
be published in 2016.
Frank Millward is an accomplished composer, multimedia artist, teacher, and aca-
demic. He makes visual art and connects it with sound. His research focuses on how
technology has transformed possibilities for interactive performance, and how an
interdisciplinary approach leads to new knowledge and innovation. From the moment
technology began transforming the music industry with file sharing, online user expe-
rience, and computer-generated composition, the lines blurred between the techni-
cal and the artistic. This became the context for his experiments in “improvising with
technology.” A theme through many of his recent projects has been the expression of
the attributes of sound represented as moving image, exploring how moving image
can inform our perception of sound. As professor of music in the School of Fine Art at
Kingston University in London, he created interactive works for online platforms and
site-specific audiovisual projections. He is currently the professor of music and the head
of the School of Creative Arts in Newcastle, Australia, where he finds opportunities to
 Contributors   xxix

foster interdisciplinary engagement using, adapting, and developing technologies for

interactive performance. His work seeks to define the complex nature of interactive
engagement and its place in the global context of art making.
Jeremy Wade Morris is an assistant professor of media and cultural studies in the
Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His
research interests include the state of the popular music industries, the digitization of
cultural goods and commodities, and the history of the software commodity. His work
has appeared in New Media and Society, Popular Music and Society, Critical Studies in
Media and Communication, and First Monday, and in collected editions on music and
technology. He also spent six years as a writer and podcaster at Midnight Poutine, a
local website devoted to music, arts, culture, and food in Montreal, Canada.
Benjamin O’Brien composes, researches, and performs acoustic and electro-acoustic
music that focuses on issues of translation and machine listening. He holds a Ph.D.
in music composition from the University of Florida. He also holds an M.A. in music
composition from Mills College and a B.A. in mathematics from the University of
Virginia. He has studied computer music, improvisation, and theory with David
Bernstein, Ted Coffey, Fred Frith, Paul Koonce, Roscoe Mitchell, and Paul Richards.
His compositions have been performed at international conferences and festivals that
include the International Computer Music Conference, Electroacoustic Music Studies
Conference, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, and SuperCollider
Symposium. He received the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for Outstanding Musical
Composition (Mills College) and is an International Electroacoustic Music Young
Composers Awards Finalist (Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology).
His work is published by Oxford University Press, Society of Electro-Acoustic Music
in the United States, Canadian Electroacoustic Community, and Taukay Edizioni
Musicali.
Rowan Oliver is lecturer in popular music at the University of Hull. His musicolog-
ical research deals with groove, sampling, breakbeats, and the musician’s relation-
ship with time and sound, focusing particularly on Black Atlantic popular music
styles. Current publications include “Groove as Familiarity with Time,” in Music and
Familiarity, edited by E. King and H. Daynes (2013) and “Breakbeat Syncretism: The
Drum Sample in African American Popular Music,” in African American Culture and
Society Post Rodney King: Provocations and Protests, Progression and “Post-Racialism,”
edited by J. Metcalfe and C. Spaulding (2015). He is an associate member of the Center
for Black Music Research at Columbia College, Chicago, and is the reviews editor for
the Journal of Music, Technology and Education. As a professional musician, he has
worked internationally with a number of artists, including seven years as the drum-
mer with Goldfrapp; and he continues to record, perform, produce, and remix in a
range of genres alongside his academic career. Critics described his recent remix of
“Fascination” by Gramme (Tummy Touch Records) as “rude, low down, bassy good-
ness,” which is very nice but doesn’t map easily onto REF criteria. In 2007 his original
xxx   Contributors

score for “Mouth to Mouth” won Best Film Music prize at the Festival International du
Premier Film d’Annonay.
Cora S. Palfy is a doctoral researcher at Northwestern University. Her research has cov-
ered a range of issues, including musical narrative, musical agency, virtuality, embodi-
ment, and the intersection between psychology and music theory. Her dissertation
deals with musical agency as a social process, and how a listener’s body is affected by
agential emergence.
David Pattie is a professor at the University of Chester. He has published extensively
on a range of subjects (Samuel Beckett, contemporary British theatre, performance
and politics, popular culture, Scottish theatre and culture, popular music). He is the
author of Rock Music in Performance (2007) and co-editor (with Sean Albiez) of
Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop (2012). He is currently completing a co-edited volume (also
with Sean Albiez) on Brian Eno.
Shara Rambarran is an assistant professor of music and cultural studies at the Bader
International Study Centre, Queen’s University, Canada. She received her Ph.D. in
Music and Cultural Studies at the University of Salford. She is an active researcher
and regularly presents her work at conferences. Her research interests include popular
musicology, postproduction, digital media, remixology, music industry, events man-
agement, education, and law (Intellectual Property Rights). She is an editor on the
Journal on the Art of Record Production and has written for Popular Music, Popular
Musicology, Popular Music and Society, and PopMatters.
Shzr Ee Tan is a senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, currently
researching musical activities on new media platforms in the Sinophone world. Her
research touches on phenomena ranging from viral videos to politico-musical activ-
ism on the Internet. Other interests include music and gender, music and politics,
urban ethnomusicology, and connections between music and food cultures. She has
published on music, media, and politics in Singapore and in the Chinese diaspora, as
well as on aboriginal song in Taiwan. Her publications include Amis Aboriginal Song as
an Ecosystem, plus chapters and articles in books and scholarly journals among which
are Ethnomusicology Forum and Journal of American Folklore. Recently, she contrib-
uted a chapter to and co-edited Gender in Chinese Music (with Rachel A. Harris and
Rowan Pease). Tan is also an active musician with a background in classical piano, jazz,
Chinese instrumental music, Korean percussion, and Okinawan folksong. She also has
experience as a print journalist in Asia, having worked for a period of time as an arts
correspondent for the Straits Times in Singapore, and thereafter for international maga-
zines and newspapers on a freelance basis.
Mark Thorley’s research centers on the impact of technology on the creative indus-
tries and is based on his background as a classically trained musician, technologist,
and entrepreneur. As an academic, he developed the Music and Creative Technologies
Programme at Coventry University after playing a pivotal role in growing the
 Contributors   xxxi

Entertainment Technology Program at Staffordshire University. He is a senior fellow

of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and has been principal investigator on proj-
ects funded by the HEA and SIGMA. His professional background is in the music and
media industries, where roles included recording studio manager, production company
and studio owner, music producer, multimedia producer, and technical consultant. He
has worked with a wide range of clients, among them major record labels, indepen-
dent record labels, major television and radio broadcasters, advertising agencies, and
production companies. He has been an elected director of the Music Producers’ Guild,
presently sits on the education committee of JAMES, and serves as an editor for the
Journal on the Art of Record Production.
David Tough is a Dove Award–nominated Nashville-based producer, engineer, song-
writer and associate professor of audio engineering at Belmont University. He has
more than fifty film and television placements with his music for songs he has writ-
ten and produced. He won the John Lennon Song Contest Grand Prize in both 2013
and 2009 for his songwriting efforts. He is a voting Grammy member. He has pro-
duced and engineered demos and master recordings for hundreds of artists worldwide
over the Internet from his website www.davetough.com. He has worked and learned
under notable engineering names such as Bruce Swedien, Alan Sides, and Neil Citron.
Tough has also worked on the business side of the music industry for companies such
as Warner Chappell Music, BMG Music Publishing, and Capitol/EMI. He has his doc-
torate in education from Tennessee State, an MBA from Pepperdine University, and a
B.A. in Music (jazz drums) from the University of North Texas.
Adam Trainer obtained his Ph.D. from Murdoch University in 2006. He has taught
media and communications, cultural studies, film studies, and popular music stud-
ies at Murdoch University, Curtin University, and Edith Cowan University. He cur-
rently teaches in popular music studies at Curtin University. He has published for
Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, Australian Screen Education, and Senses of Cinema,
and in edited collections on film, popular music, new media, and cultural studies. He
has also worked in community broadcasting, and as a music journalist.
Sheila Whiteley is professor emeritus (University of Salford, UK) and is a research fellow at
the Bader International Study Centre, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. She is author
of The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counterculture (1992), Women and Popular
Music: Popular Music and Gender (2000), and Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age
and Identity (2005); editor of Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (1996); and
co-editor of Queering the Popular Pitch (2006) with Jennifer Rycenga, and Countercultures
and Popular Music (2014) with Jedediah Sklower. She has contributed to Britpop and the
English Music Tradition (2010), Redefining the Mainstream (2013), Resonances: Noise and
Contemporary Music (2013), and The Sage Handbook of Popular Music (2014).
Justin A. Williams is lecturer in music at the University of Bristol. He is the author
of Rhymin and Stealin: Musical Borrowing in Hip-hop (2013). He received his B.A. in
xxxii   Contributors

music from Stanford University, master’s in music from King’s College London, and
a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham. Research interests include popular music
studies (especially hip-hop), musical borrowing, film music, jazz, digital patronage,
music and geography, mobility and sound studies, and the analysis of record produc-
tion. He is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to Hip-hop, and his next project
is co-editing the Cambridge Companion to the Singer-songwriter.
Ross Wilson currently works as a music teacher for Cambridgeshire County Council
with kids aged five to eighteen after graduating from Anglia Ruskin University with
a first in a B.A. Honours popular music in 2013. He is also a freelance musician and
scholar and engages with most areas of the music industry, including events man-
agement for local gigs and club nights. He plays guitar and piano to a diploma level
and composes for a variety of ensembles and styles including rock/metal and sym-
phonic film soundtracks. His third album, Saga of the Immortals, was released in 2014.
Currently he is working alongside Raspberry Pi and Cambridgeshire University to
teach the software Sonic Pi in secondary schools to introduce music coding to kids.
Beyond this, his future work includes a study of heavy metal and genre and cultural
influences, which will make up the thesis for his Ph.D.
Rafal Zaborowski studied law at the University of Szczecin, Poland, completed a B.A. in
sociology at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, in Beppu, Japan, and an M.A.  in
media and cultural studies at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, where he finished his
dissertation on the relationship between the content of Japanese hit songs and the val-
ues of Japanese youth. The ethnographic study was an attempt to situate the place of
hit songs’ lyrical content in the everyday lives and value systems of Japanese youth.
Currently he is a Ph.D. researcher in the Department of Media and Communications
at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and he is finishing his thesis
on Japanese music audiences. The thesis is an empirical analysis of audience engage-
ments with music in a generational context, and an attempt to theoretically develop
Japanese cultural concepts for the general study of audiences. He teaches media study
skills as well as social sciences at the LSE, and his main research and journalistic inter-
ests include music, audiences, contemporary East Asia, and entertainment media.
 About the Companion Website

www.oup.com/us/ohmv

Oxford has created a website to accompany the Oxford Handbook of Music and
Virtuality. Material that cannot be made available in a book, namely media and audio
examples, is provided here.
T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

M U SIC A N D
V I RT UA L I T Y
 I n t rodu ction

Sheila Whiteley

What happens when you open the Pandora’s box of music and virtuality? What do
you find? For those readers anticipating easy answers to those vexing questions, what
is virtual, or even more problematically, what is virtual music, there are both challenges
to confront and insights to be gained. As Bennett writes, “the cultural fabric of every-
day life is diversifying in ever more rapid cycles of change” (2014, 23), and as such it is
accepted that it is never possible to be of-the-moment in our discussion. Nevertheless, as
editors, we can promise our readers that the different “takes” by cutting-edge research-
ers on music and virtuality offer new and original insights. Not least, their chapters
will stimulate further debate and discussion on the expanding domain of music, and
how digital technologies have had an impact on our understanding of such concepts as
musicianship, creativity, the role of the composer, the performer, the producer, the fan,
and their sociocultural connections and virtual alliance.
As a concept, “virtuality” can initially be understood in relation to its very oppo-
site: the, as it were, un-virtual (i.e., the real, the actual). It was the perceived movement
away from such ontological and material certainties of the modern era that gave rise to
a postmodern sensibility, in which the real is understood to be increasingly replaced
by a simulation of the real, and the actual by a stand-in of seemingly questionable
worth: the “virtual.” The postmodern critique of modernism looked to modernism’s
underlying assumptions as fantastical, diagnosing a “faith in fakes,” and with the social
and political tensions of modernism’s era as arising from the fictional nature of the
grand historical narratives that seemed to be in operation. Critical theorists associated
with postmodernism have invariably set about deconstructing the coordinates of that
narrative, whether found in the Cold War, in Disneyland, in discourses of advertising,
or in finance. The virtual, then, can be understood as a kind of stasis: a holding together
of two sets of heavily qualified ideas, and with neither extreme (“the real,” the “non-
real”) understood as entirely tenable.1
The pivotal question, then is not “what is real/actual” and “what is virtual,” but
rather the extent to which the experience or degree of mediation is virtual. Elvis
Presley, John Lennon, 2Pac (Tupac Shakur), and more recently Michael Jackson have
2   Sheila Whiteley

been resurrected as virtual performance avatars, so highlighting the significance and

impact of a normalizing illusion. This is also evidenced in the embodied software
agent Hatsune Miku (the realization of William Gibson’s Rei Toei character in his
1996 novel Idoru). As a dynamic product of virtual collaboration by fans “there is
no pretense, no fabrication. Hatsune Miku is real, because the audiences expect her
to be” (Zaborowski, Chapter 7). It would appear, then, that the relationship between
narrativity, musical agency, and artistic identity lies in the fan’s ability to recognize
a clearly projected persona; as such, issues surrounding “liveness” reemerge. The
extent to which music that is not being made “in-world” but rather involves the
streaming of live or prerecorded music, coupled to the use of looped performance
animations, suggests more an illusion of liveness within the context of virtual reality.
Similarly, the interweaving of implied human bodies and projected cyborg personae
in Daft Punk subverts the effects of authorial mediation and identity. This, in turn,
raises the question of whether Internet-mediated and face-to-face practices may
give rise to an expanded conception of what it means to be a performing musician.
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra, for example, created a seemingly democratic
and utopian musical playing field, which was endorsed by classical music personali-
ties, including Wang Yuja and Lang Lang. Nevertheless, it is also possible, as Szhr
Ee Tan observes, that “Google was running a branding agenda that harnessed the
social mobility of classical performers,” thus upgrading YouTube’s “profile within the
information technology market as a serious portal and cultural broker” (Chapter 18),
making them “prestigious” as well as “universal” (ibid.).
Though it is accepted that all music has an element of virtuality—be it within the text/
recording or in the persona of the artist—it is also recognized that some artists specifi-
cally incorporate techniques that encourage listeners to understand and engage with
their music in a virtual space, a prime example being Frank Zappa (Carr, Chapter 5).
Meanwhile, interactive mixing and online communities allow fans to create remixes
and upload them to dedicated websites (or digital platforms) for critical appraisal and
possibly fan funding. As Dave Tough notes, “the growth of the speed of the Internet
and personal computing power continues to point toward more unique ways artists are
collaborating with each other anonymously and by asynchronous means” (Chapter 17).
It is also apparent that although the success of Gorillaz led to the coining of the term
virtual band, the virtual is not de facto equivalent to the digital, and accordingly, pre-
digital animated films, such as MGM’s Johann Mouse (1953), depend heavily on the idea
that Tom is actually playing the piano and that he and Johann are both hearing and
responding to the music. Another early example occurs in Ross Bagdasarian’s acceler-
ated recordings of his own voice to achieve the “chipmunk” voice and virtual band in
the 1959 cartoon Alvin and the Chipmunks. There is, then, a consensus that “terms such
as virtual world, virtual environment, virtual character, and virtual reality and their
application and usage may well be ingrained in the modern digital consciousness but
thinking about virtuality has a history almost as long as that of Western civilization
itself. Digital technology simply provides new ways to conceptualize, to use, and to
experience that virtuality” (Grimshaw, 2013, intro., 3).
 Introduction   3

These are but some of the issues raised in our handbook, Music and Virtuality, and
it is apparent that the subject matter is not only complex but diffuse and constantly
evolving. What is and what is not virtual, and how virtuality relates to music, remains
a developing field of inquiry, and even though music is at the heart of our investi-
gative chapters, it is nevertheless an interdisciplinary collection, drawing on critical
and popular musicology, ethnomusicology, studio production, cultural studies, media
studies, performance, film, sociology, geography, gender, philosophy, and information
technology. As will be revealed in our thirty-one chapters, in the contemporary world
the opportunities and problems associated with the virtual space depend on how it is
territorialized or colonized, and differences in approach—including disciplinary per-
spective, theoretical position, research methodology, and shifts in tone—reflect both
the backgrounds of our authors and their understanding of virtuality in relation to
music-making.

Structure and Contents

As we are all too aware, providing concrete definitions of the virtual, virtual music, and
virtual space is fraught with problems and will surely continue to be so as technolo-
gies evolve and multiply. As an elastic concept that changes throughout the ages and
is treated differently across disciplines, new configurations emerge, and how virtuality
relates to music remains a developing field. Not least, questions surrounding the virtual
and its relationship to the unvirtual (i.e., the real, the actual) remain an ongoing and
tantalizing issue for debate, and whereas the majority of our authors equate the virtual
to the digital (particularly the networked digital) the multidisciplinarity of the chapters
and the breadth of theoretical approaches present diffuse trajectories. Given this diver-
sity, the contents of Music and Virtuality may be thought of as a postdisciplinary field
in its breadth of study, and as such we have prepared a glossary of technical terms in use
at the time of publication. This is not intended to close off or pin down current think-
ing. Rather, its aim is to clarify how our authors have defined the terms arising from
their investigations into music and virtuality, with the aim of understanding better the
potential scope of cultural and historical enquiry.
The seven parts of the Handbook are allocated to a number of themes, but this is
not to imply that they are necessarily separate or discrete areas of research into music
and virtuality. Rather, the issues raised occupy overlapping concerns as evidenced by
the thinking behind the individual chapters, and the global debates and collaborative
discussions that took place virtually in our Authors Blog and that, apart from a very
few minor syntactical and spelling edits, are reported verbatim. Our overall approach
is, then, explorative:  offering original insights and demonstrating particular ways of
thinking about music and its relationship to the virtual. As such, the Handbook brings
together leading scholars in the field, recent doctoral research of a new generation, and
established academics with a track record of writing about music or popular music.
4   Sheila Whiteley

We have also prioritized an international/transnational perspective, thus offering a rich

and varied insight into this challenging area of research.
Familiarity with the field of research pursued by contributors, together with insights
offered by our peer reviewers (in response to our original proposal, and ongoing) influ-
enced the structure of the Handbook, which is given over to seven parts, each of which
is prefaced by an Introduction. This aims to frame the discourse and open space for
each author to occupy in the ensuing part. The appropriate part Introduction was ini-
tially circulated to contributors to ensure that the issues raised are both relevant and
insightful: as one of our authors observed, “contributors sometimes don’t see the full
implications of their own work of course: I learnt a bit more about mine from your
intro!” More specifically, the Introductions offer the reader our thoughts on how there
is an alignment in argument between the chapters, as well as highlighting key points,
and making thematic connections to other parts of the Handbook. As one peer reviewer
observed, “The introductions from one section to the next were swift and could serve
either as a table-setting for the full section or an easy index for readers to pick their way
through the book, finding a chapter here and another there that pique their interest.”
We open with five chapters that explore twentieth-century pre-digital virtuality, a
timely reminder of “what it means ‘to listen’ in our age of virtual music … when the
residual material forms of recorded music are yet to recede fully, while the emergent
virtual is still to take up its full remit” (Lloyd, Chapter 1). “ ‘Seventeenth Heaven’: Virtual
Listening and Its Discontents” provides an initial insight into how the fictional enters
into the virtual and how this then sediments into the real. Anthony Burgess offered no
details about the band “The Heaven Seventeen” in his iconic novel A Clockwork Orange
(1962), yet generations of musicians, including Sheffield synth band Heaven 17, have
performed and recorded the fictional band’s music. Lloyd also discusses the Beatles’
“Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” and its 2004 mutation by Brian Burton,
aka Danger Mouse, to provide further evidence that although “the narrative of the
Beatles is one of the most familiar in popular music’s history” (Auslander and Inglis,
Chapter 2), there are still new avenues to explore. One such is that offered by Auslander
and Inglis in their chapter, “ ‘Nothing Is Real’: The Beatles as Virtual Performers.” As
they reveal, “Even during their active career, audience’s perceptions of the Beatles’ mov-
ies, animated cartoons, and promotional films were guided by their knowledge of the
group as live performers” (ibid.), thus highlighting how the virtual and the real conflate
in our imagination and how we learn to accommodate their coexistence.
The question of what makes a musical performance virtual is a central issue in Part
One of our handbook, reminding the reader that “we should remain mindful to look at
non-digital musical examples to test out theoretical assumptions, rather than reducing
the focus to virtuality thought of as a stable concept and delivered via current technol-
ogy, where the medium can be mistaken for the effect” (Shields 2003, 5). Whiteley’s
discussion of MGM’s animated cartoon Johann Mouse provides one such example,
whereby the music, the characterization, and the story line structure the listening/
viewing experience and, together with the animated sequences, create an imaginary/
virtual world. Oliver’s chapter on sampling as virtual collaboration then focuses the
 Introduction   5

reader’s attention on hip hop’s sampled drum loops, proposing that “when a groove is
sampled, its gaps act as virtual nodes via which collaboration can occur across time”
(Chapter 4). His premise of “creative collaboration” is developed in his exploration of
hip-hop tracks that sample the drum beat from the introduction to the Honeydrippers’
“Impeach the President.” It is a process that is in stark contrast to Frank Zappa’s almost
neurotic control over his entire catalogue, which he interpreted as “a single entity,”
“a unified whole,” “one that was determined by him and open to change” (Carr,
Chapter 5). As Carr points out, his concept of a “virtual frame” allow the “merging [of]
time, space, and place” across and within his compositions, “to philosophically position
his creative output in a virtual, often teleological dimension” (ibid.). It also provided a
rationale for his regular reuse of existing material and rearrangements of compositions,
a Virtual Liveness (Sanden, 2012) whereby “the limits of human performance are clearly
surpassed” by mediation (ibid., 140).
Auslander and Inglis’s observation of how the virtual and the real conflate in our
imagination, whose co-existence we learn to accommodate (Chapter 2) is also relevant
to Part Two: Vocaloids, Holograms and Virtual Pop Stars, this time highlighting the
importance of illusion. As Jackson and Dines reveal in the opening chapter of the sec-
ond part, the Japanese phenomena of vocaloid culture can be interpreted as an organic
progression of the Japanese artistic legacy of Bunraku (shadow puppet theater). As
their research suggests, the relationship between the illusory and the real, the theat-
rical and the live, is also present in the technological ingenuity of vocaloids, though
they provide a more complex set of cultural mores and values. As they conclude, “it is
the shared notion [of illusion] that culturally locates Bunraku puppets as a precursor
to the vocaloid hologram Hatsune Miku” (Chapter 6). She is real “because the audi-
ences expect her to be, on the basis of a pop-cultural history of machine-enhanced
singers” (Zaborowski, Chapter 7). Her power is to “bring the digital out of cyberspace,
actualizing it within the physical world” (Conner, Chapter 8). It is an observation that
could also apply to Damon Albarn, when he performed live against films and videos
of the band in the live concert “Phase Three.” As Rambarran observes, “by ‘undisguis-
ing’ himself … his gesture may well herald the end of the virtual pop group Gorillaz”
(Chapter 9), revealing his controlling presence as the “real” member of an otherwise
hyperreal group.
The interaction between performer and audience continues into Part Three, which
explores the 3D Internet-based virtual world of Second Life. It offers readers an initial
insight into digital virtuality, a term that that gestures to sites of potentiality (Massumi
2002) and liminal experiences that are “real but not concrete” (Shields 2003), while pro-
viding access to a simulation of physical reality effected through technological means.
Second Life was launched in 2003 and offered musicians a new and creative approach
to performance involving live and pre-recorded music, animation, and audience social-
ization whereby participants interact with each other via avatars. Its virtual world pro-
vides a further insight into what we understand by music and virtual liveness: “music
can be live in a virtual sense even when the conditions for its liveness … do not actu-
ally exist. Virtual liveness, then, depends on the perception of a liveness that is largely
6   Sheila Whiteley

created through mediatization” (Sanden 2013, 39, cited in Gagen and Cook, Chapter 11).
For the musician, the issue of live and liveness revolves around performance: How dif-
ferent is it to perform live in a virtual world, and how does this have an impact on
the interaction between performer and audience? Our three chapters bring different
insights into this issue.
Trevor S. Harvey’s personal exploration of Second Life reflects his experience as an ava-
tar, teasing out the implications of what it means to be “Avatar Rockstars: Constructing
Musical Personae in Virtual Worlds,” while Gagen and Cook’s chapter, “Performing
Live in Second Life,” is based on a case study of the virtual band Redzone, of which
Gagen is a co-founder. Questions are raised as to what “liveness” might mean in a vir-
tual world when virtually all the music is made in the real world, and identifying both
the constraints and pleasures to be gained from performing in Second Life (SL). One of
the central concerns to emerge here is the role of technology itself and how, for exam-
ple, lag affects both performance and reception. Chapter 12, “Live Opera,” is very dif-
ferent in comparison to the previous two chapters, and as our peer reviewer observed,
“at times it comes across as a manual for aspiring SL performers and cultural manag-
ers.” As Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo discovered, producing live classical music in a
global virtual world presents both challenges and opportunities, not least in the inter-
action between performer and audiences. His experience of becoming a virtual, rather
than real-life, opera star offers readers detailed insights into the problems inherent in
such a transition, while his perspective as both a performer and a cultural manager
raises questions as to what is real and what is virtual in his performance.
The issue of control also emerges in Part Four:  Authorship, Creativity, and
Musicianship, which explores what happens to musicians’ creative practices when they
interact and how this influences more traditional understandings of authorship. The
possibility that “a composer may be, in fact, one who intentionally relinquishes con-
trol in a world where technologies offer audiences to be collaborators” (Draper and
Millward, Chapter  14) is intriguing. As Jordà observes, the Internet has encouraged
these collaborative techniques because it not only favors “the omnidirectional distribu-
tion of information, but also promotes dialogue among its users” by enabling “both col-
lective creation and the production of open and continuously evolving works” (1999, 5).
This observation resonates with Ilsar and Fairchild’s investigative Chapter 13, “We Are,
The Colors.” As they reveal, the Colors was an experimental collaborative music project
that challenged notions of ownership and power over the creative process by its interac-
tion with fans, who framed their collective collaboration within a fictional storytelling
narrative. The Colors website was conceived and realized primarily by Alon Ilsar as an
online hub, which “encouraged participants to engage with diversely alternative notions
of ego, intellectual property, capitalism, pop stardom, and recorded music while high-
lighting creative collaboration, process over product, slowing down of consumption,
temporary art, and the beauty inherent in both intentional and nonintentional sounds.
It was a deliberately and unreasonably idealistic endeavor, just like the musicians whose
lives, careers, and values it pretended to chronicle” (Chapter 13). Draper and Millward
are also concerned with narrative as a generative process, this time investigating
 Introduction   7

distance and asynchronous collaboration through their own practice-based work.

“Music in Perpetual Beta:  Composition, Remediation, and ‘Closure’ ” draws on “the
phase space of improvisation” (Borgo 2007, 69) and explores a number of the authors’
file exchange experiments “as a multidimensional map or geometry of possibilities”
(Draper and Millward, Chapter 14; these are available on the companion website). By
deliberately positioning physical separation (with Millward in London and Draper in
Australia) and time displacement between them, they explore the psychological chal-
lenges that potentially affect their performance roles, proactivity, and the music itself.
What interested our peer reviewer was how the reported struggles with the technologi-
cal are, in effect, moments of collaboration with technology: as composers they were
learning to talk with/to the technology as much as they were learning to talk with/to
each other via technology. What is evident from their research is that the studio tech-
nologies, instruments, or other so-called struggles had no bearing on their particular
research design. What changed, as the project drew to its close, was their understand-
ing of contemporary asynchronicity as an extension of musical practice.
What is becoming increasingly evident is that our understanding of creativity,
authorship, originality, and musicianship is “historically conditioned and discursively
defined” (Brøvig-Hanssen, Chapter 15) and that the Internet encourages collaboration
and constantly evolving works. Yet, as Brøvig-Hanssen explains, “the author remains a
central and functional figure—if, that is, we rethink the traditional notions of author-
ship, creativity, and musicianship with which we are working” (ibid.). “Justin Bieber
Featuring Slipknot:  Consumption as a Mode of Production” is one such example.
Despite its juxtaposition of two very different samples—the mashup of Slipknot’s
“Psychosocial Baby” with Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” it nevertheless produces a coher-
ent piece of music, while at the same time generating a feeling of incongruity. Steven
Nguyen’s (aka Isosine) role as producer thus raises another important issue for con-
sideration: “Although the distinction between consumer and producer seems to blur
within this new virtual music environment that is characterized by the aforementioned
musical ecosystem, production has not been reduced to consumption. Instead, con-
sumption must be studied as an important aspect of production” (ibid.). In contrast,
Cora Palfy returns to a more traditional interpretation of the role of the author and
authorial mediation “[where] we get only small chunks of information at a time, and
all of it is second-hand” (Chapter 16). As she reveals, this is evidenced in Daft Punk’s
music, which “contains elements that betray the artists’ original humanity” (ibid.), so
subverting Bangalter and de Homen-Christo’s insistence on their robotic presence. Our
final chapter of Part Four, “Virtual Bands: Recording Music under the Big Top,” pres-
ents a finely written reportorial discussion of Ryan States, whose studio was based in
a circus train car and whose recordings came “from a talent pool of dispersed experts
over a wide geographic area. His technique was asynchronous in nature:  musicians
could record on their own time and on their own terms. … Recording a band ‘vir-
tually’ is able to address issues associated with the imbalance of power or authority
and allows generation of creative and diverse ideas” (Chapter 17). As Tough observes,
“using a virtual band ensures that no individual defers to the opinions of one higher on
8   Sheila Whiteley

the ‘power totem pole’ and gives the producer of the product the final say and control”
(ibid.). States’s recording “experiment” culminated in his independent CD, released in
2010, entitled Strange Town.2
The identification of fans who participate, interact, and influence the creation of
music in the virtual world of the Internet, earlier discussed with reference to Hatsune
Miku and the Colors, is given a specific focus in Part Five: Communities and the World
Wide Web. Here, issues concerning what is virtual and what is real are related to how
de-spatialized audiences, communities, and networks are assembled, the extent to
which communities tend to evolve from belonging to a generic music scene or tech-
nology, and the extent to which the post-Internet age has changed how identities are
inscribed, enacted, and managed through networks (Tan, Chapter  18, “ ‘Uploading’
to Carnegie Hall:  The First YouTube Symphony Orchestra”). Part Five also extends
our earlier discussion of collaborative composition by situating listeners as remix-
ers of released stems of component song parts, thus promoting participation in the
once-professional domain of the producer (Bennett, Chapter 19). In “The Listener as
Remixer: Mix Stems in Online Fan Community and Competition Contexts,” Samantha
Bennett explores virtual (re)production, focusing on the space existing between perfor-
mance and reception. The relatively recent practice of online remixing blurs the lines
between music creation and reception, and engages fans in the once-concealed produc-
tion process. The result is a multitude of virtual intertexts, audience interpretations
of popular songs existing in the virtual world. The relationship between technology
and creativity is also foregrounded by Benjamin O’Brien’s discussion of virtual laptop
ensembles with the interesting observation that “if one is to hear music being created in
a virtual place, then it must be heard at some real locality … Thus, virtual music rests
somewhere between symbolic and imagined realities” (Chapter 20). It is an observation
that is further explored in our final three chapters of Part Five: David Pattie’s investiga-
tion into “Stone Tapes: Ghost Box, Nostalgia, and Postwar Britain” (Chapter 21), Adam
Trainer’s exploration of “From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings
of Personal Memory” (Chapter 22), and Danijela Bogdanovic’s ethnographic research
into “Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity” (Chapter 23). In
summary, Part Five develops our understanding of the post-Internet online commu-
nity by investigating the characteristics that define a social group and how this relates
to networking: its status as professional or amateur, whether it is localized or defined by
ethnicity or gender, and how these concerns affect the inscription of identity.
How music constructs a sense of place and the extent to which “attachments and
modes of belonging are lived through globalized and mediatized processes” (Longhurst
2007, 58) are key issues in Part Six: Sonic Environments and Musical Experience. The
rapid expansion of the number and variety of apps since their introduction in 2008,
and their correlation with user context, sets a context for two contrasting chapters. The
first explores how Ambiance users create immersive soundtracks that make use of both
nature and humanmade soundscapes (Brett, Chapter 24); the second reflects on how
“apps are becoming an increasingly viable avenue for the packaging and delivery of
the popular music commodity” (Morris, Chapter 25), not least with such major artists
 Introduction   9

as Lady Gaga and Björk. Hence, although virtuality may be considered as a condi-
tion of music itself, virtuality as a market consideration, that is, how popular music
is disseminated and distributed, remains an important issue, one that moves beyond
discussions of post-CD, post-vinyl forms of music dissemination, copyright battles,
and the destruction of the “long form” of albums via Spotify et al. Sonic environments
also take account of cultural geography as a developing area of research in its relation-
ship to music, space and place. This is reflected in case studies of Finnish microlabels
(Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, Chapter 26) and CBC Radio 3 (Audette-Longo, Chapter 27), while
Benjamin Halligan’s final chapter in Part Six returns the reader to the evolving relation-
ship between human (organic) and machine (computer), which has been a central issue
in discussions of Hatsune Miku (Part Two) and the robotic farce of Daft Punk (Palfy,
Chapter 16).
Although the participatory culture of the World Wide Web is undisputed, the rela-
tionship between the Internet and funding still remains a developing field of study.
In a period of decreasing investment, “music represents one of the primary sectors
where fertile ground has been found for crowdfunding” (D’Amato, Chapter  30); yet
the reality of attracting potential funders “is unlikely to be as straightforward as the
utopia that has been suggested” (Thorley, Chapter  29). The defining feature of Part
Seven: Participatory Culture and Fundraising is the mix of types of empirical data, as
well as the perceptions and reflections of musicians and crowdfunders. As our peer
reviewer commented, “These authors are not as blinkered in their assessment of this
phenomenon as many other commentators have been and this is exactly what makes
these chapters useful.” Not least—as Thorley, D’Amato, and Williams and Wilson
demonstrate—whereas investments by funders attract different rewards, the key to suc-
cess remains that of building and sustaining a relationship between the artist and his or
her fans. Without such interactivity, successful crowdfunding is unlikely.
The grouping of our chapters into seven themes reflects our concern for interaction
and the highlighting of key concepts and issues. At the same time, it became increas-
ingly apparent that the concerns and issues raised reemerge across the Handbook,
confirming our belief that the relationship between music and virtuality cannot be
regarded as a discrete area of research. Contributors were encouraged to exchange
ideas about the approach taken in their chapter, and though this avoided any undue
duplication, it also became evident that even more could be achieved by creating a blog
for the authors, which would further facilitate dialogue and interaction. The Authors’
Blog was initiated by the editors and Paul Carr as a way of airing the thoughts of our
authors on issues arising from both the title of our handbook, Music and Virtuality,
and concerns emerging from their own chapters. As editors we are very excited by this
interactive, “virtual” final chapter, which has afforded insights into the range of social,
intellectual, political, artistic, and economic issues surrounding music and virtuality as
well as ensuring topicality and methodological breadth. It also asks and discusses the
sort of questions that students and researchers new to the relationship between music
and virtuality will find useful, and the editors would like to acknowledge and thank
Paul Carr for his leadership on this project.
10   Sheila Whiteley

Coda

I would like to thank my co-editor Shara Rambarran for her support and enthusiasm
throughout our planning and design of Music and Virtuality and for her thoughtful
editing and ideas. I would also thank Benjamin Halligan and Christian Lloyd for their
advice and insights. What could have been a laborious task was instead a joyful explo-
ration of the diverse manifestations of the virtual and its relationship to music.

Notes
1. I would thank Benjamin Halligan for his thoughts on virtuality. We both consider this to
be a field of live discussion, and as such there are diverse approaches to be found in the
Handbook.
2. Also available at the Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality’s companion website.

References
Bennett, Andy. 2014. “Re-appraising ‘Counterculture’.” In Countercultures and Popular Music,
ed. S. Whiteley and J. Sklower, 17–28. Farnham: Ashgate.
Grimshaw, Mark, ed. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jordà, Sergi. 1999. “Faust Music on Line: An Approach to Real-Time Collective Composition
on the Internet.” Leonardo Music Journal 9: 5–12.
Longhurst, B. 2007. Cultural Change and Ordinary Life. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. London: Duke University Press.
Sanden, Paul. 2013. Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology, and the Perception of
Performance. New York: Routledge.
Shields, Rob. 2003. The Virtual. London and New York: Routledge.

Additional Recommended Reading

Ayers, Michael D., ed. 2006. Cybersounds: Essays on Visual Music Culture (Digital Formations).
New York: Peter Lang.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage.
———. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Duckworth, William. 2005. Virtual Music. New York and Oxon: Routledge.
Eco, Umberto. 1998. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London: Vintage.
Hugill, Andrew. 2008. The Digital Musician:  Creating Music with Digital Technology.
New York: Routledge.
Miller, Paul D., ed. 2008. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge,
MA, and London: MIT Press.
Sim, Stuart, ed. 2011. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 3rd ed. New  York and
Oxon: Routledge.
Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
 PA RT   O N E

T H E P R E - DIG I TA L
V I RT UA L

Research into the shifting relationships between what is real, what is virtual, what is
virtually real, and the here-and-now world of the actually real reveals that the digital
virtuality of the global Internet is only the latest incarnation of the virtual (Shields
2003). As such, “The Pre-Digital Virtual” takes a broader historical perspective, one
that anticipates the continuing fascination with illusion, fantasy worlds, and musi-
cal performances that bridge both lived and imagined experiences in Parts Two and
Three of our handbook. Christian Lloyd’s chapter, “In Seventeenth Heaven: Virtual
Listening and Its Discontents,” opens with one such example:  the impact of the
Heaven Seventeen on generations of readers and musicians who “virtually perform
the fictional band’s music.” As he notes, Anthony Burgess (2012), the author of A
Clockwork Orange (originally published in 1962), supplied no details about the music;
yet his “principle of omission … has generated a huge proliferation of performed and
recorded musical supplements to the fictional band,” so providing an initial insight
into how the fictional enters the virtual and, in the case of Sheffield synth band Heaven
17, how this then sediments into the real. As he explains, the aim of his chapter is to
investigate “the paradoxes and ironies” associated with “what it means ‘to listen’ in our
age of virtual music,” and his research involves “two kinetic models for virtual listen-
ing, with an emphasis on listeners’ reception in play with musicians’ production: (1) a
collapse of the virtual-other binary, with the terms and their referents in supplemen-
tary relation; and (2) a series of dialogic interactions between the virtual and its other.”
These are explored through pre-digital instances of virtual listening, and virtual music
that inspires significant material forms. His examples include the Beatles’ “Norwegian
Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” Rubber Soul (1965) and the mutation of the Beatles’
12    part one: The Pre-digital Virtual

work by Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, in the 2004 mashup of The White Album
with Jay Z’s The Black Album. Aural greed, the anonymity of downloading, illegal
file sharing, the damage this causes to bands, and the stand taken by musicians are
also explored in what Lloyd identifies as the passive-aggressive tactics embodied in
The Fiery Furnace’s Silent Music (2009). Other examples include Beck Hanson’s 2012
album Song Reader and Bill Drummond’s The 17 project. From the perversions of
silence, Lloyd turns to strategies of noise, and the “loudness wars” of the late 1990s
and 2000s, where hypercompression provided a means of catching the audience’s ears
with the sheer volume of sound. It seems this was due to the “impatience in ‘shallow’
listeners who have grown up within the era of vast digital availability via web torrents
and digital radio,” with the implication that the web “is literally rewiring our brains,
inducing only superficial understanding” (Carr 2010, back cover), although recent
research now brings this assumption into question.
Although we might well agree with Lloyd’s premise that, given the sheer amount
of music now available digitally, listening to it “carefully enough to be accurately
absorbed [into] our busy, mobile culture” is a thing of the past, fans of the Beatles
would certainly prove an exception. As Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis write, their
albums and singles not only remain “the definitive soundtrack of the [1960s] decade”
but also top contemporary popularity charts. Yet there is also a more shadowy side
to the famous four, one where “Nothing Is Real.” Auslander and Inglis take the
reader into the previously unwritten history of “The Beatles as Virtual Performers,”
one that ostensibly originated in 2009 when the video game The Beatles: Rock Band
allowed players to engage with the “virtual Beatles” and “participate in instrumental
and vocal performances of more than forty Beatles tracks.” Yet, as Auslander and
Inglis suggest, their careers as “virtual performers began many years before their
rebirth in the world of digital animation,” and that “closer inspection of the Beatles’
activities through the 1960s reveals that there were numerous occasions on which
the group participated in musical scenarios that were, in fact, effective simulations
of the conventional performer-audience encounter.” This is evidenced in the thirty-
nine half-hour episodes of The Beatles, an animated cartoon series where “stories are
loosely inspired by, and performed to, a specific Beatles track,” along with a “sing-
along” segment where “the TV audience is encouraged to join in—to sing with the
Beatles,” who engage in banter with their fans through a simulated, if one-sided con-
versation, thus blurring actuality and artifice. This was followed by the full-length
animated movie Yellow Submarine (dir. George Dunning), where the imprisoned
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are the Beatles’ Edwardian alter egos, known
to the audience from the cover of their 1967 album, so providing a further example
of the real—the material—the animated/virtual. An exploration of the Beatles’ film
career reveals that “their audiences [were given] opportunities to accompany the
Beatles rather than simply watch them: first, as fellow passengers on a surreal coach
journey” in Magical Mystery Tour (1967) and “second, as invited guests in the inti-
mate confines of the recording studio” in Let It Be (1970). This also included the
 part one: The Pre-digital Virtual   13

famous “impromptu” concert held atop the roof of Apple’s Savile Row headquar-
ters, the band’s final live performance, but as Auslander and Inglis observe, “their
intended (and principal) audience was not the crowd of unseen passers-by on the
pavements of Savile Row, but those who would experience their performance later
on the movie screen, as a performance by the virtual Beatles.” As they conclude,
“Although the terminology of the ‘virtual performer’ had not yet entered the musi-
cal vocabulary of the 1960s, how the Beatles sought to manipulate their status as
performers was an effective prototype of strategies adopted by many others during
and after the digital revolution.”
Sheila Whiteley also returns to the pre-digital world in her analysis of the animated
cartoon Johann Mouse (MGM 1953) and the “virtual” world of Johann Strauss II’s
Vienna. Given his status as the waltz king, it is not surprising that the music drives
the dynamics of the animation, while the simulations of Tom, as Strauss’s cat, and
Jerry, as the dancing mouse, reveal their status as prototypes of digitally animated
cartoon characters. Her initial analysis of the cartoon is informed by Walt Disney’s
“Twelve Principles of Animation”1 and is followed by a discussion of the music of
Johann Strauss II and the premise that even though it is obvious that Tom (as a
cartoon character) cannot (in reality) play the piano, his performance on screen is
an indication that he is playing diegetically, that is, from a sound source within the
narrative world that he and Johann Mouse inhabit. The synchronizing of the vir-
tual performance with the ghosted playing of the Viennese concert pianist Jakob
Gimpel is thus crucial to the believability of Tom’s bravura performances and to
how the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the music are matched by his mimetic musical
piano playing. Whiteley then moves to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Tom
and Johann perform at the emperor’s palace. The sense that a musical experience
is taking place is related to the characterization of Tom and Johann and how they
interact with the cultural signifiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not least in
their formal introduction to the Emperor and his court against the opening bars
of Strauss’s Kaiser-Waltzer. This, in turn, is given a docu-dramatic focus by the
heavily accented storytelling of Hans Conried, an American comedian and voice
actor whose father was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna. The music, the char-
acterization, and the storyline thus structure the listening and viewing experi-
ence and together with the animated sequences create an imaginary/virtual world,
which in turn taps into popular memory through the narrator’s “It was the same
old story” as Tom gives into his relentless pursuit of Johann. As Whiteley con-
cludes, our experience of the cartoon is syncretic: the rhythm of the music and the
characters’ animated responses structure our listening and viewing experience, so
creating virtuality through their own imaginary world. Together with the editing
and camera work, they create the necessary direct and mutually causal relation-
ship between the text, its animation, and the implied viewer: the “as if ” of virtual
performance and its affective response.
14    part one: The Pre-digital Virtual

As Shara Rambarran’s discussion of Gorillaz (Chapter 9 of this volume) demon-

strates, in today’s world “everything is a virtual copy of itself ” (Roger Morton, quoted
in Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre 2006). Rowan Oliver’s chapter in this volume, “Bring
That Beat Back: Sampling as Virtual Collaboration,” provides a further example in
his exploration of how the creative interplay between the producer who samples and
the instrumentalist whose performance is sampled can be read as a process of vir-
tual collaboration. As he acknowledges, this may well stretch our understanding of
the virtual, but Oliver’s focus on musicking as a collaborative activity for musicians
working across temporal, geographical, and stylistic boundaries does suggest a prece-
dence for the digital collaboration explored in Parts Four and Five of the Handbook.
His premise is explored with reference to hip hop’s sampled drum loops—or break-
beats—proposing that groove is the mechanism through which such musicking can
take place. Summarizing groove, he suggests that it is “generally assumed to relate to
rhythm and, more specifically, microtiming… . Given that these gestures can only
be classified as rhythmically ‘nuanced’ when heard in relation to another tempo-
ral structure—most often defined as pulse, meter, or some metronomically precise
ideal”—a broad consensus emerges that groove in music relies on the interconnected
ideas of participation and embodiment, ideas initially seeming to be at odds with
the disembodiment that is inherent in the process of sampling. Building on Schutz
(1964, 174–175), however, Oliver proposes that sampling can be interpreted as col-
laborative, particularly if it is seen as “an extension of the call-and-response tradi-
tion” (citing McLeod and DiCola 2011, 49): that “when a groove is sampled, its gaps
act as virtual nodes via which collaboration can occur across time, thereby allowing
the hip-hop producer to provide a contemporary response to the call of the original
breakbeat.” This notion is exemplified in the techniques introduced by producers
such as Marley Marl and his peers, whose roots lay in the established practice of DJ
culture, and is corroborated by several anecdotal sources acknowledging that “hip
hop producers feel, in some way, as though they are collaborating creatively with
the instrumentalists whose performances they sample.” Oliver’s premise of “creative
collaboration” is explored with reference to the journey of development and meta-
morphosis taken through several hip hop tracks by the drum break from the intro-
duction of “Impeach the President” by the Honeydrippers (1973). As he concludes,
by “exploring the virtual aspects of both the solo groove of breakbeats and the dis-
embodying process of sampling … a multilayered sense by which virtuality is inher-
ent in this practice emerges.”
As contributors to our Handbook have noted, part of the reason for the
virtual-ness of newer media comes from how they build on and extend previous
media. We would extend this observation by including “the history of ideas”—
philosophies that underpin the virtual and their historical significance—as Paul
Carr’s discursive introduction to his chapter, “An Analysis of Virtuality in the
Creation and Reception of the Music of Frank Zappa” demonstrates. Music as
 part one: The Pre-digital Virtual   15

“representational” has long been a feature of musicological debate, and Carr takes
on this issue by offering the reader an insight into the role of language in analyz-
ing musical virtuality. Drawing on Bertrand Russell’s discussion “what means and
what is meant” (Russell 2008 [1923], 84), Carr identifies vagueness—“a charac-
teristic of [an artifact’s] relation to that which is known, not a characteristic of the
occurrence in itself [Carr’s emphasis]” (85) as an important distinction, one that
he elaborates on further, specifically when discussing his interpretation of Zappa’s
music. As he observes, Leo Treitler’s assertion that “words are asked to identify
not music’s properties or the experience of those properties but abstractions that
music signifies [Carr’s emphasis]” (Treitler 1997, 30) is also considered important,
“as this effectively often locates discussion about music further into a mediated
logocentric virtual world.”
Carr’s analysis of the music and reception of Zappa’s music opens with the
premise that he “overtly and purposively employed techniques to philosophically
position his creative output in a virtual, often teleological dimension,” that “his
philosophies resonate with specific concepts of virtuality.” The reader is asked to
note that “Zappa regarded all of his individual compositions and recordings as
part of a unified whole, which was negotiated principally via three self-titled phi-
losophies:  the big note, project-object, and xenochrony,” so situating “his entire
catalogue as a single entity—one that was determined by him and open to change.”
As Carr observes, his paradigms provided a rationale for his regular reuse of exist-
ing material and rearrangements of compositions, so contributing to the construc-
tion of what Paul Sanden (2012) describes as Virtual Liveness—where “the limits of
human performance are clearly surpassed” by mediation (46). Zappa’s 1991 release
The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life “serves as an indicative example of vir-
tual live performance—with the album being presented as a unified concert perfor-
mance, but in reality being compiled from numerous locations from the 1988 tour
cut and pasted together … with guitar solos imported xenochronically: often from
not only incongruous times, but also compositions.” The album also evidences
Carr’s identification of “the philosophical theory of perdurantism, whereby the
meaning of specific songs can be considered the sum of multiple distinct tempo-
ral instances.” As such, Zappa’s “merging time, space, and place, ultimately [repre-
sents] a reality that is beyond what we normally perceive”: a concept that he termed
a “virtual frame.”

Note
1. Authored in the 1900s, Disney’s twelve principles are outlined in detail in Ollie Johnson
and Frank Thomas (1981). They were applied to many of the earliest animated feature
films, such as Snow White (1937), Pinocchio and Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and
Bambi (1942).
16    part one: The Pre-digital Virtual

References
Burgess, Anthony. 2012. A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Edition. Ed. with an introduction
and notes by Andrew Biswell. London: Heinemann.
Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows. London: Atlantic Books.
Johnson, Ollie, and Frank Thomas. 1981. The Illusion of Life:  Disney Animation.
New York: Abbeville Press.
McLeod, Kembrew, and Peter DiCola. 2011. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital
Sampling. Durham: Duke University Press.
Browne, Cass. 2006. Gorillaz: The Rise of the Ogre. New York: Riverhead Books.
Russell, Bertrand. [1923] 2008. “Vagueness.” Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy
1 (2): 84–92.
Sanden, Paul. 2012. “Virtual Liveness and Sounding Cyborgs: John Oswald’s ‘Vane’.’’ Popular
Music 3 (1): 45–68.
Shields, Rob. 2003. The Virtual. London and New York: Routledge.
Treitler, Leo. 1997. “Language and the Interpretation of Music.” In Music and Meaning, ed.
Jenefer Robinson, 23–56. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
 CHAPTER 1

“ Sev enteenth H e av e n”
Virtual Listening and Its Discontents

Christian Lloyd

Early in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Alex, the teenage narrator of the
novel, runs into two truant schoolgirls browsing in MELODIA, a “disc bootick”
(2012, 48).1 Alex’s predatory approach begins with a faked interest in the girls’ favorite
chart bands. He riffles through the record racks until they ask him excitedly: “ ‘Who
you getten, bratty?’ … ‘The Heaven Seventeen? Luke Sterne? Goggly Gogol?’ ” (49).
Alex actually favors “Ludwig van” (40), blasted through his expensive hi-fi, and dis-
misses “their pathetic pop-discs” (42) as songs “moaned by … horrible yarbleless like
eunuchs” (51).2 However, he successfully feigns enthusiasm long enough to pick up the
girls. Working to an astute principle that ensured the pop culture in the novel wouldn’t
date, Burgess supplied no details about the music of the Heaven Seventeen, nor that
of the other groups named in the text. Instead, the novelist left it to subsequent gen-
erations of readers (including many musicians) to imagine and virtually perform the
fictional band’s music.
Burgess’s principle of omission has been stupendously successful since publication. It
has generated a huge proliferation of performed and recorded musical supplements to
the fictional band in the novel, by musicians ranging from David Bowie through Echo
and the Bunnymen to Cage, the Ramones, die Toten Hosen, and so on.3 These supple-
ments range from lyrics animating elements of the text, via band or label names derived
from it, to appropriations of Alex’s streetwear by musicians such as John Bonham, Blur,
and Rihanna.4 Such musical/sartorial virtuality transforms the Heaven Seventeen into
something akin to a malevolent Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where there is
a significant ambiguity between who the musicians are in their real identity known to
fans and their simultaneous virtual being, which momentarily appears more power-
fully before our eyes. And the novel’s insinuations continue… . Reading A Clockwork
Orange today, we might wonder if the number “Seventeen” signifies the total number
of band members, indicating a supersized girl band (à la Girls’ Generation/So Nyeo
Shi Dae), or perhaps a euphoric indie collective (cousin to the Polyphonic Spree).
18   Christian Lloyd

The virtual potential of Burgess’s silent band is illimitable and ongoing. The ultimate
realization of the “musical” world of A Clockwork Orange, though, must be the career of
the Sheffield synth band Heaven 17 (initially 1981–1989), who lightly adapted Burgess’s
band name to critique 1980s capitalism with considerable yarbles, using what was then
a suitably futuristic style of music. Heaven 17 managed this actualization to the point
where it is likely that many listeners eventually didn’t recognize their fictional genesis
and virtual phase. The fictional had entered the virtual, which sedimented into the real.
The accumulating animations of Burgess’s the Heaven Seventeen suggest not only
the prophetic force of his vision of future youth culture as a hyper-accelerated, ultra-
mediated zone (“seventh heaven” plus ten) but also the instability of the opposition
between the “virtual” and the “real.” That so many musical artists have felt the urge to
supplement the silence of A Clockwork Orange’s fictional chartbusters with their own
music implies both the provocative lack in the virtual (we feel a need to fill its slight
hollowness, to turn its brinkmanship into realization) and its ability to generate the
material, in this case actual recorded music and live performances.5 In this chapter,
I investigate what it means “to listen” in our age of virtual music. Assessing examples
from canonical rock to recent digitally produced and consumed music of various styles,
and even some perverse manipulations of silence, I  am concerned not with closing
on definition, but rather with investigating the paradoxes and ironies to which listen-
ers are subject at this moment of cultural unease, when the residual material forms of
recorded music and performance are yet to recede fully, while the emergent virtual is
still to take up its full remit. Looking at such instances forces us to face some quite enig-
matic questions about the production and reception of popular music, whose answers
may prove significant precisely in their unexpectedness.
The “virtual” has proved a surprisingly tricky concept to define, despite ongoing
investigation and debate in several academic fields. In discussion of music, “the virtual”
has sometimes been taken to be synonymous with “the digital,” since these technolo-
gies allow the most frequent access to virtuality in everyday life for many (in the form
of SoundCloud, mashups, Rock Band, etc.). However, as Rob Shields points out in a
canny historicization (2003), Thomas Cramner’s 1555 trial for heresy focused on an
issue of virtuality: Was the communion bread literally transformed into the body of
Christ, or did it only offer the virtual presence of Christ? This example of the power
and centrality of virtuality to life in a premodern era should give pause to those today
who would foreshorten the discussion; indeed, Shields reinforces his point by citing
other historical instances of virtuality from cave painting to nineteenth-century pan-
oramas. He warns in light of these that we must be careful not to think of virtual-
ity in terms of the current media by which virtuality operates, but instead to trace
broader philosophical debates and older instances of virtual phenomena themselves
for perspective on the problems of virtuality that arise in our time. For instance, con-
cluding his assessment of transubstantiation, Shields asks, “[the] doctrine of virtual-
ism raised questions concerning the way we understand presence—must it be concrete
and embodied or was the ‘essentially present’ good enough?” (6) These questions are
weirdly as pertinent to considerations of current live shows like the hologram of Tupac
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   19

Shakur, who “appeared” at the Coachella Festival in 2012 (see http://www.telegraph.

co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopmusic/9208777/Tupac-hologram-the-future-of-
live-entertainment-is-dead.html), as they were to Cramner’s trial in the sixteenth cen-
tury. The festival gig relies on the “presence” of the dead rap superstar to create its aura,
just as Catholicism needed to maintain the literality of the Eucharist for its unearthly
authority. In each case, the power of virtuality to some in an audience is plain, just as
is the pertinence of skepticism by other onlookers towards such manifestations and
their intentions. So we should remain mindful to look at nondigital musical examples
to test out theoretical assumptions, rather than reducing the focus to virtuality thought
of as a stable concept and delivered via current technology, where the medium can be
mistaken for the effect.
One common feature of attempts to define the virtual from a spectrum of disciplin-
ary perspectives is its location within a binary opposition. In such efforts, the virtual is
not defined as it might be in itself, but may be opposed to the “potential,” the “actual,”
or the “material” etc., according to different commentators.6 These possible opposi-
tions incur variant patterns of blindness and insight for both the production and the
reception of virtual music. But rather than assess such in an abstract, philosophical
mode and risk a category error in our musical understanding, we would do well to
test some of them within exemplary listening experiences. In etymological terms, the
virtual emerges along a convoluted path from Latin to be what is “so in essence or
effect, although not formally or actually” (OED); that is to say, the virtual is not “real”
but has effect in “reality.” As my quote marks (tediously) indicate, the other term in the
opposition is so tricky itself that this binary is of poor clarity. As any music fan knows,
during an intense listening experience, say to an MP3 album on good headphones, the
“real” world recedes as the listener’s consciousness is saturated with music until she is
unaware of anything but her sonic environment, and fully fantasizing about her role,
say, as a member of the band. This metaxis can be virtually a disembodied experience,
yet takes place undeniably in the everyday world, often in a location as banal as a bed-
room. Does it, though, represent a departure from reality into the virtual via a nonma-
terial source of music, or are we still in the real, or in a liminal zone between the two,
or perhaps oscillating between the “virtual” and “real” realms? The problems inherent
in defining the “virtual” as simply the opposite of the “real” means this binary is not
entirely satisfactory as a way of taxonomizing a listening experience.
On another tack, ordinary listeners’ most common conception of the virtual is to
oppose it to the “material,” this opposition being usually derived from experiences of
analog versus digital musical reproduction of one type or another. In a practical sense,
the purely virtual cannot be possible in terms of musical reproduction; we could point
to the hard drive where electronic files reside, or even to the pulsing current that carries
the bits (binary digits) of digital sound, as an undeniably material element in what is
deemed to be in the category of the purely “virtual.” That said, the psychological effects
of nonmaterial listening media are worth following up, as we will see below. What both
these examples suggest (and there would be many more corroborative ones possible
if space allowed) is that what seem like simple, practical binaries as ways of thinking
20   Christian Lloyd

about the virtual are actually quite unstable constructions, readily called in question by
commonplace listening experiences. Though I will use both the “real” and the “mate-
rial” as putative poles of the virtual in my analysis, I am always keen to test virtuality
empirically rather than against a received model, which can foreclose analysis within
its own terms and so generate methodological tautology.
So, instead of deploying a binary or attempting an isolated, virtuality-as-it-is-in-itself
definition, I suggest two kinetic models for virtual listening, with an emphasis on lis-
teners’ reception in play with musicians’ production: (1) a collapse of the virtual-other
binary, with the terms and their referents in supplementary relation; and (2) a series of
dialogic interactions between the virtual and its other. The first of these is, of course,
Derridean in origin, emerging from deconstructionist practices. Put concisely, “supple-
ment” refers to how a supposedly finished text (a pop song for example) carries traces
of alternative or additional meanings whose presence reveals a lack in the purportedly
bounded world of the entity being supplemented. Derrida articulates his sense of the
supplement in Of Grammatology, especially the segment entitled “… That Dangerous
Supplement …” (1997). His later work on supplementarity in Spectres of Marx explic-
itly politicizes the concept to examine how the “great unifying projects” (1994, 3)  of
modern Europe remain haunted by specters of the marginalized or unfulfilled prom-
ises. In terms of popular music analysis, we will consider a range of supplementarities,
for instance, from unauthorized digital “supergroups” who, via mashups, reactivate the
music of their constituent classic bands and reveal what is repressed in their bound-
edness by canonical status to virtual potentials that haunt apparently stable material
objects. All these have in common that they permeate the binary boundary and cause
odd exchanges between the two supposedly opposed terms. The second listening
model I propose is again derived from literary studies, more specifically from Mikhail
Bakhtin’s work on the novel (1984). If this seems far-fetched, it is worth remembering
that Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic, largely developed through study of literary form,
is really a unified field theory, applicable to social relations generally, and represen-
tations of such, though it remains underused in music criticism. As is well known,
Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic suggests that there is no final word on any subject, that
all utterances, verbal or musical, enter an environment already saturated with others’
utterances, and then anticipate future responses. The consequent unfinalizability of any
musical oeuvre offers interesting possibilities for the manipulations of the supposedly
“fixed” by the virtual, and we will see how ingenious artists in several styles have used
dialogic means to do this.
To evaluate these two proposed models for virtual listening, it is worth considering
some pre-digital instances where materially constituted music creates virtuality of sev-
eral types, and, conversely, some virtual music that inspires significant material forms.
Such apparent temporal and technological anomalies dissolve the material-virtual
binary and allow tentative insights into both the impulse toward the virtual embodied
in analogue technology and the enduring residual position of material musical and
listening practices in the emergent virtual age.
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   21

A personal example of how analog music unexpectedly creates “new” virtual music
is embodied in my parents’ copy of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which I listened to often
while growing up. This particular LP, a first British pressing on thick, black Parlophone
vinyl, was sent to them as a present when it came out in 1965. Damage in the mail
broke a large crescent-shaped chunk out of the perimeter of the vinyl, such that the first
two tracks on both sides were unplayable. (On my UK version, these tracks are Side
One:  “Drive My Car,” “Norwegian Wood [This Bird Has Flown]”; Side Two:  “What
Goes On,” “Girl.”) Because of this missing bit of vinyl, I had to strain to imagine the
first four tracks from paratextual evidence, such as the album title, song names on the
label, the artwork on the sleeve, etc., but also could “rely” on my knowledge of other
Beatles songs from my parents’ small record collection and the radio, plus the playable
songs on the record.
I remember trying to work out how the phrases “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has
Flown),” with their spondee followed by an iambus, might fit into the regular time sig-
nature, usually 4/4, of a mid-1960s pop song. (Of course, it doesn’t have to; the song is
in a Dylanesque 6/8 time as it happens, although this is simplified to 3/4 time in many
commercial transcriptions.) I also imagined possible tunes and guessed how to expand
the lyrics on the basis of the six words I had, which implied a narrative, either slangy
(“bird” meaning woman) or figurative (a song about escape, using a well-worn meta-
phor from nature). One apparent clue, which turned out to be a red herring, was the
photo of John Lennon on the back cover with his head partly obscured by the fronds
of a fir tree, which pointed to a literal wood. In fact, “Norwegian Wood” is about an
affair Lennon was having with a journalist in a neighboring flat (Macdonald 1998), and
the figurative elements of the lyric are there to cover the author’s tracks. Whatever the
truth of the lyric, I actively created a virtual Rubber Soul in my mind’s ear, replacing
the missing portion of the original, and so creating something all the more powerful
to my childish self because it was virtually a “co-composition” with my heroes. The
boundary between humble listener and master musicians was temporarily suspended.
Paradoxically, it was the easily broken object, this first pressing vinyl, fetishized by col-
lectors as the “correct” form by which to access the music, that provoked me to generate
a virtual musical supplement to complete the lack in this original.
In How Are Things? A Philosophical Experiment, Roger-Pol Droit asks: “Do things
speak? Do they have something to say? Is it not simply we (as always) who attribute
senses to them, and a possible language? No, it is not quite as simple as that. We make
things speak, but only by acting on particulars innate to them” (2005, 185). My experi-
ence with the damaged vinyl copy of Rubber Soul bears this out. This object was subject
to transformation because of a flaw in its material, and hence was vulnerable to a vir-
tual metamorphosis that generated new musical meanings, which felt powerfully real
to one listener, and sparked creativity beyond the intention of what was produced for
sale. Clearly, in this simple case the boundary line of the material and virtual is cross-
able, and in Derridean terms there can no longer be a sure delineation of the inside/
outside of the album as the virtual supplement begins to do its work.
22   Christian Lloyd

Oddly, it is just possible that the Beatles themselves suspected the cross-cultural vir-
tuality, and so the vulnerability of their music in their choice of album title. Rubber Soul
plays off the phrase “plastic soul,” a taunt supposedly used by an African-American
bluesman of Mick Jagger, according to Paul McCartney (The Beatles 2000). “Rubber
Soul” is itself a virtual musical style: often fully soulful in effect, but not authentic black
soul, yet not quite plastic like the Beatles rivals’ worst efforts either.7 Perhaps the Beatles,
who would later construct their own avatars on the covers of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band and Yellow Submarine, had some such anxiety about their virtual status as
soul men partly in mind, a notion reinforced by the distorted photograph on the front
cover of Rubber Soul, which draws attention to itself as an image, not quite a straight-
forward representation of the real thing.
Listening within a Bakhtinian model of virtuality, other listener-musicians have
significantly dialogized Rubber Soul’s impressive coherence as a collection since it
appeared. The first such effort came in 1966, when Bob Dylan, a major influence on
Lennon’s lyrics about “enigmatic women” (Macdonald 1998), wrote “4th Time Around”
as a quick-fire riposte to “Norwegian Wood,” perhaps to unnerve his rival/follower
Lennon. Dylan’s wordy piece is a much raunchier and more detailed account of an
uneasy sexual relationship than Lennon manages. This Greenwich Village “addition”
to Rubber Soul (a kind of parasitical “bonus track”) meant that the “authentic” Beatles
song “Norwegian Wood” is undermined by a parody of its tune and style by the very
stylist who fostered Lennon’s “original.” (“4th Time Around” could, therefore, be heard
as a parody of a pastiche of the parodist’s style.) Rubber Soul becomes a song longer
with this hostile dialogization, which is not in the mini-canon that is the official album,
but which virtually joins the Beatles’ oeuvre as the mindful listener can no longer hear
the Beatles song without Dylan’s retort.
A quite different dialogization appeared in 1997, when the British-Asian band
Cornershop covered “Norwegian Wood” but sang the lyric in Punjabi to reappropriate
the Beatles’ appropriation of Indian music in 1965. (The track may be found at http://
www.metacafe.com/watch/5603695/cornershop_norwegian_wood_this_bird_has_
flown/.) This second hostile dialogization to Rubber Soul expands the album virtu-
ally once more, in this case producing an estrangement effect that opens what seemed
like a finalized recording with well-established meanings and pleasures, drawing out
instead issues of race, exoticism, and cultural ownership in a new, unfinalized dialogue
responding to Cornershop’s political concerns. In all the cases discussed so far, kinetic
virtuality erodes both the fixedness of a read-only object and what is blithely assumed
to be the perfect canon in rock to produce new meanings and potentials for listeners.
The virtual parasites revive, not kill, their host.
What do we learn when the phenomenon is reversed and the virtual inspires signifi-
cant material forms? Again the Beatles are a telling example because of their special
cultural status, which has been both signified and cultivated in the careful protection of
their canon.8 Since the digital music age began for most listeners with CDs, the Beatles
have appeased an audience still grieving their end by (1) refining the sound of their
albums digitally to take you “closer” to them in the studio (even adding highly selected
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   23

studio banter for “realism” on the absurd Let It Be … Naked [2003]); and (2) releasing
more and more rejected or marginal songs and takes in the Anthology series (1995–96),
while tantalizing fans with mention of unheard songs (e.g., “Carnival of Light”: http://
abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/carnival.htm) as if the band were still productive. On one
level this is simply a marketing strategy that exploits fan psychology. Listeners want
to believe that the Beatles, working hard as ever in Abbey Road, are really about and
should be heard, not languishing in the analog morgue. Digital technology has allowed
the creation of an actual series of new (or newish) Beatles releases, which reinforced
the virtual illusion of the band’s current presence, and EMI then played off this illu-
sion to sell material objects such as vinyl records and compact discs (at least until the
band finally joined iTunes late in 2010). In fact, these new-material releases of music
are really virtual since many of the Anthology versions of familiar songs fly in elements
from several takes, creating a new track, which could not have happened in reality but
is mixed and sounds as if it did.9
Such a tangled, ironic process might be seen positively as an attempt by the Beatles
to self-supplement their canon, to find, for instance, traces of the avant-garde in estab-
lished classics by showing glimmers of experimentation and hot-button politics in the
old grand project. In Bakhtinian terms, they might be seen trying to unfinalize the most
final canon in popular music, to break its inert perfection, show its creation in process
in a particular time and place, and so open it up to dialogue rather than having it stand
as the final word. To this end, we might ask if it is a coincidence that Cornershop criti-
cally dialogized “Norwegian Wood” shortly after Harrison’s stiff sitar playing (double-
tracked to disguise his amateurishness on this demanding instrument) was revealed
on Take One of the song in Anthology 2 (1996)? And what are the cultural politics of
the fact that the Indian musicians who appear on Beatles records go uncredited, when
Western musicians, for example Eric Clapton and Alan Civil, get sleeve name checks,
on The Beatles and Revolver respectively? In any case, virtually new music by the vir-
tual Beatles created real sales and a dominating presence on the music scene of the late
1990s in the lead-up to Britpop, as the boundary between the virtual and its others, the
sense of which realm is primary to or generative of the other, again proved undecidable.
These interactions inevitably bring to mind the mutation of the Beatles’ work by
Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, who famously made a 2004 mashup of The White
Album (1993) with Jay Z’s The Black Album (2003), and entitled The Grey Album. This
was released illegally online and was subjected to legal action by EMI, but proved
unsuppressible. Far from damaging the Beatles, as EMI worried, it seems probable that
this mashup alerted Jay Z fans to the Beatles’ music and reignited their cultural signifi-
cance. As The Grey Album was only ever in the virtual realm, there was no cover and
its illegality meant there could be no paratext determined by Danger Mouse. Fans and
online distributors of The Grey Album made their own cover images, sold burned CDs
(still available on UK Amazon at the time of writing), and posted their homemade
cover designs online. These supplements strangely asserted the constantly reversing
hierarchy between the digital and material. The pristine, digitalized Beatles music
that allowed Danger Mouse’s project in the first place proved as vulnerable to virtual
24   Christian Lloyd

contamination as the Beatles’ vinyl albums were in the examples already explored.
Ironically, Danger Mouse later found himself caught in a comical paradox when Dark
Night of the Soul, his 2009 collaboration with Sparklehorse et al., had to be “released”
as a blank CD-R within a lavish box set, including a book with photographs by David
Lynch, because of a legal dispute with EMI (see Rambarran 2013). Clearly the intention
was for fans to download the sound files from the web to burn the CD of the album
and complete the package, but it was funny that Danger Mouse could in this case sell
only his paratext.
Since digital technology has allowed musical virtuality to a previously impossible
degree, it would be easy to ignore material music and listening practices as simply
retrograde or distracting from the limitless virtual musical world now eagerly being
explored by listeners and musicians alike. But even with the excitement of fresh weekly
virtualities in music, we must remember that we are still listening in a liminal period
where residual material listening practices retain cultural significance despite the rush
into the virtual future. And paradoxically, our liminal moment means that the material
often exists as a ghost or trace in the “substance” of the virtual.
One widespread postdigital phenomenon in some musical styles that suggests the
anxieties of musicians of the transitional generation is the virtual “presence” of the
analog in their recordings, as a kind of traced realism. The use of low-fidelity sounds,
such as crackle tracks and “dirty” analog samples within virtually produced and con-
sumed soundscapes, implies the material as a revenant within the digital, the material
haunting the virtual. (Samples, like overdubs, are always virtual because they gener-
ate the effect of something that cannot be, yet appears to be; an extreme instance of
this is the duet between the deceased Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie Cole on
“Straighten Up and Fly Right” in 2009.) In many cases, such liminality may respond to
general psychological phenomena inherent in listening. In How Music Works, David
Byrne suggests that

the fuzziness and ambiguity inherent in low-quality signals and reproductions might
actually be a factor that gives . . . the listener a way in. I know from writing lyrics
that some details—names, places, locations—are desirable; they anchor the piece in
the real world. But so are ambiguities. By letting the listener . . . fill in the blanks,
complete . . . the piece of music, the work becomes personalised. They become more
involved with the work, and an intimacy . . . becomes possible that perfection might
have kept at bay. Maybe the lo-fi music crowd has a point? (2012, 126)

Byrne puts his finger on the importance of listener response to a virtual perfection,
which can create an alienating closed circuit of sound and signification. When even
the anticipatory crackle as the needle hits the groove is missing, virtual sonic perfec-
tion may be experienced as sterile, compared to its dirty material predecessors. Virtual
music has no inherent personal history because it does not change in the way that
material music platforms like vinyl records and their sleeves do. Even the compact
disc, a material platform for digital sound, wore, if charmlessly, usually in the form of
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   25

a broken jewel case or scrunched-up booklet. Every scratch or pop on a vinyl record
may be a memory of where, when, and with whom it was listened to. It is hard to think
of anyone keeping and treasuring the hard drive from whence they first heard an MP3
of, say, OutKast’s “Hey Ya” (2003) the way someone might look after a favorite cassingle
from teenage years.
In other cases, the use of sounds associated with the material within the digital-
virtual realm can be highly politicized and historically aware. This was nowhere more
telling than in the Bristol music of the late nineties. Artists like Massive Attack and
Tricky positioned analog sources from Public Enemy via Isaac Hayes to the Specials to
imply the heritage of their music, their affinity as Britons to their musical and famil-
ial forebears, who strived for identity in a period where “minority” culture had little
respect. Despite the ease with which such musicians could manipulate sound and cre-
ate perfect virtual soundscapes if they wished, they were keen to encode messy cul-
tural history in this way, and to draw attention to it by creating musical palimpsests
that suggested relationships between the past and present of their national and familial
culture. One important meaning of the crackly soundscapes of Blue Lines (Massive
Attack 1991) and Maxinquaye (Tricky 1995) is to respect the lived experience of the past,
registering it as “material” memories in the virtual yonder, insisting on keeping it real.
Since Napster appeared around the Millennium, burgeoning downloading, digital
radio, and streaming facilities mean that all generations of listeners may browse in a
free Borgesian library. When so much music is available virtually, and much important
music is produced and available only in the virtual realm, listeners’ resources/location
are no longer any impediment, and unprecedented and perverse listening phenomena
occur. For example, the more a listener attends carefully to a particular piece of music,
which implies repeated listens, the more other musical options lie inert, unlistened
to. The more careful the listener, the more damaging this syndrome gets. Listening
attentively therefore becomes a dangerous activity for anyone who envisions music as
an important agent within the larger cultural continuum, just as much as skimming
through MP3s, a more commonly criticized result of virtual music availability, does.
This continuously sedimenting musical plenty has led some listeners to revolt
entirely. There exist London music clubs where participants listen in silence to a classic
album on vinyl in its entirety before discussing it. The rarity of such a listening oppor-
tunity in the virtual age is implied by the numbers of participants who realize that being
in a public, rule-based situation is the only likely opportunity to hear music carefully,
completely, and in stasis as in the pre-digital past. (See, for instance, http://www.bbc.
co.uk/news/magazine-12209143). Other listeners have responded by calling for silence.
Paul Chivers, aka Ramjac, makes the satirical offer of a download of “Everything The
Beatles Never Did” for US$226:

This specially edited release version has the audio irretrievably silenced. It has not
just had the volume turned down. It no longer contains any Beatles material what-
soever in any form. It is however the identical length of the original piece; 8:22,
the length of the longest Beatles piece Revolution 9, and worth every penny of the
26   Christian Lloyd

asking price, merely one US Dollar per Beatles song; everything they ever did, and
thereby included in this concept. This is not what they did, it’s just my idea with
what they did, erased. Imagine erasing everything The Beatles ever did. (2013)

The ubiquity of the virtual Beatles makes this sacrilegious proposal pointedly funny,
but it also underlines the idiocies of what we might deem “anti-listeners,” who down-
load more than they can hope to listen to, a kind of aural greed that ultimately disre-
spects artists’ efforts.
A comparable play on silence and the politics of virtual music acquisition from
an artist’s point of view is the Fiery Furnaces’ 2009 album Silent Music, which was
released as sheet music only. The duo’s motivation was their bitterness toward illegal
file sharing:

Because file-sharing, or downloading, or whatever, has notoriously, or supposedly,

made the production of the conventional “with-audio” record obsolete, the Fiery
Furnaces will release a Silent Record. The Fiery Furnaces’ next album will consist
of instruction, conventional music notation, graphic music notation, reports and
illustrations of previous hypothetical performances. . . . (2009)

In practice this instruction meant a complex diagram with many unconventional direc-
tions added to the staves (2009).10 What is more, the group then promised:

Upon release of the record, the band will organize a series of Fan-Band concerts,
in which groups of perfectly ordinary Fiery Furnaces’ fans will perform, interpret,
contradict, ignore, and so on, the compositions that make up Silent Record. Write to
thefieryfurnacesemail@gmail.com to nominate your post office break room, truck
stop parking lot, municipal arts center, local tavern, or what [sic]-its-name to host
one of these “happenings.” By “happenings” I mean, what will be in the future, per-
fectly normal rock shows. And propose yourself for Fan Band participation. (2009)

This gambit set up a new division of labor between artist and listeners as the com-
position was interpreted by fans, with the band as listeners, in effect. The possibility
for awkwardness as the band had accused fans of stealing their music and then made
them perform the labor of arranging and playing it if they wanted to hear it is arguably
passive-aggressive, but Silent Record certainly had the potential to reactivate a contract
between listener and artist that the band claimed had been damaged by the anonymity
of downloading. By way of comparison, Beck Hanson’s 2012 album Song Reader was
released only in the form of a folder of illustrated scores (notes, not tabs). His motiva-
tion was less aggressive than that of the Fiery Furnaces: to write songs interpretable by
average amateur musicians in an electronic age where most transcriptions are nonsen-
sical, because of the dysfunctional interface between complex digital soundscapes and
notation originally designed for classical music performance. Song Reader was success-
ful, as listeners took over and produced a startling reversal of the flow of digital traf-
fic, uploading their versions on YouTube and SoundCloud rather than downloading a
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   27

definitive authorized take of the song by the artist. All the versions are therefore virtu-
ally authoritative.
Shaping another determined response, Bill Drummond, formerly a leading virtual
culture provocateur with the KLF, launched a project called the “The17” in 2006. One
of The17’s notices reads:

ALL RECORDED MUSIC HAS RUN ITS COURSE.

IT HAS ALL BEEN CONSUMED, TRADED, DOWNLOADED,
UNDERSTOOD, HEARD BEFORE, SAMPLED, LEARNED,
REVIVED, JUDGED AND FOUND WANTING.
DISPENSE WITH ALL PREVIOUS FORMS OF MUSIC AND
MUSIC-MAKING AND START AGAIN.
YEAR ZERO NOW.
The17 IS A CHOIR.
THEIR MUSIC HAS NO HISTORY, FOLLOWS NO TRADITIONS,
RECOGNISES NO CONTEMPORARIES.
The17 HAS MANY VOICES.
THEY USE NO LIBRETTO, LYRICS OR WORDS; NO TIME
SIGNATURES, RHYTHM OR BEATS; AND HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE
OF MELODY, COUNTERPOINT OR HARMONY.
The17 STRUGGLE WITH THE DARK
AND RESPOND TO THE LIGHT.

Drummond’s discontent with both virtual abundance and Mojo-style nostalgia for fos-
silized musical culture led him to travel around the UK forming temporary amateur
choirs, who work from textual Fluxus-type scores, perform once, and then disband
with no recorded trace. This strategy intends to assert Drummond’s principle that
music should be a performed art form, “celebrating time, place and occasion and noth-
ing to do with something trapped in the iPod in your pocket” (2008). Drummond’s
efforts are underpinned by his long and varied experiences in the music industry and
by real theoretical sophistication. Yet a major subtext to his project must be that The17
is typical of music in its long history, not abnormal, since recorded music only a cen-
tury or so old, whereas the long history of listening to music had been always site- and
personnel-specific before.
Drummond’s impulse to reconnect with music as a real-time, material practice
reflects commonly held displaced anxieties about our relationships as listeners with
virtual music. For instance, both the popularity of Rock Band and the millennial craze
for playing the ukulele suggest listeners trying (whether they are aware of it or not) to
reconnect with music by tactile means. Of course Rock Band relies on virtual technol-
ogy, whereas a ukulele is a simple stringed instrument, but the wild popularity of each
seems likely to be a subconscious reaction to dissatisfaction with current patterns of
consumption of recorded music. Indeed, Eamon Forde has wondered if we will need
a “slow music” or “slow listening” movement as a counter to “fast food” digital music,
ripped from its sonic terroir by its lack of paratext and half-digested on the run (2012).
28   Christian Lloyd

The obvious solution to this is itself the virtual friend who helps you filter your choices
(such as iTunes Genius, Pandora, Amazon Recommended for You, etc., all of which
use their own ways of manipulating datasets to make suggestions to listeners lost in the
sonic labyrinth), or human online guides (bloggers, reviewers, metacritics). However,
as Gavin Castleton notes, “now there are so many aggregators, we need aggregators to
aggregate the aggregators” (quoted in The Word, May 2012, 63). Borges might smirk at
this fulfillment of his prophecy.
By now, it seems plausible that virtual listening practices have shaped music produc-
tion, as much as the other way round. For instance, during the “loudness wars” of the
late 1990s and 2000s, hypercompression (and even digital clipping of the sound wave)
became a commonplace technique applied to the entire soundwave of many major rock
records. Such practices were most notoriously evident on Oasis’s Be Here Now (1997)
and Metallica’s Death Magnetic (2008), but spread unpredictably to songs in other
styles, such as Celine Dion’s I Drove All Night (2003; for a graphic of the extraordinary
sound wave of this song, see Wired 12.1, January 2004), or the 2006 remastered reis-
sue of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” (original release 1989), whose dynamic range was
reduced from 13db to 7db (Vickers 2010). Greg Milner has suggested that hypercom-
pression was pushed by record companies’ and producers’ wish to secure airplay from
a jaded audience simply by catching their ears immediately with sheer volume as such
listeners flipped through innumerable digital stations, even if, after a stunningly loud
opening gambit, the rest of the track then sounded absurd (2009). But this argument
is dangerously ahistorical and may be oversimplifying a more complex psychological
context to current listening, for such sonic manipulation to make a track radio-friendly
has a much longer history. Compression itself has a distinguished experimental heri-
tage in the hands of British producer and engineers like Joe Meek and Geoff Emerick,
whose highly selective uses of what were then unprecedented (ab)uses of compres-
sion produce striking effects alongside “dryer” sounds, without overly compromising
the dynamic range of the whole. Meek’s homemade compressors help the vocal on the
Cryin Shames’ “Please Stay” create stunning emotional affect; Emerick’s supercom-
pressed tom-tom sound on “Tomorrow Never Knows” “created the image of a cosmic
tabla played by a Vedic deity riding in a storm-cloud” (Macdonald 1998, 168).
What the escalation of sonic manipulation from these clever analog examples to the
crass hypercompression of whole albums more recently suggests is that where once in
the vinyl and FM radio world listeners would be assumed by producers to listen care-
fully and repeatedly to their innovations, today’s production anxieties are founded on
the assumption of impatience in “shallow” listeners who have grown up within the era
of vast digital availability via web torrents and digital radio. In this case, assumed lis-
tening practices make virtual listeners virtually co-producers, as studio work (at least
in rock music) may have involved a weird dialogic anticipation of a future listener who
may not be listening. As a result, a strange new “creativity” now resides in the virtual
listener, who has the status of a virtual co-producer.
But are these assumptions verifiable or even plausible? In The Shallows (2010),
Nicholas Carr synthesizes scientific and social scientific research to posit that the Web
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   29

“is literally rewiring our brains, inducing only superficial understanding” (back cover).
His wide-ranging and diligently historicized argument pushes the widely held “digital
natives” versus “digital immigrants” distinction. One consequence of this distinction
applied specifically to the consumption of virtually recorded music is hypercompres-
sion’s obvious appeal to “shallow” listeners, but recent research has suggested that
hypercompressed records did not have a lasting appeal and in fact sounds ridiculous
or irritating over time (see turnmeup.org). More recently, scholars have collapsed the
“digital natives” versus “digital immigrants” model because it makes a series of false
assumptions about engagement.11 In fact, hypercompression may just be a psychologi-
cally generated by-product of competition between producers making false assump-
tions about their listenership, who are a virtual imagined community anyhow, which
is to say, producers cannot meet all or even many of their consumers. It would do us
well to remember that even by the 1960s, there were virtual elements in popular music
that go unremarked by heritage fetishists. Emerick’s facilitating of backwards guitar on
“Taxman,” the lead track on Revolver, has the effect of reversing musical time: some-
thing only virtually possible even by the fabulous! Whether we acknowledge it or not,
listeners today are caught between the virtual and material practices of musicians, pro-
ducers, and media. No one is purely “native” or “immigrant” as a listener; we all have
musical green cards.
Indeed, SoundCloud and MySpace create a fresh virtual intimacy between artists
and listeners (to add to the immediacy and occasional idiocy of stars’ Twitter feeds) as
musicians can collaborate on tracks without ever being in the same room together, and
then post music immediately to get instant reactions from fans before final produc-
tion and official release. In this way, fans enjoy a powerful dialogic function as virtual
editors and critics. Indeed, when the funding to begin recording music at all for some
artists depends on online crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, some potential music will
be silenced by popular (lack of) demand.
One area of listener creativity evidently generated by networked thought patterns
and comfort with paratextless virtual music is the amateur mashup found online.
These often mix elements of the music of bands of quite different generations, sug-
gestive of withdrawals from the Borgesian library, rather than material music acquisi-
tion. The Beatles, for instance, have been mashed up with artists as various as Guns
N’ Roses, Keisha, Snoop Dog, the Shamen, and Ministry. Details of these can all be
found at http://beatlesremixers.freeforums.org/beatles-mash-ups-remixes-podcasts-
f3.html. More transgressively, unauthorized listeners have created new virtual super-
groups, for example the Beastles http://www.djbc.net/beastles/ (the Beatles mashed
with the Beastie Boys) and the Daft Beatles http://soundcloud.com/daft-beatles/sets/
daft-beatles-greatest-hits/ (the Beatles mashed with Daft Punk). Such supplementary
efforts to the canon reactivate the dead (or virtually moribund) band much more than
“Free as a Bird,” by revealing fresh virtual potentials in apparently stable oeuvres once
trapped in read-only formats.
Dialogic interactions between virtual and material musical cultures also produce
powerful ironies in terms of musical connoisseurship. In the analog past (and even
30   Christian Lloyd

to some degree in the early digital past, that is, the world where compact discs were
the dominant platform for popular music) there was necessarily limited supply and
distribution of music. Hierarchies of musical knowledge and possession of rare or cul-
turally prestigious music were possible because rare pressings and bootlegs took time
and money to hunt down. eBay and the myriad websites where bootlegs may be down-
loaded mean that such cultural one-upmanship has dissolved as anyone can acquire
rare music in one form or another. Small, culturally coherent networks of listeners who
once exchanged, for instance, bootleg cassette live tapes of indie bands via the mail,
or who haunted record fairs, have been surpassed by worldwide uploading webs who
never meet or know of each other’s existence. Just as eBay (and other online retail sites)
has revolutionized the availability of material music and iTunes digital consumption,
so apps like WhoSampled and Shazam, which tell you what a sample or song is, erode
hierarchies of knowledge and dissolve subcultural secrecy by democratizing knowledge
to all online. There is the danger of such facilities “disembedding” music that emerges
from specific cultural formations and diluting its meaning, but they must widen access
to music history and knowledge, contrary to most assumptions about young people’s
dehistoricized and decontextualized “drive-by listening” (Ogle, quoted in The Word,
May 2012, 63). What is more, in the near future the technology behind virtual cul-
ture has the potential to reactivate older material culture. An obvious means by which
collectors could send a digital file to create a printed rare LP to friends, subcultural
cohorts, or clients would be 3D printers. In other words, virtual music delivers the
capacity to create a new analog musical object, without the elitist/monied listening
coteries of the past reforming.
Perhaps the next area of virtual music that will need attention is how current condi-
tions provoke listeners into creating virtual subjectivities using music. Currently, young
listeners tend to construct virtual musical subjectivities by posting playlists online, giv-
ing friends access to their Spotify playlists, using Stitcher linked to Facebook, and so on.
Such carefully curated versions of their musical taste function to suggest virtual iden-
tity, but more recent technological developments make such efforts look quite rudi-
mentary. According to Tom Cheshire, the culture editor of Wired magazine, a future
remedy for listeners lost in the sonic labyrinth will be the hyperpersonalization of vir-
tual music. Smartphone apps like Songza and Project Now already create playlists that
gleaned data assume will be suitable for working to or running to “using information …
such as your location, the time of day, the weather; a robo-DJ tuned to your taste … a
soon-to-launch app plays music based on your heartbeat,” extending personalization
beyond the cultural to the physiological (2013, 33). This potential to create a virtual self
that is both aesthetic and bodily can only become more complex in the future.
Perhaps the ultimate irony of virtual listening is the commonly experienced, yet
underexamined, way in which all music is virtual.12 With the overabundance of music
available free and instantly in the digital era, the percentage of the total that we can
claim to have heard grows more miniscule by the day. (In the pre-digital past, money
and availability of vinyl discs limited consumption, and the cost of studios and limita-
tions of home recording equipment meant that less was recorded to hear anyhow.) So
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   31

our basic situation vis-à-vis music, almost any music, is that we haven’t heard it. What
is more, what we have heard is unlikely to have been listened to carefully enough to be
accurately absorbed since our busy, mobile culture works against silence and periods
of contemplative listening time. Instead, we often create our own virtual music by con-
struing a song from headphone leakage on public transport, or reading reviews and
imagining what an album is like, perhaps (mis)remembering a song we heard once,
or skimming through albums on Spotify we feel we should have heard to be culturally
literate, pretending to have heard albums we did not and to have attended prestigious
concerts we did not in order to accumulate cultural capital,13 or maybe mixing up ele-
ments of different songs in our memories by mistake, and so on ad infinitum. These
would by past standards have been seen as dishonest or fallacious listening practices,
yet our “composing” of virtual music in these ways embodies a strange creativity. In
many important senses, these subjective “versions” of published music are how music
lives, how even the discontents of our musical age find meaning in our paradoxical
virtual soundscape.14

Notes
1. Burgess writes the novel, published in 1962, in Nadsat, a bespoke Anglo-Russian slang
devised to articulate the values of the teenage subculture in the narrative.
2. “Yarbles” are “testicles” in Nadsat.
3. David Bowie’s song “Suffragette City” warns “droogie don’t crash here,” a reference to
the “droogs” or members of Alex’s gang; Echo and the Bunnymen took the name of the
Korova Milk Bar for their record label; Chris Palko, aka Cage, a New York City rapper,
initially went under the stage name “Alex” in tribute (see http://chrispalko.com/index.
html; the Ramones wrote their 1984 instrumental “Durango 95” after the type of car that
Alex steals for a joyride; the German group Die Toten Hosen composed an entire 2005
album about A Clockwork Orange, called Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau or A Little Bit
Horrorshow. There are many, many comparable further examples.
4. For a photograph of the menacing Bonham dressed as a “droog,” see http://richflaherty.
com/clockwork/influence.html; a screen capture from Blur’s arch promo film for “The
Universal” is http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=blur+the+universal&FORM=HD
RSC2#view=detail&id=326A265908A89CD61D8F5B727ADFC3FAE06C2F28&selectedI
ndex=19; for stills of Rihanna’s latter-day “You Da One” video, see http://glamazonsblog.
com/2011/12/rihanna-you-da-one-video-fashion/.
5. Andrew Biswell notes the broad and enduring generative power of A Clockwork Orange
on popular music in his introduction to the Restored Edition: “Moloko, The Devotchkas
and Campag Velocet are merely the most obvious examples [of bands who draw their
names from the text]… . The drummer of the Sex Pistols claimed he had only ever read
two books: a biography of the Kray twins and A Clockwork Orange. The Rolling Stones
wrote the sleevenotes to one of their albums in Nadsat [actually, this was Andrew Loog
Oldham]” (xxviii). No one to date has appropriated “Luke Sterne” or “Goggly Gogol” as
stage names.
6. See Deleuze (2006), Massumi (2002), etc.
32   Christian Lloyd

7. Read Ian Macdonald’s superb analysis of the Rubber Soul sessions in Revolution in the Head
(143–161) for the extent to which the Beatles had U.S. soul music consciously in mind. See
especially the sections on “12-Bar Original” (157–158) and “The Word” (159–160).
8. As is well known, the Beatles were very late to iTunes, do not license their tracks to com-
pilations and rarely to advertisements, and never sully “perfection” with bonus tracks.
9. The most striking example of how the Beatles used virtuality to create a sense of psy-
chological materiality was “Free as a Bird,” in which a shaky cassette recording returns
Lennon to life and to the band through Jeff Lynne’s ingenious work. This fantastic pro-
duction was the ultimate realization of fans’ fantasies about the band reforming, but
relied on hard-nosed studio manipulation to invoke Lennon’s ghost or trace.
10. See http://www.thefieryfurnaces.com/site/2009/07/29/band-to-release-silent-record/ for
an exemplary page.
11. See Bennet, Maton, and Kervin (2008) and Helsper and Eynon (2010).
12. My analysis here is indebted to Pierre Bayard’s provocative argument in How to Talk
About Books You Haven’t Read (2007).
13. Hear LCD Soundsystem’s debut single “Losing My Edge” (2002), whose narrator claims
to have been to an impossible number of seminal gigs, rehearsals, DJ sets, etc.
14. Thank you to Laird Barrett, Tim Lloyd, Mitch Piper, Jon Stewart, Liz Hubbell, Rachael
Barreca, Peter Lowe, and Shannon Smith for their kind help as this chapter progressed.
Special gratitude is due to Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran for encouraging me to
get my thoughts on music down in the first place.

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Anonymous. 2009. “Band to Release Silent Record.” http://www.thefieryfurnaces.com/
site/2009/07/29/band-to-release-silent-record/ (accessed Mar. 20, 2013).
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis:  University of
Minnesota Press.
Bayard, Pierre. 2007. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. London: Granta.
Beatles, The. 2000. Anthology, ed. Brian Roylance. London: Cassell.
Bennet, S., K. Maton, and L. Kervin. 2008. “The ‘Digital Natives’ Debate: A Critical Review
of the Evidence.” British Journal of Educational Technology 39 (5): 775–786. http://onlineli-
brary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-8535 (accessed Jan. 7, 2014).
Burgess, Anthony. 2012. A Clockwork Orange:  The Restored Edition, ed. Andrew Biswell.
London: Heinemann.
Byrne, David. 2012. How Music Works. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows. London: Atlantic Books.
Cheshire, Tom. 2013. “Sounds of Tomorrow.” Evening Standard Magazine 1, February: 33.
Chivers, Paul, aka Ramjac. 2013. “Everything the Beatles Never Did.” http://ramjacradio.band-
camp.com/ (accessed Mar. 20, 2013).
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. “The Actual and the Virtual.” Dialogues II, ed. Eliot Ross Albert, 112–115.
London: Continuum.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx. New York and Oxon: Routledge.
———. 1997. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
 “Seventeenth Heaven”   33

Droit, Roger-Pol. 2005. How Are Things? A Philosophical Experiment. London: Faber.

Drummond, Bill. 2008. 17. London: Penkiln Burn.
———. The 17. 2013. http://the17.org/home.php (accessed Mar. 20, 2013).
Fiery Furnaces, The. 2009. “Band to Release Silent Record.” http://www.thefieryfurnaces.
com/site/2009/07/29/band-to-release-silent-record/ (accessed Mar. 20, 2013).
Forde, Eamon. 2012. “The Tyranny of Music Choice.” The Word: 60–63.
Helsper, E. J., and R. Eynon. 2010. “Digital Natives: Where Is the Evidence?” British Educational
Research Journal 36 (3): 503–520.
Macdonald, Ian. 1998. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties. London:
Pimlico.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. London: Duke University Press.
McCormick, Neil. 2012. “Tupac Hologram:  The Future of Live Music Is Dead.” The
Telegraph, Apr. 17. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopmusic/9208777/
Tupac-hologram-the-future-of-live-entertainment-is-dead.html (accessed Mar. 20, 2013).
Milner, Greg. 2009. Perfecting Sound Forever: the Story of Recorded Music. London: Granta.
Rambarran, Shara. 2013. “ ‘99 Problems’ But Danger Mouse Ain’t One: The Creative and Legal
Difficulties of Brian Burton, ‘Author’ of The Grey Album.” Popular Musicology Online 3.
Rowan, Rip. 2004. “Pump up the Volume.” Wired. http://archive.wired.com/wired/
archive/12.01/play.html?pg=2 (accessed Feb. 10, 2013).
Shields, Rob. 2003. The Virtual. London: Routledge.
Vickers, Earl. 2010. “The Loudness War:  Background, Speculation & Recommendations.”
http://turnmeup.org/ (accessed Mar. 20, 2013).

Audiovisual Material
Beatles, The. Rubber Soul. 1965. UK: EMI Records. 1267. Vinyl album.
———. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 1987. UK:  EMI Records. 7464412. Compact
disc album.
———. Yellow Submarine. 1992. UK: EMI Records. 7464452. Compact disc album.
———. Revolver. 1992. UK: EMI Records. 7464412. Compact disc album.
———. The Beatles (aka The White Album). 1993. EU:  EMI Records. 7464438. Compact
disc album.
———. “Free as a Bird.” 1995. UK: Apple Records. 724388258722. Compact disc single.
———. Anthology 2. 1996. UK: Apple Records. 724383444816. Compact disc album.
———. Let It Be … Naked. 2003. UK: EMI Records. 7464422. Compact disc album.
Blur. “The Universal.” 1995. UK: EMI Records. 724388255424. Compact disc single.
Bowie, David. 1976. “Suffragette City.” UK: RCA Victor. 2726. Vinyl single.
Cornershop. 1997. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” On When I Was Born for the 7th
Time. UK: Wiiija Records. WIJCD 1065. Compact disc album.
Cryin Shames. 1966. “Please Stay.” UK: Decca. 12340. Vinyl single.
Danger Mouse. 2004. The Grey Album. http://www.last.fm/music/Danger+Mouse/The+Grey+
Album (accessed Mar. 3, 2014).
Dylan, Bob. 1966. “4th Time Around.” On Blonde on Blonde. US: Columbia Records. CS 9316.
Vinyl album.
Hanson, Beck. 2012. Song Reader. London: Faber and Faber.
Jay Z. The Black Album. 2003. UK:  Roc-A-Fella Records. 006024 986155-6 0.  Compact
disc album.
34   Christian Lloyd

LCD Soundsystem. 2002. “Losing My Edge.” UK: Output. OPR DFA 002. Vinyl single.
Massive Attack. Blue Lines. 1991. UK: Virgin. CDV 3126. Compact disc album.
Cole, Nat King, and Natalie Cole. 2009. “Straighten up and Fly.” On Re:generations. US: Capitol.
50599920841416. Compact disc album.
OutKast. 2003. “Hey Ya.” On Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. EU:  Arista. 82876 52905 2.
Compact disc album.
Ramones, The. 1984. “Durango 95.” On Too Tough to Die. UK: Beggars Banquet. BEGA 59.
Vinyl album.
Rihanna. 2011. “You Da One.” On Talk That Talk. UK: Def Jam Recordings. 6025278787423.
Compact disc album.
Toten Hosen, Die. 1988. Ein Kleines Bisschen Horrorschau. Germany: Virgin. 077778676329.
Compact disc album.
Tricky. Maxinquaye. 1995. UK: 4th & Broadway. BRCD 610. Compact disc album.
Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse. 2010. Dark Night of the Soul. UK:  EMI. 5099964813622.
Compact disc album.
 chapter 2

“ Nothing I s  Re a l ”
The Beatles as Virtual Performers

Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

The narrative of the Beatles is one of the most familiar in popular music’s history.
It tells us that after years of limited success in the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg,
the group became the most influential and successful musical force of the 1960s; its
singles and albums were, and remain, the definitive soundtrack of the decade. Amid
unprecedented scenes of global fan hysteria, the Beatles—as performers, songwrit-
ers, and recording artists—transformed conventional understandings of the strategic
importance of popular music, and inspired generations of future musicians. However,
after some fourteen hundred stage appearances, their growing discontent with the con-
straints of live performance led them to abandon it in the summer of 1966. The deci-
sion was prompted not by the exhausting routines of touring per se, but by the negative
impact it had on their abilities as performers:

George Harrison: We got in a rut, going round the world. It was a different audi-
ence each day, but we were doing the same things. There was no satisfaction in it.
Nobody could hear. It was just a bloody big row. We got worse as musicians, playing
the same old junk every day. There was no satisfaction at all.
—Davies (1968, 232)

Evidence of the chaotic nature of those shows is visible in The Beatles at Shea Stadium,
the TV documentary filmed during the group’s historic concert in August 1965. They
run out onto the field, heavily guarded, to be faced by fifty-five thousand screaming
fans who create a nonstop din so loud it is impossible for the audience to hear the
music, or for the Beatles to hear themselves. Fans faint and swoon; some attempt to
rush the stage and are carried off by police. At one point, John Lennon looks to the
heavens and speaks in gibberish, presumably because he realizes that no one is listen-
ing; at another, he pounds the organ with his elbows, in the knowledge that whatever
36    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

sounds are produced will remain unheard. Ringo Starr’s comments on the concert
clearly regretted the lack of genuine contact between audience and performers:

What I remember most about the concert was that we were so far away from the
audience […] I like to have the audience right in my face. I like to have some reac-
tion, something going on between me and them. It was just very distant at Shea […]
it was totally against what we had started out to achieve, which was to entertain,
right there, up close.
—Beatles (2000, 187)

Following the Beatles’ final live performance, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in
August 1966, the creation of their music took place exclusively in the recording studio,
reaching its perceived summit with the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
in 1967. After the group formally disbanded in 1970, the four Beatles pursued indepen-
dent solo careers during which they returned, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to
live concert performances.
In the decades that followed, the increasing availability of substantial quantities of
previously unreleased audio recordings of the group—The Beatles Live! At the Star-Club
in Hamburg, Germany, 1962 (1977); The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl (1977); The Beatles
Live at the BBC (1994)—and video—The Complete Ed Sullivan Shows (2004); The
Beatles at the Budokan, Tokyo (2007); The Beatles at Shea Stadium (2008)—provided
a nostalgic record of its live history that was welcomed by contemporary audiences,
but that unequivocally confirmed the performing career of the Beatles as a phenom-
enon of the 1960s. Thus, in 2009, when the video game The Beatles: Rock Band was
released, it seemed as though the group had been reborn as virtual performers after
an absence of several decades. By allowing players to participate in instrumental and
vocal performances of more than forty Beatles tracks, the game established a simulated
form of interaction, in which the Beatles were reintroduced to the modern world as
co-performers:

Meet The Beatles! Rock The World! Follow the legendary career of the Beatles from
Liverpool to Shea Stadium to Abbey Road. Play drums, lead guitar, bass guitar and
sing three-part harmony with up to three microphones. Feel what it’s like to per-
form the Beatles’ classic songs, on stage and in the studio.
—Harmonix Music Systems (2009, sleevenotes)

The game was received with huge critical acclaim. The Guardian drew attention to its
aesthetic form, in which “clever montages detailing the different ages and visual identi-
ties of the band evoke a feeling of vicarious Beatles membership [. . .] the joy of play-
ing along to Beatles songs is deeply infectious” (Boxer 2009, 2). Reviews also praised
its employment of innovative technologies to present the “virtual Beatles” to diverse
audiences, many of whom were born long after opportunities to see and hear the “real
Beatles” had disappeared; the New  York Times concluded that “by reinterpreting an
 “Nothing Is Real”   37

essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another, The
Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience [. . .] that will
not only introduce the Beatles’ music to a new audience but also will simultaneously
bring millions of their less-hidebound parents into gaming” (Schiesel 2009, 1).
However, we suggest that closer inspection of the Beatles’ activities through the
1960s reveals there were numerous occasions on which the group participated in musi-
cal scenarios that were, in fact, effective simulations of the conventional performer-
audience encounter. In many ways, this may be a surprising assertion. Sarah Thornton’s
observation that “while authenticity is attributed to many different sounds, between
the mid-50s and the mid-80s, its main site was the live gig: in this period, ‘liveness’
dominated notions of authenticity … the essence or truth of music was located in its
performance by musicians in front of an audience” (1995, 26) may appear to be at odds
with our argument. However, we would suggest that even during their active career,
audiences’ perceptions of the Beatles’ movies, animated cartoons, and promotional
films were guided by their knowledge of the group as live performers: the authentic-
ity and ultimate success of the virtual Beatles thus derived from that attributed to the
performance history of their corporeal counterparts. In this sense, our argument ulti-
mately is not entirely at odds with Thornton’s, although our emphasis will be that the
career of the Beatles as virtual performers began many years before their rebirth in the
world of digital animation.
We understand the term virtual performer to refer to performers who are available
to their audiences only as mediated representations, rather than in corporeal human
form. Recent examples include the back-from-the-dead version of Tupac Shakur that
performed at Coachella 2012, the three-dimensional animated cartoon “members” of
Gorillaz, the video projection of Elvis Presley that forms the central attraction of the
Elvis Presley in Concert touring production, the inclusion of the simulated character
Aimi Eguchi within the Japanese girl band AKB48, and the virtual versions of Madonna
and the Black Eyed Peas.1 In cases where musicians perform both live and in mediated
representational spaces (such as Madonna, the Black Eyed Peas, or indeed, any musi-
cians who both make music videos and play live), their virtual versions supplement
their live presence. In cases where the musicians are deceased or have decided not to
perform live anymore, as is the case for the Beatles and Presley, their virtual versions
become surrogates rather than supplements, the only form in which the artists remain
available as performers.
Whereas the contemporary virtual versions of Tupac, Madonna, et al. are products
of the Musion Eyeliner projection system, a digital technology that creates the illusion
of live, three-dimensional presences, the Beatles could avail themselves only of analog
media in constructing virtual versions who appeared on television and cinema screens
long before they showed up via the videogame console. Of course, the rationale behind
these strategies was not new. As exemplified by the career of Bing Crosby, who used
a range of radio, film, and television appearances to supplement his concert perfor-
mances, and Elvis Presley, who made twenty-seven films between his release from the
U.S. Army in March 1960 and his return to live performance on the stage of Las Vegas’s
38    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

International Hotel in July 1969, a partial or substantial reliance on mediated represen-

tations has long been a familiar option for many musicians. However, once the Beatles
abandoned the stage forever, such representations were the only ones within reach of
their audiences and, as such, introduced new elements into the relationship between
the group and its fans.
From the mid-1960s onward, the group’s virtual surrogates included the Beatles as
cartoon characters, in the ABC-TV series The Beatles (1965–1967) and in the feature
film Yellow Submarine (1968); the Beatles performing in a series of promotional films
made to accompany their singles from “Rain” (1966) through “Something” (1970);
the Beatles as characters in their television film Magical Mystery Tour (1967); and the
Beatles as themselves in the documentary Let It Be (1970), which includes the famous
“impromptu” concert held atop the roof of Apple’s Savile Row headquarters.
By maintaining a virtual presence on such occasions, the Beatles not only could
shore up their continued popularity and offer fans means of engaging with them other
than their recordings, but were also able to maintain their status as cultural leaders
and innovators; thus Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, and the television film
of “All You Need Is Love” (1967) provide full psychedelic expression of the Beatles’
allegiance to the hippie counterculture. The various representations of the Beatles also
have a general relationship first to the dissatisfaction with live performance that caused
them to withdraw from concertizing and second to their status as global celebrities.
For example, in the animated television series made and broadcast when the Beatles
were still performing around the world, the problems caused by their nonstop touring
schedule and their inability to go unrecognized were recurrent plot ingredients within
their cartoon adventures. In later instances, such as the film for “Paperback Writer”
(1966), the Beatles are seen performing, but alone, in a darkened studio, away from the
screaming fans. Other representations, including those in The Beatles, Magical Mystery
Tour, and the promotional films for “All You Need Is Love” and “Hey Jude” (1968),
depict the Beatles enjoying the freedom to wander as they please or else maintaining an
easygoing relationship with the public, neither of which was the case. In all their guises,
the various virtual Beatles were in a position to relate to their fans as friends and col-
leagues rather than ravenous consumers, and shared a degree of liberty and mobility
that the real Beatles, as celebrities, could not.

Cartoon Representations

Both animated screen versions of the Beatles were projects developed in response to
demands that the Beatles themselves were unable or unwilling to fulfill. In 1964, during
the group’s first North American tour, Al Brodax, head of the TV and Motion Picture
Department at King Features, contacted the group’s manager, Brian Epstein, to suggest
an animated television series, based around the music and perceived personalities of
the Beatles. For Epstein, overwhelmed by rapidly spiraling demands for the Beatles to
 “Nothing Is Real”   39

perform in territories around the world, the proposal presented itself as an opportu-
nity through which mediated representations of the group might take the place of at
least some of the nationwide tours and live performances that fans expected. From
1963 to 1966, the Beatles were engaged in a demanding schedule that included some
five hundred concerts around the world, and the recording of twelve singles and seven
albums. Consequently, a significant attraction of the series was that it required no addi-
tional physical involvement by the Beatles themselves; no new songs were needed, and
their speaking voices were provided by two actors (Lance Percival and Paul Frees). In
order to present recognizable versions of the group members, Brodax reproduced and
exaggerated their individual characteristics as they had been projected in A Hard Day’s
Night (1964):

John was the one with the wry sense of humour. Ringo was more of a clown. George
was the gentleman who was also very much capable of a wry disposition too. And
Paul was the ambassador of good will for the group, and the charmer, and the one
that all the girls were running after.
—Somach and Sharp (1995, 221)

These personality sketches were reinforced by associated physical design templates

based on photographs of the group, which were the foundation of the animation guide-
lines compiled by the series director and animator, Peter Sanders:

John: the leader of the group and in control of all situations. Paul: the most poised
and stylish Beatle. George: loose-limbed and angular. Ringo: nice, gentle, but always
rather sad-looking.
—Axelrod (1999, 28)

Thirty-nine half-hour episodes of The Beatles cartoon series were subsequently pro-
duced by King Features and initially broadcast on ABC-TV in the United States over
three seasons in the autumn schedules of 1965, 1966, and 1967. Each program’s open-
ing credits are followed by two separate cartoon adventures whose stories are loosely
inspired by, and performed to, a specific Beatles track. The two cartoons are separated
by a “singalong” segment in which the lyrics of two more Beatles songs appear on
screen to accompany the relevant soundtrack, and the TV audience is encouraged to
join in—to sing with the Beatles. At this point, the viewers are directly addressed by one
or another of the cartoon Beatles. In a recapitulation of the traditional stage exchanges,
the viewers are chided that “not everyone is singing properly,” urged to “do better next
time,” and told to “get out your guitars, drums, tissue paper and combs, or anything else
you’ve got.” These sequences supply the illusion of an authentic interaction between the
Beatles and their fans through a simulated, if one-sided, conversation. In their blurring
of actuality and artifice, they also recall the prerecorded interview discs distributed to
radio stations during the group’s first visit to the United States, which allowed disc jock-
eys to interject appropriate questions to the Beatles at specified gaps in the recording,
40    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

in order to mimic the discourse of a live, face-to-face interview (Rayl and Gunther
1989, 23).
Furthermore, many of the cartoon episodes are built around the premise of casual or
unexpected personal encounters between the Beatles and their fans. On the beaches of
Hawaii, in the jungles of Africa, on the promenade deck of a cruise ship, in a hotel in
Transylvania, on the streets of London, New York, Tokyo, and Rome, the Beatles meet,
talk, flirt, advise, and play with their fans, or alternatively are pursued by them. The
very first episode, for example, featured “A Hard Day’s Night” (in which the Beatles
take refuge from a chasing crowd by retreating to a sinister castle) and “I Want to
Hold Your Hand” (in which the group’s escape from eager fans takes them below the
waves in a diving bell). Significantly, many of these adventures take place when the
Beatles are visiting or performing in countries that, in reality, they never visited: Egypt,
India, Norway. It is also interesting to note that among the songs “sung” by the group
in the series are several (“Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Penny Lane,” “Strawberry Fields
Forever”) recorded or released after the Beatles’ final live concert in 1966 and never
performed by the Beatles on stage. Like the imagined visits, their inclusion also repre-
sents not merely a simulation but an expansion of the live Beatles, in much the same
way that tribute bands such as the Bootleg Beatles and the Cavern Beatles knowingly
override the inconveniences of historical fact to pursue “a sympathetic collusion, or
suspension of disbelief, that allows audiences and performers to contribute to the fic-
tion of a Beatles concert in the 21st century” (Inglis 2006, 131).
In 1967, Epstein and the Beatles were being pressed by United Artists, the film studio
that had produced A Hard Day’s Night and Help! to honor the terms of the contract
they had signed in 1963 by making their long-awaited third movie. For their part, the
Beatles, newly retired from live performance, were reluctant to commit themselves to
the rigors of filming. Buoyed by the popularity of The Beatles series, Brodax intervened
to suggest that a full-length animated movie, produced by King Features and distrib-
uted by United Artists, might prove to be an appropriate solution. In Yellow Submarine
(directed by George Dunning), the collarless Pierre Cardin suits, mop-top hairstyles,
and cheerful good humor of The Beatles—all of which reprised the familiar, collec-
tive personae presented to the group’s fans through its numerous stage and television
appearances in the early and mid-1960s—give way to two new characterizations. When
called from the streets of Liverpool to embark on an underwater journey to the mythi-
cal world of Pepperland, the Beatles are four related, but distinct, individuals whose
visual identities are assembled from a number of contemporary sources—Victoriana,
military uniforms, floral patterns, psychedelic fashions, and assorted combinations of
beards and moustaches. Once in Pepperland, the group set out to rescue the impris-
oned Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They (and we) find that its members are
the Beatles’ Edwardian alter egos, imprisoned in time and space by the Blue Meanies,
and known to the audience not through live appearances but from the album cover of
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The movie’s closing scenes, in which the captives are released and the Blue Meanies
vanquished, are largely constructed around notional forms of interaction between the
 “Nothing Is Real”   41

Beatles and their cinema audience. During the performance of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band,” Lennon’s observation that “you’re such a lovely audience, we’d like
to take you home with us, we’d love to take you home” is emphasized in speech as well
as song. When color, motion, and life return to the monochrome world of Pepperland
during the group’s rendition of “All You Need Is Love,” the lyrics are on screen (in the
style of the singalong sessions in The Beatles). When the Beatles themselves appear in a
brief filmed sequence at the end of the movie, they address the audience directly, saying
that “there’s only one way to go out—singing!” before the lyrics of “All Together Now”
(in a multitude of languages) appear alongside the track itself. When released in 1968,
the film gave audiences a belated opportunity to engage directly—if incompletely—with
the Beatles, whose last live performance had taken place two years earlier. And in its
implicit sentimentality and explicit optimism, it also employed at least some of the sty-
listic nuances that had defined the relationship between the group and its fans:

For all its drug-induced imagery, it presented the public with the cosy, safe and
affable Beatles they knew and loved […] As The Daily Telegraph nostalgically pro-
claimed, “the Beatles’ spirit is here, if not the flesh.”
—Neaverson (1997, 95)

Promotional Films
for Television (1966–1968)

The Ed Sullivan Show2 on the CBS network played a crucial role in promoting the
Beatles in the United States. Although they had their first number-one single in Britain
with “Please Please Me” in February 1963, and achieved enormous domestic stardom
by the middle of that year, they had yet to make a significant impact across the Atlantic.
Capitol Records, the Beatles’ American label, had been reluctant to release their mate-
rial despite their success in the UK (Spitz 2005: 439–444). Finally, in late December
1963, Capitol released “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” backed—significantly—by a strong
promotional campaign. Capitol Records is said to have invested between $40,000 and
$100,000 in this campaign, the centerpiece of which was a special “Beatles Issue” of the
National Record News, a four-page tabloid that was widely distributed to record retail-
ers and fans alike to establish the major themes and tone of the Beatles’ introduction to
the American market (Frontani 2007, 23–30).
At the beginning of February 1964, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reached the number-
one position on the U.S. charts. Although Americans had now heard the Beatles, they
had had very few opportunities to see the group, who had not yet visited the United
States. Sullivan had noted the group’s remarkable public impact on a trip to the UK in
October, and booked them on his weekly television variety show, broadcast live from
New York City. Epstein famously obtained star billing for the group in exchange for
42    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

a reduced appearance fee, and the Beatles appeared on the show for the first time on
February 9, 1964. To say that this performance was historic would be a gross under-
statement: seventy-three million people tuned in, and the Beatles’ American career was
decisively launched (Sercombe 2006, Frontani 2007). They appeared twice more on
the program before leaving the United States (once live from the Deauville Hotel in
Florida, and once in a clip filmed at the time of their first appearance), and performed
live on the show again in September 1965.
The Beatles’ final contribution to The Ed Sullivan Show was in June 1966, when they
performed two songs, “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” on film. The clips had been
shot the previous month and were intended to publicize the group’s new single in the
U.S. market. The Beatles also appeared in an introductory sequence, filmed separately,
in which they apologized for their absence and introduced the clips to Sullivan’s studio
audience. This audience enthusiastically applauded the Beatles as if they had been there
in person, thus creating the illusion of their presence for viewers watching at home,
and simultaneously reinforcing the conviction that the filmed Beatles were surrogates
for the real ones who had appeared on the same program so successfully in the past.
Interestingly, David Frost would use an intentionally deceptive version of this gambit
on his UK program Frost on Sunday in 1968 when introducing the Beatles’ film clip of
“Hey Jude”:

To fake the illusion that the Beatles were appearing exclusively on his programme,
live in the LWT (London Weekend Television) studio, David Frost came to
Twickenham this afternoon and was taped on the “Hey Jude” set introducing the
Beatles. First they scooted through a version of Frost’s long-established theme music
(composed by George Martin and titled “By George! It’s The David Frost Theme”)
and then Frost spoke into the camera, as only he can, saying “Magnificent! A perfect
rendition! Ladies and gentlemen, there you see the greatest tea-room orchestra in
the world. It’s my pleasure to introduce now, in their first live appearance for good-
ness knows how long in front of an audience, the Beatles.” There was, of course, no
audience.
—Lewisohn (1992, 297)

The deceptiveness of Frost’s claim notwithstanding, the episode shows how the Beatles’
filmed television performances were framed, quite deliberately, as substitutes for live
appearances. In addition, the simulation was so convincing that many viewers and crit-
ics wrongly believed that the group had indeed given a genuinely live performance to
the studio audience; Disc & Music Echo reported at the time that Frost had “managed
to get the Beatles and Mary Hopkin to appear on his TV show” (Sandercombe 2007,
244), and in his historical review of the Beatles’ records, published in 1989, Dowlding
states that “the song was performed live on David Frost’s British TV show in September
1968” (205).
It is significant that the clips for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” were shown on
U.S. television about three weeks before the Beatles embarked on their final concert
 “Nothing Is Real”   43

tour of Germany, Japan, and North America in the summer of 1966. As suggested ear-
lier, these television performances and their setting could not have been more different
from the chaotic and hysterical circumstances that surrounded them on those tours.
The clip for “Paperback Writer,” directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was shot at Abbey
Road studios, and shows the Beatles neither as crowd-pleasing showmen nor as the
objects of crazed idolatry, but as working musicians. They perform sitting down, in a
darkened and otherwise quiet studio, reflecting their current attitude to music making:

Though the Beatles had toyed with the concept of moving away from live perfor-
mance ever since they had first entered a recording studio three years earlier, the
group now began creating music to be heard only on record rather than in perfor-
mance. “Coming into the studio was a refuge for them,” said George Martin, and
the group began staying past midnight working on their records. “It was a time and
place when nobody could get at them.”
—Stark (2005, 181)

Although they would continue their established practice of dressing identically when
playing live (different outfits were designed for each tour; those for the 1966 tours fea-
tured elegant, wide-lapelled black jackets and high-collared white shirts), here they are
more individual in their dress. McCartney and Lennon are in shirtsleeves, Harrison
and Starr wear jackets, but not the same jacket. The Beatles seem to be relaxed and to
enjoy each other’s company: jokily, they are all wearing sunglasses in a dark room. In
short, the virtual Beatles represented in this film were able to construct and control the
circumstances of their performances and the terms under which they were presented
to an audience in ways that their corporeal counterparts could not, and the contrast
is striking:  quietude, privacy, and intimacy replace the noise, exposure, and need to
maintain distance from their hordes of fans that characterized the Beatles’ onstage life.
In fact, McCartney had (somewhat surprisingly) signaled the group’s preference for
the recording studio as early as 1963: on the first of the Beatles Christmas flexi-discs,
distributed free to fan club members from 1963 to 1969, he revealed:

We like doing stage shows because it’s great to hear an audience enjoying them-
selves. But the thing we like best is going into the recording studio to make new
records […] what we like to hear most is one of our songs taking shape in a record-
ing studio, and then listening to the tapes afterwards to hear how it all worked out.
—Flexi LYN492

The live broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” in June 1967 again presents the Beatles as
being in command of the context in which they performed to a much greater extent
than was possible on public stages. This performance may be unique in the annals
of rock music; not only was it part of Our World, a live global television broadcast
achieved through satellite hookups and, according to BBC publicity, “linking five con-
tinents and bringing man face to face with mankind, in places as far apart as Canberra
44    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

and Cape Kennedy, Moscow and Montreal, Samarkand and Soderfors, Takamatsu and
Tunis” (Lewisohn 1992, 259), but it was also the recording session at which the song was
recorded. Although certain tracks were recorded ahead of time, and some judicious
editing and overdubbing added later, the bulk of the track was actually recorded during
the broadcast (Everett 1999). The six-minute segment, directed by Derek Burrell-Davis,
maintains the studio setting used for “Paperback Writer”; it again shows the Beatles at
work, playing in a direct, professional manner, and depicts a scenario in which the cre-
ation of music is the central activity. In keeping with the countercultural mood of 1967,
the group also indulged in a healthy dose of psychedelic spectacle for its performance
of “All You Need Is Love.” The Beatles are not dressed identically, but they all wear
colorful, loose-fitting satin and brocaded jackets designed by the Dutch collective the
Fool (whose merchandise the Beatles would begin showcasing in their Apple Boutique
later that year). The studio is suffused with banks of flowers and balloons; McCartney
even has a red flower tucked behind his left ear. During the song’s long coda, figures
wearing sandwich boards displaying the words for “love” in many languages appear,
walking around the crowded space in a parade that is greeted by a fall of artificial snow.
All of this reflects the Beatles’ embrace of, and role in, the hippie counterculture of “the
Summer of Love.”3 In addition, a crucial aspect of the performance is that they are positioned
in the middle of a crowd, with spectators seated next to them and behind them. Children
and adults, friends and spouses of the Beatles, including Jane Asher, Eric Clapton, Beatles
biographer Hunter Davies, Marianne Faithfull, Pattie Harrison, Mick Jagger, Gary Leeds of
the Walker Brothers, Keith Moon, Graham Nash and his wife, Keith Richard, and members
of the production crew, are all in close proximity to the Beatles as they play and record, and
all are invited to clap and sing along. It is as if the Beatles are seeking to recreate the easy
intimacy they experienced in the Cavern at the start of their career, and to enjoy the sense
of being part of the audience, of playing for people they knew and with whom they could
be comfortable. Although the image of participation created was also fully in tune with the
communitarian ethos of the psychedelic underground, it was nevertheless a simulation of
community that implicitly included the untold millions watching the global broadcast, and
that would have been impossible for the Beatles to have experienced outside the highly con-
trolled conditions of a recording studio.
The television performance of “Hey Jude” (also directed by Lindsay-Hogg) that pre-
miered on Frost on Sunday recapitulates the image of the Beatles performing in the
midst of a supportive crowd. The clip begins with a very tight shot of McCartney’s
face as he sings at the piano, and most of the shots in its first half are close-ups of
individual Beatles or medium shots that show them interacting pleasurably with one
another as they play and sing. As in all of the television performances discussed here,
the suggestion is that we are eavesdropping on the group at work. Midway through
the clip, however, as the song’s verses yield to the long, repeated chorus that makes
up its second half, the camera pulls back abruptly to reveal that the Beatles are sur-
rounded by a crowd of around three hundred mostly young people, positioned even
closer to the musicians than in “All You Need Is Love,” and singing and clapping along.
As Stark notes, “The Beatles’ video of ‘Hey Jude’—with the group singing the endless
 “Nothing Is Real”   45

coda surrounded by dozens of ordinary people—once again highlighted the collective

nature of the counterculture they still purported to lead” (Stark 2005, 249). Even more
than the group’s contribution to Our World, the clip creates the impression that not
only are the Beatles very comfortable in their intimate relationship with the audience,
but also the people around them are truly collaborating with them in singing the song.
As the chorus goes on and the crowd swarms around the Beatles, distinctions between
musicians and audience become less and less clear. The Beatles have effectively reestab-
lished the proximity with their audience they had lost in years of playing at stadiums
and other large venues, and seem to be in their element.
These filmed performances suggest that despite their ultimate rejection of touring and
concertizing the Beatles never lost interest in performing for the public. However, they
had to find ways of doing so that were tenable in the wake of Beatlemania. The creation of
virtual Beatles who performed only on television and could have a close and communal
relationship with the audience in the safe and controlled space of the studio, a relationship
that was no longer available to the “real” Beatles in the “real” world, offered a solution.

Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be

The Beatles’ film career began with two movies in which they were required to play fic-
tional variations of their true selves. Although distinguished by, respectively, an unusu-
ally inventive screenplay, and a distinguished cast, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! fell
within the conventional parameters of popular music movies:  faced with a series of
comic obstacles, the stars manage to overcome them, while finding time for a number
of musical interludes. Yellow Submarine, as discussed earlier, substituted animated ver-
sions of the same Beatles across a range of fantastic locations. However, the group’s two
other movies represented considerable departures, in form and content, from this pre-
ferred pattern. In different ways, both gave their audiences opportunities to accompany
the Beatles rather than simply watch them: first, as fellow passengers on a surreal coach
journey, and second, as invited guests in the intimate confines of the recording studio.
In the wake of Epstein’s death in August 1967, the Beatles accepted McCartney’s idea,
mooted several months earlier, that they should write, produce, and direct their own
movie. The semi-improvised Magical Mystery Tour built on the idea of a Sunday chara-
banc (bus) outing—a familiar event in British working-class communities through the
1950s and 1960s, before the era of mass car ownership. The film and its music open with
a clear invitation to join the Beatles on their adventure:

Roll up! Roll up! Roll up for the mystery tour!

Roll up—and that’s an invitation
Roll up—to make a reservation.
The magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away!
—John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Magical Mystery Tour”
46    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

From that point on, the premise of the entire Magical Mystery Tour project remains
focused on the audience’s sense of involvement and participation alongside the Beatles.
In the twenty-four-page book containing the two-disc EP released to tie in with the
film, the invitation is repeated:

AWAY IN THE SKY, beyond the clouds, live four or five

Magicians […] If you let yourself go, the Magicians will
take you away to marvellous places. Maybe YOU’VE been
on a MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR without even realising it.
Are you ready to go? SPLENDID!
—Magical Mystery Tour, Parlophone MMT-1

This simulation of interpersonal dialogue continues in the book’s strip cartoon, which
asks readers “Have you EVER seen so many people IN ALL YOUR LIFE?” and declares
“I won’t tell you the MARVELLOUS and AMAZING things which happen in the tent,
BUT I WILL TELL YOU IT IS MAGIC!”
The coach takes the Beatles, their fellow passengers (who included some of the group’s
friends and a number of fan-club members), and the viewers to a series of venues and
activities: an army recruiting office, a sports day at a disused aerodrome, a strip club, a ball-
room. The scene in the strip club is especially distinctive for its presentation of the Beatles
not as performers but as spectators: Lennon and Harrison are in the front row to watch
stripper Jan Carson’s act to the accompaniment of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s per-
formance of “Death Cab for Cutie.” Apart from mimicking an episode in the Beatles’ own
career when they were backing musicians in a strip club in Liverpool’s Upper Parliament
Street (Smith 1963, 10), the scene presents an alternative perception of the Beatles by
removing them from their normal position as onstage musicians, and relocating them as
audience members who watch and listen to the entertainment in the company of others.
Throughout the film’s fifty-five minutes, there are repeated and direct conversations
with the audience: while selling tickets to Ringo Starr, Lennon’s voiceover promises
viewers “the trip of a lifetime”; when describing the magicians’ home, he urges the
audience to “come with us now”; at the end of the film, he reminds us “that was the
Magical Mystery Tour. I told you. Goodbye.” And in its re-creation of the traditional
passenger singalong that always brought such coach tours to an end, the enthusiastic
communal singing of immediately recognizable songs like “Toot Toot Tootsie,” “The
Happy Wanderer,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and “When the Red Red Robin”
offers audience members the chance to add their voices to those of the Beatles in a
nostalgic finale.
In A Hard Day’s Night, Help! and Yellow Submarine, the Beatles appear as themselves
and are therefore, to an extent, differentiated from the audience. In Magical Mystery Tour,
there are no references to their status as Beatles, and of the six new songs in the film, only
two are performed diegetically: “I Am the Walrus” by the group, “Blue Jay Way” by George
Harrison alone. Instead of seeing them merely as musicians, the audience is also intro-
duced to them as coach passengers and wizards. As a result, “the viewer’s perception of
 “Nothing Is Real”   47

the group is constantly blurred by a series of dramatic and non-dramatic paradoxes which
partially obscure any single and coherent image of the Beatles as a pop group” (Neaverson
1997, 68). Given the lack of a clearly defined boundary between “us” and “them,” it thus
becomes plausible to enjoy the simulated interactions offered to the audience as it boards
the coach with the Beatles, for what was accurately described in the New Musical Express
as “ a journey into a fantasy land where anything happens” (Drummond 1968, 3).
The Beatles’ last film was the documentary Let It Be (1970), which reinscribed the
performer-audience distinction challenged in the television films for “All You Need Is Love”
and “Hey Jude,” and erased in Magical Mystery Tour, while furthering a sense of intimacy
with the Beatles. This time, however, the effect of intimacy is created through the way the
film affords the viewer a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the Beatles as working musicians.
The group agreed to be filmed because United Artists felt that the brief appearance in the
postscript to Yellow Submarine was not sufficient to meet its contractual obligation. Footage
was shot in January 1969 on a sound stage at Twickenham Film Studios rather than in
the authentic studio environment the Beatles found comfortable, and showed the group
embroiled in the personal conflicts that would lead to its dissolution within a year.
It is interesting to compare the movie with the other notable studio documentary
of the era, One Plus One (also known as Sympathy for the Devil), the film Jean-Luc
Godard made with the Rolling Stones in 1968. Although shooting of the Beatles film
(directed, like several of its short promos, by Michael Lindsay-Hogg) began just two
months after the release of One Plus One, the contrast in mood and momentum could
not be greater. Stephen Glynn describes the Stones’ film as “the record of a rebirth,
a successful reversion to origins in a burst of creative energy” but characterizes the
Beatles’ film as “an unsettling and sad cinema-vérité chronicle of the decline and dis-
integration of a musical collective” (2013, 147–148). Whereas the recording studio had
previously figured in the Beatles’ television films as a safe, calm space in which they
could make music untrammeled and relate to their audience on their own terms, the
simulated studio in Let It Be is a site of conflict and unrest. One ill-tempered exchange
between McCartney and Harrison over the latter’s guitar playing aptly typifies the
hostility within the group:

mccartney:  I always hear myself annoying you. Look, I’m not trying to get you.
I’m just saying, “Look, lads: the band. Shall we do it like this?”
harrison:  Look, I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all, if
you don’t want me to play. Whatever it takes to please you, I’ll do it.
—Sounes (2010, 237)

Arguably, however, the Beatles’ fractious behavior only intensifies the feeling of inti-
macy in the film. We may be seeing the Beatles at their worst, but we are still seeing the
Beatles—and in a closer, more revealing light than ever before:

For the first time on film, such unvarnished moments unveiled the Beatles’ genu-
inely human personalities, albeit after years of interpersonal strain. As Lennon later
48    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

recalled, the release of Let It Be “would break the Beatles, you know, it would break
the myth. That’s us, with no trousers on and no glossy paint over the cover, and no
sort of hope. This is what we are like with our trousers off, so would you please end
the game now?”
—Womack and Davis (2006, 107)

In effect, the audience is encouraged to eavesdrop on the Beatles at work with a “voy-
eurism which is a fascinating, if at times painful, experience [.  .  .] one finds one-
self squirming with a sense of guilty embarrassment as the Beatles expose the open
wounds of their relationships for public consumption” (Neaverson 1997, 111–112). The
film’s intended objectives were to reduce on screen the distance between musicians
and audiences in a way that would have been impossible in the physical world, and to
provide audiences with insights into the recording and performing process not acces-
sible through conventional record consumption or concert attendance. However, by
the time of the movie’s release in May 1970, the Beatles had announced that their career
as a group had ended. The status of Let It Be thus immediately changed from an addi-
tional vehicle among many through which audiences might experience the Beatles to
the final opportunity to experience them in any form.
Let It Be famously ends with the Beatles performing on the rooftop of their Savile
Row offices in what would be their last public performance. The Beatles at the start of
1969 were tentatively contemplating a return to live appearances, and there was a plan
that the film should end with a concert of the new material on which they were seen
to be working. However, a lack of agreement within the group about the logistics of an
actual performance could not be resolved, which led to a fairly spontaneous decision
to simply perform unannounced on the roof. This lack of publicity guaranteed that the
Beatles’ first live appearance in two-and-a-half years would not generate the level of
excitement that would undoubtedly have greeted a normal concert. Indeed, as shown
in the film, the people in the street below either paused to listen silently and respect-
fully, or simply moved on.
At first blush, it may seem that this event should be understood as a concert by the
Beatles rather than a chapter in the story of the virtual Beatles. However, the rooftop
performance represents another solution to the perennial problem the Beatles con-
fronted through the 1960s: how to perform for the public without enduring the difficult
and unsatisfactory conditions of live performance they experienced under Beatlemania.
Furthermore, the rooftop performance was not a concert—at least not in the usual
sense—as it did not have, and was not intended for, a concert audience. Although it is
true that those who happened to be on Savile Row at the time were privileged to wit-
ness the final live performance by the greatest rock band of the 1960s, it is equally true
that the Beatles were not performing for them. Lindsay-Hogg explains: “You were at a
Beatles concert with nobody up there except yourself. And probably because they didn’t
have the burden of an audience, they really did play for each other” (Doggett 2011, 64).
The group’s press officer, Derek Taylor, makes a similar point: “It was not insignificant
that they chose a rooftop, their own private rooftop, out of reach and for the most part
 “Nothing Is Real”   49

out of view, to do their last show together” (Doggett 2011, 64). In this sense, the Beatles
were only nominally performing in public. Even though the rooftop was technically a
public space, they were unable to see the passersby below and were not performing for
them. As McCartney put it, “We were playing virtually to nothing—to the sky, which
was quite nice” (Beatles 2000, 321).
Although the rooftop setting saw the Beatles playing in public once again, it enabled
them to do so under conditions that replicated those of the television films, particularly
“Paperback Writer,” or others in which they are seen simply playing together, such as
“Revolution” (1968). In all of these cases, the primary audience for the Beatles’ perfor-
mances was the Beatles themselves. The television or film viewer enjoys a privileged
glimpse into their private act of music making in a setting that permits the Beatles
to focus on their playing and on each other, and the viewer to focus on their music
and performance. As Derek Taylor implies in the quotation reproduced earlier, this
required the maintenance of a safe distance between the Beatles and their audience, a
distance often achieved, as discussed, by the creation and deployment of virtual sur-
rogates to perform in their places. To the extent that the Beatles did on this occasion
technically perform in public—in the flesh—the rooftop concert is distinctive. Their
intended (and principal) audience was not the crowd of unseen passersby on the pave-
ments of Savile Row, but those who would experience their performance later on the
movie screen, as a performance by the virtual Beatles.

Conclusion

The relationship between the Beatles and their audiences provides, in surprisingly
obvious ways, a concise distillation of their career. From the small but loyal followings
they established in the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg, through the ecstatic theater
audiences of the British package-tour concert circuit, to the beginnings of “stadium
rock” signaled by their appearance at Shea Stadium in 1965, and their eventual with-
drawal from all live appearances, the conditions and contexts in which the group and
its fans encountered each other charted the development of popular music itself in the
1960s.4 After the group had ceased touring, Harrison admitted:

We probably loved The Cavern best of anything. We never lost our identification
with the audience all the time. We were playing to our own fans who were just like
us […] It was just spontaneous. Everything just happened.
—Davies (1968, 108)

But as the Beatles rapidly outgrew the local venues of Merseyside to embrace the new
routines of financially lucrative but musically unfulfilling national and international
tours, their sense of identification with an audience disappeared. Spontaneity gave way
to calculation, closeness gave way to separation. As the physical dimensions of their
50    Philip Auslander and Ian Inglis

performances changed almost beyond recognition, new ways had to be found to sat-
isfy the ever-increasing demands for more and more concert appearances around the
world. Initially, the alternative modes of presentation they found were logical and prag-
matic additions to their conventional performances, but over time—particularly after
their live career ended—they became substitutions rather than supplements.
Although the terminology of the “virtual performer” had not yet entered the musical
vocabulary of the 1960s, how the Beatles sought to manipulate their status as perform-
ers was an effective prototype of strategies adopted by many others during and after the
digital revolution. The introduction of The Beatles: Rock Band may seem to presage a
new era in the group’s career, but we have argued that important elements of the group’s
current “virtual” status were grounded in their employment of pre-digital practices.
The technologies with which virtuality is conventionally associated are certainly new;
but the intent with which the group’s virtual presence was pursued and interpreted has
been a distinctive component of the mutual awareness of the Beatles and their audi-
ences for several decades.

Notes
1. A holographic version of Madonna made a guest appearance with Gorillaz at the 2006
Grammy Awards ceremony. The virtual Madonna interacted with the band members,
who appeared as three-dimensional cartoons. Holograms of two members of the Black
Eyed Peas, Fergie and Taboo, appeared in holographic form at the NRJT Music Festival
in 2011. The two figures danced and sang but, at the end of the performance, suddenly
pixilated and fell to the ground in the form of a cascade of small cubes.
2. The Ed Sullivan Show was a television variety show that ran on the Columbia Broadcasting
System from 1948 to 1971. Sullivan presented a wide variety of acts that included vaudevil-
lians and acrobats, stand-up comics, and all manner of musicians, including the popular
artists of the day. Sullivan has long been credited with playing a significant role in intro-
ducing the Beatles to the United States by booking them on his program. Besides the
Beatles, the rock artists who appeared on the program included Elvis Presley, the Rolling
Stones, and the Doors. In the latter two cases, the program’s producers asked the artists
to change lyrics they felt referred either to sex or to drug use. The Stones complied; the
Doors did not.
3. The Summer of Love was an idea promulgated by leaders of the growing hippie com-
munity in San Francisco to ward off the potential problems surrounding the influx of
young people into the city that began at the start of 1967. The inaugural event was the
Human Be-In staged in Golden Gate Park on January 14. Attended by thirty thousand
participants, it showed that the hippies had coalesced into a self-conscious and definable
community. Faced with the prospect of fifty thousand young people flocking to the Bay
Area during the summer (it turned out to be closer to a hundred thousand), community
leaders sought to create a spirit of peaceful cooperation.
4. Although the Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium is often cited as a predecessor to Arena
Rock, a phenomenon associated with the 1970s, it was not the first instance of a rock
concert staged at a sports venue. The event often nominated as the first rock concert, disc
 “Nothing Is Real”   51

jockey Alan Freed’s Moondog Coronation Ball, took place at the Cleveland Arena in 1952,
and Bill Haley and the Comets, along with LaVern Baker, performed at the Sports Arena
in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 1956. The Beatles themselves played at the Washington
Coliseum in Washington, DC, during their first trip to the United States in 1964.

References
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Boxer, Steve. 2009. “The Beatles Rock Band.” The Guardian (Technology Guardian) 10: 2.
Davies, Hunter. 1968. The Beatles. London: Heinemann.
Doggett, Peter. 2011. You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup. New York:
HarperCollins.
Dowlding, William J. 1989. Beatlesongs. New York: Fireside.
Drummond, Norrie. 1968. “I Still Say Beatles Tour Was Entertaining.” New Musical Express 6: 3.
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Frontani, Michael R. 2007. The Beatles:  Image and the Media. Jackson:  University of
Mississippi Press.
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Doubleday.
Sandercombe, W. Fraser. 2007. The Beatles Press Reports. Burlington, Ontario: Collectors Guide.
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 chapter 3

Tom, Jerry, a nd t h e
Virtual V i rt u o s o

Sheila Whiteley

Johann Mouse, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s seventy-fifth one-reel cel-animated

cartoon, is set in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and home
of composer Johann Strauss, famous for his waltzes and polkas. Starring Tom as
Strauss’s cat and Jerry as the dancing Johann Mouse, it was released on March 21,
1953, and won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject Cartoon.
It was the cat-and-mouse series’s seventh and final award in ten years.1 Directed by
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and produced by Fred Quimby, the animation
created a virtual experience of the narrative world inhabited by Johann, whose
ecstatic waltzing is triggered when Strauss plays the piano, and Tom, who would try
but fail to catch him. Spurred into learning the piano when the composer goes away
on a journey, Tom teaches himself to play using the Johann Strauss primer “How to
Play the Waltz in Six Easy Lessons,” which consists of playing the first nine notes
of The Blue Danube. Retreating to the attic, Tom turns the pages, picking out the
notes on the piano, ending with full-bodied accompanying chords before returning
downstairs, seating himself at Strauss’s grand piano and breaking into a virtuoso
performance. Johann, hypnotized by the sounds of the waltz, starts to dance, the
chase resumes, and the viewer is transported into the virtual world of nineteenth-
century Vienna.
My chapter explores how the chase, the music, the quasi-Austro-Hungarian set-
ting, and the characterization provide access to the virtual world of Johann Mouse.
Although the cartoon was produced by MGM, my analysis is informed by Disney’s
“Twelve Principles of Animation,”2 which he authored in the early 1930s and which was
to become the foundation for hand-drawn character animation.3 I end with a discus-
sion on how and why Johann Mouse can be considered an early example of pre-digital
simulation.
 Tom, Jerry, and the Virtual Virtuoso    53

The Twelve Principles of Animation

The Chase
The chase is a classic trope in the animation genre, with the Tom and Jerry cartoons
being among the most famous pioneers.4 As an award-winning series, Tom and Jerry
left audiences well-acquainted with Jerry’s ability to both fool and escape from Tom,
whose principal motivation is to catch the mouse through whatever means are avail-
able to him. Prior knowledge of their exploits allows the audience to anticipate and
construct a coherent picture of the chase and its outcome regardless of its geographical
and historical location,5 and even though the majority of the Tom and Jerry cartoons
take place inside a typical suburban American home, the formula can be successfully
applied to different scenarios. As cultural archetypes (Tom the villain, Jerry the elusive
prey) they embody and “are pre-packaged with certain assumptions … as perform-
ers, they’ve already taken a step toward a shade of virtuality that humanity is familiar
with and accepting of ” (Conner, 4). It is also evident that although cartoons usually
take place with musical accompaniment, the music in Johann Mouse has a more direct
engagement with the action by motivating the cause and effect of the chase as Tom
attempts to ensnare Jerry through his pianistic skills. In essence, music becomes the
thematic and activating hub of the cartoon, and the viewer’s experience of the cartoon
is syncretic. It depends not simply on the visual track or the audio track, but rather on
the combination of the two, as will be discussed further in the section “Tom, Jakob
Gimpel, and the music of Johann Strauss II.”
Disney’s first five principles of animation are especially relevant to the realization
of the chase: “Squash and stretch is used to exaggerate the amount of non-rigid body
deformations, usually with the purpose of achieving a comedic effect” (Ghani and
Ishak 2012, 165). It was considered the most important element in animation, not least
in animating dialogue and facial expressions.
The recurring theme of chase (and crash) is introduced early into the cartoon.6
Presaged by a medley of Strauss waltzes, credits, and the leather-bound storybook
of Johann Mouse, which opens onto fairytalelike drawings of the cityscape, the audi-
ence is told, “This is the story of a waltzing mouse. His name is Johann and he lived
in Vienna at the home of Johann Strauss.” As the story book page turns, storytelling
moves into animation and the virtual world inhabited by the protagonists, Tom Cat
and Johann Mouse, so suggesting a blatant signal of entry into the virtual from the
material culture associated with the book. The composer is seen through the open
window, seated at the piano, his fingers synchronized with the movement of the
waltz medley with its shifts in tempo and dynamics. Johann emerges from his mouse
hole in the wall and dances, first alone, then with the curtain tassel as his imaginary
partner, each movement carefully synchronized with the 3/4 rhythm. Meanwhile,
54   Sheila Whiteley

Tom is glimpsed hiding behind a wall, watching Johann dance and anticipating the
moment of chase and pounce. As the narrator informs us, “Every day he would try
to catch him and he would fail.” The initial pursuit ends with Tom’s face squashed
against the wall over the mouse hole, his body suspended and his paws stretched
and overlapping so suggesting a momentary lapse in consciousness. A  cut to the
bathroom shows him bathing the red lump on his head before a second foiled chase.
This time Tom ends up on his head, sprawled against the wall, his body flattened,
his back legs elongated and stretched out, only to resume the chase the next day, this
time bouncing back from the wall, his body squashed and his face flattened into a
dishlike oval, before the last attempt, where he is seen sliding down the banisters
and crashing through the window onto the street below. The overall effect of the
chase sequence is suggestive of Tom’s body having both weight and volume, while
the animating mechanics of the action are exaggerated to comedic effect through
squash-and-stretch techniques as the motion of the chase comes to a sudden halt
and his body crashes into the wall or window.
These initial sequences also underpin the second principle, “Anticipation,” which
“helps to guide the audience’s eyes to where the action is about to occur” (Ghani and
Ishak 2012, 171). The framing of Tom’s body prior to the initial chase sequence, for
example, is a well-observed animation of a predatory cat on the prowl, poised ready
to chase his victim, pounce, and kill. At the same time, there is a suggestion that Tom
both hears the waltz and knows about its effect on his prey. Peeping around the corner
of the wall, the front of his body is flattened while his back feet move to the rhythm
of the waltz, his rear end rotating from side to side in time to the music, while his
twitching tail signals the chase. The music contributes to this sense of anticipation,
as Strauss plays the modulatory chords (da-da-dum, da-da-dum) that lead into the
next section of the waltz and Tom’s head first comes into view. The third principle
concerns “Staging or mise-en-scène,” which communicates to the audience the mood
and attitude of the characters as they relate to the story line. As discussed in anticipa-
tion, the staging of Tom’s predatory position, the chase, and the squash and stretch of
his body as he crashes into the wall, together with the narrator’s promise that he will
“try and try again,” work to reveal and confirm the prevailing theme of the Tom and
Jerry cartoons. The setting may be Vienna, but the cause and effect of the chase is just
another variation on the cartoon’s defining theme. In common with earlier Tom and
Jerry cartoons, there is “a chain reaction of actions-reactions” that allows the audience
to see and anticipate what is happening in the story, and “the background design is
simplified to ensure that it doesn’t obscure or compete with the animation” (Ghani
and Ishak 2012, 171).
Attention is then drawn to the fourth principle, “Straight Ahead,” which starts at
the first drawing and works drawing-to-drawing through the sequence, as in the
depiction of Strauss’s fingers as he plays the piano, and “Pose to Pose,” where the ani-
mator draws the first and last poses of the action (the key drawings) and then draws
the in-between frames, as in, for example, Tom’s fast sprint as he moves into the chase
and crashes into the wall. The fifth principle, “Follow-through and Overlapping
 Tom, Jerry, and the Virtual Virtuoso    55

Action,”7 provides subtlety and detail, for example, when Tom’s body impacts with
the wall and the rest of his body (his arms, legs, tail) follows the path of the action
and slowly subsides to the floor. Overlapping action can be seen when he changes
direction, swerving, flattening out, his tail and feet pointing upward, his body flat-
tened and ready to slide into Johann. Follow-through also reveals how the character,
Tom, feels, his changing expressions, as when “the master went away on a journey.
This left the cat in a serious predicament. He knew that if there were no music, the
mouse wouldn’t waltz.”

Tom, Jakob Gimpel, and the Music of Johann Strauss II

As a cartoon character, it is obvious that Tom cannot, in reality, play the piano and
must therefore be thought of, in some way, as virtually performing the Strauss waltzes
and polkas. At the same time, his piano playing is an indication he is playing diegeti-
cally,8 that is, from a sound source within the narrative world that he and Johann
Mouse inhabit. The synchronizing of the virtual performance with the ghosted play-
ing of Viennese concert pianist Jakob Gimpel9 is thus crucial to the believability of
Tom’s bravura performances and how the tempo, dynamics, harmonic movement, and
stylistic idiosyncrasies of the music are matched by the cuts, and his mimetic musi-
cal piano playing. It would seem, then, that Tom is actually playing and hearing the
music on screen (i.e., it is not the nondiegetic underscore to the cartoon that occurs
when the story first opens). This is also true for Johann, of course, and later, Strauss’s
household servants, and the emperor and his court when the cat and mouse perform
at the palace.
Johann Mouse was not Gimpel’s first ghosting. In 1946, he was Bugs Bunny’s invis-
ible partner when he “played” Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, but the film
credits for Rhapsody Rabbit did not include his name. “This was at his own request,”
his son, Peter Gimpel, explained, “because at that early stage of his American career,
he did not wish to become known as ‘the guy who played the piano for Bugs Bunny.’
However, Johann Mouse correctly credits Jakob Gimpel as the pianist and composer
of the musical arrangements.”10 He also observes that his father would have played
through the music once or twice “and then executed the comically distorted passages
at the direction of the musical director.” He adds (quoted in Aschinger 2011),

Jakob Gimpel was a phenomenal improviser, and his arrangement for Johann Mouse
faithfully reflects his improvisational style. My father would have improvised freely
on the various themes, and then written down his favourite ideas. It would not
have taken him more than a couple of hours. I do not believe he composed a full,
integrated paraphrase of The Blue Danube, but only the pieces that were needed
for the film. At least the only score found is fragmentary. That is a pity, because
many pianists have admired the fragments, and have written to ask me for the full
composition.
56   Sheila Whiteley

Peter Gimpel further explains, “Johann Mouse … is pretty much a genuine virtuoso
performance,” and his father arranged the music for the cartoon himself.

The arrangement would have grown naturally out of the basic story idea: The cat
must imitate Johann Strauss in order to attract the mouse. Strauss is automatically
identified with the “Blue Danube”, so that is what the cat must play. However, to
make it funny, the writers had the cat learn to play piano from a book, “Six Easy
Lessons”. It contains the first notes of the Waltz theme. By that he immediately
reaches the level of a great virtuoso. The next step was to engage my father to com-
pose a virtuoso arrangement of the waltz and record it for the cartoon. (ibid.)

He adds, “In ‘real life’ … his hands glided over the keyboard, almost without any per-
ceptible movement of the fingers. … When Tom plays with his hind feet, it reminds me
very much of my father’s hand positions in certain passages” (ibid.).
Transforming the audio recordings to the cartoon piano sequences would have
been supplemented by photographs, or even movies, of Gimpel’s hands while play-
ing.11 For the cartoon, however, the hand movements are exaggerated for comic effect,12
as is evident in Tom’s playing of the waltz, where the slight heaviness in the accented
first beat of the 3/4 Viennese waltz is seen in the weighted movement of his accom-
panying left hand as it traces the rhythm. Changes in tempo, as in the transition to
secondary themes, are often preceded by virtuoso scalic/arpeggiated runs, a momen-
tary pause (with hands suspended over the keyboard) and a rubato introduction to
the next theme. The segue into The Tritsch Tratsch Polka in the piano sequence at the
Archduke’s Palace, for example, accentuates the rhythmic impetus of its 2/4 time signa-
ture with dramatically exaggerated hand movements, which are picked up in Johann’s
exuberant and often can-canlike performance. As Philip Brophy points out, in his dis-
cussion of the Bugs Bunny musical cartoons, “The humour of the situation is very
much derived from Chico Marx’s piano performances, where gesture is transformed
into ridicule and musical suggestion is blown up into comic display” (2003, 137).13
The comic effect of Tom’s satire on the more pretentious aspects of concert recit-
als can be related to Walt Disney’s interoffice communication to Don Graham
(Dec. 23, 1933), not least the importance of exaggeration to enhance the comic effect
of actions:

It wouldn’t be bad if you made up a list of the qualifications of an animator in order

of importance. . . . The list would start with the animator’s ability to draw; then, abil-
ity to visualize action, breaking it down into drawings and analyse the movement,
the mechanics of the action—to take a natural human action and see the exagger-
ated funny side of it—to anticipate the effect or illusion created in the mind of the
person viewing that action. It is important also for the animator to be able to study
sensation and to feel the force behind sensation, in order to project that sensation.
Along with this, the animator should know what creates laughter—why do things
appeal to people as being funny. (Disney, quoted in Letters of Note, 2010)
 Tom, Jerry, and the Virtual Virtuoso    57

In this respect, it is interesting to observe the credibility of Tom’s piano playing and
the blend of “realism” and “exaggeration” that underpins his performance. With refer-
ence to Disney’s “Twelve Principles of Animation,” credibility is informed by reference
to “the Arc”: “All actions, with few exceptions, follow an arc or slightly circular path,
and the seventh principle draws attention to the ways in which arcs give animation a
more natural and better movement” (Ghani and Ishak 2012, 173). As pianists are well
aware, the right-hand playing of a note in the bass of the piano followed by a note in
the extreme treble traces an arc rather than a straight line and facilitates faster move-
ment than moving in a straight line up the keyboard. This principle is evident in both
Strauss’s and Tom’s piano playing, thus providing a natural look when moving across
the keyboard.14 See, for example, Johann Strauss’s introductory medley and Tom Cat’s
performance at the Archduke’s Palace.
As discussed earlier (in the section “The Chase”), Johann’s rapturous response to
the waltz provides the clue to the cartoon’s unraveling narrative. If Tom wants to catch
Jerry, then music will be the key to his success. As such, the eighth principle draws
attention to “Secondary Action,”15 which adds to and enriches the main action by add-
ing smaller complementary motions. The carefully observed initial dance sequence, for
example, relates the dynamics of Johann’s movements to the dynamics of the waltz: the
“in-time” steps of his legs are prioritized, his right hand rests on his imaginary partner’s
back as he leads, his left hand held aloft, holding “hers,” while his head tilts and turns
as he moves into a reverse turn. The sequence also echoes the formality of the Viennese
waltz, as Johann bows to his imaginary partner, the curtain tassel, momentarily open-
ing his eyes in greeting, although exaggerating his pleasure as the dance ends with a
kiss. All the actions work in support of one another, and once again, the rhythm of the
music is the animating catalyst.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire

and the Musical World of Johann Mouse
As its title suggests, the Austro-Hungarian Empire comprised two kingdoms, with capi-
tals in Vienna (Austria) and Buda (Hungary), the latter uniting with neighboring Pest in
1870 to become Budapest. Vienna, however, was the primary capital and was affection-
ately known as the City of Music, due largely to the significance of composers Johann
Strauss I (1804–1849) and his son, Johann Strauss II (1825–1899). Known as the “waltz
king,” the younger Strauss was largely responsible for the popularity of the waltz during
the nineteenth century and beyond, composing more than four hundred waltzes, pol-
kas, and quadrilles, as well as a ballet and several operettas, of which Die Fledermaus is
probably the best known. He also composed a number of patriotic marches, dedicated
to the Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef I, as well as the Kaiser-Walzer, Op. 437 (1889),16
composed to celebrate the visit of Franz Josef to the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, where
it symbolized a toast of friendship extended by Austria to Germany.17
58   Sheila Whiteley

The opening mise en scène of Johann Mouse situates the relationship between Johann
Strauss’s music, Vienna, and the animated world of Tom and Jerry/Johann Mouse.
Credits (the names of animators, background, narration, musical direction, and piano
arrangements created and played by Jakob Gimpel) are set against an orchestral med-
ley of Strauss waltzes, and as the names of the directors and producer move into the
red leather-bound story book of Johann Mouse, the tempo quickens, and the viewer
is introduced to a panoramic tour of Franz Josef ’s capital city. As mentioned earlier,
the voice-over by Hans Conried tells us that “this is the story of a waltzing mouse. His
name is Johann and he lives in Vienna in the home of Johann Strauss.” The scene shifts
toward a large private house and the shadowy figure of a pianist is seen; the background
music changes to a virtuoso piano arrangement of The Blue Danube, the story book
changes to animation, and we see Johann Strauss playing a medley of waltzes, so estab-
lishing Johann Mouse’s story geographically, historically, and musically.
The “Basic Principles of Drawing” (Principle 11) draw attention to form, weight, vol-
ume, solidity, and the illusion of third dimensions, and are evident not only in the open-
ing storybook sequence of the cartoon, where viewers are introduced to the cityscape
of Vienna, but also in the animation, where color and movement give an illusion of
three dimensions through movement in space, and four dimensions by movement in
time. Johann Strauss’s home is authenticated by the mise en scène of its décor and its
two pianos, but the invitation to perform at the Kaiser’s Palace provides the most com-
pelling example of the cartoon’s attention to detail. Presaged by a return to Conried’s
narrative of events, Strauss’s maid tells the butcher boy about “a cat who could play,
a mouse who could dance.” The butcher boy tells the crowd in the square, and one
of the palace guards overhears, and is shown running through the state rooms of the
palace18 to where the emperor is seen, seated at his desk: “Good heavens, the emperor
couldn’t believe his ears, so they were commanded to perform at the palace at once.”
The emperor is in the throne room of the palace, surrounded by his courtiers and pal-
ace guard, and the grandeur of the occasion is emphasized by the orchestral sounds of
the Kaiser-Walzer, and as the door opens, Tom and Johann are seen formally dressed
in tail-coats and ties. The commentary moves into animation and the two diminutive
figures are seen bowing before processing toward a white grand piano in the presence
of the emperor, who is seated on his throne.

Characterization
The characterization of the principal characters, Tom, Johann Mouse, Johann Strauss,
and the emperor, relate to Disney’s twelfth and final principle, “Appeal,” and the extent
to which the characters have charisma. Tom, for example, is characterized as villain-
ous in his quest to capture Johann, comic in his foiled attempts, and charming as he
disguises his otherwise predatory nature. See, for example, his facial expressions as he
anticipates his initial move from piano to the chase. In contrast, Johann is portrayed as
both cute and clever, consistently foiling Tom’s attacks, as in the final court sequence,
 Tom, Jerry, and the Virtual Virtuoso    59

where he emerges from the mouse hole, smiling and dancing while Tom looks grimly
on. The relationship between Tom and Johann also shows the importance of conti-
nuity in the story line and character development: both have a clear set of needs that
drive their behavior and actions, and these can be characterized as a battle of wits. At
the same time, it is important for the animator to know what appeals to the audience
as being funny, and whereas many of Tom’s outcomes are seen as somewhat sadistic,
the exaggeration of his injuries, and the knowledge that he will always bounce back, is
nevertheless comedic in effect. In this context, it is interesting to see why the cartoons
avoid approaching Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley19 by “refusing to risk tipping into
the troublesome of pitfalls” (see Thomas Conner’s Chapter 8 in this volume). Jerry is
never caught, killed, and eaten, as would be more likely in typical cat-mouse confronta-
tions. This, after all, is popular family entertainment, and as such, Tom’s killing instinct
is always frustrated and for Jerry there is always a happy ending.
The cartoon depiction of Franz Josef 1 portrays him as elderly, with bald head, promi-
nent white whiskers, and tufted sideburns. It would suggest that he was well into old age.
The performance of the Kaiser-Walzer, which heralds Tom and Johann’s command per-
formance at the palace, provides one historical indication of his caricature in the cartoon.
At the time of its composition in 1889, Franz Josef (who was born in 1830) would have
been fifty-nine years of age; Johann Strauss II, who is depicted in the opening animation,
would have been sixty-four. However, there is always a certain license in animation, and
the caricature of Franz Josef most resembles the portrait painted circa 1910, when he was
eighty years old, wearing his white uniform with decorations, albeit he appears chubbier
and more benign in the cartoon. Given the importance of exploring photos and images
of the characters to be portrayed, there is definitely sufficient resemblance to suggest
a certain authenticity. Johann Strauss, however, is represented primarily by his hands
as he plays the piano. Dressed in a blue frock coat and tapered trousers, typical of late
Victorian male attire, he is shown as a shadowy figure, silhouetted in his upper room at
the house, or departing in the coach, or seated at his Grand piano. His significance lies in
his virtuoso playing and his hand movements on the keys. His face is never shown and
his hand movements, when compared to Tom’s exaggerated performance, are shown
gliding over the keyboard, with only slight accentuating gestures.
The minor characters, such as the palace guard who runs to tell the emperor about
“the cat who can play,” are also given an appropriate uniform, including a helmet
replete with plumed ostrich feathers. Strauss’s servants, who are seen peeping behind
the door and applauding Tom and Johann, again wear uniforms reminiscent of fin de
siècle maids, cooks, butler, and coachman, while the crowd in the square is seen wear-
ing the long gowns and top hat and tails of the period.
The overall importance of the music, the mise en scène, and characterization lies
in the way that Tom and Johann engage with the cultural and musical signifiers of
Austro-Hungarian imperialism, not least the formality of the court and the allusions
to power referenced in the Kaiser-Walzer, suggesting both historical and geographical
plausibility, as well as establishing the mood, emotion, and reaction of the characters to
the various scenarios.
60   Sheila Whiteley

Animation and Virtuality

Though it is accepted that my analysis so far simply explores the animating techniques
in Johann Mouse, Disney’s recognition that animators should study expressive motion
scientifically, and have an “appreciation of acting,” that “the first duty of the cartoon is
not to picture or duplicate things as they actually happen—but to give a caricature of life
and action … to bring to life dream fantasies and imaginative fancies” (Gimpel quoted
in Aschinger 2011; my italics), provides a comparison with the virtual, as “a place, a
space, a whole world of graphical objects and animated personae which populate fic-
tional, ritual, and digital domains as representatives of actual persons and things …
as standing in for flesh-and-blood persons and physical places” (Shields 2003, xv).
Our relationship to virtualism has moved increasingly toward computer-mediated,
digital virtuality and virtual environments, but as Rob Shields reminds us, virtual
spaces and understandings of the virtual have a long history, both as a cultural cat-
egory and as part of the mental toolkit. They are present “in the form of rituals and in
the built forms of architectural fantasies and environments, such as Baroque trompe
l’oeil simulations” (2003, 2), as in, for example, the illusory space created by mirrors in
the emperor’s palace in the MGM/Hanna/Barbera cartoon. In essence, they create a
dreamscape, inviting the viewer into an imaginary virtual world. The Kaiser-Walzer,
for example, actualizes the virtual by associating the idea of the emperor as an authen-
tic historical figure with his depiction in the cartoon, while the court ritual (Tom and
Johann’s ceremonial bowing, for example) evokes their relationship to the virtual figure
as a historically correct procedure. As Kirmayer observes,

The psychological museum and archaeological metaphors by which the past is

conceived tend to transform the temporal into the spatial and are intensely visual.
Layers are excavated, veils lifted, screens removed. As such the recall of socially and
effectively charged events involve a social organization of a present space (structured
encounters with a site, even tours or processions), with specified stopping places
and actions (obsequities, gestures and readings) and time (seasonal ceremonies as
well as historical space and time). (1989, cited in Antze and Lambek, 1996: xii)

Not least, the imagination of the viewer is critical in closing the gap between fiction
and reality and between the virtual (e.g., Tom’s playing of the piano) and the actual
(Gimpel’s ghosted performance). The past, then, as realized in Strauss’s Vienna, has a
virtual existence as a magical-animated narrative; Tom’s virtual dramatis persona on
the screen, not least his piano playing, has credibility to the extent that it is lifelike,
albeit exaggerated, and overly dramatic. As such, his piano playing, more specifically
his performing with his feet, is both fascinating and seemingly unbelievable, albeit that
Mozart is seen playing the piano upside down in the film Amadeus (1984, dir. Milos
Forman). Other examples would include Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar with his teeth,
and Jerry Lee Lewis, whose piano playing also included improbable positions. As my
 Tom, Jerry, and the Virtual Virtuoso    61

co-editor, Shara Rambarran, commented, all had the “wow” factor, and as such, Tom is
but one example of the unusual when it comes to performing skills.
As discussed earlier, Disney’s systematic analysis of actions (walking, expressions of
the body, music and rhythm, and the phrasing and rhythm of dialogue and its relation-
ship to mood and gesture) was critical to the realization of successful animation. He
also recognized that many of his animators failed to master intentionality and intuition
and needed more training in character motivation. In a memo sent to his office in 1935,
he mentioned “that they did not understand what really makes things move: why they
move—what the force behind the movement is” (Disney 1935, 3).20 In most instances,
the driving force behind action is the mood, personality, or attitude of the character, or
all three. Not least, structure, plot, and narrative were recognized as vital ingredients
in conveying storylines to an audience, and in Johann Mouse it is the music that drives
the action and the virtual experience of Johann Strauss II’s Vienna, affecting the mood,
personality, and attitude of both Tom and Johann. In other words, as Shields observes,
“Techniques of the virtual create the illusion of presence through props, simulations,
partial presences and rituals which invoke the past” (2003, 41). It is recognized that
there is a difference between computer-generated images/animation (where objects
are defined in relation to their three-dimensional shape and surface properties21), but
this is arguably a technological distinction. As Ghani and Ishak note, “Although the
[twelve] principles were developed for traditional hand-drawn animation, they also
apply to both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) computer-based ani-
mation” (2012, 171). It is an observation that is supported by Shields: “Virtualism in the
late twentieth-century fad for computer-mediated, digital virtuality … draw[s]‌on and
repeats historical forms of the virtual” (2003, 2).
As such, it is suggested that the relationship between the virtual world of the ani-
mated cartoon and how the chronological narrative and the musical text (the score,
the synchronized movement of the images, the rhythms of the waltz and polka, and the
animated mimetic/rhythmic response of Tom and Johann) create a virtual organic cor-
relation between music and dance through animated sound whereby the narrative con-
nects to the musical text in terms of flow, movement, mobilization, and dynamics. The
use of nondiegetic and diegetic sound add their own impact to the narrative, the for-
mer contextualizing the narrative through the off-screen orchestral sounds of Strauss’s
Viennese waltzes against the voice-over of the narrator, Conried, while the latter is
represented as coming from the piano playing of Johann Strauss/Tom and, as such, is
presented as originating from the piano(s) in the story space, so creating believability.
The sense that a musical experience is taking place is related to the identity and
characterization of Tom and Jerry and to how they interact with the cultural signifiers
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire both historically and geographically, not least their
formal introduction to the emperor and his court against the opening bars of Strauss’s
Kaiser-Waltzer. This, in turn, is given a docudramatic focus by the heavily accented
storytelling of Conried, an American comedian and voice actor whose father was a
Jewish immigrant from Vienna. The music, the characterization, and the storyline thus
structure the listening/viewing experience, creating an imaginary/virtual world, which
62   Sheila Whiteley

in turn taps into popular memory through the narrator’s “It was the same old story”
as Tom gives into his relentless pursuit of Johann, whose dance on the emperor’s white
grand piano ends with the inevitable chase, his escape down the mouse hole, and Tom’s
crash into the wall. Against a soundtrack of rapturous applause, Tom turns the final
page of the book to reveal “The End” of the cartoon.
The transitions from storybook/narration to animation and the virtual world suggest
an acute awareness on the part of Hanna-Barbera of the possibilities inherent in vir-
tuality. As viewers, our experience of the cartoon is syncretic: the rhythm of the music
and the characters’ animated response structure our listening/viewing experience, cre-
ating virtuality through their own imaginary world.22 Together with the editing and
camera work, they create the necessary direct and mutually causal relationship between
the text, its animation, and the implied viewer, the “as if ” of virtual performance and
its affective response. As such, we are offered a virtual experience of Strauss’s Vienna,
where fact, fiction, and fantasy merge in the narrative of “a cat who can play, a mouse
who can dance.”

Notes
1. The first Tom and Jerry cartoon premiered on Feb. 1, 1940, the last on Aug. 1, 1980.
2. The principles are outlined in detail in Ollie Johnson and Frank Thomas (1981) and
were applied to many of the earliest animated feature films, such as Snow White (1937),
Pinocchio and Fantasia (1940), Dumbo 1941), and Bambi (1942).
3. My discussion is informed by Ghani and Ishak (2012, 162–179), and “Animation Notes #5.
12 Principles of Animation.” All websites accessed Aug. 25, 2013.
4. Others in the genre include Sylvester and Tweety, Elmer, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck.
5. A key question in psycholinguistics concerns how readers relate what is currently being
read to what has gone before.
6. Readers are invited to watch the cartoon on the 2004 DVD box-set, Tom and Jerry: The
Classic Collection, to which my discussion refers.
7. 3D computer animation facilitates mixing and blending overlapping motions from differ-
ent areas of the character.
8. Diegesis and its relation to the virtual world of Johann Mouse will be discussed in the
second section of my chapter.
9. Jakob Gimpel immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1938.
10. http://www.musik-heute.de/591/he-made-bugs-bunny-a-virtuoso-pianist-jakob-gimpel/
See also Gimpel (2004).
11. Principle 9, Timing, recommended studying frame-by-frame movements of actors or
animals as a guide to animation. Most 3D computer animation allows fine tuning the
timing by shaving off or adding frames with nonlinear time editing.
12. Curiously, the cartoon depiction of Strauss’s initial playing of The Blue Danube shows his
left foot controlling the damper pedal. As Tom’s feet never reach the pedals, this anomaly
is confined to the Maestro’s performance.
13. Leonard “Chico” Marx (1887–1961) was an American comedian and film star and mem-
ber of the Marx Brothers. His performing persona suggested a dim-witted con artist, but
 Tom, Jerry, and the Virtual Virtuoso    63

he was also a talented pianist. It is suggested that Brophy’s discussion of Warner Bros. is
applicable here, viz., that the cultural stance of the cartoon is derived from prewar enter-
tainment forms, “especially in regard to humour (vaudeville), narration (slapstick), and
music (burlesque)” (2009, 139). The caricaturing of a bravura concert pianist in Tom’s
performance and the chase and crash theme are obvious examples.
14. In contrast, non-arc motion appears restricted or robotic.
15. 3D computer animation allows layering and building up secondary motions, e.g., build-
ing layers of hair.
16. Known also as the Emperor Waltz.
17. For further Information on Johann Strauss II, see Kemp (1985), and “Johann Strauss II
…” (n.d.).
18. The cartoon depiction of the kaiser’s residence is evocative of the grandeur of the
Schönbrunn Palace, his 1,441 room Rococo residence in Vienna.‎
19. A 1970 theory from robotics that has since been applied as far afield as film studies and
product design. Please read the introduction to Part 2 for further details.
20. “Letters of Note.”
21. A 3D model would be made of the character and the appearance of skin, hair, clothing,
and the various surfaces that reflect and interact with light would be defined. Lights and
a camera, together with 3D software, would then provide a simulation of what the 3D
object would look like if the surfaces were real, while the lights and the camera would
provide definition.
22. Hanna-Barbera Cartoons dominated American television animation for nearly four
decades in the mid-to-late twentieth century; productions included Josie and the Pussy
Cats, The Archies, The Flintstones, and Scooby Doo. It is also interesting to note the Disney
Foundation’s more recent engagement with virtuality. It owns the most internationally
prominent of physicalized virtual pop stars, the Muppets (created by Jim Henson in the
1950s), who, as Philip Brophy writes, “perfected the virtuality of music performance”
(2003, 19), as well as pioneering virtual reality films such as the collaboration with Steven
Spielberg, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The studio invested in a computer anima-
tion production system and produced various fairy stories (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin,
Beauty and the Beast) and the Lion King, the twenty-second-highest-grossing motion pic-
ture of all time in the United States.

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
“Animation Notes #5. 12 Principles of Animation,” AiM Centre for Animation and Interactive
Media. http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html.
Antze, Paul, and Michael Lambek, eds. 1996. Tense Past. New York: Routledge.
Aschinger, Wieland. 2011. “He Made Bugs Bunny a Virtuoso:  Pianist Jakob Gimpel—
Modest Man, Highly Gifted Artist.” Musik Heute. http://www.musik-heute.de/591/he-made-
bugs- bunny-a-virtuoso-pianist-jakob-gimpel/.
Brophy, Philip. 2003. “The Animation of Sound.” In Movie Music: The Film Reader, ed. Kay
Dickenson, 133–142. In Focus: Routledge Film Readers. London and New York: Routledge.
Disney, Walt. 1935. “Letters of Note:  How to Train Animators.” http://www.lettersofnote.
com/2010/06/how-to-train-animator-by-walt-disney.html.
64   Sheila Whiteley

Ghani, Dahlan Abdul, and Sidin Bin Ahmad Ishak. 2012. “Relationship Between the Art
of Wayang Kulit and Disney’s Twelve Principles of Animation.” Revista de Cercetare si
Interventie Sociala 37: 162–179.
Gimpel, Peter. 2004. “Jakob Gimpel:  A  Biographical Essay.” Jakob and Bronislaw Gimpel
Archives. http://www.gimpelmusicarchives.com/jakobgimpel.htm.
“Johann Strauss II (1825–1899).” n.d. The Johann Strauss Society of Great Britain. http://www.
johann-strauss.org.uk/strauss.php?id=123.
Johnson, Ollie, and Frank Thomas. 1981. The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. New York:
Abbeville Press.
Kemp, Peter. 1985. The Strauss Family:  Portraits of a Musical Dynasty. Tunbridge Wells:
Baton Press.
Shields, Rob. 2003. The Virtual. London and New York: Routledge.

Audiovisual Material
Johann Mouse. 1953. Cartoon. Directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Hollywood,
USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
 chapter 4

Bri ng That B e at  Bac k

Sampling as Virtual Collaboration

Rowan Oliver

This chapter focuses on music technology and production techniques that predate the
Internet but that, nonetheless, have contemporary relevance to the thinking around
music and virtuality presented in this volume. The pivotal role played by digital sam-
pling in the development of hip hop, and other subsequent genres that rely on the
technique to some extent, is widely acknowledged and has been examined from vari-
ous perspectives, both aesthetic and legal. I argue that the creative interplay between
the producer who samples and the drummer whose performance is sampled can be
read as a process of collaboration (albeit one that may stretch the term somewhat, as
will be seen), and one that simultaneously relies on three ideas of virtuality in order
to function: the original performance becomes virtual once disembodied by the sam-
pling process, the groove of the performance has a virtual dimension that enables other
musicians to interact with it, and this interaction occurs across a virtual network that
spans space and time.
Small’s ideas around the term musicking as a verb, where he argues for music to be
conceptualized as a process whose meanings are generated by the various participants
in a given performance (whether composer, performer, listener, and so on), provide
a useful framework within which to begin considering such interaction as collabora-
tion1: in the musicking that occurs when a hip-hop producer engages with fragments of
existing music/performances from the past via sampling, a kind of virtual collaboration
becomes possible for musicians working across temporal, geographical, and stylistic
boundaries.2 In this chapter I explore such virtual collaboration in relation to the use
of sampled drum loops—or “breakbeats”—and proposes that groove is the mechanism
by which this musicking can take place. Before going on to consider virtuality and col-
laboration in this context, however, an initial summary of the history and theory of
both sampling and groove will provide some necessary background detail.
66   Rowan Oliver

Sampling

In essence, a sampler allows the user to record and digitally store fragments of sound
that can then be played back using a range of methods, for use in either a studio pro-
duction or a live performance context. The storage capacity of the sampling device, and
the editing, processing, and playback options offered, vary from one model to the next,
although they all operate using more or less the same principles. The original intention
behind the sampler’s design was that it would enable logistically constrained producers
to incorporate otherwise inaccessible or unaffordable sounds—such as an orchestral
string section, for example—into their work with a degree of realism not offered by the
synthesizers of the day. (It is amusing to see that many of the magazine advertisements
for samplers in the early 1980s also drew attention to the novelty factor of being able to
sample everyday sounds, such as a barking dog, for example.)3 It was not long, however,
before the technology was subverted and its potential to extract sounds from existing
recordings unleashed, allowing producers to lift classic funk drum sounds from vinyl
records and incorporate them in their own music.4 Initially, this new approach was
applied by sampling single drum strokes, but the technique was soon extended, unlock-
ing the possibility to sample and loop longer rhythmic fragments, and thereby paving
the way for the production style that is characteristic of hip hop’s vaunted “golden era.”
Since such creative misuse of sampler technology began, critics and scholars have typ-
ically cast sampling somewhere between, at best, an intertextual process falling within
the long and (ig)noble history of artistic appropriation/quotation and, at worst, an act
of theft, cynically perpetrated for personal gain by individuals bereft of any creativity
or originality of their own.5 Offering another perspective, Shaviro (2003, 45) proposes
that hip hop’s creative practices can be likened to “cultural hacking,” a description that
hints at iconoclasm and rebellion on the part of sampling producers, rather than any
spirit of collaboration or engagement with earlier musicians. Histories of hip hop often
cite high-profile and infamous sampling litigation cases as the death knell of the genre’s
golden era, poring over the career-stalling lawsuit Biz Markie endured as a result of
appropriating Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” (1972) or the costly suing
De La Soul suffered in response to their use of “You Showed Me” by the Turtles (1969),
for example.6
Although the use of digital sampling as a music production technique is not exclu-
sive to hip hop, its earliest, pioneering exponents were central to the genre’s develop-
ment from the mid-1980s onward.7 The techniques introduced by producers such as
Marley Marl and his peers had their roots in the established performance practice of
hip-hop DJ culture but gradually extended the musical possibilities of recontextual-
izing existing material beyond what DJs were already doing with vinyl and turntables.
Small notes “the black genius for humanizing the mechanical in surprising ways” (1994,
402), a point to which Allen adds a culturally specific nuance, saying that “hip hop
humanizes technology and makes it tactile” (2000, 91, my emphasis).8 Though this
may seem obvious in relation to the DJ’s appropriation of turntable technology and the
 Bring That Beat Back    67

tactile, kinetic interaction such performance demands, how producers could be said
to humanize sampler technology and make it tactile is less straightforward. One could
argue that by sampling a breakbeat, the producer imbues the sample technology’s cir-
cuitry with a sense of human feel, but there is a counterargument that suggests the act
of sampling a performance somehow dehumanizes the playing (temporarily, at least, as
I argue later in relation to disembodied groove).

Groove

Groovology—the study of groove—was originally established through the work of

ethnomusicologists Charles Keil and Steven Feld, beginning as early as 1966 with the
publication of Keil’s article “Motion and Feeling through Music” (Keil and Feld 2005,
53–76). Since then, numerous scholars (or “groovologists”) have pursued aspects of
the concept of groove, working across a range of disciplines and using a wide array of
methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Although it also incorporates such strands
as timbre, dance, and so on, groove is generally assumed to relate to rhythm, and more
specifically microtiming, as it occurs in the nuanced rhythmic gestures of an individ-
ual musician’s performance (whether consciously intended or otherwise). Given that
these gestures can be classified as rhythmically “nuanced” only when heard in relation
to another temporal structure—most often defined as pulse, meter, or some metro-
nomically precise ideal—the terminology used in groovology has developed (some-
what negatively, if inadvertently) to connote lack of alignment, using phrases such as
“participatory discrepancies” and “microtiming deviations” to describe these human,
performative gestures.9
If groove is conceptualized primarily in this way, the possibility of measuring the
difference between when a note should be played and when it is actually played arises,
allow some quantitative data to be generated and thus for groovologists to feel that at
least one aspect of their nebulous subdiscipline has been briefly tamed. To this end,
much study has focused on measuring the time that elapses between the start points of
successive musical events (notes, drum strokes, etc.) in a performance, such durations
being termed “inter-onset intervals” (IOIs). As researchers involved in measuring IOIs
readily acknowledge, this approach is not without its pitfalls: there are difficulties in
deciding what constitutes the onset of an event, how to define the temporal framework,
and so on.
Other groove-related research focuses on entrainment, using neuroscientific meth-
odologies to examine how two or more musicians synchronize their individual perfor-
mances when playing together: Doffman’s work on synchronization in jazz trio playing
(2008) and Clayton’s use (2007) of the entrainment concept within ethnomusicology
are relevant examples. Recently, a branch of study dealing with the role of produc-
ers and technology in creating groove has been introduced, notably Butler’s research
(2006) into rhythm and meter in Electronic Dance Music, as well as a large-scale
68   Rowan Oliver

project led by Danielsen entitled “Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction”
(2010). Witek’s research (2009) looks at emotional and physiological responses to
groove, thereby broadening the context in such a way that dancers and listeners become
included as fellow musicking participants in groove, alongside musicians. This is fully
in keeping with Small’s original concept, of course.
Over the last forty years, other strands within groovology have developed that this
brief overview does not cover, but that attest further to the diversity of ideas falling
under the umbrella term groove. The reason for including such a summary of the field
here is to demonstrate that ultimately, despite the range of approaches, intentions, and
details that groovology encompasses, a broad consensus emerges that groove in music
relies on the interconnected ideas of participation (whether on the part of musicians,
listeners, or dancers) and embodiment. At this stage, the question of groove’s relevance
to virtuality (and vice versa) remains unclear, so in order to bring virtuality into the
discussion it is necessary to find a way of diminishing these two important factors in
groove, given that they are seemingly at odds with any sense of the virtual.

Solo Groove
My recent work on the idea of “solo groove” began to address several questions: Is it
possible for one musician to groove on his or her own?10 If so, how does participation
feature in this process? As will be seen, both of these questions are relevant to how
sampling makes virtual collaboration possible via groove. I propose that the existence
of breakbeats provides an empirical answer to the first question. When, for example,
drummer David Garibaldi plays the often-sampled solo introduction to Tower of
Power’s “Squib Cakes” (1973), he is undeniably generating a groove; we can say that he
is grooving. The term groove is thus shown to function as both a noun and a verb, in
much the same way as Small’s theory of music and musicking.
As for the second question, which deals with the idea of participation in solo groove,
when Garibaldi is playing in this way, he is participating with time itself, aligning his
drum strokes with it, playing against it, and so on. The real-time performance choices
he makes during this participatory groove process (in terms of dynamics, patterning,
and feel, for example) will be based on a contextually nuanced sense of musical time.
How the context dictates the nuanced sense of musical time could be based around fixed
timeline structures such as the Afro-Cuban clavé, less fixed (but no less important) sty-
listic conventions such as swing in jazz, or simply the individual musician’s rhythmic
feel (whether consciously intended or otherwise). If the listener shares a sense of musi-
cal time that is informed by at least some of the same contextual nuances as Garibaldi’s,
then the listener will be able to engage with the groove too, at which point the drummer
is not only grooving with time but also with the other participants in the musicking
process. (When this point is reached, then arguably the groove can no longer be said
to be “solo” as such, although its sounded dimension—the drumming—is still being
generated by a single musician.) If we can accept that solo groove is a viable concept
 Bring That Beat Back    69

because it involves a form of participation with time itself, rather than with other musi-
cians, then the prevailing view that groove participation occurs primarily between
musicians playing together can be put aside, thereby setting the scene for a discussion
about the role of sampled breakbeats. This idea therefore constitutes the basis for the
thinking outlined in the later section on virtual groove, which aims to answer a third
question that is crucial to this chapter: What happens when solo groove is sampled, and
how do producers (and other musicians) interact with the sampled groove?

Disembodying the Groove
Once the concept of solo groove has usefully altered our perception of how participa-
tion works as a factor in groove, it is the sampling process that strips away the next
significant factor by effectively disembodying the breakbeat’s groove. One could argue,
of course, that from the invention of the phonograph in 1877 onward, any technol-
ogy designed for the purpose of capturing audio (a delightfully roguish term that sits
well alongside the larcenous characterizations of sampling mentioned earlier) effec-
tively disembodies performances, at least in terms of allowing them to be reproduced
independently of an actual performer’s body.11 As I discuss later, several scholars have
addressed this phenomenon in relation to the recording process, that is, the transfer-
ence of a performance generated by a live musician into a storage medium of some
variety, most often for the purpose of mass reproduction.12 Because the source material
that sampling producers traditionally favor tends to be stored on artifacts resulting
from this mass reproduction (that is, drum breaks on vinyl records), sampling adds an
additional remove to the disembodiment inherent in the recording process; it decou-
ples the breakbeat not only from the drummer who originally played it, but also from
the medium into which it was subsequently embodied (or reincarnated, perhaps).
Shaviro makes two observations that seem relevant to how disembodiment relates
to virtuality. The first is fairly general: he notes that “in the contemporary imagination,
virtual reality is often equated with disembodiment” (2003, 99) and goes on to explore
William Gibson’s early conceptions of cyberspace, recognizing a duality between the
actual and the virtual that is later echoed in Danielsen’s thoughts on groove (2006), as
I will discuss later.13 Shaviro’s second observation does not explicitly mention virtuality
as such, but he does directly relate the idea of (dis)embodiment to sampling practice,
arguing that hip hop is a musical environment in which the digital “rebecomes analog”
(2003, 45, emphasis original). He is referring here to the process that occurs when a
digital sample (for the sake of relevance, let us assume that this sample is a breakbeat)
is played back in audio form as part of a hip-hop production. When this happens, at a
literal, technological level the digital code that represents the sample is passed through
a digital-analog converter and thus arrives at the sampler’s output ready to be played
back through a loudspeaker. At a more figurative level, however, the drummer’s origi-
nal performance, which was digitally disembodied during the sampling process, can
be thought of as rebecoming analog. This way of characterizing the use of samples in
70   Rowan Oliver

hip hop is exciting because rather than implying passive playback of an inert histori-
cal artifact, Shaviro’s use of language here suggests vitality and energy, inviting com-
parison with Walter Benjamin’s idea (1969) of “reactivation” (which I discuss later with
reference to Auslander’s illuminating commentary of 2009 on this topic). Together,
these parallel ideas—“rebecoming analog” and “reactivation”—help to build a context
in which virtual collaboration via sampling can be understood, but before considering
this in more detail it would be useful to explore the virtual aspects of groove and how
these enable this type of collaboration.

Virtual Groove

It may seem strange, in a book about virtuality, to focus on a phenomenon that research-
ers generally conceptualize in relation to embodiment, as tends to be the case with
groove. Nevertheless, there is undeniably a virtual dimension to groove, and I argue
that it is this which makes collaboration via sampled breakbeats possible: though musi-
cians, dancers, and listeners may all experience groove as something that is expressed
physically, or that at least invites a physical response (whether or not this impulse is sub-
sequently enacted), the significance of the silent moments within groove production is
noted by Chernoff (1979) and Danielsen (2006), among others.14 Chernoff makes the
groundbreaking assertion that, in African music, “a good rhythm … should both fill
a gap in the other rhythms [within the ensemble] and create an emptiness that may be
similarly filled” (1979, 114). In her book on funk grooves, Danielsen then builds on this
idea, writing that “rhythm is conceived as an interaction of something sounding and
something not sounding” (2006, 46–47).
Expanding further on his pertinent idea, Chernoff outlines the potential that such
gaps create within the drum ensemble for call-and-response interplay, not only among
the drummers but also between drummers and dancers. His observations are derived
from the context in which his research fieldwork took place, but the rhythmic rela-
tionships he describes between instruments in an African drum ensemble find an
equivalent in the relationships within the drum kit, a point Mowitt demonstrates in
his discussion of call-and-response as it occurs between the snare and the bass drum
in a rock-and-roll backbeat (2002). The potential for rhythmic interplay identified by
Chernoff is taken up and framed in a more groove-centric way by Danielsen (2006, 54),
who tellingly suggests that the gaps “almost represent a field of power,” an idea echoed
in Bogue’s assertion that “the virtual may be conceived of loosely as a field of vectors
of potential development and metamorphosis, each vector a line of continuous varia-
tion along which an actual process of development and metamorphosis might unfold”
(2004, 97).
It is worth pointing out that this is not a binary system, so a gap does not simply hold
the potential to either be filled or be left unfilled! Such a system would be very limit-
ing, when in fact there are a range of options available at any given point to another
 Bring That Beat Back    71

musician who is participating by interacting with the gaps in a groove. Listening to how
an MC’s flow interacts with a looped breakbeat in hip hop, one finds it clear that there
are moments when the rhymes interlock with the drum patterns by filling the gaps,
while at other times the syllables coincide with main drum strokes, thereby leaving
the gaps empty and so drawing attention to them and reinforcing their power. Within
any gap, there are many nuanced degrees of rhythmic placement the MC could choose
to enact, ranging from the metronomically straight to the extremely swung, hence the
idea that the vectors of potential development represent a field of power. The choices
the MC makes in enacting these possible nuances dictate how the overall lyrical flow
will sound, and this flow’s character also depends on how it is heard in relation to the
breakbeat (as it nearly always is).
So to summarize the ideas thus far, when a drummer originally performs a breakbeat,
the gaps in the groove hold potential for other musicians to participate in the perfor-
mance, and indeed may even be seen to invite such participation. When the breakbeat
is subsequently sampled, the original groove becomes disembodied, taking on a virtual
status until such time as it is replayed, at which point the breakbeat rebecomes analog
and the groove is reactivated. Following Bogue’s assertion about the virtual, the gaps in
groove can be seen as virtual nodes from which flow vectors of potential development
and metamorphosis, and these in turn become an actual process of development once
another musician participates in the reactivated groove.
When Benjamin writes about reactivation, he is concerned with the mediating effect
of reproduction on the relationship between audience and work (1969). A later transla-
tion of the same essay does not use the term reactivate, but rather “actualize” (2008, 7),
which aligns neatly with the “virtual vs. actual” duality mentioned earlier, suggesting
that there is a parallel here: when the breakbeat sample is played back, and thus crosses
from the virtual domain to the actual, this transition equates to reactivation. Thus it is
the notion of participating in, or working with, a reactivated groove that builds a sense
of “co-labor” into sample-based production. Although it is obviously true to say that in
the vast majority of cases such “working together” is not consensual on the part of the
sampled artist and therefore cannot be seen as an equal collaboration, it can be argued
that at the level of groove generation whatever composite sound emerges is a result of
the work of both the sampling producer and the sampled drummer; for the purpose
of my study, this is “collaboration,” and the virtual potential of groove is what makes it
possible.

Collaboration Across Time

The basis for comparison may not be immediately apparent, but collaboration across
time has a precedent in multitrack recording, although admittedly this usually works
on a shorter scale than the sampling-based collaborations that are the focus here. In
multitrack recording practice, the constituent layers of the song are typically added one
72   Rowan Oliver

at a time, often beginning with the drums, followed by the bass, then the guitars, and so
on until all the elements have been captured, at which point the mixing that is required
to convey the illusion of a co-present performance can begin. The timescale during
which the recording phase is completed can vary, of course, depending on a number of
factors, but it is likely to be measured in days or weeks, rather than the years or decades
that might elapse between a breakbeat’s original recording and its subsequent appropri-
ation as a sample. At a superficial level, then, the collaboration between musicians dur-
ing the multitrack recording process described here does not appear to have a virtual
dimension, presumably because the musicians spend at least some of their time in the
same room making creative decisions (even if this co-presence is more likely to occur
in the studio control room during the mixing phase of the process than in the live room
during the recording phase). In that sense, their collaboration is nonvirtual, but if we
consider how, for example, the bass player interacts with the tracks already prerecorded
by the drummer, the virtual dimension of groove as described in the previous section
is undoubtedly at work. The virtual nodes established by the drummer’s recorded solo
groove are there for the bassist to interact with, even though the drummer himself is
not playing at the same time.
Thus the precedent for collaboration across time emerges; indeed, one could argue
that when the combined groove of the drummer and the bassist is created in this way,
it makes little difference whether the drum take was recorded moments before the
bass take or several years earlier! Writing about phonography, with an emphasis on
the relationship between recording and jazz (regarding spontaneity and performance,
in particular), Brown decries the negative impact that he perceives to result from the
use of such multitrack recording practice in jazz fusion. He writes that “solos are often
simply laid on top of tracks already recorded, so that the impression of players reacting
to each other’s moves is sheer illusion” (2000, 123). The exact meaning Brown intends
by his use of the word moves here is unclear: Is he describing the physical movements
by which musicians playing together might communicate their intentions regarding
tempo, structure, and so on to one another during an improvised performance, in a
kind of communal, nonverbal conducting role based around significant glances and
subtle gestures? If this is the case, then it is clear that multitrack recording practice
(and, to a greater extent, interaction with a sampled breakbeat) negates the possibil-
ity of reaction to such embodied movement. Or is he perhaps describing the musical
interaction itself, casting the improvisation as a chess game in which notes, phrases,
and rhythms are likened to moves made by rival players as they act and react to one
another’s actions? In this case, there is no reason either that multitrack techniques or
interaction with sampled breakbeats need to be seen as problematic for other musicians
who subsequently add layers to existing recordings.
Moving beyond standard contemporary multitrack recording practice, conceptually
speaking, Stanyek and Piekut describe a longer-term version of collaboration across
time in their article on “deadness” (2010), which assesses the phenomenon of posthu-
mous duets, such as “Unforgettable” (1991), sung by Nat King Cole and his daughter
Natalie Cole, in which the latter’s vocal contribution was recorded twenty-six years
 Bring That Beat Back    73

after her father’s death.15 The examples Stanyek and Piekut cite are mostly vocal duets,
in which the interaction hinges primarily around melody, harmony, and timbre rather
than groove, though one could argue that “virtual nodes” similar to those found in
groove also exist in these other aspects of music, thus enabling the duets to take place
between the living and the dead. The article is playful and wide-ranging, exploring the
topic in great detail (both technological and philosophical) and presenting a strong
case for posthumous duets to be considered as collaboration.
Several anecdotal sources corroborate the idea that hip-hop producers feel, in some
way, as though they are collaborating creatively with the instrumentalists whose per-
formances they sample. Retelling the tale of Marley Marl’s apparently accidental dis-
covery of drum-sound sampling, Chairman Mao envisages the outcome as “enabling
funky drummers from his scratchy record collection to cross decades and sit in on his
own productions” (1997, 88). Note that Mao’s turn of phrase suggests it is the drummers
themselves who “cross decades” here, rather than just the sound of their drumming. DJ
Abilities gleefully announces that “when I’m sampling, I have all these artists: they’re
in my band” (Franzen 2010, at 10’12”), before name checking such jazz luminaries as
Wes Montgomery and Art Blakey to illustrate which players his virtual band lineup
might include. Commenting from the perspective of an original instrumentalist whose
performance is appropriated by hip-hop producers, Clyde Stubblefield—the drummer
who played the breakbeat on James Brown’s exhaustively sampled “Funky Drummer”
song—opines that he would “prefer to get [his] name on the record saying ‘This is Clyde
playing!’ … The money is not the important thing” (Franzen 2010, at 53’56”). The legal
framework around sampling dictates that even when a hip-hop producer has official
authorization to use Stubblefield’s performance in a track, no part of the associated
sample-clearance fee would be paid to the drummer himself, because Brown, rather
than the musicians in his band, owns the rights to “Funky Drummer.” What Stubblefield
says, however, suggests that though he has long since come to terms with the financial
implications of this situation, he actually places more value on recognition of what his
sampled performance contributes, musically, to any subsequent productions. This atti-
tude demonstrates a remarkable spirit of camaraderie (or perhaps resignation) on the
part of someone who is arguably entitled to bear more of a grudge toward his virtual
collaborators, whose participation has been nonconsensually forced on him.
The perspectives quoted here reinforce the view that the collaborative process is
severely lopsided: the breakbeats and the groove they encapsulate travel through time
in only one direction, from the past to the present. What is harder to identify imme-
diately is any sense that the collaborative participation of contemporary musicians
somehow reaches backward in time to engage with the original musicians whose per-
formance is sampled. Theorizing how we understand original performances by listen-
ing to recordings, however, Auslander proposes that such understanding emerges from
a “conversation between ourselves and the performance, a conversation to which both
sides are understood to contribute” (2009, 87, my emphasis).16
Ascertaining the “degrees of collaborative agency” (Birringer 2011, 49) involved in
sampled breakbeat production techniques may also help with the issue of imbalance
74   Rowan Oliver

in the collaboration. Catts and Zuur (2011) acknowledge that nonequal collaborations
exist, and it seems that this might be an apt way to describe the virtual collaboration
between the sampling producer and the drummer whose beats are sampled. In this
relationship, the producer (who is in a position to make unilateral decisions that affect
the final musical outcome) clearly has a considerably greater degree of collaborative
agency than the drummer.
The idea of engaging with recorded performance through a kind of conversation is
further refined by Weheliye (2005), who argues that as usage of the phonograph became
more widespread it had the effect of geographically disrupting call-and-response pat-
terns in African American life, because musical activity recorded in one place would
now be listened to in a growing number of increasingly far-flung, remote locations. In
a similar vein, sampling could perhaps be seen to temporally disrupt call-and-response
patterns. Schutz remains unconcerned by this development however, discussing the
“interposition of mechanical devices” in the relationship between performer and lis-
tener in an enlightened tone. He goes on to say that the performance context could be

a small group of persons in a private room, a crowd filling a big concert hall, or
the entirely unknown listeners of a radio performance or a commercially distrib-
uted record. In all these circumstances performer and listener are “tuned-in” to one
another, are living together through the same flux, are growing older together while
the musical process lasts. (1964, 174–175)

By adding “the hip hop producer who samples breakbeats” to the possible performance
contexts listed here, Schutz’s thinking here can be updated to incorporate the idea of
sampling as collaboration, thus making his ideas relevant to my argument, particularly
if sampling is seen as “an extension of the call-and-response tradition” (McLeod and
DiCola 2011, 49). As I have discussed, when a groove is sampled, its gaps act as virtual
nodes via which collaboration can occur across time, thereby allowing the hip-hop pro-
ducer to provide a contemporary response to the call of the original breakbeat in its
presampling context.

Figure versus Gesture = Virtual

versus Actual = Digital versus Analog

When assessing the various states through which the breakbeat shifts in its journey
across time during the process of virtual collaboration, Danielsen’s previously men-
tioned conceptualization of rhythm as interaction between sounding and unsounding
elements provides a useful framework within which to work. In her writing on groove,
she refers to the actual, played element of this pairing as “gesture” and the virtual,
unsounding temporal framework as “figure” (2006, 47), but during its evolution from
 Bring That Beat Back    75

funk through successive eras of hip hop (and then into jungle music and beyond), the
breakbeat shifts back and forth between these roles, migrating across the interface
between the analog and digital domains. In its original funk setting, the breakbeat
is a played gesture that interacts with the unsounded figure consisting of both the
pulse and a generic funk feel. When the breakbeat is sampled, however, different shifts
occur depending on the sample manipulation techniques that the producer employs.
If the breakbeat is looped, it becomes a kind of sounded figure, a temporal framework
with which other musicians, vocalists, or programmed layers can interact via gesture.
If the breakbeat is chopped into smaller constituent drum hits and reconfigured—a
common hip-hop production technique—then it becomes a new gesture (albeit
one whose sonic signature will still carry traces of the original gesture). If the break
remains unchopped but is displaced in relation to the pulse by being retriggered at a
point other than the downbeat, then it becomes a kind of hybrid: it is both a gesture
that has become a figure (as is normally the case with looped breakbeats) and, in turn,
one being restated as a new gesture that is metrically realigned in relation to the pulse
of the original breakbeat. Throughout the convoluted series of possible transitions
between figure and gesture that it might undergo, Shaviro’s aforementioned notion of
a musical environment in which the digital “rebecomes analog” (2003, 45) is funda-
mental to the breakbeat’s role.
In a passage that favorably compares sample-based production to live instrumenta-
tion, in terms of the options that it affords producers for the expression of aesthetic
preferences, Schloss lists the advantages as

the ability to juxtapose the ambient qualities of different recording environments,

to repeat individual notes exactly (in terms of dynamics, attack, and so on) and to
organize sounds into patterns that would be difficult or impossible to perform live
due to the physical demands of an acoustic instrument. (2004, 150–151)

The breakbeat from the introduction to the Honeydrippers’ 1973 single “Impeach the
President” has been employed by a number of hip-hop producers in manifestations
that use all of these advantages of sampling at various points during its journey of
development and metamorphosis. In Wu-Tang Clan’s “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta
Fuck Wit’ ” (1993), producer RZA juxtaposes the breakbeat’s original recording envi-
ronment with that of the Lafayette Afro Rock Band’s “Hihache” (1974) break. In MC
Shan’s “The Bridge” (1987), Marley Marl uses the control over individual notes that
sampling offers as a way to construct a reconfigured pattern from the constituent drum
strokes within the original breakbeat. And in Audio Two’s “Top Billin’ ” (1987), Milk
Dee and Daddy-O organize the sounds into patterns that (although not impossible to
perform live) defy the conventions of normal drum performance in terms of how the
retriggered patterns function in relation to the song’s meter.
In Katz’s view, whereas “traditional musical quotations typically cite works; samples
cite performances” (2010, 150). As mentioned earlier, much groovological research sup-
ports this view, and so uses the nuances of rhythmic gesture within an individual’s
76   Rowan Oliver

performance as a focus for study, but in the early stages of sampler usage in hip hop,
timbre (as heard on vinyl, resulting from funk production techniques) seems to have
been an equally important attractor of the sampling producer’s attention. In interviews,
Marley Marl enthusiastically highlights the Impeach break’s timbral qualities as the
factor that draws him to it, and indeed his preference for chopping rather than looping
this breakbeat indicates that he is less concerned with the rhythmic subtleties of the
original feel than with how he can use the sounds it contains. So how does this prefer-
ence fit with the theory that gaps in groove act as virtual nodes enabling participation,
and therefore collaboration, across time and space? If the gaps in groove are conceived
of only as spaces between events on a horizontal temporal axis, then the theory falters
somewhat in the face of those sample manipulation techniques that prioritize timbre
over rhythm. I propose, however, that gaps in groove can also be conceptualized verti-
cally, in terms of timbral space. This makes sense when we consider the recombinant
qualities of African diasporic music:  the drum patterns researched by Chernoff, the
rock-and-roll backbeat Mowitt describes, and the chopped and reconfigured Impeach
breakbeat all feature interdependent internal relationships not only in their rhythm,
but also in their sound.17

Conclusion

At first glance, the art of sampling funk breakbeats and using them as the basis for
new tracks in genres such as hip hop and jungle appears to have neither a virtual nor
a collaborative dimension. By seeking out and exploring the virtual aspects of both
the solo groove of breakbeats and the disembodying process of sampling, however, a
multilayered sense by which virtuality is inherent in this practice emerges. Once this
sense of virtuality has been established, it becomes clear that it is precisely this quality
that makes viable the suggestion that there is a collaborative dimension to the process
of engaging with breakbeats via sampling. Although there is a clear difference between
this and the more widely accepted understanding of collaboration as something tak-
ing place between artists working together at the same time (if not in the same place),
anecdotal evidence from hip-hop practitioners indicates that the engagement with
the past made possible by sampling can rightly be seen as a two-way conversation
rather than either unimaginative plundering or dutiful quotation of a fossilized musi-
cal artifact.
As Danielsen recognizes, by virtue of the gaps in groove, “music has a part of itself
in the virtual domain” (2006, 47). Once a sampled breakbeat is reactivated in its new,
updated context, and so rebecomes analog, the potential for participation encapsulated
by these gaps—or virtual nodes—enables future generations of musicians to collabo-
rate virtually with the drummers whose original groove has been sampled, thereby par-
ticipating in a musicking process that spans both time and space.
 Bring That Beat Back    77

Notes
1. For his seminal explanation of these ideas, see Musicking: The Meanings of Performing
and Listening (Small 1998).
2. It is, of course, unnecessary to exclude producers from inclusion in this term. When it
becomes helpful to the discussion, I distinguish between “instrumentalists” and “produc-
ers,” but this is always done on the assumption that both groups are still “musicians” first
and foremost. Interestingly, in an article on Eric B and Rakim, Harry Allen refers to DJ/
producer Marley Marl as an “instrumentalist” (1987, 59).
3. Several of these advertisements are collected online at http://retrosynthads.blogspot.
co.uk.
4. Approximately a year after the arrival of “the first pure sampler” in 1981, according to
George (1998, 92).
5. By way of example, the subtitles of two recent books make their authors’ positions on this
point very clear: Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies
of Creativity (McLeod 2005) and Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects
Musical Creativity (Demers 2006).
6. For an authoritative history of the genre, see Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (Chang 2007), along-
side other useful commentaries such as Hip Hop America (George 1998).
7. Sampling is, in fact, fairly ubiquitous in contemporary popular music. Even within styles
that might initially appear to conform to older, guitar-based rock approaches, it is not
unusual to find sampled or programmed loops running somewhere in the mix.
8. Acknowledging the nonmusical elements of hip-hop culture, Small also points to graffiti
on New York subway trains as another example of this process.
9. “Participatory discrepancies” was originally from Keil and Feld (2005, 96–108).
“Microtiming deviations” is used by various authors, e.g., Iyer (2002).
10. See Oliver (2013), which owes much to Prögler (1995), Farmelo (1997), and Danielsen
(2006).
11. Auslander suggests that the listener hears the reproduced performance as “deracinated
from its original context” (2009, 84).
12. Bayley’s Recorded Music:  Performance, Culture and Technology (2010) brings together
some fine, representative examples.
13. See Neuromancer (Gibson 1984).
14. Iyer observes that “the act of listening to rhythmic music involves the same mental pro-
cesses that generate bodily motion” (2002, 392), which supports the case that the listener
is involved in groove even without any physical activity on his or her part.
15. Among other things, the “deadness” concept represents a playful twist on Auslander’s
thinking regarding “liveness” (1999). There is, perhaps, a tenuous terminological link
here between the “deadness” concept of posthumous collaboration and Mtume’s damn-
ing conclusion that hip-hop sampling is, in effect, “artistic necrophilia” (quoted in George
1998, 96)!
16. As with so many of the ideas presented in my chapter, Small’s musicking concept is again
seen to be relevant here.
17. Thinking about the potential for groove interaction with a breakbeat via its sound as
well as (or even instead of) its rhythm opens up useful analytical approaches for my
planned future research concerning post–hip-hop developments in sample manipulation
78   Rowan Oliver

techniques (such as those used in jungle music during the early 1990s, for example,
which demonstrate more timbral than rhythmic priorities, presumably as a result of the
Jamaican influence on this genre).

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Allen, Harry. 1987. “Soul Power.” Spin, December: 59–62.
———. 2000. “Hip-hop Hi-tech.” In Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black
Literature, ed. Kevin Powell, 91–95. New York: Wiley.
Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge.
———. 2009. “Reactivation:  Performance, Mediatization and the Present Moment.” In
Interfaces of Performance, ed. Maria Chatzichristodoulou et al., 81–93. Farnham: Ashgate.
Bayley, Amanda, ed. 2010. Recorded Music:  Performance, Culture and Technology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken.
———. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. J. Underwood.
London: Penguin.
Birringer, Johannes. 2011. “Saira Virous:  Game Choreography in Multiplayer Online
Performance Spaces.” In Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and
Interactivity, ed. Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon, 43–59. Basingstoke:  Palgrave
Macmillan.
Bogue, Ronald. 2004. “Violence in Three Shades of Metal:  Death, Doom and Black.” In
Deleuze and Music, ed. Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, 95–117. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Brown, Lee. 2000. “Phonography, Repetition and Spontaneity.” Philosophy and Literature
24(April): 111–125.
Butler, Mark J. 2006. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic
Dance Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zuur. 2011. “The Tissue Culture and Art Project: The Semi-Living as
agents of Irony.” In Performance and Technology:  Practices of Virtual Embodiment and
Interactivity, ed. Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon, 153–168. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Chairman Mao. 1997. “The Legacy of Marley Marl.” Ego Trip 3(3): 88–89.
Chang, Jeff. 2007. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop:  A  History of the Hip-Hop Generation.
London: Ebury Press.
Chernoff, John M. 1979. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action
in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clayton, Martin. 2007. Music, Time and Place:  Essays in Comparative Musicology. Delhi:
B. R. Rhythms.
Danielsen, Anne. 2006. Presence and Pleasure:  The Funk Grooves of James Brown and
Parliament. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
———, ed. 2010. Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Farnham: Ashgate.
Demers, Joanna. 2006. Steal This Music:  How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical
Creativity. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
 Bring That Beat Back    79

Doffman, Mark. 2008. “Feeling the Groove:  Shared Time and Its Meanings for Three Jazz
Trios.” Ph.D. diss., Open University.
Farmelo, Allen. 1997. The Unifying Consequences of Grooving: An Introductory Ethnographic
Approach to Unity Through Music. Musicians United for Superior Education. http://
musekids.org/UCS.html.
George, Nelson. 1998. Hip Hop America. New York: Penguin Putnam.
Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. London: Gollancz.
Iyer, Vijay. 2002. “Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in
African-American Music.” Music Perception 19(Spring): 387–414.
Katz, Mark. 2010. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, rev. ed. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Keil, Charles, and Steven Feld. 2005. Music Grooves:  Essays and Dialogues, 2nd ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McLeod, Kembrew. 2005. Freedom of Expression:  Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other
Enemies of Creativity. New York: Doubleday.
———, and Peter DiCola. 2011. Creative License:  The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mowitt, John. 2002. Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Oliver, Rowan. 2013. “Groove as Familiarity with Time.” In Music and Familiarity, ed. Elaine
King and Helen Prior, 239–252. Farnham: Ashgate.
Prögler, Joseph. 1995. “Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm
Section.” Special Issue: Participatory Discrepancies, Ethnomusicology 39(Winter): 21–54.
Schloss, Joseph. 2004. Making Beats:  The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Retro Synth Ads. n.d. “Blogspot.” http://retrosynthads.blogspot.co.uk.
Schutz, Alfred. 1964. “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship.” In Collected
Papers (Vol. 2): Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen, 159–178. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff.
Shaviro, Steven. 2003. Connected, Or What it Means to Live in the Network Society.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Small, Christopher. 1994. Music of the Common Tongue. London: Calder.
———. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Stanyek, Jason, and Benjamin Piekut. 2010. “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane.”
Drama Review 54(Spring): 14–38.
Weheliye, Alexander G. 2005. Phonographies:  Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Witek, Maria. 2009. “Groove Experience:  Emotional and Physiological Responses to
Groove-Based Music.” In Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of European Society for
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Audiovisual Material
Audio Two. 1987. Top Billin’. First Priority Music.
Cole, Natalie, with Nat King Cole. 1991. Unforgettable. Elektra.
Franzen, Benjamin. 2010. Copyright Criminals. New York: Indiepix Films.
80   Rowan Oliver

Honeydrippers, The. 1973. Impeach the President. Alaga Records.

Lafayette Afro Rock Band. 1974. Hihache. Editions Makossa.
MC Shan. 1987. The Bridge. Cold Chillin’.
O’Sullivan, Gilbert. 1972. Alone Again (Naturally). MAM.
Tower of Power. 1974. Squib Cakes. Warner Bros.
Turtles, The. 1969. You Showed Me. White Whale.
Wu-Tang Clan. 1993. Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit’. Loud Records.
 chapter 5

An Analysis of V i rt ua l i t y
in the Creat i on a nd
Re cep tion of t h e Mu si c
of Frank Z a ppa

Paul Carr

Virtuality, Vagueness, and the Impact

of Language on Analysis

The problems associated with the “representational” nature of music have been a fea-
ture of musicology and indeed Western thought for many years, with Eduard Hanslick’s
notion of how music’s “beauty” lies in its formal structure as opposed to containing or
purveying any inherent emotionality or referentiality (1986) conflicting strongly with
influential Greek metaphysical thought,1 or indeed late-antiquity scholars such as Saint
Augustine (354–430)2 and Boethius (c. 475–524).3 Like these authors, later scholars
such as Francino Gaforio (1451–1522) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) both consid-
ered music to be a representational reflection of the divine, a factor that according to
Nicholas Cook was also prevalent in literature of the time, as evidenced in works such
as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596–1598) and Milton’s Arcades (1634).
It is important to note that Hanslick was influenced by the Transcendental Idealism
of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who according to Donelan “considered it [music]
a decorative art, a poor imitation of vague emotional content” (2008, 12). In Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he differentiates between the objective world as it is and
what he described as the subjective world of ideas. Describing the former as noumenon
and the latter as the phenomenon, he outlines how external objects (e.g., music) do
not exist for the subject and so need to be differentiated in terms of their purposive-
ness (their function unto themselves) and how purposeful they are to us. With this
82   Paul Carr

distinction, Kant unwittingly presents an important factor when considering virtuality

in music, with purposiveness clearly linking to the ideal of Absolute Music,4 and the
concept of the purposeful representing an antecedent to many philosophies discussed
in this chapter, in particular the impact of written language. It is important to point out
that in congruence to the alternative philosophical positions outlined by the likes of
Georg Hegel (1770–1831)5 and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), vagueness was con-
sidered a potential virtue by some, with music for the latter having the potential to not
only represent the phenomenal world, but embody the metaphysical depths of the suf-
fering will, by temporarily blurring the distinction between subject and object.6
When asking the question of how music, without the help of words, can signify any-
thing in the external world, Jenefer Robinson (1997, 4) highlights an important point
regarding the role of language in musical virtuality:

[. . .] but without specially introduced conventions—such as [those that] stipulate

the meaning of national anthems and leitmotif—musical phrases and chords do
not normally have conventional meanings as words and sentences in a language
do. Pictures represent things and so can be said to signify them, but again, without
special stipulations, such as is given by a title, music cannot normally represent par-
ticular people, scenes and events as pictures do.

Obviously referring to Hanslickian thought, Robinson is alluding to the inherent vague-

ness of meaning in instrumental music, and how words have the capacity to work along-
side it, effectively assisting its signification. However, as early as 1842, Felix Mendelssohn
was presenting an alternative view regarding the “problem” of language itself. Stipulating
the message that music communicates to be beyond language, he writes:

People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they should think
when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it
is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with
individual words. These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misun-
derstood in comparison to genuine music. (Quoted in Treitler 2001, 5)

Writing thirty years after Mendelssohn in 1872, Nietzsche continues this perspective,
this time alluding to issues associated with critical discourse itself:

[. . .] hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never uncover the
innermost core of music, but, once it attempts to imitate music, always remains in
superficial contact with it, and no amount of lyrical eloquence can bring its deepest
meaning a step closer. (1995, 35)

In an article entitled “Vagueness,” Bertrand Russell discusses the relationship between

“what means and what is meant” (2008 [1923], 84), and how the study of symbolism
can assist us in not being “unconsciously influenced by language,” concluding that “all
language is vague” (ibid.). Indeed according to Russell, all representation is vague to
 Virtuality in the Music of Frank Zappa    83

some degree, with the relationship between the “representing system [the signifier] to
the represented system [the signified] seen to be ‘one-one, but one [to] many” (2008
[1923], 89)—a polysemic combination he considers the epitome of vagueness.7 Russell
believed the epistemological space between the actual properties something may pos-
sess and what is known about it to be a by-product of Kant’s Idealism and potentially a
delusion, therefore positioning vagueness to be “a characteristic of [an artifact’s] rela-
tion to that which is known, not a characteristic of the occurrence in itself” (Russell 2008
[1923], 85; my emphasis). This is an important distinction, and will be elaborated on
later, when specifically discussing the interpretation of Frank Zappa’s music.
Taking this argument a step further, Leo Treitler purports the language of analysis to
have a tendency to “hold music [not only] at arm’s length from the listener but also from
meanings that may be attributed to it—to make musical meaning indirect and conceptual
and to locate it outside of music” (Treitler 1997, 30; my emphasis). Treitler’s consequent
assertion that “words are asked to identify not music’s properties or the experience of
those properties but abstractions that music signifies” (ibid.; my emphasis) is important,
as this effectively often locates discussion about music further into a mediated logocentric
virtual world—be this a good or bad thing.8 Subjective metaphorical discussion about
music is described by Treitler as “low level criticism” (ibid., 38) and begs the question, Is
the language we use when discussing music reflecting the reality of musical meaning, or
in fact constructing our own version of it? Can we indeed transfer musical experiences
into the written word? Language therefore can be considered to have the potential to
assist the signification of music, although the signification of their combined forces can
still be considered vague, due to the ontological issues highlighted above.
As noted by Leonard Meyer (who seems to be basing his opinion on the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure), musical meaning cannot exclusively be located in the music
itself, nor in what it refers to, but is a combination of both signifier and signified, with
the observer involved in a hermeneutic process of evolving meaning with what she or
he is listening to (Meyer 1956). The often-quoted Elvis Costello maxim (although origi-
nally used by Martin Mull) that “writing about music is like dancing about architec-
ture” (Brackett 1995, 157) summarizes the epistemological divide in terms of how far we
can move into secondary signification/connotation, before musical analysis becomes
too vague to be meaningful, or formalism, before it becomes too rigid and descriptive.

Frank Zappa and the Virtual: The Big

Note, Project-Object, Xenochrony,
and Conceptual Continuity

This chapter aims to discuss the creation and reception of the music of Frank Zappa,
who overtly and purposively employed techniques to philosophically position his cre-
ative output in a virtual, often teleological dimension. Because of the vast number of
84   Paul Carr

texts that have focused specifically on the history of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of
Invention, the chapter does not intend to provide any historical overview of Zappa’s
life. It will instead focus on how his philosophies resonate with specific concepts of
virtuality.9
It is important to note that Zappa regarded all of his individual compositions and
recordings as part of a unified whole, which was negotiated principally via three self-
titled philosophies:  the big note, project-object, and xenochrony. Zappa often used
these paradigms to indoctrinate a variety of overt and subliminal semiological clues
into his compositions, manipulations of time and space and studio-live environments,
in addition to providing rationales for his regular reuse of existing material and rear-
rangements of compositions. Regarding the big note, in an article he wrote for Life
magazine in 1968, he stated:

Everything in the universe is composed basically of vibrations—light is a vibration,

sound is a vibration, atoms are composed of vibrations—and all these vibrations just
might be harmonics of some incomprehensible fundamental cosmic tone. (Zappa
1968, 84)

As outlined earlier, this overt Plato-influenced positioning of music as part of a meta-

physical cosmic tone has some parallels to scholars such as Augustine, Kepler, and
Boethius, although there is no concrete evidence to suggest that Zappa considered
his music to be an imperfect representation of this heavenly order. Indeed, although
brought up in the Catholic faith, Zappa was highly critical of “religion.” However,
Zappa did have a lifelong tendency to regard his entire catalogue as a single entity, one
that was determined by him and open to change. He commented:

All the material in the albums is organically related and if I had all the master tapes
and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a
different order, it still would make one piece of music you can listen to. (Quoted in
Slaven, 2003, 121)

On a more practical level, Zappa incorporated his project-object philosophy to jus-

tify the numerous arrangements, remixes, and reuse of his own and others’ recorded
material that he incorporated into his music. As I have stated in other essays, Zappa’s
persistent reuse of his own material at both a musical level (for example the use of
extracts of 200 Motels [1971] in “Bogus Pomp” [1987], or large portions of Sheik Yerbouti
[1979] in Thing-Fish [1984]) and a production level (many of his albums and songs
were reproduced during his lifetime), in addition to his numerous references to other
composers’ music, clearly assert that he differentiated between the completed work of
art in a recording and the ongoing challenge of redefining it. This process is similar not
only to Joseph Grigely’s notion (1995) of how texts are consistently in a state of change
as they age, but also to the “nominalist” view depicted by Lydia Goehr (2007), where
“Types” (what Grigely describes as a “Work,” and Zappa the “Object”) are considered
 Virtuality in the Music of Frank Zappa    85

the benchmark through which derivative “Tokens” are taken (Goehr 2007, 17). This
perspective is ontologically more “horizontal” than the “vertical” big note, which
regards composition as less an act of creation than of discovery. The gray area between
the vertical-facing big note and the horizontal project-object leaves Zappa’s philosophi-
cal positioning of his music unsurprisingly ambivalent.
The other important technique that Zappa incorporated into his creative process was
that of xenochrony. Meaning “alien time,” this was principally used to synchronically fuse
two otherwise incongruent individual textual strands into a single performance. Unlike
traditional overdubbing, which focuses on multiple takes being intentionally part of the
same composition, xenochrony incorporates not only takes from incongruent live per-
formances and/or studio takes, but also takes from incongruent compositions—so any
“interactions” taking place between performers have no intentionality on the part of the
player—purely taking place in a virtual dimension. The guitar solo from the composi-
tion “Packard Goose” (1979) serves as an indicative example. Originally recorded live in
Zurich 1979 on the song “Easy Meat,” the solo has a rhythmic freedom that at time domi-
nates and is totally unhindered by the simple backing track vamp. As many of Zappa’s
solos were recorded over modal vamps, Zappa would have considered it harmonically
straightforward to make these juxtapositions, and as he had a preference for his guitar
solos played in live conditions, it made creative sense to combine live and studio environ-
ments, where he is effectively combining not only otherwise incongruent compositions,
but also times and spaces. This process presents an interesting distinction from John
Cage’s work, which aimed principally to eliminate the intentionality of the composer,
not the performer. In Zappa’s case, although “chance operation” took place at the level
of how the xenochronic parts combined (i.e., the guitar and backing track of “Packard
Goose”), it could be argued that his “God like” manipulation of recorded musical con-
tent was reflective of his traditional Westernized notions of the composer-performer
relationship: “music comes from composers—not musicians” (Zappa 1989, 174).
Zappa used these three techniques not only to allude to numerous semiological ref-
erences of his own and other composers’ music, band folklore, and popular culture
at large, but also to construct what Paul Sanden (2012) describes as Virtual Liveness,
where the detail of what actually constructs a live performance requires ontological
consideration and clarification (46). Sanden’s principle concern focuses on the impact
of when “the limits of human performance are clearly surpassed” by mediation, a factor
that leads him to ask the question, “Does this mediatisation, in fact, erase all traces of
liveness?” (46) It is Sanden’s contention that

in highly mediatised musical contexts [such as recordings], perceptions of liveness

may extend beyond what a “real” performer has presented for his audience, and
he may find himself sharing the stage with, or even relinquishing it entirely to, an
imagined and technically enhanced performing persona. (47)

Sanden’s assertion that a high level of mediatization has the capacity to affect the capac-
ity of listeners to identify the sources of what they are listening to has a particular
86   Paul Carr

resonance with Zappa, with websites such as Globalia10 and Kill Ugly Radio11 repre-
senting an interest in an almost obsessive tracking of xenochronic and project-object
tendencies in particular, a process that has become known as “conceptual continuity”
to his fans.
These technological constructions are seen by Sanden to contain “traces of real peo-
ple” (2012, 50), which are then (re)created in the minds of listeners—forming a form of
liveness that is “an interaction between concrete and digital”—essentially constructing
“hybrid personas” (52). Zappa’s 1991 release The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life
serves as an indicative example of virtual live performance, with the album being pre-
sented as a unified concert performance, but in reality being compiled from numerous
locations from the 1988 tour cut and pasted together. Indeed the virtual dimension of
this album is made even more complex, owing to the use of guitar solos imported xeno-
chronically: often from not only incongruous times, but also compositions. This proc-
ess was taken a stage further on the six-part You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore series
(1988–1992), which featured cut-and-paste techniques that facilitated Zappa alumni
“performing” together, when in reality they played in his band many years apart. The
song “Montana” is an indicative example. Originally recorded on Overnite Sensation
(1973), the “live” version recorded on You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore Vol. 4 (1991)
includes the fusion of a 1973 live recording from the Roxy Theatre Los Angeles in 1973
with a recording eleven years later, from the Universal Amphitheater in Hollywood.
Aside from featuring musicians who were playing with him in 1973 (including Roy
Estrada, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Bruce Fowler) and 1984 (among them Ray White,
Robert Martin, and Ike Willis), the track also features a mix of instrumentations from
the respective times—the earlier one featuring two drummers, full brass section, and
percussion (as featured on the original recording) while the latter includes technolog-
ical 1980s instruments such as electric drums and keyboards. Interestingly, the means
of fusing the two recordings is rather crude by Zappa standards, with the union clearly
taking place 4’18” into the track, during a complex instrumental break. However, with
Zappa being the only constant between the two time zones (as was the case with many
of the similar mixes in the entire six-part collection), it goes some way to verifying his
belief that musicians were secondary to the compositions themselves.
Thanks to Zappa’s obsession with recording his live concerts over many years, the
musicologist has an opportunity to ask an important question concerning where the
ontological presence of specific songs lies: Should our focus be centered on individual
recordings (as outlined by the likes of Moore 2001 and Zak 2001), or can our atten-
tion be focused on a broader, more atemporal space, a process that resonates not only
with the techniques Zappa employed above, but also with the philosophical theory of
perdurantism, whereby the meaning of specific songs can be considered the sum of
multiple distinct temporal instances—which can include live performances, recorded
rearrangements, or indeed in Zappa’s case even ongoing performances and recordings
by tribute bands? When discussing an individual performance of Beethoven’s Seventh,
Jean-Paul Sartre was clear that he was not listening to “the symphony,” but an individ-
ual instance of a work that is ultimately “heard in the imagination” (Priest 2001, 290).
 Virtuality in the Music of Frank Zappa    87

Although a single performance or even a recording may derive from a “real” instance
in time, place, and space, “the symphony” (or in our case “a composition” by Zappa)
can be considered the sum of its many parts, which exist in the past, present, or future,
making many of his compositions, by default, virtual. Using Sartre’s thinking, it is not
the music (i.e., the symphony) that becomes real in a performance, but the perfor-
mance that becomes unreal in the music, to quote Sartre: “the work of art is an unreal-
ity” (Priest 2001, 93).

Technology, Lyrics,
and the Invention of Reality

It may be a good thing to copy reality; but to invent reality is much

much better.
—Giuseppe Verdi in 1876, quoted in Fisk 1997 123)
Although not the main focus of this chapter, it is important to point out that Zappa was
a pioneer of incorporating technology to compose music, a practice that commenced
in the early 1960s with pieces such as “Speed Freak Boogie” (1962)12 and cumulated
in his final recording, Civilization Phaze III (1994), which incorporated rearrange-
ments of earlier pieces from albums such as Thing-Fish13 and in particular Lumpy
Gravy (1967).14 In the intervening years, as with many rock and pop musicians, Zappa
incorporated technology to develop what Stephen Davies describes as “virtual perfor-
mances” (2003), considering them to be “the electronic manipulation and sculpting of
sound to achieve effects that, typically cannot be achieved live” (37). Davies continues
to propose two constituent parts of virtual performance: that “no continuous perfor-
mance event of the kind that seems to be represented on the disk need take place and
[second, that] the performance occupies an aural space unlike any present normally in
the real world” (ibid.). Of Zappa’s early recordings, this practice is particularly appar-
ent on “multiple take” compositions such as “Plastic People” and “Brown Shoes Don’t
Make It” (Absolutely Free, 1967). Although these performances appear on the surface to
be live, their details reveal otherwise, and using Sartrean terminology, the individual
takes could be described as “real,” but the composition themselves “unreal”; indeed, a
recording such as this can be considered a virtual documentation of Zappa’s imagina-
tion as a producer and composer.
At the time of these recordings, the abilities of individual musicians would argu-
ably have made a single take of a work such as “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” very
improbable, so Zappa can effectively be regarded as using technology to facilitate his
imagination, a position that Goehr describes as an “idealist view” (2007, 37). Because
of the importance of group interaction and production techniques in the forming of
a composition, it is proposed that this position could be considered largely defunct
in much rock music of the time, although when technology is used in such a way as
88   Paul Carr

to surpass the abilities of musicians’ technical resources, imagination has to be con-

sidered an important factor. Later in his career, Zappa would use the Synclavier in a
similar way, to bypass what he considered the limitations of what he described as “the
human element” (1989, 173). This practice with Zappa is pervasive and is encapsu-
lated on his composition “The Dangerous Kitchen” (1983),15 which combines the pre-
cision of the recording studio with the improvisatory nature of the live environment,
resulting in music that appears to be beyond what is humanly possible. Indeed, Steve
Vai’s studio transcription performance of Zappa’s live improvised vocal line creates
an allusion of musical “perfection” that, like the earlier recording of “Brown Shoes
Don’t Make It,” was only later realized live, as evidenced by Zappa bootleg recordings
from the 1970s with “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”16 and the posthumous version of
“The Dangerous Kitchen” performed on Zappa’s Universe (1993).
It is also worth briefly discussing that as documented throughout the You Can’t Do
That on Stage Anymore series Zappa also combined recordings from various times
and spaces into a single recording. These recordings combined what he considered
the best takes of specific versions of his work, which represent a utopian live perfor-
mance, spanning time, space, and place.17 The incorporation of techniques facilitating
perfected studio recordings and live performances represents an ontological shift, from
the recording being used to represent reality (as was the intention of single-take, pre-
overdub early recording technology) to one that forms a pseudo-reality, described by
Virgil Moorefield as the difference between the “illusion of reality” and the “reality of
allusion” (2005, xiii)—and it is proposed that Zappa played an often-undervalued part
in this ontological shift.
As I indicated in an earlier article, there is a sharp contrast between the anti-realist
methodologies Zappa uses to conceptualize and construct his music and the realism of
his lyrical content, which often discuss the realities of life as he saw it. Although on the
surface this appears as a philosophical tension, it was proposed that

Zappa does not make a choice between his art and actuality, but pursues both simul-
taneously. Zappa’s music can be seen to combine process and product and anti-
realism and reality, with the combination having the potential to make the listener
initially more uncertain, but eventually more involved. (Carr 2013, 143)

In his autobiography, Zappa discusses his technique of simplifying the instrumental

accompaniment of his work when wishing to accentuate lyrical content, asserting
that the backing has the potential to “get in the way of the words” (1989, 182). He goes
on to state that his lyrics “are for entertainment purposes only” (185), believing that
“some of them [his lyrics] wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the fact that we live in a
society where instrumental music is irrelevant” (ibid.). As indicated in his autobiog-
raphy, when testifying before the Maryland State Senate in a widely publicized cen-
sorship case against the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), Zappa reiterated
his belief that lyrics “cannot harm anyone” (294)—a point he made when contesting
 Virtuality in the Music of Frank Zappa    89

the PMRC recommendation that all recorded music should contain a governmental
obscenity rating, similar to the system used in movies.
Despite his claims that some of his lyrics are “truly stupid” (185), the lyrics in Zappa’s
music are obviously of great importance to him, often facilitating critical commentaries
on subject areas ranging from life on the road18 to unscrupulous televangelists,19 to issues
with society at large.20 Although contesting against the power of words in the PMRC
hearings of the mid-1980s, in typical Zappa fashion he also contradicts this perspective,
asserting that love lyrics, as opposed to creating realistic commentaries, usually act as “a
subconscious training that creates a desire for an imaginary situation which will never
exist” (89). In Zappa’s case, his lyrical content would attempt to break down these ideo-
logical imaginary narratives, instead focusing on providing listeners with the realism of
songs such as “Wowie Zowie” and “I Ain’t Got No Heart” (Freak Out! 1966).

Conclusion

Paul Weiss proposes that any event, such as the development of a mountain range,
the growth of a flower, or a musical composition, whatever the length of its ongoing
redevelopment, is to be ultimately “one single present, not a sequence of presents”
(1961, 20) as we experience it. Weiss considers it impossible to grasp the full nature of
this “single present” because of the impossibility of experiencing all of its instances.
Likewise, with compositions such as Frank Zappa’s, which have often been rearranged
over numerous years, in multiple times and places, we cannot experience them as a
single entity, but via snapshots of smaller events, which let us consider or indeed mea-
sure the larger whole. Interestingly, this process is similar not only to the theory of
perdurantism as outlined earlier, but also to Organicism, where a musical work is con-
ceptualized as an “Organism,” where individual parts combine to form part of a func-
tioning whole, with the human body acting as a metaphor for the musical work. This
concept has its roots in the work of the philosopher George Hegel, who stated that “if
the work is a genuine work of art, the more exact the detail the greater the unity of the
whole” (Beard and Gloag 2010, 94). Using the philosophies outlined in this chapter, our
experience of music, regardless of our method of analysis, is virtual by default, as we
are only ever experiencing but a single occurrence of the ontological whole, which is
constantly in a case of becoming—something Zappa deliberately incorporated into his
creative processes.
Weiss believed that a work of art can be examined from a formal,21 transcenden-
tal,22 intentional/motivational,23 psychological24, or ontological perspective, but it is
proposed that all are a virtual means of assessing what the work actually is. As indicated
during the introduction of this chapter, and as outlined by philosophers such as Kant,
Schopenhauer, and Russell, the ontological space between the actual properties of an
artifact and what we know about it is virtual by nature. Zappa was instinctively aware of
90   Paul Carr

this, and presented his “sound sculptures” within this dimension, often relying on the
audiences’ interpretation to provide personal meanings, as opposed to specifics (Zappa
and Occhiogrosso 1989, 167):

The audience doesn’t have to know, for example, who Jan Garber or Lester Lanin is
to appreciate those textures—the average guy is not going to say “Hey, Richie! Check
this out! They’re doing Lester!” He knows what that style means. He’s groaned over
it in old movies on Channel 13 for years.

Metaphorically, his music is in some ways analogies to a pioneering building, which

contrasts sharply with its environment (in Zappa’s case the music industry), awaiting
the surrounding structures (other artists and audiences) to catch up—effectively acting
as an inspirational exemplar for others to follow. To take the architecture metaphor a
step further, just as the outside of buildings creates hermeneutic expectations of the
inside, much of the imagery and visual gestures of popular music prepares the listener
and fan with expectations of what is to come. However, this is often not the case for
Zappa, whose album covers and rock star persona in particular contrast strongly with
the variety and stylistic incongruence of his music.
In his autobiography, Zappa makes a comparison of moving mobiles and sound
sculptures to composing music—an analogy that can be extended. Just as a sculptor
stands back from his work to examine it from various angles to ensure it not only
works as a whole, but has various meanings depending on the perspectives one views it
from, so Zappa, with his manipulation of space, time and place, facilitates the listener’s
experiencing music without the constraints, expectations, and impacts of image, style,
and genre, making the virtuality of his music all the more profound. Most importantly,
although a sculpture can be appreciated from multiple angles, the artist often positions
it within a space where the most pertinent view is initially seen by all. This is something
that was carefully manipulated by Zappa, who used rock music as the centripetal pull,
off which numerous other styles and genres were subtly, often subliminally introduced
to listeners:

Rock is the only living music in America today. It’s alive. I’m bringing music [seri-
ous or classical concepts] to our rock arrangements. Stravinsky in rock is like a
get-acquainted offer, a loss-leader. It’s a gradual progression to bring in my own
“serious” music. (Quoted in Shelton 1966, 12)

As indicated in this chapter, Zappa’s compositional processes engaged with reality as

proposed by much speculative philosophy, merging time, space, and place, ultimately
representing a reality that is beyond what we normally perceive. Although much popu-
lar music occupies an abstract space by default thanks to its incorporation of technol-
ogy, lyrical content, and polysemic interpretation in particular, Zappa’s approach was
overtly purposeful, intensifying, manipulating, and dissecting the space of our everyday
experience into arguably a higher reality—which is available only through art.
 Virtuality in the Music of Frank Zappa    91

If it is the nature of all art to make impossible/imperceptible things appear real, then
some of Zappa’s work fulfills this objective. In his autobiography, he discusses placing
his work into a “virtual frame,” believing that “without this humble appliance, you can’t
know where the art stops and The Real World begins” (140). He continues to assert that
“anything can be music, but it doesn’t become music until someone wills it to be music,
and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music” (141). To follow in the
footsteps of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, is this a space where real-
ity as we experience it has the potential to be suspended and a virtual space begin? In
the case of Zappa’s virtual picture, the distance between the artifact and the spectator
could sometimes appear close25 and sometimes wide, with his use of recording and
distribution technologies having a particular impact on the latter. To quote Marcell
Cobussen: “Music represents itself as and presents itself at the junction between the
here and the there, the threshold where one sheds the mastery of the eye” (2008, 3).
This represents Zappa’s idiolect perfectly.
As indicated at the start of this chapter, when we write about music it is important
to consider it as a paratext, in which one simultaneously focuses on both the music
itself and the variety of texts (musical and otherwise) associated with it, arguably never
fully reflecting the reality of our experience; it is virtual by default. As Cobussen (2008
68) outlines, he believes Martin Heidegger to be

groping for a language which does not seek to most completely represent the com-
prehensible but, instead, a language which endeavours to refer to unthought of
dimensions and undecided zones that escape common thinking.

The often paradoxical position between the capacity of language to reflect the true
meaning of music and its capability to accentuate what was previously omitted dur-
ing analysis, or even during the conceptualization of it, is important when discussing
virtuality in music, as, in congruence with Heideggerian thought, it gives the analyst
an opportunity to be aware of assumptions that presume music (and other objects of
analysis) to be what Heidegger described as being “ready to hand” (2008 [1926], 47). As
stated by Michel Imberty (quoted in Nattiez 1987):

The musical signifier refers to a signified that has no exact verbal signifier . . . musi-
cal meaning, as soon as it is explained in words, loses itself in verbal meanings, too
precise, to literal: they betray it. (9)

However, in the Heideggerian thinking of Cobussen, language also offers the musicolo-
gist with an opportunity to provide an account of “the unsayable within the said, the
indescribable within a definition, an otherness within the same, in short, a language on
the threshold of the inaccessible and the inexpressible” (Cobussen 2008, 69). Unlike
the virtual appearances of Ed Sheeran and One Direction on the X Factor in November
2012, which overtly attempted to deceive the public into believing they were watching
music in a time frame simultaneous to themselves (i.e., live), the ontological presence
92   Paul Carr

of Zappa’s music overtly exits in the past, present, and future, and can therefore be con-
sidered as existing in a parareality—indeed, a virtual one. It is hoped that this chapter
has gone some way to describing it.

Notes
1. For example, Plato’s notion of the World of Forms, the perceived inherent emotional con-
tent of the Greek modes, or the transmission of ethical content in music.
2. Augustine was attracted to music because of its ability to represent eternal beauty, but
was also wary of its tendency to conjure up “earthly” sensory pleasures. According to
Lewis Rowell, his analysis of musical rhythm included “earthly” durations and sounds
that were perceived by the listener, and how these sounds resonated with the soul of both
performer and listener, which then enabled us to contemplate “perfect, eternal rhythm”
(1983, 90).
3. Influenced by Augustine, Boethius believed there was no dualism between mind and
soul—with “the seeker of knowledge inevitably arriving at spiritual understanding as
well” (James 1995, 74)—as music was a representation of the eternal. Boethius is credited
with establishing the Pythagorean concept of the division of mathematics into the areas of
geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music, a combination he entitled the quadrivium.
He summarizes this union of mind (including the intellect and logic), body (feelings),
and spirit in what he called musica mundana (the music of the spheres), musica humana
(the harmony between our body and soul), and musica instrumentalis (the music made
by man, which is an imperfect representation of musica mundana).
4. A concept that developed as a product of German Romanticism during the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. Regarding instrumental music as a timeless self-sufficient
entity that has no context but itself, Romantic metaphysics of the time positioned instru-
mental music above language and distinct from the senses, song words, and even the
composer themselves, essentially reflecting the essence of things as opposed to being
limited by language-based concepts. This position was famously criticized by Richard
Wagner, who regarded instrumental music as a mere step on the way to the union of
harmony (harmonia), dance (rhythmos), and words (logos)—which was portrayed via
his total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk. As outlined by Philip Tagg, the ideal of a self-
sufficient Absolute Music that is not dependent on nor conditioned by other music is
problematic on many levels. See Tagg (2013, 84–131).
5. For example, his concept of the World Spirit (Weltgeist) manifesting itself in history.
6. Which, according to Lawrence Ferrera, he conceded as being a phenomena that “could
not be logically demonstrated.” See Ferrara (1996, 183).
7. While conceding that “there is no doubt that music is polysemic from a logocentric view-
point,” Tagg questions the notion that music itself is polysemic. See Tagg (2013, 167–171).
8. “Assuming, often implicitly, that the semiotic properties of (verbal) language apply to
other symbolic systems”; Tagg (2013, 592).
9. For indicative examples, see Courrier (2002), Russo (2006), Miles (2004), and Slaven (2003).
10. See Globalia, “Information Is Not Knowledge,” http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/index.html
(accessed Mar. 4, 2014).
11. See Kill Ugly Radio, “Welcome to Zappa Wiki Jawaka,” http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/
wiki/Main_Page (accessed Mar. 3, 2014).
 Virtuality in the Music of Frank Zappa    93

12. Originally recorded in 1962, the track incorporates Zappa manipulating time and space
via the use of multiple overdubbed and speeded-up guitar tracks. See Zappa, Mystery Disc
(1998).
13. “Amnerika,” on Zappa, Thing-Fish.
14. Much of the second half of Civilization Phaze III consists of reedits of parts of Lumpy Gravy.
15. Which combines at least two live locations spliced together with a studio-recorded Steve
Vai guitar transcription.
16. For example, Zappa, Stadio Comunale, Bologna, Italy, 30 August 1973 and Zappa, Parc Du
Penfield, Brest, France, 19 March 1979.
17. The sleeve notes of the entire six-part series allude to the chosen takes being “The best
available version.”
18. For example, “Stevie’s Spanking” on Zappa, Them or Us, Barking Pumpkin, SVB074200,
1984, LP recording; originally released in 1984.
19. For example, “When the Lie’s So Big,” on Zappa, Broadway the Hard Way, Barking
Pumpkin, D1-74218, 1988, LP recording; originally released in 1988.
20. For example, “The Illinois Enema Bandit” on Zappa, Zappa in New York, DiscReet, 2D
2290, 1978, LP recording; originally released in 1978.
21. What happens in the work.
22. How it relates to the heavens or a creator.
23. Why an event or musical gesture takes place. I take this to also include Marxist theories
of music.
24. How the music psychoanalytically displays the inner feelings and emotions of the artist.
25. For example, when overtly quoting other composers’ music, or commenting on band mem-
bers’ touring behaviors, or with crooked politicians and unscrupulous religious leaders.

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
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Brackett, David. 1995. Interpreting Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Cobussen, Marcel. 2008. Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality Through Music. Aldershot: Ashgate.
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Hanslick, Eduard. [1854] 1986. On the Musically Beautiful. Indianapolis: Hackett.

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Audiovisual Material
200 Motels. Directed by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer. Los Angeles: United Artists, 1971.
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Mar. 05, 2014).
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Page (accessed Mar. 05, 2014).
Mothers of Invention, The. 1966. Freak Out! Verve. V6-5005-2.
———. 1967. Absolutely Free. Verve. V6-5013.
 Virtuality in the Music of Frank Zappa    95

Zappa, Frank. 1968. Lumpy Gravy. Verve. V6-8741.

———. 1973. Over-Nite Sensation. DiscReet. MS2149.
———. 1978. Zappa in New York. DiscReet. 2D 2290.
———. 1979. Joe’s Garage: Acts II & III. Zappa. SRZ21502.
———. 1979. Sheik Yerbouti. Zappa. SRZ-2-1501.
———. 1983. The Man from Utopia. Barking Pumpkin. FW38403.
———. 1984. Them Or Us. Barking Pumpkin. SVB074200.
———. 1984. Thing-Fish. Barking Pumpkin. SKC074201.
———. 1987. London Symphony Orchestra Vol. 2. Barking Pumpkin. SJ-74207.
———. 1988. Broadway the Hard Way. Barking Pumpkin. D1-74218.
———. 1991. The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life. Barking Pumpkin. D2 74233.
———. 1991. You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore Vol. 4. Rykodisc. RCD 10087/88.
———. 1993. Zappa’s Universe. Verve. 513575-2.
———. 1994. Civilization Phaze III. Barking Pumpkin Records. UMRK 01.
———. 1998. Mystery Disc. Rykodisc. RCD10580.
 PA RT   T WO

VO C A L OI D S ,
HOL O G R A M S , A N D
V I RT UA L P OP   STA R S

Part One’s investigation into how digital virtuality is only the latest incarnation of the
virtual continues into Part Two with Jackson and Dines’s research into “Vocaloids and
Japanese Virtual Vocal Performance: The Cultural Heritage and Technological Futures
of Vocal Puppetry” (Chapter 6), which reveals that the fascination with illusion and
the fantasy worlds associated with vocaloid performance is anticipated in the Japanese
culture of Bunraku. More specifically, they examine “the use and conceptualization
of puppet theater (Bunraku) to raise questions about the cultural location of vocaloid
software and the emergence of the ‘virtual’ voice/artist,” while revealing that “notions of
illusion are an inherent part of traditional theatrical practice and experience of Japan.”
As they point out, “Although centuries old, one must not underestimate the cultural
and aesthetic importance of Bunraku in unraveling the complexities and idiosyncra-
sies of modern-day vocaloids. Indeed, what remains fundamental within this study is
the placement of both Bunraku and vocaloids as parallel art forms in problematizing
human, and in the latter case technological, emotions and sentiment. As a Bunraku
play such as Chushingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (first performed 1748) mixes
fact and fiction to create a “fictional” work of complex heroics and revenge, vocaloids
too combine the real and illusory to explore Japan’s increasing fascination with tech-
nology.” As Jackson and Dines conclude, “Bunraku fuses … the theatrical and the live,
realizing both conditions simultaneously; and this tradition is continued through the
technological ingenuity of vocaloids,” albeit that the latter “provide a more complex set
98    Part Two: Vocaloids, Holograms, and Virtual Pop Stars

of cultural mores and values to realize its import.” It would seem, then, “that vocaloids
have a double significance. If an understanding of vocaloids can be drawn from the
cultural and aesthetic realm of the Bunraku, then the vocaloid can also furnish an aes-
thetic framework in which to unravel the relationship between Japan in the present and
its relationship with technology.”
Like vocaloids, “Bunraku dares us to disbelieve, but we refuse. We continue to cling
to the unreality, as if it were real, despite the blatant evidence to the contrary.” Rafal
Zaborowski’s research (Chapter 7) into “Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols”
comes to a similar conclusion: “Hatsune Miku is real because the audiences expect
her to be.” For a reader not already familiar with Hatsune Miku, Zaborowski accom-
plishes the double feat of introducing her and offering an explanation as to why the
fans’ accounts of media engagements are necessary for an understanding of the com-
plex and dynamic relation in all elements of the circuit of music. Drawing from the
tradition of empirical audience research, his discussion is contextualized within a
range of socioeconomic, cultural, and technological factors and their consequences
for domestic and global audiences. As his research demonstrates, “The nature of
dynamic cultural exchanges between vocaloid producers and audiences is coevolu-
tionary. The underresearched fan expectations and pleasures derived from engage-
ments with particular elements of Hatsune Miku—the voice, the lyrical content,
the production model, the ‘reality’ aspect—both play into and are affected by other
moments in which meaning is circulated.” As such, Hatsune Miku is realized as “a
dynamic product of virtual collaboration by fans, who imagine and create on message
boards, video channels, and online music platforms.” His conclusion is intriguing and
presents the reader with an underlying paradox: “Whereas teenage girl and boy idols
play carefully defined roles in order to appeal to mainstream ideals, in vocaloid there is
no pretense, no fabrication…. Based on a pop-cultural history of machine-enhanced
singers, the audiences make her real, because she sings about things that matter to
them. Finally, she is real, because she represents a bottom-up, collective model, where
access and participation are potentially unlimited.” In the battle between holograms
and teenage pop idols, it is, then, the latter that are considered virtual!
Zaborowski’s exploration into the significance of fans and audiences in vocaloid
culture is supported by Thomas Conner in his Chapter 8, “Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and
Beyond: Rewinding and Fast-Forwarding the Virtual Pop Star.” As he explains, most
existing research into virtual reality has addressed the performative experience as an
immersive one, with CAVEs and other constructions. Hatsune Miku, and others like
her, “bring the digital out of cyberspace, actualizing it within the physical world”: “and
that’s before you learn that everything she performs is written by an innovative net-
work of content-providing fans.” For Conner, this intrusion challenges numerous
existing visual communication theories and aesthetics. As he reveals, “the first genera-
tion of virtual pop stars involved physical objects, from animation cels to Muppets,
optimized for mediatized display. A new generation, from Gorillaz and Dethklok to
Miku and 2.0Pac, seeks to reverse that polarity and bring the digital out of cyberspace,
 Part Two: Vocaloids, Holograms, and Virtual Pop Stars    99

actualizing it within the physical world.” In each case, the success of the character
is directly related to its presentation within the context of a performer narrative, its
visual depiction stopping well short of the uncanny valley.1 For these and future virtual
pop stars, navigating that precipice is the key to popular acceptance across cultures.
Jackson and Dines’s earlier observation that the rather Western fixation on the
authenticity of the human voice (whoever is seen and heard to be singing should
be the actual owner of the voice and physically connected to it in some realm of
reality) has a curious resonance with Damon Albarn’s live performance in the 2010
gig, “Phase Three.” As Shara Rambarran observes, despite the large projector screen
showcasing the images and videos of Gorillaz it was difficult not to focus on Albarn
as he was dominating the stage and interacting well with the audience. By perform-
ing live in front of an audience, Albarn displays his true identity. No longer the
advocate for the virtual group, he is “Gorillaz.” Our final chapter, “ ‘Feel Good’ with
Gorillaz and ‘Reject False Icons’: The Fantasy Worlds of the Virtual Group and Their
Creators,” explores the underlying agenda of what has been dubbed the “ultimate
manufactured pop band.” As Rambarran explains, “The image of a pop artist takes
an ironic twist as Gorillaz’ looks are unconventional, and it is the peculiar animated
modification of their bodies along with their distinctive personalities” that give the
band their appeal. In particular, Rambarran continues the discussion of Japanese
virtual performers by focusing on Noodle, the guitarist of Gorillaz, who carries
elements of Japanese popular culture (such as anime) and is also presented as a
powerful female cyborg. In essence, Gorillaz are a simulation of a pop group: hyper-
real. Drawing on Baudrillard (1993, 1994), she argues that the four characters in
Gorillaz are “generated as would-be humans through the aid of digital technol-
ogy”:  they are virtual beings who are “neither real or unreal” (Baudrillard 1994,
125), and that it is Damon Albarn who controls the musical and media direction
of the group. A  detailed discussion of the identity of its four members (Murdoc
Niccals, 2D, Russel Hobbs, and Noodle) and the creative world of Kong Studios is
given a specific focus in a close analysis of “Feel Good,” the first single from the sec-
ond Gorillaz album Demon Days (2005). Drawing on Roland Barthes (“The Third
Meaning,” 1977), Rambarran reveals that the song and the video provide an insight
into Albarn’s personal agenda: his attack on the ideology surrounding the contem-
porary music industry, finally raising the question as to whether the revelation of his
real identity is a form of retrogression.

Note
1. The uncanny valley is a term coined by Masahiro Mori (1970). Mori observed that as
robots are built to look more humanlike they appear more familiar, until they become
indistinguishable from human beings. He argued that this near-humanlike robot would
appear strange or creepy, terming it bukimi no tani, which has been translated as the
uncanny valley (Vasudevan and MacDorman n.d.).
100    Part Two: Vocaloids, Holograms, and Virtual Pop Stars

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage.
———. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mori, Masahiro. 1970. “The Uncanny Valley.” Energy 7(4): 33–35.
Vasudevan, Sandosh, and Karl F. MacDorman. “Exploring the Uncanny Valley.” https://exper-
iment.informatics.iupui.edu/pages/about (accessed Mar. 7, 2015).
 chapter 6

Vo cal oi d s
and Japanese V i rt ua l
Vo cal Performa nc e
The Cultural Heritage and Technological
Futures of Vocal Puppetry

Louise H. Jackson and Mike Dines

Notions of illusion are an inherent part of the traditional theatrical practice and expe-
rience of Japan, and it is contended here that they normalize the creation of synthetic,
virtual performance avatars that front the sampled vocaloid software. In contrast to the
rather Western fixation on the authenticity of the human voice (whoever is seen and
heard to be singing should be the actual owner of the voice and physically connected
to it in some realm of reality), this chapter holds the idea to account by exploring the
world of the Japanese vocaloids in the context of Asian theatrical practices—specifically,
examining the use and conceptualization of puppet theater (Bunraku) to raise ques-
tions about the cultural location of vocaloid software and the emergence of the “vir-
tual” voice/artist.

Introduction

It would be easy to dismiss the vocaloids, a range of commercial vocal synthesizer soft-
ware developed by the Yamaha Corporation and Crypton Future Media (Kenmochi and
Ohshita 2007), as a symbol of the death of the artist, lacking in emotion and “authen-
ticity.” Yet one could argue that such inauthenticity is a peculiarly Western ideal, evi-
denced by reactions to the dubbing of actors with “real” singers’ voices in many musical
films, notably My Fair Lady (1964), The King and I (1956), and High School Musical
102    Louise H. Jackson and Mike Dines

(2006). Spring (2011, 285)  discusses “the illusion that the body seen onscreen is the
source of the voice emanating from the soundtrack, and simultaneity, the illusion that
the filming of the image and the recording of the voice occurred concomitantly and in
the same space.” Although Spring is focused on tracing the relationship between the
voice and body on film, it bears a resemblance to our own investigation as we start to
unpack the intersectional between the recorded, the virtual, and the authentic.
The vocaloid software itself began in March 2000, with Yamaha showcasing
Leon and Lola—the first vocaloid artists—at the annual trade show of the National
Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) in January 2004. From 2004 to 2006, a
number of software updates were added to this initial model, until 2007, when
Yamaha released Vocaloid 2. This in turn was superseded by Vocaloid 3, which was
launched in October 2011, accompanied by a number of software plug-ins, includ-
ing the VocaListener and Vocaloid-flex, additions that widened the parameters of the
Vocaloid 3. The title chosen for this chapter, “Vocaloids and Japanese Virtual Vocal
Performance,” positions the vocaloid software and creation of “artists” (or avatars)
such as Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin, and Megurine Luka in a continuum of Japanese
theatrical and artistic legacy, highlighting important parallels with the Japanese the-
atrical practice of Bunraku (puppet theater) prevalent within the Japanese Imperial
age. By perceiving the vocaloid software as a creative process in itself and as a natural
progression of this theatrical tradition of illusion (rather than a more ominous predic-
tion of the future), we may see a platform for expression instead of a threat to creative
freedom.

Bunraku and Vocaloids: Puppets

and Relations of Illusion
and Virtuality

As a theatrical practice, Bunraku is a sophisticated form of puppet theater, whose

peculiarity lies in the visibility of the puppeteer alongside the puppets themselves.
This visibility is further compounded by each puppet having more than one control-
ler, with the main puppeteer moving eyelids, eyebrows, mouth, and right arm, the
first assistant operating the left arm, and a second assistant the legs. These are accom-
panied by a chanter (tayu), who is the voice of the puppets, and a shamisen player,
who provides music to the drama. Bunraku saw the height of its popularity during
the seventeenth century, particularly in the collaboration between the playwright
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724) and chanter Takemoto Gidayu I  (1651–1714).
However, with the growth of Western influence in Japan during the Meiji Period
(1868–1912), Bunraku saw a decline in popularity, and although the art has had a
number of revivals since, it has survived mainly thanks to government support and
sponsorship.
 Vocaloids and Japanese Virtual Vocal Performance    103

Although centuries old, one must not underestimate the cultural and aesthetic
importance of Bunraku in unraveling the complexities and idiosyncrasies of modern-
day vocaloids. Indeed, what remains fundamental within this study is the placement
of both Bunraku and vocaloids as parallel art forms in problematizing human, and
in the latter case technological, emotions and sentiment. As a Bunraku play such as
Chushingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (first performed 1748) mixes fact and fic-
tion to create a “fictional” work of complex heroics and revenge, vocaloids too combine
the real and illusory to explore Japan’s increasing fascination with technology. In other
words, just as Bunraku puppets explored the self through the relationship between illu-
sion, reality, and puppetry, vocaloids are exploring the enigma of technology within the
modern, with both incorporating the controllers as being real or recognized as part of
the illusion on stage.
The importance of Bunraku, therefore, is in the paradoxical positing of “illusion” and
“reality.” In his writing on Bunraku, Roland Barthes (1971, 76) noted that it “uses three
separate scripts and presents them simultaneously in three places in the spectacle: the
puppet, the manipulator, the vociferator; the effected gesture, the vocal gesture.” Here,
Barthes noted the complexity surrounding artifice and actuality. Notions of illusion and
how a spectacle is presented to the audience within Bunraku, therefore, present that
spectacle as both illusory and real. “Traditional puppeteers recognized long ago that
the realm of illusion which they [would] create,” write Inoura and Kawatake (1981, 548).
“The world within the frame can exist only so long as it does not become too real, only so
long as it is perceived constantly in terms of other realities and other illusions. Bunraku
puppets of Japan provide the best example of this recognition” (152). It is, moreover, a
spectacle enhanced with the chief puppeteer having his emotionless face exposed to the
audience while the two other operators wear black hooded capes.
Consequently, one can assert that Bunraku fuses the illusory and the real, the theat-
rical and the live, realizing both conditions simultaneously; and this tradition is con-
tinued through the technological ingenuity of vocaloids. However, whereas Bunraku’s
significance within Japanese culture may be realized in simpler terms, vocaloids pro-
vide a more complex set of cultural mores and values to realize its import. In other
words, although vocaloids may indeed be seen within Japanese theatrical culture, the
perception of this art form in reference to other cultures—developing technological
communities in the West, for example—may find a more problematic point of cultural
reference, including those of other “realities” and other “illusions.” However, one could
posit that vocaloids have a double significance. If an understanding of vocaloids can be
drawn from the cultural and aesthetic realm of the Bunraku, then the vocaloid can also
furnish an aesthetic framework in which to unravel the relationship between Japan in
the present and its relationship with technology.
Attempting to locate a cultural heritage for relatively new phenomena is not unusual;
nor is it a particularly new process. The need to have some form of legacy or precursor
to a new trend is said to provide stylistic authenticity and history. But for the purpose of
this chapter, the concern is to try to explore a creative practice that is culturally located.
An evolutionary process within an art form is generally perceived as acting from within
104    Louise H. Jackson and Mike Dines

the art form itself, with influence from cultural and social factors exerting external
pressure on it. On the one hand, Japan, as a nation and as a cultural location, has a
long, rich, and varied history of artistic practices; yet on the other hand, it is often
assumed to be the epitome of the twenty-first-century nation, embracing technologi-
cal advances and development. What is interesting in this apparent technology-driven
locale is the repositioning of traditional artistic practices. Emphasis is placed on the
“new,” but theatrical and artistic practices such as Bunraku are protected artifacts of a
bygone Imperial age, becoming museum pieces or tourist attractions and having less
connection with the people of the nation.
Although the tradition of idiosyncratic puppetry may remain stylistically in the past,
its mobilization of the relationship between the puppeteer, the puppet, and the viewer
still holds true today. Consequently, the theater drew much attention from the West in
academic writings of the 1970s and 1980s, with Roland Barthes (1971) and Susan Sontag
(1984) both using Bunraku to explain some Western ideas in a form of Neo-orientalism
that took hold under the guise of postmodernism. Barthes in particular found within
the relationship between the three actors of puppet, musician, and singer in Bunraku
play the opposite of Western theater, where the basis is found “not so much in the
illusion of reality as the illusion of totality.” Through this, in Western theater Barthes
asserts the totality of the elements is the foundation for illusion, that they are indivisible
and perceived as such. Conversely, Bunraku is distinct because of its divisible compo-
nents. The visibility of the puppet manipulator on stage and acceptance of this as part
of the spectacle brings “a piece of the body, a shred of man, to life, all the while keeping
for it its vocation as a ‘part’. It is not the simulation of the body which Bunraku seeks, it
is—if this can be said—the body’s tangible abstraction” (1971, 78–79). This notion, we
will see, plays out further in our discussion and is something that holds as an evolution-
ary factor with the vocaloids. As Inoura and Kawatake note, “the history of Japanese
puppetry is the history of the stripping away of curtains that once hid the manipulators
and the chanter narrator” (1981, 146).
Furthermore, as Jenkins (1983) suggests, “watching the puppet’s manipulators, we
acknowledge that the puppet is an illusion at the same time that we allow ourselves to
be deceived by the illusion” (415). He continues: “Bunraku dares us to disbelieve, but
we refuse. We continue to cling to the unreality, as if it were real, despite the blatant
evidence to the contrary. For a few timeless and irrational moments the Bunraku pup-
pet connects us to our naked hunger for illusion.” The links between Bunraku and
vocaloid begin therefore with the superficial: construction of a puppet, something to
be manipulated to tell a story by an external force. However, as Barthes (1971) describes,
there is a difference between construction of the Bunraku puppet and that of Western
puppets. Whereas in Western puppetry the puppet is “expected to offer the mirror of
his contrary” (78), in which the caricature of the puppet affirms what Barthes calls
“life’s moral limits” (author’s italics), within the puppetry of the Bunraku the illusion is
accepted and put to use; it is the shared notion that culturally locates Bunraku puppets
as a precursor to the vocaloid hologram Hatsune Miku and others.
 Vocaloids and Japanese Virtual Vocal Performance    105

There is a belief that the relationship between Japan and its inhabitants’ embrac-
ing of technology is mediated by its exploration of the future through the dramatic
arts (Babcock 2004). Cyborgs, Post-Atomic dystopias, and fantasies constructed
of technological futures are well-recognized imageries within Japan and are accom-
panied by those that may be more familiar to the West, from anime such as Akira
(1998) to Ghost in the Shell (1995) or even Laputa:  Castle in the Sky (1986) from the
Western-friendly Studio Ghibli. It may be possible to suggest that the evolving virtual
performance practices that use vocaloid software are following a similar cultural role
by exploring the future through codes the culture already controls. In particular, the
commercially driven popular music scene, which has attracted much debate as to the
impact of Western popular music and Japanese popular music has evolved from its
folk traditions. Jones (1981) began exploring injecting new narratives into Bunraku to
update it and make it more accessible to contemporary audiences. This is not an unfa-
miliar tactic, to preserve a practice that is rooted in a different cultural and political
era. How commercialism and capitalism have affected Japanese music is explored more
fully below, but the impact on theater in its traditional form has been just as evident

Vocaloids as Hybrid Art

Forms: Popular Music, Anime,
and Technology

The previous section of this chapter examined the cultural background of vocaloids;
this section attempts to disentangle the cultural and aesthetic complexities surround-
ing the phenomenon. Specifically, it looks at the concept of the vocaloid to raise ques-
tions about the cultural positioning of theater and technology, exploring the numerous
ways that technology has superseded the creation of the puppet in Japanese theater.
As Frederickson notes: “Social technology prepared the way and was the stimulus for
machine technology in musical art worlds. When social technology moved the orches-
tra to the pit, it would be only a matter of time before the orchestra could be moved to
the sound studio for musical shows” (1989, 195). He concludes: “If the social technology
established that the orchestra need not be visible, it was only a matter of time before
machine technology would replace the orchestra. If the audience can’t see the orches-
tra, its live presence is not necessary since it has become merely a sound source to be
submitted to rational principles of organization.”
Studies investigating Japanese popular music are divided into ways of viewing the
musical developments through a variety of methodologies; many are differentiated by
the use of the voice and style of singing. Japanese pop (often abbreviated to J-Pop) is
a popular music genre that superseded Kayōkyoku, or “lyric singing music,” in Japan
during the 1980s. With its roots in the Western popular music of the 1960s (The Beatles,
106    Louise H. Jackson and Mike Dines

Beach Boys, etc.), J-Pop fused Japanese musical stylistics with its Western counter-
parts, incorporating rock, synth-pop, and other styles and thus creating its own sty-
listic idiosyncrasies. Although most of the discourse in this area has focused on the
impact that imported Western culture and music has had on the development of Japan’s
pop music—or indeed the numerous issues surrounding the West’s deciphering of this
fascinating musical dialect—less explored are the internal factors that have enabled
fertilization of the aesthetic, which does not recognize the “cultural factors that give
Japanese popular music distinctive characteristics which are highly valued in Japan”
(Herd 1984, 75). Indeed, by exploring the dominant, residual, and emergent cultural
elements, which are inseparable from each other, one can argue

that no single element—not even dominant ones—can be reified as static and

thereby outside that process. . . . Clearly, the relation between traits of historical and
more recent musical practice is one of residual to dominant elements, as “dominant”
in this context refers to the hegemony of Euro-American popular music styles as a
referential frame for Japanese music since the mid-twentieth century. (De Ferranti
2002, 196)

Stevens (2008) describes the evolution of popular music in Japan through a lens of
power positionality, shifting from a postwar conquered nation to a consumer nation
in a global market. This chapter therefore recognizes those internal factors that influ-
enced the popular music of Japan from within the country itself, raising questions of
cultural locale and the unraveling of the aesthetic within the vocaloid, and contending
that evolutionary cultural practices are influenced as much by internal historical pro-
cesses as external forces.
It is thus important that those preconceived Western ideas and the concept of the
simulacra in Japanese popular music be handled with care. Although one may think
that the West cannot decipher the vocaloid (we do not wish to be defeatist), it merely
highlights the potential for error and misreading. A good example of this misinterpre-
tation, for instance, is discussion of cynicism when discussing the increasing suspicion
of the image of the real replacing the real. What do we find, then, when we explore the
vocal synthesizer technology of Vocaloid 2 alongside the accompanying avatars such
as Hatsune Miku and others? Certainly within Western media the incredulity that an
audience would want to pay to see a holographic projection of a cartoon front for a
synthesized vocal program is palpable. However, we wish to explore the complexities of
vocaloid culture within the context of the traditional puppet theater of Japan, thus ena-
bling an understanding of a cultural heritage manifesting itself within contemporary
technology; this, we would argue, is the key to a more authentic reading. It is argued
here that by understanding the cultural placement and generation of illusion—a tradi-
tional theatrical device, discussed above—the vocaloid is paramount in the generated
technological and conceptual understanding of the “virtual pop star.”
Although there are a variety of vocal software platforms, the focus of this discussion
is on characters (such as Hatsune Miku) related to Vocaloid 2 software, released by
 Vocaloids and Japanese Virtual Vocal Performance    107

Crypton Future Media. There are also other developments in the relationship between
Japanese popular music and virtuality (in particular such activities as creation of Eguchi
Aimi—a virtual member of the supergroup AKB48, constructed from blending facial
features of members of the sixty-one-person group, who is voiced and moved via vocal
samples and motion capture data), and it is further possible to argue that this type of
development is rooted in the theatrical traditions discussed previously. The general
reporting, however, tends to focus on the threat this development poses to popular
music as we know it (although the irony of discussing “manufactured pop” as a closely
linked proxy to virtual pop stars is not lost on Western commentators). However, the
thinly veiled skepticism in much of the online commentary seems to be leaning toward
an implication that the vocaloid avatars are believed to be real. The case of Eguchi
Aimi, when fans were fooled into believing the character was real, is perhaps an excep-
tion to any defense because it was created as a deliberately coercive stunt, which the
fans investigated after becoming “suspicious” of how similar she looked to other mem-
bers of the group.
This raises the question of whether the real world needs to have assurance that
something is “alive” or not so as to determine its acceptance. However, as explored,
the cultural understanding of illusion and how virtuality is associated with this
opens it up to further interpretation. The voice goes under much manipulation in
the recording and documenting of its performance, and it could be argued that there
is little difference between an external manipulator working with samples and what
is employed on a recording of Lady Gaga, for example. For others, it becomes vital
that behind the sound, however abstracted, there be a locatable being, “real,” liv-
ing (or at least alive at one point), to make the decision to make the noise that
is documented. This is a different aesthetic construct from what can be found in
many Asian art practices. For example, the singing voice in Bollywood films does
not belong to the actor portrayed on the screen, and the Playback singers, as they
are known, are perhaps even “bigger” than the bodies that they lend their voices to
(Weidman 2010).
Impressions of gender in musical production and construction of the avatar image
also constitute a platform for our investigation of vocaloids as twenty-first-century
descendants of Bunraku. Issues of image and sexuality come to the fore when exploring
the creation of a teenage avatar who becomes a fixation for subcultural Otaku culture.
This image uses manga-style imagery of the young female: hyperlong hair; hyperbig
eyes; and a sense of vulnerability, conveyed through positioning of the eyeline, sug-
gesting submissiveness to the observer, combined with a wardrobe that could easily be
used as a postnuclear school uniform. This image, which has its voice controlled exter-
nally to itself, symbolizes a dominant form of control, that is, the ability to be heard.
Therefore, dynamics of gender and how identity is played out through construction of
(feminized) images of musicians are as potent within discussion of women in Japanese
popular music as any others, but perhaps not as visible in the discourse surrounding
women in popular music. Identity constructions in Japanese popular music, in particu-
lar the more traditional popular song forms of Enka, play out traditional gender roles,
108    Louise H. Jackson and Mike Dines

which Yano (1997) suggests provides a comfort and a placing for older consumers of
popular music:

Older listeners look to the Enka stage for affirmations of maleness and femaleness
past: men in control of lives, situations, people; women reacting to men’s actions. . . .
These listeners find solace in the unchanging world of these songs and the gendered
images of their singers. (116)

Cogan and Cogan offer an overview of the major arguments presented within the con-
text of Japanese studies. They conclude that “Japanese female groups and solo artists
are stereotyped with the view that they are controlled by male producers” (2006, 73–74)
and suggest further that control of music production is based on traditional gender
roles, with a balance of power in male ownership of the production process.
Aside from this rather familiar argument of heteronormativity in music production,
what is of particular interest here is the construction of avatars, a visual representa-
tion of the vocal synthesizers. As noted above, construction of a character for Hatsune
Miku was at the behest of the CEO of Crypton Future Media, but the construction
(and subsequent obsession) of a female identity located in Japanese culture has roots
in previous Western obsessions (for example, Japonisme, a French fashion in the nine-
teenth century) and reminds us that “the exoticized and eroticized bodies of Japanese
women are certainly not a new fashion in Europe and North America” (Hsu 2008, 110).
This is particularly potent when a significant proportion of fans of the vocaloid move-
ment are located outside of Japan and the avatars are positioned much more as anime
characters, resulting in an “emotional investment” with an appeal far beyond the more
underground or fanatical niche markets (Kelts 2012).
Exploration of sexuality and gender identity in anime opens up questions regarding
national imperialism and class power (Newitz 1995). It is, however, possible to locate con-
struction of the avatar not just within a normative representation spectrum of gendered
identity, but within an understanding of what Zhivkova describes as “figurativeness”
(2004, 8–9), an archetypal element of Japanese culture. In this way, art works positioned
from within Japanese culture (acknowledging the impact of non-Japanese customs on
the evolution of art forms and practices) do not just use “forms that are symbolic of real
forms, [they] literally depicts those forms.” Therefore, the vocaloids are literally depicting
the intersection between technology and creative production, reflecting a culture that
has in it a deeply embedded tradition of illustrating meanings and whose “pieces are
originally suggestive of the whole picture.” In this way the synthesized voice is not a sym-
bolic representation of the human voice, but a real synthesized voice that, like Cyberpunk
anime, “asks questions about what makes us ‘human’ in a heavily corporatized, media-
saturated world. How do we differ from higher forms of artificial intelligence? How do
we distinguish objects, places, and experiences from their mediated copies? Where do we
draw the boundaries between nature and technology?” (Park 2005, 61).
The Western development of holographic projections (as in the rearticulating of
artists such as Tupac) play out the role of the hero achieving the enlightened state,
 Vocaloids and Japanese Virtual Vocal Performance    109

transcending physical presence, with the technological space to do so positioned as

feminized other (new technology and cyberspace in Cyberpunk terms). These play out
traditional performance roles (both of gender and musical performance). However, it is
the position of this chapter that the vocaloids act as a fissure, whereby the fascination of
the West with “projection of Japan as the ‘postmodern future’ ” is located in their taking
“over the narrative … the object becomes subject … when Japan ‘looks back’ at the
United States using the same ideological frame that has been used to render it ‘other’ ”
(Park 2005, 62). To do this, the triple combination of software, avatar, and songwriter
uses its own cultural language of figurativeness (Zhivkova 2004), which underpins
traditional Japanese artistic practices. Subsequently, “in this future, the technological
Other is no ‘other’ at all—neither an external space to be conquered nor an object to be
used—but rather something that already exists within oneself ” (Park 2005, 63).
Throughout this chapter we have explored the development of vocaloids against a
variety of frameworks. In particular, the notion of illusion, which is an inherent part of
traditional theatrical practice and experience in Japan, have been traced as a framework
through which to read and understand the development of vocaloids and their associ-
ated avatars. These ideas of illusion can be seen to normalize creation of an otherwise
synthetic, virtual performance. The avatars that front the sampled vocaloid software
within the cultural and creative languages can then be understood by positioning this
development as an artistic descendant of a traditional Japanese art form. Doing this, we
traced concepts that are culturally located (the habitus) and inform both creative use
and reception of the vocaloids.
In addition, the Western fascination, manifested particularly in anime, plays a part
in understanding the interaction with the avatars. As we saw, the Western appropria-
tion of a Japanese future (as manifested in Cyberpunk writings), is used to reflect back
a gaze from Japanese culture toward the West, and opens up further questions about
the role of the Vocaloids as a way of viewing the West. Furthermore, in cultural terms,
questions relating to the importance of Dōjin (the Japanese culture of self-publishing)
and its relationship to Otaku (culture interested in anime and manga) may be asked to
highlight the peer-to-peer significance in the sharing of vocaloids. Here, works either
new or based on a character, self-published within dedicated sites and marketed through
general media sites, may promote new readings of the impact of this development.
Finally, the complex and intricate relationship between consumer-generated media,
continuous development of technology, and Japanese popular music should not be
underestimated. As Stevens rightly notes, “while technology is thought to distance
people from art in most contexts, in the Japanese pop music industry, it works to
enhance notions of authenticity in the artist/audience relationship” (2008, 6). With
the rise of the Internet, therefore, and in particular websites such as YouTube and Nico
Nico Douga, the ability to create a product such as a vocaloid artist becomes an easier,
simpler process, whereby industry and enthusiast can gain possible authorship.
By understanding the world of the Japanese vocaloids in the context of Asian theatri-
cal practices, specifically the use and conceptualization of Bunraku, the cultural loca-
tion of vocaloid software allows us to engage with this technology and artistic practice
110    Louise H. Jackson and Mike Dines

differently from some other Western responses (notably through voyeuristic fascina-
tion or incredulity).

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Japan in Anime” Deliberations, Fall: 5–11.
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Cogan, Brian, and Gina Cogan. 2006. “Gender and Authenticity in Japanese Popular
Music: 1980–2000.” Popular Music and Society 29(1): 69–90.
De Ferranti, Hugh. 2002. “Japanese Music Can Be Popular.” Popular Music 21(2): 195–208.
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1982 Yamaha World Popular Music Festival.” Popular Music 4: 75–96.
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Weatherill.
Jenkins, Ron. 1983. “The Poetics of Theatre.” Theatre Journal 35(3): 414–415.
Jones, Stanleigh H. 1981. “Experiment and Tradition:  New Plays in the Bunraku Theatre.”
Monumenta Nipponica 36(2): 113–131.
Kelts, Roland. 2012, Dec. 21. “Hatsune Miku Goes Highbrow.” Japan Times. http://www.japan-
times.co.jp/culture/2012/12/21/music/hatsune-miku-goes-highbrow-2/#.Uqw1l2RdV_s
(accessed Aug. 20, 2013).
Kenmochi, H., and Hayato Ohshita. 2007. “Vocaloid:  Commercial Singing Synthesizer
Based on Sample Concatenation.” Paper presented at Interspeech Conference (Antwerp,
Belgium), Aug. 27–31, 2007.
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America.” Film Quarterly 49(1): 2–15.
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Literature Today 79(3/4): 60–63.
Sontag, Susan. 1984. “A Note on Bunraku.” Threepenny Review 16: 16.
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Song Performance in Early American Sound Cinema.” Film History 23: 285–299.
Stevens, Carolyn S. 2008. Japanese Popular Music. Abingdon: Routledge.
Weidman, Amanda. 2010. “Behind the Scenes:  Playback Singing and Ideologies of Voice
in South India.” Paper presented at conference Women Performers as Agents of Change:
Perspectives from India (University of Alberta), Mar. 15–16, 2010.
Yano, Christine. 1997. “Inventing Selves:  Images and Image-Making in a Japanese Popular
Music Genre.” Journal of Popular Culture 31(2): 115–129.
Zhivkova, Stella. 2004. “Figurative Elements in Koto and Bunraku Music and Their Analogues
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Symposium on Arts Education in Asia (Osaka University, Japan), Jan. 9–11.
 chapter 7

Hatsu ne M i k u a nd
Japanese Virt ua l  I d ol s

Rafal Zaborowski

In the digital music age, it could be argued that all idols are virtual. The primary mode
of listening to a song is through the use of a speaker, while being physically separated
from the performer. The listener might try to recognize the source of the sound, or
might interpret the song in the context of the artist’s previous endeavors, or, in the
act of reduced listening1 idealized by Pierre Schaeffer (Chion 1983), theoretically might
remove everything but the sound from the experience, and try to listen to the song for
the song’s sake. Whatever the listener does, the idol will not be there.
This seems, at first, hardly new or exclusive to music. With the exception of book-
signing events, we rarely have poetry recited by the author, but instead we read it to
ourselves at home or on a train. In a similar way, radio and television texts are medi-
ated by technology, and consumed in a variety of everyday contexts. The twist that
music brings to this framework is that, in some cases, the performer not only is physi-
cally absent from the listening experience, but does not exist at all. One example is the
Japanese virtual idol Hatsune Miku, and other idols from the vocaloid line. Miku, while
not being human, sings and dances, performs at live concerts, stars in commercials,
and tours the world through a hologram projection. As I describe later in more detail,
for her fans and producers Miku is a “real” entity, and the lack of a physical body can
even enhance the emotional engagements on offer during the audiencehood.2
This complicates the traditional approaches to musical performance, including
Phillip Auslander’s concept of persona as “an entity that mediates between musicians
and the act of performance” (2006, 102). According to Auslander, the persona is dif-
ferent from the “real” person and from the narrative-bound character, and this, for
Auslander, tied to Raymond Williams’s idea of television flow in modernity: the exis-
tence of personas allows performers “to engage productively with the information flow
of postmodern culture without being wholly absorbed into it, and equally without pre-
tending it was possible to step outside of it” (Auslander, forthcoming).
112   Rafal Zaborowski

Vocaloid (also known as Vocalo) presents a challenge to this model. Although the
three categories (person, persona, character) could be used to theorize earlier virtual
bands, such as Gorillaz, or even further back, the Archies, a vocaloid idol is neither a
person (as it is not human) nor a character (as it goes well beyond the narrative bound-
aries), and it certainly is not a persona (as it is not mediating a real person; for the fans,
Hatsune Miku does not stand for Saki Fujita in the way that 2D stands for Damon
Albarn).3 Unlike a nonvirtual celebrity, bound in a dynamic contrast of a digital per-
sona and a private individual, the virtual idol actually benefits from lack of a physical
frame (Black 2012), and this may change the nature of fan engagements.
In this chapter, I draw from the tradition of audience research to show the significance
of empirical data in the analysis of structure and growth of vocaloid cultures. I argue
that the audiences’ accounts of media engagements are necessary to understand the
complex and dynamic relations in all elements of the circuit of culture. As I will discuss,
this is especially true in the case of vocaloid music, because of high levels of fan partici-
pation and audience knowledge of the production aspects. Moreover, I will suggest that
the nature of dynamic cultural exchanges between vocaloid producers and audiences
is coevolutionary. The underresearched fan expectations and pleasures derived from
engagements with particular elements of Hatsune Miku—the voice, the lyrical content,
the production model, the “reality” aspect—both play into and are affected by other
moments in which meaning is circulated. In the following sections, after a brief tour
of theoretical foundations for the chapter I will first describe the traditional Japanese
entertainment model, and contrast it with the rise of vocaloid cultures and its conse-
quences for domestic and global audiences. Then, I will present data from interviews
conducted with young Japanese consumers, where the popularity of vocaloid music is
contextualized within a range of socioeconomic, cultural, and technological factors.
Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut (2010) offered the concept of “deadness” in place
of Auslander’s version of mediation, and attributed to the media a greater amount of
effective, agentic power. Stanyek and Piekut analyzed posthumous duets (i.e., collabo-
rations of deceased and living musicians, enabled by technology) to challenge existing
concepts of liveness and deadness. For them, the fact that Nat King Cole is dead did not
diminish his agency in a duet recorded posthumously with his daughter Natalie; the
agency is in co-labor itself—in the relations between the musicians and between them
and the technology. Although Stanyek and Piekut’s article did not extend this model to
digital music, the implications for new media are clear. Vocaloid cultural production
conceptualized as interactive labor between a producer and a digitalized idol makes
sense, but it does not solve the Hatsune Miku question. Who is the composing software
user collaborating with? Most directly, they are interacting with the prerecorded and
digitalized voice of Saki Fujita. On another level, they are also engaging with the enig-
matic persona, whose basic details (name, age, height, weight, favorite singing style)
were provided to them by the developers, Crypton Media. However, there is another
kind of co-labor present: Hatsune Miku is a dynamic product of virtual collaboration
by fans, who imagine and create on message boards, video channels, and online music
platforms.
 Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols    113

What is, then, the vocaloid idol? Is it an avatar, a dynamic algorithm (Auslander 2013)?
Is it a custom-made commodity (Black 2012), a type of intermundane collaboration
(Stanyek and Piekut 2010), or an example of “virtual liveness” (Sanden 2012, 46)? The
challenge of analyzing Hatsune Miku and the Vocalo cultures lies not only in going
beyond known paradigms (“person” and “character,” “text,” “recording,” and “perfor-
mance”), but in a necessary attempt to include audience approach to the traditionally
text-focused field of music. In Chapter 8 of this book, Thomas Conner recaps the his-
tory of virtual pop idols through the careers of animated acts such as Alvin and the
Chipmunks, the Muppets, and Gorillaz. Although the phenomenon of virtual musi-
cians and bands has fascinated the mainstream press, and lately has attracted some
academic attention (Sanden 2012, Richardson 2005), the reception perspective on vir-
tual idols and their interpretation by audiences remains unexplored. Hatsune Miku
and the Japanese vocaloid cultures, the focal points of this chapter, are no exceptions.
For example, Ian Condry (2011) aptly linked the bottom-up and open-source struc-
ture of the vocaloid model to the spread of hip hop in Japan in the 1990s, but despite
alluding to Nobushige Hichibe’s ethnographic data (2010) on comic market consumers
he lacked audience data to check that with vocaloid fans. Daniel Black (2012) placed
vocaloid among other virtual idols and music tools and suggested, building on Hiroki
Azuma (2009), that the all-digital features of Hatsune Miku enabled hardcore fans to
engage with and modify the performer in a more intimate way than ever before—but
those ideas also remain empirically untested.
This is not to say the reception approach disregards, or should disregard, the text. On
the contrary, one of the most significant legacies of audience studies is the establish-
ment of an interpretative link between media texts and the audiences. The audiences
negotiate and produce meanings, but they also shape social relations in the everyday
context by engaging with the texts (Livingstone and Das 2013). The mediation of these
participatory activities of the audience with texts is especially meaningful in the con-
text of society and culture, because societal and cultural participation is increasingly
participation through media (Livingstone 2013, Carpentier 2011).
How these textual engagements are taking place has been interdisciplinarily theo-
rized. Classic reception studies from the Germanic tradition influenced audience
research in the conceptualization of the text reader’s practices, which are embedded in
a whole array of personal, societal, and genre-specific contexts. Wolfgang Iser (1978)
and Hans Robert Jauss (1982), in particular, noted the dynamic nature of the reader-
text engagement when they wrote that the practice of interpretation is nonlinear, as the
readers’ viewpoint wanders back and forth (Iser), their perspective changes, and their
expectations are shaped by a horizon of previous experiences and knowledge about the
style and genre (Jauss). A body of audience studies on books, magazines, and television
texts in the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, provided empirical data that challenged the
alleged passiveness of media reception, and forced us to rethink the conceptual frame-
work on media interpretation (among other works, Ang 1985, Radway 1984, Liebes and
Katz 1990, Livingstone and Lunt 1994, Morley, 1992). The studies forcefully suggested
that audiences (plural) were diverse and complex (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998),
114   Rafal Zaborowski

that the texts could be open (Eco 1979) and polysemic (Fiske 1986), and that ethno-
graphic work with media informants is necessary to uncover those heterogeneous rela-
tions and not have to rely on the “implied” reader. Much of such work relied on the
tradition of British cultural studies and the concept of the “circuit of culture,” according
to which the key moments in the cultural process (production, consumption, regula-
tion, representation, and identity) are connected and inseparable (du Gay et al. 1997,
Johnson 1986; see also Champ 2008 for a review of the concept).

Offices, Idols, Virtual Idols

An “idol” (aidoru) in Japan refers to a male or female singer and media personality, most
often teenage, who also frequently models for magazines and appears in promotional
campaigns. Although there seems to be no set definition of aidoru, the lines between
“idols” and “non-idols” are most frequently drawn around the portrayed persona (idols
are pure, down-to-earth, and easy to relate to), affiliated agency and management style
(idols often form groups and are banned from dating, and their image remains heavily
controlled), music style (idols sing mostly bubbly pop) and abilities (idols often possess
no special singing talents; more valued is the effort they put in, and their proximity to
the audience). The aidoru machine intersects media and industries and, especially in
recent years, has become synonymous with mainstream Japanese pop, as idols remain
the only acts seemingly not affected by the CD sales decline.4
Virtual idols share some of the characteristics outlined above (persona, “age,” mul-
timedia visibility), but lack others. The manufactured voice and singing style, digital-
only presence, and holographic visualization are significant points distinguishing
Hatsune Miku from the mainstream Japanese music model. However, it is primarily
the vocaloid production and distribution system that is structurally different from the
standard industry practice in the Japanese entertainment business.
The Japanese music business is centered on “offices” (jimusho), vernacular for “artist
management companies.” Offices not only sign and produce music acts, but also cre-
ate most or all their content, retain master and publishing rights, and keep full creative
control. Although not limited to idol pop (see, e.g., Christine Yano’s 2002, discussion of
the enka genre, or Carolyn Stevens’s 2007 experiences with a Japanese rock band and
their agency), the jimusho model is most powerfully described in English in Hiroshi
Aoyagi’s book on the idol industry (2005), where he discussed a range of practices
exemplifying the power of offices over other institutions in the music business. To
avoid the attention of the public and regulating institutions, offices operate as small
companies, but they retain ties, formal or informal, with large Japanese corporations
and are said to be linked to the underworld (Marx 2012).
As a result, the offices are the dominant power in the Japanese music industry. By
controlling the master and media rights, they are effectively in charge of the whole cre-
ative process: they (or, rather, their corporate bosses) decide who will be promoted on
 Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols    115

TV and radio, they dictate the image of the performers as well as much of their private
lives, and, naturally, they control the musical content. All this is hardly a secret to the
audiences and general public. The on-stage characters and the performer personas,
clearly manufactured, are sold to the audience on a disbelief suspension clause, or, in
the words of a jimusho producer, “a lie that we are all in on” (P4, interview, 2012). The
amount of control over (especially young) idols can easily be tracked through main-
stream media news in Japan, which in some cases gets picked by English-language out-
lets. That was the story of Minami Minegishi, a twenty-year-old member of the all-girl
band AKB48. Minegishi, who had been spotted breaking the contractual “no dating”
ban, was demoted to a trainee level, and shaved her head in a video apology (McCurry
2013). The story, although perhaps rare in the international press, is only one of many
similar appearing in Japanese media in the span of a month.
Human and labor rights aside, the jimusho system has been criticized within the
industry for its inability to cope with the new market reality. The centralized model
became unable to produce anything outside its comfort sphere—musically conserva-
tive songs to appeal to the widest audience and good-looking, “safe” idols to return
years of production investments and help secure advertising and television deals—and
with declining TV viewership and press readership rates, the office idol model is bound
to be endangered (Marx 2012, 52). This ties in with similar issues in other industries,
as in anime production (Kelts 2008), and reflects the overall challenges of Japanese
entertainment to engage with the global market:  misunderstanding of international
content flows, an aversion to new media model, fears of decentralizing, and an uneasy
approach to intellectual property (IP) regulation (P2, interview, 2013). A  model to
tackle these challenges is presented on the example of production and distribution of
vocaloid music.
Vocaloid starts with a piece of software. A copy of Vocalo voice synthesizer is avail-
able for around $170 (for Hatsune Miku V3, available from September 2013; Crypton
Media 2013). The software allows the user to input lyrics (divided into syllables) and
assign them notes (and voice effects), which the vocaloid, using a prerecorded voice
collection, will mash into a vocal track. Seemingly just the next step in synthesizer
software evolution, the truly innovative aspect of vocaloid lies in its marketing strategy.
The software was first developed by Yamaha Corporation in 2004, but it was not until
2007 that Crypton Future Media, a small (at the time) company, added an extra mod-
ule to the vocaloid line, developing the first virtual, animated persona for the series,
Hatsune Miku. Since then, the software is sold not just as a tool for musicians, but as a
singer—your own personal music idol. The idol is not, however, the voice actress who
prerecorded the syllabic sounds5 (Saki Fujita, in the case of Hatsune Miku), but an ani-
mated, virtual being. Miku is therefore not just a picture on the software package but,
as provided by Crypton, a sixteen-year-old girl, 158 cm tall, weighing 42 kg, and with a
passion for idol style and dance music (Crypton Media 2013).
After Hatsune Miku (lit. “the first sound from the future”), there have been a num-
ber of vocaloid releases by Crypton, and also by other companies. These vocaloids, each
with its own voice bank, differ by age, gender, and even language. Yet Hatsune Miku
116   Rafal Zaborowski

remains the most popular and the global face of vocaloid. Apart from being the vocalist in
more than one hundred thousand songs (including at least one internationally bestselling
single, “The World Is Mine”6), a character in comics, movies, and games, Miku also has
starred in commercials and movies and toured the world as an on-stage hologram.
One of the reasons for the popularity and the range of associated media activities is
the vocaloid creation and distribution model called PiaPro (Peer Production) Character
License, which is a twist on the Creative Commons agreement. Under the license,
everyone is allowed to noncommercially transform and recreate Hatsune Miku’s image,
and create derivative works from it at no cost (apart from the vocaloid software price,
where applicable). However, as soon as the project becomes commercial, the creators
will be bound to a mutually agreed deal with Crypton Media. The reason for such a
twofold license is Crypton’s dissatisfaction with the existing copyright laws, especially
in Japan: though traditional arrangements would greatly limit fan activity and interac-
tion, an open source software license would not account for the fact that the vocaloid
software remains commercial and it is only the character image and derivative works
that fall under free noncommercial use. The creators, then, can freely create vocaloid
music, which they upload and distribute through video sharing services, most notably
Nico Nico Douga, but also YouTube and Vimeo in the case of non-Japanese musicians.
The works are also shared through Crypton’s own web space.
IP rights and distribution aside, the office-managed idol industry and the decentral-
ized vocaloid model share a similar imagery and marketing practices. The concept of
teenage idols as androids or cyborgs is not an unusual theme in promotional videos or
campaigns, and this, of course, links to the prominent trope of virtuality and cyborgi-
zation in Japanese popular culture way back. Referring to idols specifically, we might
mention Kyoko Date, the ultimately failed attempt at the world’s first virtual idol, in
1996. In the modern idol era, we could point to the 2012 Glico campaign with girls
from AKB48. In this cross-media promotional campaign, a new member named Aimi
Eguchi was announced to be joining the group shortly. Her profile, personal details,
and picture were presented on the campaign website and in other outlets, spurring
a nationwide discussion: Is the girl real (Kolawole 2011)? She was not, but the image
was realistic enough to fool anyone; the thing that drew most suspicion was not the
visual, but the fact that the newcomer had, at sixteen, no recorded history in show
business—a rare circumstance in Japan, where idol auditions start for children even
ten years younger, and by fourteen it is already too late to hop in (P5, interview, 2012).
Finally, after weeks of speculations (on online message boards, and also in the main-
stream press, and on morning TV shows), Eguchi’s face was revealed to have been
constructed from facial features of the six most popular members of the group at the
time. The reveal was followed by a launch of an online activity, where fans could cre-
ate their own “perfect virtual idols” combining facial elements of nearly fifty chosen
AKB48 members.
This is certainly not new. In Japanese music videos, the trope has been implemented
in a number of popular idol songs in recent years. To take just the most commercially
successful women idol productions: in Momoiro Clover’s “Neo Stargate” (2013) the five
 Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols    117

performers are woken up from a sci-fi hibernator and transformed into futuristic cos-
tumes with full-face, spiked masks. In AKB48’s “Beginner” (2010), girls are connected
to a mainframe in a computer game simulation, which has them one by one annihilated
by virtual projections (brutally, to the extent that the video was pulled from TV distribu-
tion). Cyborgs, robots, or virtuality can be found in W’s “Robo Kiss” (2004), MiniMoni’s
“Lucky Cha Cha Cha” (2004), Namie Amuro’s “What a Feeling” (2011), and Kyary Pamyu
Pamyu’s “Invader, Invader” (2013); in a number of Ayumi Hamasaki’s or Utada Hikaru’s
videos (including 2004’s “You Make Me Want to Be a Man,” released in the United States),
and finally, in the whole concept behind acts such as Perfume or K-On.
This is not to say that the trope is unique to Japan, or East Asia. We could find a
number of similar conventions in U.S. hit songs. In “The World Is Not Enough” (1999),
the vocalist’s cyborg body (created by scientists of Asian ethnicity) is a weapon used for
sabotage; elements of cyborgization of human physique appear in David Guetta’s “Turn
Me On” (2011, featuring Nicki Minaj), Bjork’s “All Is Full of Love” (1999), a number of
Kraftwerk or Daft Punk videos; and more could be easily found just in the 2000s (see
Collins, 2011, for examples of robots as musicians since the 1970s). The point to make
here is rather a point of establishing thematic continuity. The audiences who listen to
vocaloid music are familiar with the convention. Depending on their age, there is a fair
chance they were exposed to Sharon Apple, a singing hologram superstar in the 1995
internationally renowned anime Macross Plus, or to “Beginner”; they might have read
about the artificial intelligence and idol singer Rei Toei in William Gibson’s novel Idoru
(1995), watched a video of “Robo Kiss,” or played one of the popular enhanced reality
mobile phone applications (such as Barcode Girlfriend or Bride Collection) that sim-
ulate a relationship with a virtual being. In other words, an individual engaging with
Hatsune Miku engages with her also in the context of their experiences of and expecta-
tions toward the virtual idol genre.
However, details of such engagements remain largely unexplored by scholars.
Because of a scarcity of empirical data, the framing of vocaloid audiences in academic
or mainstream literature remains at best speculative. Accounts of production, distribu-
tion, and representation in the two models above are insufficient to analyze the whole
cultural circuit. How and why do people listen to Vocalo? How do they engage with
the vocaloid product, and how, if at all, with its particular elements? Does the level of
knowledge about the industry practices in both models matter in fans’ musical engage-
ments, and if so, how? The emerging questions of how audiences make sense of Vocalo
music require giving voice to those audiences and contextualizing the analysis within
the overarching frame of the circuit of culture.

Interviewing Japanese Audiences

The ethnographic data in this chapter come from a five-month fieldwork conducted by
the author in Nagoya and Tokyo, Japan, between January and May 2012. To tackle issues
118   Rafal Zaborowski

of vocaloid audiences’ interpretations, behaviors, expectations, and attitudes, research

design was largely qualitative (see Bauer and Gaskell 2000, 7–9; Silverman 2010, 8–14).
The ethnographic portion was composed of focus groups, individual interviews, and
participant observation, and a combination of these three methods permit an explora-
tion of several aspects of audience engagements. The group setting, despite its artifi-
cial element, enabled dynamic and comparable reflections, while follow-up individual
interviews were more personal and focused on more detailed nuances of sense mak-
ing. The observation element was the most revealing about the participants’ life-worlds
within which media encounters are placed, and provided a comparison point for the
participants’ interview data.
Although part of a larger project investigating the engagements with music of two
Japanese generations,7 the academic inquiry into vocaloid was present in the research
throughout all stages of fieldwork, from preparation through prefocus group ques-
tionnaires, focus group interviews, individual interviews, and participant observation.
In the project, 104 participants were interviewed. From the industry side, there were
ten individuals coming from various areas of the Japanese music industry (musicians,
managers, producers, composers, DJs); all other participants, “the audiences,” were
divided into two age segments, sixteen to twenty-five and thirty to forty. Of these, 83
participants were interviewed in fourteen focus groups, nine for the younger segment
(53 individuals) and five for the older (30 individuals). Additionally, 9 more partici-
pants (1 from the younger segments, and 8 from the older) were interviewed individu-
ally on the basis of the same interview guide. In the next research stage, 28 focus group
participants were interviewed in depth, individually. Lastly, the interviews and focus
groups led the researcher to observe and participate in fifteen music-related events in
and outside participants’ homes. These included karaoke get-togethers, domestic rou-
tines, family car rides, and live concert attendances.
Apart from two interviews with North American DJs (based in Central Japan) in the
industry part of the fieldwork, all participants were Japanese but came from a range
of socioeconomic and geographical backgrounds. They were recruited by a number
of methods, including offline and online advertising, onsite solicitations, and per-
sonal introductions. The gender ratio, although reasonably well balanced, was skewed
toward women (55 to 37 in the audience part). After the participants were thoroughly
informed, verbally and in writing, about the research, all signed consent forms (in case
of minors, the form was also signed by a parent). All focus groups followed a similar
topic guide, divided into four main parts: musical engagements and experiences, gen-
erations, the role of music, and the image of the performer. Individual interviews fol-
lowed up on patterns discovered during the first research stage and supplemented the
data with a detailed account of everyday musical routines.
Interviews were transcribed and translated by the researcher, and then input, the-
matically coded, and analyzed using qualitative analysis software, nVivo. Thematic
analysis was chosen because of its advantages in working with qualitative data and its
ability to focus on key issues while capturing the deep context of the data and the stud-
ied phenomena (Flick 2002). Thematic analysis also permitted necessary flexibility and
 Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols    119

aided the participatory research design (Braun and Clarke 2006). The categories for
coding were created both deductively and inductively, that is, they were based on the
pre-fieldwork research and the interview guide but were also shaped by the emerging
empirical data. After the coding process, the themes were further analyzed: I reviewed
and compared them, contextualized within the dataset, checked against socioeconomic
attributes of the participants, and noted emerging patterns. A primary source of data
for this chapter was one of the data-led themes, “vocaloid.”
Because, as mentioned, the data are part of wider research, methodologically and
conceptually they need to be read in the context of the larger study. In this chapter,
I  will primarily refer to interviews and observations with vocaloid fans within the
sample. Although I will mention overall trends, and quote nonvocaloid audiences to
provide the necessary context, I will focus on nine participants, all but one from the
younger of the two cohorts: Aiko (woman, age eighteen), Asuka (woman, eighteen),
Sayaka (woman, nineteen), Kaho (woman, twenty), Shota (man, eighteen), Taiki (man,
eighteen), Takashi (man, nineteen), Taku (man, twenty), and Keita (man, thirty). The
young people whose views I present in the chapter are not intended to be seen as accu-
rate representatives of their generational segments, or of Japanese youth in general.
Instead, the aim here was to show a spectrum of attitudes about and engagements with
virtual idol music, and suggest a framework helpful in analyzing vocaloids and their
audiences.

Listening to Hatsune Miku

Approximately half of all participants were familiar with the name “vocaloid,” but most
(and in the younger cohort, almost everyone) have at least heard about Hatsune Miku.
In each focus group there was at least one person who admitted to having some Vocalo
music in their homes or on their MP3 players.
As was the case with other kinds of music, the participants engaged with vocaloid
songs in a variety of modes. Keita stressed that he cared most about the melody, not
lyrics, as he listened to vocaloid predominantly while studying. On the other hand,
Takashi stated he took pleasure in more “focused” listening, where he would wear
his headphones and just lie down on the bed, “concentrating on the story.” Between
these two extremes there was a middle ground that included all other participants. For
them, music was present in a number of contexts that were not easily categorized into
background and foreground listening (cf. Gurney 1880, Lee 1933, Schramm 2006). For
instance, Aiko listened to both idol and vocaloid music during her school commute,
surrounded by a number of visual and audio stimuli, yet at times she still engaged
consciously with the texts, modifying her playlist or browsing music websites for song
information. She was listening alongside, “ubiquitously” (Kassabian 2013).
The vocaloid element further challenges the modes. When Keita said he felt as
if “[Hatsune Miku] was here with [him]” when he played a song, he was making a
120   Rafal Zaborowski

comment on the artist-performer proximity. When a listener tries to recognize and

interpret the sound and compensates for the lack of visual cues (Sanden 2012), he or
she does not go back to Saki Fujita. Precisely because Hatsune Miku is a fan creation,
musicwise (as songs can be created by anyone) and personalitywise (as fans dynami-
cally shape the Miku persona), her presence is much more direct: she is nowhere, and
thus she is everywhere.
This proximity is significant. Condry, attempting to explain the popularity of
Hatsune Miku, allures to mediation, noting how Miku is “social without being real”
(2011, 14). Following a long tradition of Japanese successful music idols (Aoyagi 2005),
personalitywise Miku is portrayed as approachable and ordinary. In the global narra-
tive, despite being an international pop star, she craves fast food and sneaks out of the
studio to take a nap (Sweet 2011). Still, vocaloid idols depart from the idol template
noted by Aoyagi in two important ways: their pitch and appearance is perfect, and the
lyrics do not emphasize ordinariness in the same way pop texts do (Zaborowski 2012).
I will mention both elements in the last section.
Listening is also linked to the structural organization of music on playback devices.
Asuka had her music strictly categorized into folders on the MP3 player. The folders,
for her, related to normal types of feelings generated by the songs (“cheerful,” “nostal-
gic,” “calm”), and she told me she deliberately used the categories in accordance with
the time of day, the day’s events, or her personal mood. Sometimes, however, she would
let the player decide and “just let it shuffle, let it shape my feeling.” A similar strategy
of song organization into thematic folders was used by Taiki, Sayaka, and Aiko. Just
as in previous studies of music audiences, music served here as a mood regulation
tool (DeNora 2000), and an empowering instrument of personal soundsphere control
(Bull 2000).
The last significant mode of engagement with Vocalo music observed was karaoke.
Most focus group conversations about vocaloid included one or more participant anec-
dotes in which they or their friends sang a vocaloid song in a karaoke box. Because of
the extremely wide scale, high pitch, and fast-paced singing style of popular virtual
idols, the original performance proved difficult to recreate. The karaoke experience,
as related by casual vocaloid listeners Sayaka and Kaho, felt ambiguous; the effort was
“fun,” but ultimately “doomed.”
To just say it was “fun,” however, does not convey the complexity of engagements that
take place in a karaoke room, especially with vocaloid songs. Karaoke boxes in Japan
have long been described as a place of deep social interaction across all age cohorts,
where professional and social capital is established, displayed, and modified (Oku 1998,
Mitsui 1998), but much less has been written about individual engagements and the
spread of “one-man karaoke” parlors. Such places, where one rents a small room to
sing alone, were important for many of the participants. Asuka and Aiko used them for
practice, in anticipation of karaoke social gatherings, while for Keita one-man karaoke
was the only place he could sing his favorite songs freely.
For Shota and Taiki, whom I  observed in a karaoke room, vocaloid was the only
karaoke repertoire, unless, they said, they were accompanied by classmates who do not
 Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols    121

know about the boys’ Vocalo passion; indeed, during another observed karaoke occa-
sion in a larger group, to fit in with the school crowd Taiki reverted to mainstream pop
tunes or old time classics instead. But when there were just two of them, the karaoke
playlist was completely dominated by Hatsune Miku and other virtual idols, such as
Len and Rin Kagamine and Luka Megurine, and so were the two teenagers’ MP3 play-
ers. During our three-hour singing session, vocaloid tunes were sidelined only twice
(both times in favor of anime songs). Worries about the inadequate pitch or impossible
verbal pace of the original were seemingly absent (cf. Keil 1984). Vocalo singing was
also accompanied by actions not scripted by the on-screen rolling lyrics. Just like thou-
sands of spectators at a Hatsune Miku live performance, Taiki and Shota were shouting
out fan chants between and against the melody, and performing dynamic moves and
gestures during their karaoke performances. Unable to attend vocaloid concerts, in
this intimate space the boys recreated the fan rituals they had seen on video-sharing
websites or read about on vocaloid message boards. The act, they both agreed, made
the experience more “real.”

Who/What Is the Virtual Idol?

There were three main reasons discussed by participants when asked about their appre-
ciation for vocaloid songs: the production model, the sound, and the lyrics. Although
split on the last two (as alluded to earlier, individuals listened to Vocalo in differ-
ent modes, and thus valued different elements), all eight participants mentioned the
first aspect, albeit stressing it in various ways. I will present all three in the following
paragraphs.
The first element related to the distribution model. Among the participants,
I have not met anyone who created vocaloid content, despite the fact that more than
half of all individuals were educated, formally or informally, on at least one music
instrument, and there were a few amateur musicians with experience in composing.
The latter, already band members with a vocal lead present, expressed no need for
a voice synthesizer. Meanwhile, among the younger vocaloid fans, Vocalo creativity
was equally low, but for varying reasons. Aiko could not rationalize a vocaloid soft-
ware purchase to her parents, as it had, for them, no connection to the school cur-
riculum. Takashi and Shota, the only two who saw the software in action and made
an attempt at creating a vocaloid song, did not pursue the interest because of lack
of technology access (no personal computer). There are insufficient data to specu-
late on the paths not taken in the context of links between the school and home
(Buckingham 2007, Ito et al. 2013, Livingstone and Sefton-Green forthcoming). Still,
the interviews show that the teenagers held the production and distribution model
of vocaloid songs in high esteem. As Shota reported, “It’s just a bunch of talented
people, using [the software] for everyone to enjoy. They don’t have to go through
[the industry], they just upload.”
122   Rafal Zaborowski

The crowdsourcing element, then, and the fact that the vocaloid producers were
largely not part of an office seemed a vital component in the popularity of Hatsune
Miku among teenagers, ideologically or in terms of access (the questionnaire data show
that for these young people telephone or PC downloads and video upload sites were the
primary, and often the only, way of obtaining music).
The second element concerned lyrics. Describing her favorite elements of Vocalo,
Sayaka said, “I like this nonhuman feel, this speed, these fast-paced words.” Indeed, the
nature of the virtual voice pack makes no pitch or pace impossible, but it also permits
the type of content that is absent in mainstream pop music. Here, again, the stress on
the participation aspect was noticeable in the interviews. Asked about the elements he
likes most in vocaloid music, Takashi replied, “Unlike other [pop songs], they all have
stories. It’s like playing a game … like reading a novel. You are in it; you are part of the
story [my emphasis].”
There are two interesting things about this statement. First, similar quotes have
been heard in other empirical reception studies, providing data for theoretical mod-
els of the text and the reader, where the audience is not a silent slave to the text but
an active decoder and interpreter. Second, in the excerpt, Takashi refers to the reality
of mainstream Japanese pop music (J-Pop) content in the early 2010s. At the time of
most focus groups in this research (February 2012), the top five songs on Oricon (the
most popular Japanese chart ranking) were all bubbly tunes, all by idol performers,
with lyrics concerning bittersweet high school graduation (“Give Me Five,” AKB48),
the challenges of sexual abstinence (“Junjou U-19,” NMB48), a boy’s soft side (“Super
Delicate,” Hey! Say! JUMP!), girl talk (“Guru guru Curtain,” Nogizaka46), and a lost
friend (“Ai, Texas,” Tomohisa Yamashita).8 All except arguably the last one are much
more “closed” in Eco’s sense and do not anticipate a variety of decoding paths for the
model reader. Admittedly, the participants were not probed about their reactions on
the aforementioned top five; they were, however, outspoken on the qualities of lyrics
they did enjoy. The three most popular songs among the vocaloid fans were “Rolling
Girl,” “Wrong-side-out Lovers” and “Oh, Is That So?” All three were praised by the
participants for the unusual choice of “meaningful topics” (Asuka) and “adult themes”
(Taiki): bullying and self-harm in “Rolling Girl,” coming to terms with adulthood in
“Wrong-side-out Lovers,” the body shame in “Oh, Is That So?” Although structured,
comparative lyrical analysis was not a part of this research, a further study could look at
the themes in popular vocaloid and non-vocaloid music to potentially uncover deeper
ruptures between the two.
The third element, the voice, was itself a divider during the focus groups. Miko
(woman, thirty-four), Tatsuya (man, twenty-two), and a handful of other participants
said they felt alienated by the digital sound, and despite appreciating the melodies and
the visual elements of virtual idols, they said they could not engage with the songs
emotionally. Tatsuya raised an example of vocaloid songs covered by human amateur
performers seen on video-sharing websites, and those performances, for him, repre-
sented the best of both worlds: the skill of a vocaloid producer combined with a natural
human voice (cf. other chapters in this volume discussing the “uncanny valley” effect).9
 Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols    123

On the other hand, for the interviewed vocaloid fans, the voice was an indispensable
part of the experience. In the words of Sayaka: “The original, it must be Miku. If not,
then it’s just another song.”
The most direct question about the voice was unexpectedly posed by a participant’s
mother. Takashi, whom I accompanied in his mother’s car, had just burned a music
compilation CD for car listening. Takashi put it in the car stereo, and after two vocaloid
songs had finished, the mother bluntly commented: “It’s nice. But the voice, it’s always
the same, no?” Takashi gave it some thought, and replied:  “It’s precisely because the
voice is the same, that you can appreciate the quality of the melody and the lyrics.”
The voice did not, however, sound the same to all participants. Similar questions
asked of other individuals revealed a number of listening patterns. “The voice sounds
different when I’m sad. Or when I’m away from home . . .” said Keita. In contrast, rather
than attributing the change in experience to his mood or location, Shota referred to the
skills of the producer, who can “make” Miku sing differently, and also to the agentic
qualities of a virtual idol:

Shota:  Sometimes she sounds sad. Even though . . .

Interviewer:  . . . The sound is really the same.
Shota:  Yes. But it’s not, really. She sounds sad. She sounds angry. It’s noticeable.

The voice, the lyrics, the production model—three aspects noted by participants—link
back to the concept of the circuit of culture, and the coevolution of its elements. The
proximity of producers and fans is enhanced by participation (potential or real): the
modes and engagements of the audiences do not exist in a vacuum, but on the contrary,
consumption can affect production and vice versa.
The data also bring back aspects of reality and virtuality. In the interviews, the “real-
ity” of vocaloid idols was often mentioned from a practical side. “It does not really
matter,” said Aiko about the fact Hatsune was not human, “It’s not as if I could meet her
[if she was].” This, a commentary about the star culture and the performer-audience
proximity in late-modern popular culture, is perhaps most importantly an indicator of
socioeconomic status, and the divides within music audiences. Most of my rural and
small-town participants admitted to never having attended a big concert. Because of
the distance to the nearest prefecture capital city, where popular acts may (or may not)
perform during a national tour, the cost in time and money is too great to be able to
participate. Television and video-sharing websites (rarely concert DVDs) remain the
primary sources for watching an idol sing.
The conceptual differences of “reality” elicited most vocal responses when discuss-
ing aspects of supporting virtual and nonvirtual idols. Although some participants
equally enjoyed mainstream idol pop music and vocaloid music (Aiko, Kaho), oth-
ers were eager to point out how, in their minds, vocaloid was superior—namely, the
aspects of authenticity and reality. The bluntest comparison came from Taiki: “This is
real. This is the real freedom of expression. Look at the idols, look at the girl groups.
All fake.”
124   Rafal Zaborowski

And so, paradoxically, in the battle of holograms and teenagers, it is the latter that are
considered virtual. Whereas teenage girl and boy idols play carefully defined roles in
order to appeal to mainstream ideals, in vocaloid there is no pretense, no fabrication.
Hatsune Miku is real, because the audiences expect her to be, on the basis of a pop-
cultural history of machine-enhanced singers. The audiences make her real, because
she sings about things that matter to them. Finally, she is real because she represents a
bottom-up, collective model where access and participation are potentially unlimited.

Conclusion

Hatsune Miku is not a person. Her different personas and characters are the outcome
of a participatory activity by producers and fans. Characters, because Miku is ascribed
a plethora of narrative roles: she is a ridiculously selfish girlfriend in “The World Is
Mine,” a bullied teenager in “Rolling Girl,” and a world-famous yet down-to-earth sing-
ing diva with a fondness for bacon-wrapped hot dogs in the U.S. Toyota Corolla TV
commercial. Personas, because it could be argued (but it is not the primary focus of this
chapter) that each producer creates an individual version of Miku, contributing to the
collective imagination of vocaloid fans.
Vocaloid succeeds because of this participation element, but the latter is not neces-
sarily indicative of the former. The earlier attempts to capitalize on virtual idols, such
as Kyoko Date in 1997, did not work precisely because they were based on a traditional
capitalist model (Condry 2011). This is not the first time the East Asian entertain-
ment industry is predicted to spur different models of distribution as an alternative to
Western cultural hegemony (cf. Hesmondhalgh 2013, 303), but unlike J-pop and K-pop,
with their inherent cultural traits and controversial labor practices, vocaloid is more
culturally odorless (see Iwabuchi 2002) and potentially much easier to export overseas.
In this chapter, I discussed the audience element in the vocaloid music culture and
presented findings from multimethod, ethnographic data. Following classic theoreti-
cal reception scholarship and empirical studies of book fans and television audiences,
I suggested that the audiences engage with virtual idols and Vocalo cultures heteroge-
neously. The nature of these encounters differs in terms of modes, media, and sense-
making practices, and although the textual aspect of vocaloid matters in limiting the
range of interpretative paths, it does not determine the outcomes. Perceived notions of
virtuality or reality are made in the communicative and interpretative acts of listening,
and they depend on a number of individual and social contexts, including knowledge
of and attitudes toward industry practices.
The emerging image of Vocalo cultures tells a story of coevolution, where production
and reception aspects are closely intertwined. The specific nature of relations between
all elements in the music ecosystem is crucial to a comprehensive understanding of
virtual idols, but the paucity of academic inquiry into music audiences (Vocalo or oth-
erwise) limits the analytical repertoire on offer. Vocaloid culture is a telling example
 Hatsune Miku and Japanese Virtual Idols    125

of diverse and rich audiences who defy one-dimensional notions of reception, but the
implications stand also in the context of research on music in general.

Notes
1. Schaeffer’s reduced listening refers to a mode of listening where the sound is phenomeno-
logically isolated from its context (i.e., from its perceived source and possible meaning) in
order to “consider the sound event in itself ” (Chion 1983, 31).
2. I thank Sonia Livingstone, Tal Morse, and Daniel Kardefelt Winther for their valuable
comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
3. Saki Fujita is the voice actress who recorded the vocal database for Hatsune Miku. 2D is
the lead vocalist of Gorillaz, voiced primarily by musician Damon Albarn, who is also the
frontman of the band Blur.
4. Scholarship on Japanese idols is still scarce. Existing studies tend to focus on aspects
of idol production and the intimacy between the performers (usually female) and their
fans, drawing comparisons to idolatry in Japanese history, religion, or culture (see, e.g.,
Nakamori 2007, Galbraith and Karlin 2012, Aoyagi 2005).
5. Interestingly, the actresses do not record the voices as separate syllables, but as a string of
random and often nonsense words accompanied by a melody (see Fujita 2008, video in
Japanese, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIkbPKX4fjU accessed Sept. 10, 2013).
6. Authored by ryo, the song was originally uploaded to video sharing website Nico Nico
Douga in 2008. The single was released on the U.S. iTunes store in 2011.
7. The study (Zaborowski, forthcoming) looked at the nature, quality, and implications of
everyday music engagements of two generations of Japanese audiences. The study col-
lected original mixed-method ethnographic data to understand how audiences accom-
modate themselves in the world through popular music, as well as to compare strategies
of interpretation and meaning making in personal and social spheres. Stemming from
Western cultural studies of audiences on the one hand and from empirical concepts and
fieldwork from Japan on the other, the project challenges the two frameworks, draws par-
allels with the early days of film and television reception research, and discusses the con-
nections and disconnections between modern media studies and popular music studies.
8. It needs to be mentioned that three of these (“Give Me Five,” “Junjou …” and “Guru
guru …”) were written by one man, producer Yasushi Akimoto.
9. The term was first coined by Masahiro Mori in 1970 to describe the discomfort one feels
interacting with an inanimate object whose similarity to a human falls within a specific
range (see Mori 2012).

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Richardson, John. 2005. “ ‘The Digital Won’t Let Me Go’: Constructions of the Virtual and the
Real in Gorillaz’ ‘Clint Eastwood’.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 17(1): 1–29.
128   Rafal Zaborowski

Sanden, Paul. 2012. “Virtual Liveness and Sounding Cyborgs: John Oswald’s ‘Vane’.” Popular
Music 31(1): 45–68.
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Sage.
Stanyek, Jason, and Benjamin Piekut. 2010. “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane.”
TDR: The Drama Review 54(1): 14–38.
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Routledge.
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaA2liN9LKM (accessed Aug. 11, 2013).
Yano, Christine R. 2002. Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song.
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Political Science.
 chapter 8

Hatsu ne M ik u , 2 . 0Pac ,
and Beyond
Rewinding and Fast-Forwarding the Virtual Pop Star

Thomas Conner

You’re perfectly within your rights to jump to conclusions immediately on witnessing

a virtual performer such as Hatsune Miku. She’s an audacious spectacle—an anthropo-
morphic digital software agent projected onto a physical stage, singing with a computer-
synthesized voice while real human musicians play alongside her—and it’s common to
walk away from one of her concerts suspecting that you’ve borne witness to something
utterly unprecedented, groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting. At my first Miku concert,
I scribbled some impromptu notes on the flyleaf of a novel I had with me, starting with,
“It’s Rei Toei!!”1 Wide-eyed wonder and awe are suitable first responses—and that’s
before you learn that everything she performs is written by an innovative network of
content-providing fans.
Hatsune Miku and others in the current class of digitally animated singers—including
2.0Pac (a nickname for the buzzworthy “hologram” of the late rapper Tupac Shakur
presented in April 2012 at the Coachella pop music festival), other resurrected rappers
(the late Eazy-E and ODB reappeared on stages in 2013 as “holograms”), and other
digital idols in Asia—exude the futurism of science fiction and the seemingly limit-
less potentials of new communication media, but they are simply the latest upgrades
in what is now a considerable history of virtual pop music performance. Miku and
2.0Pac appear on stages as if beamed directly from the imaginations of speculative nov-
elists (or, in the case of the latter, the grave), but each exists and communicates within
certain parameters established by a previous half-century of virtual pop stars specifi-
cally designed for and presented through electronic media. Although appearing to be
singular personalities with agency, today’s characters—like so many who have come
before—are made available for cultural consumption through a complex production
process involving a large body of labor (including, in Miku’s case, the contributions of
the consumers themselves).
130   Thomas Conner

Previous virtual performers have been successful, however, because of two key fac-
tors: a strict adherence to performer narratives, and a philosophy of design that reins
their visual depictions well short of the uncanny valley.2 Performer narratives, as
defined in Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur’s lively study of the Muppets, are those involving
“performer characters, engaged in acts of performance as well as non-performance
character development” (2012, 178). Although Miku is usually depicted by fans in the
act of performance, many Miku songs and videos grapple with whether an offstage
life is even possible for her; she also starred in an opera that dealt with larger, age-old
existential questions.3 All the virtual figures described in this chapter are performer
characters and as such—according to Calbreath-Frasieur’s theory, which stands on
the shoulders of Henry Jenkins’s concept of transmedia storytelling (2006)—their
meta-narratives navigate more easily around questions of identity and authorship,
allowing fans to accept the presentations of the characters as if unmediated. But as
showfolk, complete with that subculture’s historic connotations of creative and moral
experimentalism, virtual performers from the Archies and Josie and the Pussycats
to Kermit the Frog and Hatsune Miku are allowed to exist in a cultural zone where
it’s safe to be different, or even digital, something a little more or less than human.
The human performer (particularly the actor) is a cultural archetype prepackaged
with certain assumptions, a person already straddling the boundary between reality
and fantasy, able to permeate the liminal space where virtual performers ultimately
are actualized. If animated characters first claim to be performers, then they’ve
already taken a step toward a shade of virtuality that humanity is familiar with and
accepting of.
Their visual designs, however, rarely allow viewers opportunities to doubt their live-
ness. Much has been written about the power of virtual and digital simulacra to evoke
an inherent fear of death (see MacDorman 2005; MacDorman and Ishiguro 2006;
Misselhorn 2009). The virtual characters discussed in this chapter, however, succeed
primarily because their designs consciously avoid that possibility. Line-drawn anima-
tion figures, blocky Muppet bodies, the anime stylings of Gorillaz and Japan’s vocaloid
idols:  these all wisely avoid tipping into the troublesome pitfalls of Mori’s uncanny
valley, a theory since applied as far afield as film studies and product design. Several
attempts to cross that divide by creating characters depicted in a more photo-realistic
style wound up described by viewers and critics as unsettling or creepy—precisely
the psychological slump illustrated by Mori’s chasm—including the now infamous
motion-captured performances in the films Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in 2001
and The Polar Express in 2004. Other films have peered over the uncanny precipice and
wisely pulled back. When designing characters for the movie Shrek, animators decided
to make Princess Fiona less anthropomorphic because, as one film executive said, “she
was beginning to look too real, and the effect was getting distinctly unpleasant” (quoted
in Misselhorn 2009, 347).
This chapter chronicles that lineage of mediated, virtual music performers, each of
which keeps his or her performer-narrative visualizations short of the uncanny valley.
This is a survey of popular entertainment, hopefully in concert with Louise Jackson
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    131

and Mike Dines’s historical prelude of virtual performers’ collective and technological
cultures in a previous chapter. I will conclude by forecasting the kinds of virtual per-
formers that may be beaming out of digital projectors in the future.
Miku serves as my touchstone here for the current popular expression of vir-
tual music performance, in that she encapsulates (let’s not say embodies …) both
a definition of the form and its successful actualization within new media. I define
a virtual pop star as a noncorporeal, mediatized character presented as a singular
musical performer, whether an individual or group, with the appearance of agency.
These are characters created, voiced, or visualized usually by collective labor, pre-
sented in reality and in the market for commercial and artistic purposes. Likewise,
Miku boasts many of the attributes of modern virtual performers. Like several virtual
performers we will see here, she was born as a marketing image related to a physi-
cal commodity and only later realized and rebranded as a performer. In that role,
she has been successful—chart-topping recordings, sold-out concerts, commercial
endorsements—and as a result branched into transmedia ubiquity in Japan, from
manga star to Google spokesperson.
Miku’s digital form is what makes her worth noting in this context as a transi-
tional figure, not because of the digital material of her virtuality but because of the
space in which that digital materiality ultimately has been presented. Less than
a decade ago, in order to witness digital simulations of three-dimensional real-
ity, users were required to don awkward and often bulky headgear, eyewear, or
haptic gloves before entering immersive CAVEs or other physical constructions.4
Existing studies of virtual/augmented/mixed reality, across disciplines, has exam-
ined it in terms of that screened experience. Miku, 2.0Pac, and others, however,
are new ambassadors of the digitally virtual, projecting their experience into our
physical reality, providing the illusion of an absence of screens and requiring noth-
ing by the user in order to experience the performance. These performers augment
reality, no equipment required (by the viewer). Despite the minimal presence of
Hatsune Miku and the concept of the virtual pop star in existing literature, they all
herald an era of digital entertainment augmenting our reality without the presence
of screens.
Though they seem to exist in thin air, these new performers did not materialize
directly from it, even figuratively. Other virtual performers have colonized previous
media that users were already familiar with and using, namely recorded audio and
television. Today’s digitally projected performers realign years of VR (virtual reality)
design with that modality by appearing on the same stages where flesh-and-blood
norms have ruled for centuries. The turning point that many of these new charac-
ters represent, however, was made possible by cheaper technology and the increasing
ubiquity of computing, which has begun to evert cyberspace. The first generation of
virtual pop stars involved physical objects, from animation cels to Muppets, optimized
for mediatized display. A new generation, from Gorillaz and Dethklok to Miku and
2.0Pac, seeks to reverse that polarity and bring the digital out of cyberspace, actualizing
it within the physical world.
132   Thomas Conner

Kids’ Stuff: The Chipmunks,

the Archies, and
the Hanna-Barberapalooza

Virtual pop performers have been present throughout pop culture with some regularity
since at least the 1950s. The first virtual pop star many North Americans encountered
was a squeaky-voiced, animated rodent trio—an audio gimmick that, coupled with
some cartoon imagery on a series of record covers and a resulting prime-time televi-
sion show, evolved into a global and long-lasting animated music brand: Alvin and the
Chipmunks.
In 1958, singer-songwriter Ross Bagdasarian (recording as David Seville) experi-
mented with a vocal effect while recording the song “Witch Doctor.” Using a tape recorder
to capture certain portions of his vocals sung slowly and recorded at half speed, then
played back at regular speed, Bagdasarian created the effect of a duet between himself in
regular voice and his sped-up, high-pitched alter ego as the gibberish-spouting (“Oo-ee,
oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla bing-bang”), romantic-advice-dispensing title charac-
ter (Setoodeh 2008). The success of the single (three weeks at number one) led him to
try it again, which he did later that same year on “The Chipmunk Song,” credited this
time to the fictional Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, which eventually became just Alvin
and the Chipmunks (Childs 2004). “The Chipmunk Song” was a huge hit, earning a
Grammy award, reaching number one on December 8, 1958, and selling 2.5  million
copies that month alone (Crouse 2000), leading to a series of recordings featuring the
chirpy vocal effect applied to numerous popular hits, an animated television series, a
film franchise, and retail sales of more than $1 billion (Setoodeh 2008).
The requisite visual imagery created for the first three Chipmunks LP covers initially
depicted the trio in a semirealistic, painterly style quite different from what became the
group’s standard image. The debut, Let’s All Sing with the Chipmunks (Alvin, Simon,
and Theodore 1959), for instance, shows three chipmunks with pointy heads, realis-
tic hind legs, and dark-brown fur highlighted with black streaks. The following two
albums, Sing Again with the Chipmunks and Around the World with the Chipmunks,
both released in 1960, featured artwork in this same style. In 1961, however, all three
albums were reissued with new cover art. The basic illustrations were the same, but the
Chipmunks trio and their human counterpart now were depicted in the style of ani-
mation cels from the new CBS prime-time television program in which they starred,
The Alvin Show (CBS, 1961–62). Here we see the Chipmunks as we still recognize them
today:  in an outlined, 2-D animation style, with more rounded figures and, more
importantly, happy humanlike faces (one character now even wears eyeglasses).
The input of this collective creative labor is part of the Chipmunks’ foundational
template for the virtual pop star. The Chipmunks began as the idea and product of one
man in a studio, but once seized by the market they became the product of a multitude
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    133

of recorded voices, sound engineers, and visual animators in both television and film,
all working (often across many national borders) to produce the illusion of a performer
narrative involving three cheeky cartoon rodents. Like Hatsune Miku, the Chipmunks
also set a visual standard that would be adhered to for decades: virtual music perform-
ers designed as 2-D cartoons and thus appearing in that style throughout other media,
from album covers to merchandising. Unlike Miku, whose anime-like image (origi-
nally developed by an artist for use on the packaging for vocaloid, the software provid-
ing her voice) has never been photo-realistic and has kept shy of the uncanny valley,
the Chipmunks and the numerous cartoon bands to follow honed to a safe, animated
template of visual production.
The next significant animated virtual band seized on the familiar animation form as
a means of eliminating altogether the troublesome human celebrity from creative and
performative participation. As music supervisor for The Monkees (NBC, 1966–1968),
a popular live-action television comedy about a fictional (not virtual) pop band, Don
Kirshner oversaw the songwriting and recording for the music presented on that
show—music that was, at least at first, performed and recorded by session musicians
and presented on screen while the actors lip-synced and mimed their performances.
Several songs marketed as the Monkees were real commercial hits. But as the show
developed, the actors chafed against mimicking the performances of others and insisted
on contributing to the creation of the show’s music. Kirshner refused and was fired.
Matt Stahl’s analysis of this situation speculates on the thinking that led Kirshner to a
Brobdingnagian, Bagdasarian idea:

But a question must have consumed him:  where, in a pop music world increas-
ingly populated by performers who, like the Monkees, had been infected by the
Romantic-countercultural rock ethic of individualism and authenticity ascendant
at the time, would he find a commercially viable group who would add value to his
constant capital in a satisfactory way and whom he could treat as calculative actors
for whom alienation and powerlessness could easily be compensated? (2010, 12)

Kirshner even told Rolling Stone that he “wanted to do the same thing with a car-
toon series that Ross Bagdasarian had done with the Chipmunks. … I wanted my own
Alvin, Simon and Theodore. I figured the country was ready for it” (as quoted in Stahl
2010, 13). Joining forces with Filmation Associates, a studio then enjoying great success
by turning superhero comic-book characters into cheap children’s television program-
ming, Kirshner did the same for the Archies, drawn from the comics series about a
clique of wholesome teens. Despite the characters in the comic books having never
previously mentioned interest in forming a band, The Archie Show (CBS, 1968–69)
debuted on Saturday mornings with the four main characters following the same nar-
rative and production arc as The Monkees: “wacky adventures, zany humor and three
minutes of pure bubblegum pop” (Childs 2004, 4).
Kirshner’s move paid off: the virtual Archies were a huge hit in the real world. The
number one song in 1969—a year commonly viewed as the apex of the anti-Vietnam,
134   Thomas Conner

topical protest-song movement—was the Archies’ bubblegum-defining single “Sugar,

Sugar.” Despite the ascendancy of the previously mentioned “individualism and
authenticity,” this song was not the product of a particular artist or group of artists but
of a burgeoning commercial content-generating machine. Stahl defines virtual labor as
“performative labor that appears to be performed by an individual but that is actually
the result of a division of labor incorporating creative and technical workers, intellec-
tual property, and high-tech equipment” (2010, 4). “Sugar, Sugar” was presented and
marketed as performed by the cartoon Archies, but the song was written by producer
Jeff Barry and singer-songwriter Andy Kim, and sung by musician Ron Dante (Childs
2004), all hired by Kirshner (Gold 2004), and presented in the TV show thanks to the
additional virtual labor of writers, animators, and background artists.
“Sugar, Sugar” sold ten million copies, but the buying public and even some in the
music industry remained slightly confused by the reality-virtuality of the Archies.
Numerous promoters requested Kirshner and Filmation to—somehow—tour the car-
toon band (Stahl 2010). Dante maintains he didn’t perform in the guise of his virtual
persona:  “I never toured or made TV appearances as the Archies. The comic book
people owned the rights to the Archies and wanted the group to stay as an animated
group” (Gold 2004). The band’s virtuality was thus never compromised.
In the years that followed, it seemed as if every Saturday morning cartoon started
with a band, including fictional groups The Impossibles (CBS, 1966), The Beagles
(CBS, 1966–67), The Banana Splits (NBC, 1968–1970, which mixed live action and
animation), The Cattanooga Cats (ABC, 1969–1971), Groovie Goolies (CBS, 1970–71),
Josie and the Pussycats (CBS, 1970–71) and Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space
(CBS, 1972), Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan (CBS, 1972), Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kids (NBC, 1973), Jabberjaw (ABC, 1976–1978), and a reboot of Alvin and
the Chipmunks (NBC, 1983–1990), plus virtual representations of real-life stars like
The Jackson Five (ABC, 1971–1973) and The Beatles (ABC, 1965–1969), the latter a
significant part of the virtualizing process to which the band submitted (as Philip
Auslander and Ian Inglis explain in Part Three of this book). Several also attempted to
expand the transmedia virtuality of the characters by marketing the music—albums
such as Here Come the Beagles in 1967 and We’re the Banana Splits in 1968—and
by almost bridging the animated personas with live concert presentations, as with
a “tour” by the Banana Splits that featured costumed actors in each city miming to
a prerecorded soundtrack and even handing out “autographed” photos (Rutherford
2008). Josie and the Pussycats featured music created by a human band that recorded
six singles and an album, Josie and the Pussycats: From the Hanna-Barbera TV Show,
the cover of which shows the real, leotarded human singers on the cover. A planned
concert tour, however, was scrapped because the album stiffed (Charles 2009). The
tour, though, had been part of the plan from the genesis of the show (“Hanna-Barbera
wanted to get three girls who could really sing and do their own performing,” reports
Dan Janssen, the album’s producer; Janssen 2001) and there were even “plans for the
gals to perform the songs live at the end of each episode” (Fields 2012), a kind of
animation-human hybrid of performance prefiguring the Gorillaz.
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    135

Ghosts in the Machine:

From the Silicon Teens to Jem
and the Holograms

By the turn of the 1980s, synthesized sounds began saturating recorded music—including
an early MTV-era virtual band called the Silicon Teens, a one-man project using actors
in photos and interviews to support the illusion of being an actual group—and synthe-
sized visuals began infiltrating video entertainment, from film’s first, award-winning
depiction of laser holography in the 1976 sci-fi epic Logan’s Run through the 1984 intro-
duction of Max Headroom, “the world’s first computer-generated TV host,” portrayed
by Matt Frewer in a variety of TV projects and advertisements. Indeed, the narrative
of the first Star Wars film hinged on a message delivered by Princess Leia Organa via
holographic projection from the robot R2-D2. The popular concepts of holography and
computer-generated corporeality began to carry a “futurist mantle” (Bryson 1998) and
to “connote futurity” (Schröter 2011, 31), as well as contributing to an important distinc-
tion between actual digitally immersive VR and what Jon McKenzie calls virtual vir-
tual reality (VVR)—the special-effect depictions of VR and holography seen in novels,
movies, and television (1994).
The idea of holography as a replacement for the human performer began to be
expressed. After the success of “The Robots,” a single from the album The Man-Machine
in 1978, the German synth pioneers in Kraftwerk mentioned a desire to stage an elec-
tronic upgrade of the “Banana Splits” model:  performing in many cities on a single
night by staging multiple teams of robots to simultaneously perform (or appear to per-
form) their music. Gerald Casale, of the synth-pop group Devo, envied that plan for
reasons of both creative control and the bottom line, telling an interviewer in 1979:

We have a similar idea. We’d like to use holograms in the major venues. I think it
would be better; if I was in the audience I’d actually prefer hologram projections of
the performer than the performer. I think it would be a more valuable experience.
I think it’s more human all the way round. The artist can contemplate what he will
show you more thoroughly, show you something in fact better, more intense, imagi-
native, and not burn himself out doing so. So that his energy is conserved to give
you more. When you think of it, the physical act of touring is really a punishment,
it’s not even twentieth century. I mean it’s just so crude, to go around 40 cities in
45 days, the amount of money and crew and equipment, the logistics involved. All
the things that can go wrong. It’s just archaic. (Morley 1979)

So the next virtual pop star was, of course, Jem and the Holograms (Hasbro/Marvel,
1985–1988). This successful syndicated cartoon, which followed the basic TV model
of virtual bands from the 1960s and 1970s (a performer narrative interspersed with
song performances, this time presented within the narrative as its own meta set piece
136   Thomas Conner

beginning with MTV-style titles in the lower-left corner of the screen), chronicled the
career of Jem, the rock star alter ego of young Jerrica Benton, an alternate identity
made possible by Synergy, a supercomputer “designed to be the ultimate audio-visual
entertainment synthesizer” and one that “can generate completely realistic holograms”
(Marx 1985). Via a pair of earrings containing tiny holo-projectors, Jerrica commands
Synergy to project transformative clothing, hairstyles, and makeup over herself and
her three bandmates so they may assume their pop-music identities, as well as various
special effects used in onstage visualizations and within the series’ adventure plotlines.
The idea of holography in this case was the creation of an original Hatsune Miku–like
performing agent, but instead of presenting it by itself these characters “wore” it like
a costume on stage—or, as contemporary performance-capture techniques in cinema
have been pejoratively referred to, like digital makeup.
The virtuality of Jem and the Holograms remained onscreen, and in a very 1980s
twist the characters were not agents for fictional characters (such as the Chipmunks
and the Archies) or promoted as avatars for real celebrity performers (the identities
of those voicing the characters remained submerged in the show’s end credits); rather,
Jem and the Holograms was produced as a marketing vehicle for a line of toys—the
TV characters were actualized agents of their corresponding dolls. The show’s anima-
tion studio, Sunbow Productions, was an arm of an advertising agency, Griffin-Bacal
Advertising, hired by toy maker Hasbro to create the series. This is the same team
that previously had produced the G.I. Joe and Transformers cartoons for TV with the
same priority of marketing as entertainment. So firm was this mission to market action
figures that—in stark contrast to the ready availability of Miku recordings—despite a
total of 151 full-production pop songs written and recorded for use in the sixty-five Jem
episodes, none of that music ever saw independent commercial release, though several
dozen of the songs were issued on cassettes included in the packaging of Jem dolls and
playsets (Pranceatron 2013).5

Let’s Get Physical: From Puppets

to Projection

Virtual pop stars can exist as three-dimensional physical objects, too, not only as visual
artwork, animation cels, and televisual veils. These creations also fit into the rubric
of virtual performance when their corporeal bodies are crafted for presentation only
through an electronic medium. The Chipmunks may have been the first virtual pop
stars via recordings and animated television, but the first virtual performers to present
themselves from physical, 3-D sources likely were the audio-animatronic attractions
created by Walt Disney designers as theme park performers, beginning with the sing-
ing birds in Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room, which opened in 1963, and including
the Country Bear Jamboree. Disney’s singing bears opened in 1971 and remained a
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    137

popular Disneyland attraction until 2001, a year before The Country Bears, a feature
film based on the characters and using puppetry to depict the characters, was released.
Disney also now owns the most internationally prominent example of physicalized
virtual pop stars: the Muppets, the popular puppet franchise created by Jim Henson
in the 1950s and whose characters (Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, etc.) have starred in
three television series, ten movies, and numerous online videos, as well as releasing
albums, comic books, video games, and more. The Muppets perfected the virtuality
of music performance in two distinct ways. First, as performing characters appear-
ing throughout that variety of media, the Muppets blazed Jenkins’s transmedia trail
by seamlessly threading their performer narrative through all of the aforementioned
media, infiltrating well beyond the standard lunchbox fare of the Hanna-Barbera era.
For example, the narrative of a Muppets video on YouTube is related to or extends
that of the Muppets movies, television show, and more, with each expression being
interconnected yet understandable by itself—a precursor to Hatsune Miku’s overall
narrative running through online video, onstage performance, opera, even television
commercials. Embedded within that transmedia fluidity is the Muppets’ particular
performer narrative, which has the Muppets performing for us as performers for oth-
ers, chiefly by singing and staging musical theater, and frequently backed by a band,
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. The locality of their performance is critical to our
discussion, though; the Muppets have physical bodies but are only presented on screen
and in audio recordings. They are noncorporeal in that … well, have you ever seen an
actual Muppet?
In addition, Henson made a couple of significant innovations in his field. He framed
every Muppet performance so that the puppeteer was completely invisible, hidden
within a stage set or positioned outside the camera frame, but—the second way the
Muppets expand pop virtuality—he also wrote the characters as if they were self-aware
and acted with agency yet had no knowledge of being puppets. The Muppets “believe”
they are independent, autonomous creatures (Finch 1993). On an episode of The
Muppet Show featuring a rare guest puppeteer, Kermit made the introduction with a
self-reflexive humor typical of nearly all Muppet appearances: “Ladies and gentlemen,
it’s very seldom that we have a guest puppeteer on the show. In fact, between you and
me, it’s rare that we have any puppeteer on the show” (as quoted in Stoessner 2009, 74).
The easy conflation of the Muppets’ world and ours is part of the exposition justify-
ing the characters’ general lack of hesitation about mixing with humans and pursu-
ing their own desires within the real world. The Muppets exist in a mixed reality, and
they helped fertilize new media for the very kind of hybrid narrative that performance
figures such as Miku now exploit. “When dealing with a completely fictional world,”
writes Calbreath-Frasieur, “it is usually obvious when a text is allowing audiences to
explore that world. With the Muppets it is hard to tell where our world ends and theirs
begins” (2012, 179).
Within the last several years the presentation of this kind of virtuality within real
space has been actualized less with 3D materials and more with digital projection, a
shift from physical items created for presentation within media toward media created
138   Thomas Conner

for presentation within physical space. Before Miku stepped off a software box and
onto a concert stage, two pop bands in the West began experimenting with tweak-
ing and evolving the previous virtual music models. Gorillaz and Dethklok both have
enjoyed significant commercial success in the process, and both projects are significant
for successfully crafting new hybrid forms of live concerts featuring performances of
their human personnel and their animated avatars—performances that, notably, each
began as purely virtual presentations but eventually evolved to include sight of the
flesh-and-blood labor.
Gorillaz are a virtual quartet consisting of animated members named 2D, Murdoc,
Noodle, and Russel, plus numerous human guest appearances on recordings and in
concerts. The group was created in 1998 by Blur singer Damon Albarn and creator-
illustrator Jamie Hewlett as a means to comment on the nature and power of celebrity
in popular culture. “With Gorillaz,” Hewlett said in an interview, “we wanted to show
that imaginary characters could be bigger than actual celebrities, who are really imagi-
nary characters anyway” (Conner 2010). Gorillaz were successful out of the gate: the
self-titled debut album in 2001 sold more than seven million copies; the band was
named Most Successful Virtual Band by the Guinness Book of World Records, a category
that had not existed previously; and the second Gorillaz album, Demon Days (2005),
won a Grammy award.
From the outset, too, Albarn and Hewlett presented Gorillaz in live concerts. The
first outing was almost purely virtual. For the Gorillaz Live world tour, March 2001
to July 2002, Gorillaz concerts featured a large screen obscuring the entire stage. On
the screen were shown various two-dimensional and digitally animated videos in sync
with the music. Behind the screen was the live human band performing the music in
real time. Occasionally, a strong white light shone from behind the screen, casting the
human performers in silhouette for the audience to see. The Gorillaz characters also
spoke to the audience, sometimes via actors present for the performance and some-
times via prerecorded dialogue. As the tour progressed, the stage setup changed so
that a semitransparent scrim covered the bottom of the stage while the screen show-
ing animated visuals filled the upper portion of the proscenium; the literal spotlight-
ing of the human performers occurred first for longer periods of time, then almost
permanently throughout the concerts (2-J 2013). This pattern of steadily increasing
the sight of the human performers and decreasing the focus on the animated visuals
continued, until on the 2010 Gorillaz tour the human musicians were no longer hid-
den at all, just merely cast occasionally in subdued lighting while the videos played
above them. Albarn ascribed this to the increased presence of special guest stars on the
tour—“I couldn’t entertain the idea of putting Lou Reed or Bobby Womack behind a
screen,” Albarn said, “I’m not that daft” (Conner 2010)—a move that utterly surrenders
the duo’s original subversion of human celebrity status. The reversal indeed may have
been inevitable. As John Richardson points out in his study of one of Gorillaz’ songs,
“Hinging on the notion of the virtual as a conduit for parodic artistic expression, the
subversive intent of the band’s evasive strategies was predestined to be compromised by
[Albarn’s] iconic status within British popular culture” (2005, 3).
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    139

However, Albarn and Hewlett initially announced that they would present the
group’s second tour in 2005 by depicting the characters as three-dimensional simula-
tions using the same two-dimensional technology as 2.0Pac and Hatsune Miku pre-
sentations. The Gorillaz “holograms” were to appear on stage with the human guest
stars from the group’s Demon Days album. “Holograms and humans on the same stage
is where it gets spooky,” band spokesman Chris Morrison told the Guardian newspa-
per, again citing the simulations as a “way to rebel against celebrity culture” (Simpson
2005). But the tour never happened. Hewlett later explained that the technology was
too expensive to tour, and too glitchy: “Live, it’s impossible to do, it turns out. You can’t
turn your bass up, you can’t turn anything up, because it vibrates the invisible expensive
holo-screen stretched between the band and the audience. The holograms go to pieces”
(Conner 2010).
But Gorillaz did pull off one simulated-hologram performance the following year—
with the technical difficulty Hewlett mentioned accounted for in the production. At
the start of the February 8, 2006, Grammy awards telecast, the Gorillaz characters
appeared in simulated 3D form on the stage of the Staples Center in Los Angeles per-
forming the song “Feel Good Inc.” Midway through, two human rappers from the hip-
hop group De La Soul, who appear on the recorded single, joined the virtual band on
stage, standing in front of the invisible projection screen and contributing their rapped
verse. “Feel Good Inc.” then segued into “Hung Up,” by Madonna, who appeared first
also in projected virtual form—a photo-real video projection as opposed to the less-
realistic animation forms of the Gorillaz—cavorting with 2D and Noodle before the
projection screen vanished and the human Madonna supplanted her digital doppel-
gänger on stage to complete the song with her live band and with the Gorillaz thereafter
relegated to traditional video screens positioned throughout the stage. Hewlett, how-
ever, said that the audio of the Gorillaz during the first segment of this set piece was a
prerecorded track heard only on the television broadcast and in the earpieces of the De
La Soul rappers. Because of the vibration issue cited above, “there was not really any
sound in the actual theater,” he said, adding during the 2010 interview; “The [techni-
cians] we did that with, since then, have fixed the problem.”6 Indeed, in 2007, the year
following the Gorillaz’ Grammys performance, Hatsune Miku made her stage debut.
That was also the year another virtual band debuted on stage: Dethklok. This vir-
tual band combines elements of the traditional television-based model for virtual
performers and the Gorillaz’ live concert model. Metalocalypse (Cartoon Network,
2006–present) is a two-dimensional animated comedy series; the show premiered in
August 2006 and completed its fourth season in July 2012, following the misadven-
tures of Dethklok, a group of brutish death-metal musicians who are so internation-
ally famous that they constitute the world’s seventh-largest economy. The music on
albums and seen performed by the animated Dethklok in the show is performed by the
show’s creator, animator and musician Brendon Small, with occasional session play-
ers. Dethklok concerts feature loud metal music thrashed out live by Small and an
assembled band. The players are visible, but they’re not the main visual attraction. The
job of delivering the eye candy falls, like the TV show, to a screen showing Dethklok in
140   Thomas Conner

animated performances and, also like the TV show, some comedy bits. Small explained
in an interview the reasoning behind the meta-narrative of a Dethklok concert:

I’d watched that Gorillaz DVD [Demon Days Live] where they play behind the scrim
and all you see is their shadows, and I lost interest very quickly. There was no con-
nection between me and the performer. So I thought, what if I did this? We’re not
supposed to be the band, but we make the sounds for the records. We don’t look
like a metal band. We look like a bunch of fatsos on stage. The show can’t be about
us. People would come and go, “Hey, they’re not Dethklok. That’s disappointing.”
So we wound up doing what Gorillaz eventually did, which was hang the giant
screen above us for the animation of the band, but we’re still [seen] onstage making
a connection with the superfans and hypernerds who know who we are and want
to see us play. I’m a guitar player. When I see a show, I want to get close. I want
to see the fingers, the guy’s tricks. Others might want to see the drummer when
he goes crazy. This way we can satisfy both audiences. But really, our job is to be
largely unseen. We’re the pit band like in a Broadway show. We’re the Metalocalypse
Players. (Conner 2012)

The evolution from purely virtual presentation on 2D screens to a mixed reality of

human performers with screens emulating 3D may be a response to the previously
cited unrest at the pure-virtual performances and an inevitable progression “which
could be interpreted as evidence of the power of conventional modes of representa-
tion over the popular imagination” (Richardson 2005, 6). The most commercially suc-
cessful of these virtual pop stars, namely the Chipmunks and the Muppets, achieved
their crossover appeal because they were presented within the context of the real world
instead of as characters within a virtual world that the spectator had to make an effort
to enter. Gorillaz and Dethklok both had initial commercial success as an electronic
entity, on records and videos, but as a live act they had to evolve to include more promi-
nent showcasing of the human contributors and collaborators in order for audiences
to accept them.

Miku’s Children: The Future

of Virtual Pop Stars

In the future, this kind of human handholding should become less necessary as our ability
to present more realistic, uncanny valley-crossing simulations improves. The continuing
evolution of virtual pop stars is tied to the development of three nonmusical technolo-
gies: digital re/animation, projection systems, and artificial intelligence. Keeping in mind
that technology forecasts tend to become outdated, if not entirely quaint, within hours of
publication, I will close this chapter with a brief consideration of the trajectory of this tech
and how it could advance future performances by virtual pop stars.
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    141

Digital Re/animation
Like all computing hardware, the technology facilitating the creation of digital perfor-
mances is subject to Moore’s law7 and thus expected to continue increasing exponen-
tially in processing power. The faster the chips, the finer the detail of rendered digital
imagery and audio; the subtler the detail, the better the chances of landing a virtual
simulation on the far side of Mori’s slippery slopes, making it thus acceptable to human
audiences. Whether animating original characters or reanimating images to create a
simulation of an existing or deceased human performer, eventually technology will
allow designers to create and mediatize photo-realistic characters that not only will fail
to evoke the uncanny, they will go unnoticed as simulations. Once the technological
bridge is in place, virtual pop stars and synthespians are likely to throng across it. With
technology supporting the visuals, the near future likely belongs to more photo-real,
2.0Pac-like simulations than anime-style, Miku ones.
Audio re/production technology is also roaring toward more detailed simulations.
Where once the pinnacle of digital audio was an eight-bit chiptune scoring an Atari
video game, music instrument synthesis has become not just strikingly realistic but
more accessible; some of today’s GarageBand instrument tools cheaply available for an
iPhone sound as realistic as live instruments. The most difficult instrument to sample
and reproduce has been the human voice; Miku now stands as the latest zenith of those
efforts, with a new English version unveiled in 2013. Several other vocaloids exist, cre-
ated by sampling syllables from a singer or actor and loading them into the vocaloid
software’s language-reconstruction database; thus far, a major pop star has not lent his
or her voice to this process. It’s only a matter of time. This will open new vistas to both
creative and copyright control. I have control over what is said with my own voice, but
when my voice is realistically sampled, simulated, and exists on the hard drives of vari-
ous entertainment companies, control is subject to new legalities and ethical concerns.
Brad Pitt’s physical likeness was completely digitized for the production of the film The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button (a process facilitated by Digital Domain, the same
company that reanimated the imagery for 2.0Pac). Down the road, could Digital Brad
be dusted off to advertise a particular product or make certain political statements?

Projection Systems
Whether these new characters remain imprisoned on two-dimensional screens (visible
ones like TVs, computers, and mobile devices; or invisible ones, such as the Pepper’s
ghost systems) remains to be seen. The holy grail for today’s projection designers is to
realize the illusion of that Princess Leia hologram: a three-dimensional, moving figure of
light in real space, visible without a screen and without the need to wear special glasses.
At the time of writing, several breakthroughs indicated that the Force may be
with designers pursuing this goal. Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto,
142   Thomas Conner

California, successfully tested a small display that produces a stereoscopic illusion

of a three-dimensional object hovering in real space above the screen, and viewable
from various angles without glasses (Fattal et al. 2013), reported in one newspaper with
the gleeful headline, “Princess Leia Hologram Could Become Reality” (Sample 2013).
Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, claimed in 2012 that a display system “about the
size that … will fit inside an R2-D2” would be testable within a year (Pachal 2012);
in 2013, the lab’s Mark-II, a successor to a holographic display originally designed by
hologram pioneer Stephen Benton in the 1980s, was demonstrated by transmitting the
performance-captured 3D image of an MIT student dressed as Princess Leia. These
results so far are crude but promising.
The performance potential for these displays is clear. MIT’s Ito posits that such
reality-augmenting displays could significantly affect not only daily life but “perfor-
mance art” and “storytelling” (Pachal 2012). James Rock, co-founder of Musion, which
designed the projection display system for 2.0Pac, sees not only new creative potential
but new entertainment delivery systems and business models, as well. “If we can get
the Rolling Stones to come and perform in front of our camera … for an afternoon, do
five songs,” he posits, he could then say, “ ‘Mick, you don’t have to ever go out on tour
again and you’ll be earning a revenue’ ” (“ICT Summit” 2012). Concerts could become
a boutique specialty service for those wishing to be present, and a pay-per-view living-
room bonus for those wishing to be telepresent—the Stones projected onto your patio,
Madonna voguing on your tabletop, Siri introducing Justin Bieber in the palm of your
hand. Curt Thornton, CEO of Provision, a Los Angeles company developing 3D simula-
tions for marketing purposes, suggests eventually plugging a life-size holo-display into
a gaming system and doing battle, Wii-style (“Interview with Provision President …”
2010). Players could wait to fire until they actually see the whites of their opponent’s
eyes. In fact, some degree of physical interactivity with virtual performers may be in
the offing, with several companies now seizing plunging prices for Kinect-type spatial-
recognition cameras and employing them with holographic simulations to allow users
to press buttons, select menus, even shake hands, all simulated in “thin air”—an actual-
ization of Hiroshi Ishii’s theory about transforming the “painted bits” of 2D screens into
the “tangible bits” of 3D display, giving “physical form to digital information, making
bits directly manipulable and perceptible” (2001, 19).

Artificial Intelligence
My own virtual pop star studies began by seeing the animated, pre-programmed
Hatsune Miku and thinking of Rei Toei, an artificial intelligence with near-complete
agency in both cyberspace and the physical world. If artificial intelligence, like holo-
graphic display tech, develops in the direction of speculative portrayals in film and
literature, robot and virtual performers eventually could become “autonomous enough
to demand their own bank accounts, book their own gigs, chase or lead new musical
trends, set their own riders” (Collins 2011, 35). In fact,
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    143

Really potent AIs may supplant human musicians through sheer virtuosity, reliabil-
ity and work ethic; they may prove exceptionally popular with human audiences, if
they do not sublime into new musical realms beyond the ken of biological hearing,
where humans cannot follow. (37)

So dramatic a leap forward, though, isn’t immediately required. Simply making a vir-
tual performer such as Miku able to respond in small ways to a unique audience would
be breakthrough enough. Miku currently delivers her pre-programmed performance
regardless of crowd response. The first applause meter appeared on a game show in
1956 (Clayton 2009); surely the contemporary version of similar audio-detection tech-
nology could be wired into Miku’s performance matrix, sensing whether the crowd
responded more strongly to the ballads or the upbeat dance numbers, and adjusting
the set list accordingly. A virtual performer could react to heckles and boos, or return
a spontaneous cheer with, “I love you, too!” Locative features could be added easily,
as well. 2.0Pac greeted his audience by asking a pre-programmed question, “What the
fuck is up, Coachella?!” If a much-ballyhooed follow-up tour of the presentation had
materialized, GPS data could have been synced to each transmitted performances so
2.0Pac could automatically and accurately deliver an updated version of the twentieth-
century rock-and-roll cliché, “Hello, Cleveland!”

Conclusion: A New Manifestation

With the advent of virtual pop star projection, allowing characters once imprisoned in
an uncanny cyberspace to be accepted walking semifreely among us, the whole world
becomes a potential screen. Watching entertainment on TV, watching a movie in a cin-
ema, watching videos on portable tablets or smartphones: in each case, the presentation
of the virtual remains optional. We can move our eyes away from the screen, back to
reality, in order to exit the virtual world and end our immersion. As augmented real-
ity tech increases the presence of virtual objects and information within real space, it
decreases the ability to easily escape the virtual. As simulations become more interac-
tive, humans will have the potential to become part of a virtual character’s performer
narrative—either in a bit part or by participating in some mind-blowing, realistic kara-
oke. These developments Luigi Lentini calls “a manifestation that is absolutely new in all
of history” (1991, 336). Lentini, a Costa Rican engineer, considered this situation from
the perspective of an architect designing public spaces and saw the intrusion of the
virtual into reality as taking the screen’s transparency and turning it into an opacity; the
virtual information applied to the view of reality actually blocks out real information,
overlaying physical objects and environments, and obscuring them from view. “If the
limits of the screen disappear,” Lentini wrote, “there is always an ‘in front of ’, an ‘in back
of ’, an ‘above’ and a ‘below’. But holograms, for example, with their three-dimensional
effects, would cause these perceptions to disappear, to the extent that they join what is
144   Thomas Conner

real with the image, in scientific terms, or they hide it in terms of human perception”
(337). He mentions superimposition in terms of “exclusion” (336)—the very opposite of
William Bricken’s “inclusion,” which he called “the primary defining characteristic of
VR” (1990). But Lentini’s view is not alarmist or an attempt to thwart the march of AR
into our mixed-reality spaces, public and private. He concludes boldly:

The possibilities of expression have been multiplied enormously both for the art-
ist and for everyone. Now there is no screen, institutionally approved location or
stage. Everything can be transformed into a space of multiple dimensions. . . . The
individual, with respect to himself or herself, faces for the first time in history, out-
side of the realm of magic, the materialization of the imaginary and the possibility
of sharing it with others, the possibility of being the object and the subject of the
imposition of the imaginary. (Lentini 1991, 337–338)

Notes
1. William Gibson’s 1995 speculative-fiction novel Idoru introduced Rei Toei, a digital soft-
ware agent appearing as a human woman (and as a legitimate, fully three-dimensional
hologram) as both a performer on stage and a celebrity about town.
2. The uncanny valley hypothesis by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori concerns the
emotional responses of humans to robots or other anthropomorphic simulations (Mori
1970). The more humanlike a figure is made, he claimed, the more positive the emotional
responses it will elicit from humans, until reaching a point at which the increased anthro-
pomorphism instead generates highly negative responses. After that, once the object
becomes nearly indistinguishable from a real human, emotional responses rebound
accordingly. This dip in the upward response curve he called “uncanny,” referencing
Freud’s earlier psychological concept explaining feelings of “dread and creeping horror”
(1919).
3. The End, starring Hatsune Miku, premiered Dec. 1, 2012, at Japan’s Yamaguchi Center for
Arts and Media and was widely reported as “the first humanless opera” (Le Blanc 2013).
4. Cave automatic virtual environments (CAVEs) are structures featuring projections or
screens on the interior walls in order to create an immersive virtual-reality space.
5. For the record, other virtual pop stars I don’t have the space to cover here include simi-
larly prioritized advertising efforts such as the California Raisins (United States), Crazy
Frog (Sweden), Mickael Turtle (France), Pigloo (Germany), and Finland’s Pikku Orava;
the Bot Brothers, one of the first artists to distribute music solely via the Internet; the
comics-and-records projects Eternal Descent and Deathmøle; plus legitimate groups
Prozzäk (Canada), One-T (France), Strawberry Flower (Japan), Vbirds (UK), Mitsula
(Philippines), and the Studio Killers (Denmark-Finland).
6. In video footage of the Gorillaz/Madonna performance (review it at http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=lwxccVAl5A8), you can hear an unusually high level of chatter from the
audience during the Gorillaz portion of the performance. Because they could see the
visuals but not hear the music, the crowd received fewer of the usual performance cues
instructing them to pipe down. Only when Madonna appears, performing live for all to
hear, does the crowd react loudly to her arrival and then settle in for the remainder of
 Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond    145

the performance. In his Gorillaz study as well, Richardson cites three music magazine
reviews with similar “reports of unrest in audiences” at Gorillaz performances (2005, 6).
7. Moore’s law is an observation made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the
number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since
the integrated circuit was invented, thus increasing the processing power of computers
exponentially over time.

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 chapter 9

“Feel Go od ” wi t h
Gorill az and “ Re j e c t
False I c ons ”
The Fantasy Worlds of the Virtual Group
and Their Creators

Shara Rambarran

In a world where everything is a virtual copy of itself, where there’s

nothing but image, wherse publicists have publicists and where celeb-
rity is bleakly industrial, it’s inevitable that “image” starts to collapse on
itself. . . .
—Roger Morton, quoted in Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre (2006)

Over the past decade, celebrity and reality television culture have had a major impact on
both media and popular music. The current wave of successful popular music has been
based largely on manufactured pop, thus encouraging reality television competitions
globally to find the next “pop star” (e.g., Pop Idol and The X-Factor). It is also evident that
an insight into future pop stars’ personal lives is often more appealing to the media and
public than the music, making it problematic for professional musicians to be acknowl-
edged simply for their musical output. Damon Albarn reflects, “The centre aspect of it
is how uniformed it makes everything, it doesn’t celebrate how the individual pop cul-
ture should be, constantly pulsating new ideas, new approaches and new manifestos”
(quoted in Pop Britannia 2008). Albarn also comments on how manufactured artists and
bands are not allowed to experiment or control their own music, primarily because the
music industry expects them to produce standardized songs to keep the targeted audi-
ence satisfied.

They do an amazing thing, but then the whole weight of the celebrity and money
destroys it, and they can’t come astray from a single hit. . . . I think that is true of
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    149

so many things in our culture these days; no one is given a chance to experiment.
(Albarn, quoted in Baltin 2001)

One cannot help but surmise that Albarn may be reflecting on his own musical career
as lead singer with the Britpop group Blur.1 During the 1990s, the popularity of Britpop
had led to the media intruding into musicians’ private lives, especially Albarn’s,2 who
felt that the pressures began to restrict his musical career. Not least the hyped media
attention on Britpop prevented him from experimenting with other musical styles
(Phillips 2001). In 1998 Albarn and comic book artist and designer Jamie Hewlett
reacted by creating the virtual pop group Gorillaz, arguably their response to the cult
of celebrity and reality television’s association with manufactured pop music. It was,
as Tony Wadsworth writes, the “ultimate manufactured band” (Wadsworth quoted in
Phase One: Celebrity Take Down 2002), one that enabled Albarn to work behind the
scenes and compose music, while Hewlett concentrated on developing the four char-
acters. Creating Gorillaz as the “ultimate manufactured pop band” can, perhaps, be
seen as somewhat of a parody given such contemporary boy bands as One Direction,
but while Gorillaz are an imitation of a pop group, as John Richardson suggests, they
are also “an effortless combination of ‘serious’ and more playful strategies” (2005, 4),
suggesting a more subversive reaction to successful manufactured bands. Certainly
both Albarn and Hewlett believed that they could produce a mainstream act with an
agenda: to have control of the group in terms of artistic and musical creativity. There
was also less pressure on Albarn, because it safely allowed him to move away from his
“trademark” Britpop sound, avoid media attention, and experiment with other musical
styles such as dub, reggae, pop, and hip hop.
Once their vision of creating a virtual band became public knowledge, Albarn and
Hewlett were subject to something of a media scramble, as the press was keen to know
more about this new experimental project. This added pressure on Hewlett and the
animation company Passion Pictures, because they were producing a music video
for the track “Tomorrow Comes Today” (2001) within a time frame of three weeks
(Bananaz 2009). The blurring of reality and fantasy is evident in the video where
Gorillaz are seen singing, driving, and walking in London. Albarn pledged that “this is
not novelty … we see Gorillaz [as] a complete subversion of current trends” (quoted
in Duerden 2001): televised singing competitions, a commercialized music industry,
and the grooming of pop stars. Albarn also created the “Reject False Icons” campaign,
a direct protest against celebrity idols, where he encouraged fans to scribble the words
“reject false icons” as graffiti.3

Virtual Gorillaz

The image of a pop artist takes an ironic twist as Gorillaz’ looks are unconventional,
and it is the peculiar animated modification of their bodies along with their distinctive
150   Shara Rambarran

personalities that make the band appealing to the audience. To fully appreciate Gorillaz
and the various roles they play, it is important to understand that the group is a simu-
lation of a pop group; that because of their virtual presence, they belong to the cat-
egory of the hyperreal. As such, it is considered relevant to consider further the concept
of hyperreality and its foundation, the simulation. As Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)
argued, reality can no longer exist because we are surrounded by simulations of signs,
the majority of which are presented in the media. He supports his argument by refer-
ring to imitation as a simulation, representation, or reduplication; the simulation
does not separate the “real/original” and “fake/representation” as they are too similar
in appearance. In music for example, a producer or DJ who remixes records or uses
samples would be using simulations of the music (regardless of medium) and not the
original. If an artist or group were to mime for media-related purposes, they would be
simulating a live performance. If someone wanted to make a copy of a CD, she or he
would be making a simulation of the CD.4
The notion of simulation is associated with Baudrillard’s theory of “orders of the
simulacra,” which describes the various stages of the representation as based on
(1) counterfeit (fake imitation), (2) production (duplicate), and more relevant to this
discussion (3) simulation (Baudrillard 1993, 51; 1994, 6). The third order is dominated
by simulations in which its “original” cannot be detected:  the representation of the
simulation blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, and is usually digitally
produced. In Baudrillard’s view, there is no such thing as reality, only hyperreality.
In a world of hyperreality we are influenced by free-floating signs and are separated
from reality; it tends to be more attractive than the real world because of the signs
we are exposed to (1994), and as such the hyperreal is “more real than real” (1990, 11;
1994, 144). Another example of hyperreality is virtual reality, where technology can
create computer-generated environments and people (Gamble 2005).5 Virtual reality
is observed in films (with The Matrix being a commonly cited example) and cyber-
space, where the creation of worlds, way of living, changing identities, and bodies
are apparently limitless, permitting users to escape from reality and live in fantasy
by experiencing another “real life” temporarily. In particular, bodies in virtual real-
ity are presented as a mixture of machine and human, known as cyborg (cybernetic
organism). Cyborgs are evident in popular culture, in films like Robocop (1987), The
Terminator (1984), Avatar (2009), and Elysium (2013). There is a blurring of bound-
aries when constructing cyborgs:  nature-artificial, real-unreal, human-nonhuman,
biological-technological, and so forth.
It is suggested that Gorillaz fall into the third order of simulacra. The members are
almost replicas of human beings, but they are not fully presented as robots or automa-
tons. Instead, they are generated as would-be human beings through the aid of digital
technology, which in this case enables the group to be perceived as cybernetic or virtual
beings who are all “neither real or unreal” (Baudrillard 1994, 125). Rather, they could
be perceived as the death of a “real” band:  Gorillaz is not a manufactured product
formed by the music industry that is dependent on the overproduction of idol singers
and boy/girl bands with similar images, personalities, lifestyles, and music. The third
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    151

order also implies that the simulation has total control of its purpose or role (1994).
This can be explored from two angles when studying Gorillaz. First, they are in control
of the image, personality, videos, performances, lifestyles, and music. Second, it is obvi-
ous that it is Albarn and Hewlett who are in control of Gorillaz. Albarn, in particular,
controls the musical and media direction of the group and can arguably be compared
to a music manager and producer. The difference, however, is that Albarn never expe-
rienced such control in his earlier musical career, which raised a further question about
Albarn’s personal agenda for Gorillaz. Could the liberation of Albarn’s musical creativ-
ity and control of a virtual band be an idealized representation of himself? Is 2D the
lead singer, the (virtual) alter ego of Albarn? Albarn teasingly says “no” (Lester 2003).
The association of hyperreality with Gorillaz lies primarily in the identity of its four
members.

Murdoc Niccals
Murdoc Niccals, the bass player of Gorillaz, was the “founder” of the group (Bananaz
2009). He was born on June 6, 1966, in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Tall and shaggy-haired,
his black clothing suggests a metal/rock image, while his green skin, green teeth, and
eyes (which are composed of two colors, one black, one red) separate him from being
identified as human. Particular attention is paid to his date of birth: 06/06/1966, an
obvious biblical association with the devil and 666 as the number of the beast (Rev.
13:  11–18). Murdoc’s Satanist associations (Browne 2006)  lie with his middle name
(Faust), literary collections (e.g., Pacts with the Devil), and metal music (such as Black
Sabbath). Murdoc explains that he furthered his taste in music by listening to such styles
as punk, dub, and reggae (Browne, ibid.), a possible reason metal is hardly included in
the music. As the founder member of Gorillaz, he first recruited the singer 2D.

2D
2D (real name Stuart Pot) was born on May 23, 1978, in Crawley, England. His body
appearance is almost human in form, but he has “natural” blue hair and striking black
eyes (Browne 2006, 18). He is, however, visually impaired from two car accidents
caused by Murdoc, which also resulted in 2D suffering with mobility problems, long-
term headaches, and anxiety (20–22).6 As a teenager, his hobbies included watching
horror films directed by Lucio Fulci and George A. Romero, and listening to music by
the Specials, the Clash, and the Human League (ibid.). As well as singing, 2D plays the
moog, stylophone, drum machine, and Casio VL-tone (19). 2D and Albarn share the
vocals and have similar cheeky grins. 2D and Murdoc’s friendship resembles a broth-
erly love-hate relationship, and when they fight it is quickly resolved by their mediator,
the third recruited member, Russel Hobbs, the drummer.
152   Shara Rambarran

Russel Hobbs
Russel Hobbs, an African American, was born on June 3, 1975, in New York City.7 He
was sent to England for his own safety after his friends were shot dead in a drive-by
shooting (Browne 2006, 23). At the time, he claimed to have seen the Grim Reaper and
become possessed (his eyes turned white).8 He further states that the Grim Reaper put
the spirits of his dead friends into his own large body, when, thanks to their musical
talents, he instantly became a musician (25). He also claims that one of his inner ghosts,
Del, raps while he is drumming. Like the other members of Gorillaz, Russel’s physical
appearance is striking. Other than horror, his identity resembles the hip-hop genre
(for example baggy jeans, trainers, designer street wear, machoism). His height, body
size, and white eyes also identify him with such comic characters as the Hulk and King
Kong. He is, however, a “gentle giant” and is protective of his fellow band mate, Noodle,
the most significant member of the group.

Noodle
Noodle, a Japanese guitarist, joined Gorillaz when she was ten years old. She resembles
an anime character and has cyborg features. Her recruitment to the group was unusual.
After Murdoc placed an advertisement for a guitarist in the New Musical Express
magazine, Noodle arrived instantly in a freight container from the courier company
FedEx (Browne 2006, 29). Her personal history is revealed and explored in “Phase
Two,” where it is described by the biographer of Gorillaz, Cass Browne (2006).9 As he
concludes, although the super soldier background of Noodle is reminiscent of Battle
Royale (2000) and thus appears as a constructed history, it has nevertheless shaped her
identity in terms of her look, style, and body.10
Noodle’s trademark style in “Phase One” is based on Japanese culture:  a gakuran
(military) jacket, miniskirt, cloth-covered sandals, and a radio helmet with
headphones—associated with anime films such as Mach Go Go Go (Speed Racer) and
Uchû senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato). In photographs and videos, Noodle
displays signs of her cultural origins such as the Japanese flag, which is found on her
t-shirt, and a nihontō (sword) carried on her back. A mon on her clothing reveals the
initials of the Battle Royale (“BR”).11 This symbol is strongly connected with the con-
troversial film referred to earlier, and to Noodle’s reported background in the training
camp. In anime, however, Noodle does not carry the facial features presented in this
genre. For example, Japanese women in anime have large eyes, which are associated
with cuteness and innocence (Poitras 1999).12 Noodle has small eyes, and it is their
shape that contributes to her look (in contrast to the other members, where it is the
color of their eyes that is focused on). Noodle, however, carries the “cutismo” factor in
her performances, which in anime is associated with shōjo (girls who are pre-teenage),13
while displaying signs of shōjo culture, which includes independence, power, and mas-
culinity (Napier 2005).14 What is also significant is that at the beginning of a shōjo
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    153

film, the female character is introduced to the viewer by flying.15 What is different in
Noodle’s situation is that she reportedly “flew” to England via FedEx cargo plane!
Another significant quality that has an impact on Noodle’s virtual identity is gender.
She has been mistaken for a boy, which is due to her tomboyism, uniform, and short
hair. Judith (Jack) Halberstam argues that tomboyism is an “extended childhood period
for female masculinity” (1998, 5); tomboyism is an admiration for boys who enjoy their
independence (6). Noodle’s independence, as a robotic shōjo, lies in her defense skills,
while her female masculinity relates to another anime style, mecha (mechanical and
robotic-based), thus confirming her identity as a cyborg possessing both “power … and
technological competence” (Napier 2005, 86). In common with other cyborgs, she has
a “greater capacity for violence, combined with enormous physical prowess” (Springer
1999, 47), and her abilities are displayed through her weaponry skills and martial arts.
It is also suggested that her multiple identities (including her personal history) put her
into a sharper relationship with cyborg than the other members of Gorillaz, who are
cyborgs simply because of their technological creation. As a female cyborg, Noodle’s
greater power is challenging. Annie Balsamo argues that female cyborgs are stronger
than male cyborgs because they “embody cultural contradictions which strain the tech-
nological imagination” (1999, 149); they appear to be more highly experienced than the
male when confronting humans and using technology, which challenges the dominant
norms surrounding the role of women in society (passive, nurturant, and so forth).
Her body (shōjo, cyborg) and image (super soldier, tomboy, cultural origins) integrate
the construction of her multiple identities to make her the most interesting character
in Gorillaz.

Gorillaz.com

Kong Studios is in cyberspace, where Gorillaz live and create their music. Their virtual
world is a form of computer mediated communication (CMC), which allow social
interaction with fans. In a virtual world, for example, the user can move around and
have an impact on the world, and other online users can contribute to her or his expe-
rience at the same time (Gaunlett and Jackson 2008). At Kong Studios, the fans can
explore the lives of Gorillaz and search around their home. Gorillaz.com is more than
a standard website; it is a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), where fans can
congregate at Kong Studios anytime, in virtual form, although not as avatars as in
Second Life.16
Like Second Life, Gorillaz.com resembles a 3D virtual computer game or massively
multi-player online games (MMOGs), where the fans can wander into members’ bed-
rooms and the recording studio, view music videos, enter competitions, play games,
shop, and if lucky, chat with Gorillaz.17 The fans can also chat with each other. The
website serves additionally as a PR facility. Any music releases, tour dates, and gossip
are announced on the site first before it is released to the media. Gorillaz offer their
154   Shara Rambarran

fans the opportunity to become virtual and explore their world by sharing their lives
and music. This allows the fans to escape reality temporarily and interact with Gorillaz
through technology, blurring the boundaries of virtual reality and reality.

Demon Days: “Feel Good Inc.”

The second Gorillaz album, Demon Days (2005), was “Noodle’s vision” (Russel in The
Raft 2005). Her aim was to portray the trauma and terrors of life and nature, and to
bring hope. The album was produced by Danger Mouse (famous for The Grey Album
mashup; see Rambarran 2013 and Chapter 1 in this volume for information) and con-
sisted of hip hop, gospel, dub, pop, electronica, Arabic, and Latin music. “Feel Good
Inc.,” the first single from Demon Days, and an appropriate subject, will now be ana-
lyzed as it neatly demonstrates the theme of the album and the concept of Gorillaz.
My analysis draws on Roland Barthes’s “The Third Meaning” (1977), his analysis of
the three layers of meaning in an image. As he observes, all three meanings are always
present: the first two are those of communication and signification, and the third “out-
plays meaning—subverts not the content but the whole practice of meaning” (Barthes
1977, 62), thus exceeding signification. As Barthes states, the first stage is to unpack the
surface text, which is known as the “informational” (primary) level. The second stage
is to find the “symbolic” (secondary) level, by analyzing the codes or the “obvious”
(1977, 54) found in the previous stage. The third meaning is derived from and outplays
the interpretations presented in the “informational” and “symbolic” levels, and thus
“can be seen as an accent, the very form of an emergence, of a fold … marking the
heavy layer of informations and significations … [which] structures the film differ-
ently without … subverting the story” (62–64). This additional meaning is infinite,
suggesting that it can be “evident, erratic, obstinate” (53) or concealable, essential, or
desirable. This results in an inconclusive meaning of the text. It does, however, offer
the participant (observer) an alternative understanding of the text. The third meaning
is best understood visually, by focusing on a film (image), still photograph, or music
video, because as “Feel Good Inc.” will demonstrate, it may be challenging to play out
the third meaning in reality. Although “Feel Good Inc.” may offer various interpreta-
tions to listeners, readers, and academics, the following will offer an accommodating
understanding of the music and video by searching for its third meaning.18

Music
To understand the song and video, the informational and symbolical levels will be ana-
lyzed first. The song title proposes its intention to “feel good.” This is signified at the
start with the sounds of laughter. The emotion of the laugh suggests an uneasy mixture
of feeling—happy or evil—that opposes the sign of the title as it confuses the listener as
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    155

to how the song will develop.19 The words “feel good” are then heard, which brings the
music in. The bass line leads the introduction and acts as an ostinato. The tonality of
the bass line (and song) is in the key signature of E-flat minor. The bass groove is sup-
ported by a simple 4/4 drum beat, and this combination acts as a memorable external
hook for the listener. Another hook (“feel good”) is then repeated by 2D in falsetto. In
Ueli Bernays’s study of falsetto, 2D is suited to the category of “falsetto mannerism”
(2010). His falsetto expresses pain and vulnerability, reflecting his personal anxiety (as
discussed earlier). Like the sound of laughter (which opens the track), the words “feel
good” and falsetto mannerism conflict with the apparent meaning of the song; apart
from the uplifting bass groove, the vocals are signifying a negative emotion. The words
“feel good” musically correspond with the bass line while the rest of the introduction is
layered with internal hooks: guitar and vocal percussive sounds. The slightly distorted
and filtered vocal gradually crescendos into the first verse.
The first verse opens with a soft Sprechstimme melody by 2D. His laid-back expres-
sion then disappears when he asks for his dreams to go away because they deprive him
of sleep (“and all I wanna hear is the message beep, my dreams they gotta kiss because
I don’t get sleep no”). Here, the timbre of 2D’s vocals is quite distorted, which signifies
a sense of disillusion. The bass line finishes the verse by descending on an E-flat pen-
tatonic scale (Fig. 9.1).
The bass line’s assertive presence at the end of the verse continues in the lead into
the chorus. An added note in the score (see Fig. 9.1) is present in beat 2 of the sec-
ond measure. This is the “message beep,” which signifies that the chorus is a telephone
answer message. The timbre of the message in the chorus is slightly uplifting because
2D is singing “Windmill, windmill for the land … love forever love is free”—a desire
for happiness. 2D’s alter-ego voice, Albarn, really stands out as his vocal qualities lie
within his original style of singing, Britpop.20 This representation of Albarn’s musical
past is supported by a “retro signifier” (Scott 2001, 209) as heard in the phrasing of the
chorus, reminiscent of the Kinks’ 1966 song “Sunny Afternoon”; both share a similar
melodic shape and pattern.21 Other than that, the lyrical content of the chorus has a
setting that suggests a fantasy soundscape. 2D’s desire for the “windmill” to overtake
the land is accompanied by atmospheric and heavenly string sounds, supporting the
fantasy setting of the chorus. The answer-message vocal style carries crackling sonics
in the background. The chorus is also layered with crackles to simulate the hissing and
telephonic sounds in a recorded message.

Figure  9.1  Author’s own transcription of the descending bass line that concludes the first
verse in “Feel Good Inc.,” composed and produced by Gorillaz, David Jolicoeur, and Danger
Mouse (2005); excerpt.
156   Shara Rambarran

The next section is a rap featuring the hip-hop group De La Soul. The mood of the
music takes a dramatic turn because its timbral qualities are aggressive, frenzied, and
loud. In the music, De La Soul express their way of escaping reality by indulging in
drugs—a harsh response to 2D’s words. The first part of the rap describes the experi-
ence of “scoring” drugs, which is to be read as “These hazmats, fast cats” (dangerous
gangsters) are making the “ladies, homies” queue up to get their “chocolate attack”
(drug fix) at the “track” (which is short for “track worker,” meaning drug dealer). This is
followed by the effects of taking drugs, which invokes thoughts of violence (“I’m step-
ping in the heart of this here, care bear bumping in the heart of this here”).22 The rap
then focuses on 2D when De La Soul tries to discourage him from dreaming of a better
life (“we gonna go ghost town, this Motown”). They make reference to the “melancholy
town” by stating that they are going to “ghost town” in Motown, a possible allusion to
the industrial metropolis Detroit.23 They warn 2D that he will die (“bite the dust”),
if he pursues his idea. If his idea comes to effect, however, he will “kill the Inc.” (the
enemy: De La Soul and population). The rap finishes when they maliciously tease 2D
to chase his dream (“so don’t stop, get it, get it”), but only while high on drugs (“until
you’re cheddar header”).24 They also encourage 2D to observe their way of escaping
reality through “gravitating,” “navigating,” and laughing.25
The loud burst of laughter heard at the end of the rap, signifies a psychedelic drug
experience.26 As Whiteley observes, disoriented sound images and emotions reflect-
ing drug experiences create a “disembodied, hallucinatory impression of the threat of
madness” (1992, 105). Here, the laughter’s sound images—a mixture of excitement, fear,
and paranoia—dominate the music through its loud dynamics. The gripping, rhythmic
vertigo effect and loud dynamics focus the listener’s attention as the laugh becomes
thicker and louder, successfully overpowering 2D’s vocal return: the high-pitched leit-
motif “feel good.” The music carries the same rhythm, guitar parts, stabbed brass synth
sounds, and now a resonated and squelchy bass groove. The overall timbre of the rap
is aggressive, frenzied, and loud-pitched, which is ironic for a group like De La Soul,
traditionally known for their alternative/poetic jazz and non-gangsta rap.
The next section is the break, which begins with a two-note high-pitched riff played
by a choir pad and the strings. The “heavenly” sounds have some delay to empha-
size the peaceful atmosphere (as opposed to the previous timbre in the rap section).
The guitar then plays a hypnotic short melody and is decorated with white noise and
jet sounds, which enhance the fantasy atmosphere. After 2D repeats the chorus and
sings “is everybody in?” the word “everybody” and guitar are morphed together as a
sample and manipulated with a filter sweep controlled by envelopes, which produces
an ascending tinny sound. This sound leads to the finale of the song, which consists of
a De La Soul rap and the distinctive laughter.
Although the informational and symbolic levels have been identified and analyzed
by decoding the music, it is significant to note that there is one musical element in
evidence throughout the song: timbre. This element is consistent in various vocal parts
from the introduction to the end of the song, and each section expresses its own tonal
colors. Stan Hawkins insists that when timbre has a key role in a song, “it soon becomes
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    157

clear that continual variations in the vocal nuances and gestures hold a critical clue
to delineating codes of meaning within the song” (Hawkins 1996, 25; 2002, 110). This
exists in “Feel Good Inc.,” where vocal nuances and gestures have consisted of falsetto,
scat, telephone voice, Britpop, gangsta, and the memorable laugh. All of these qualities
have brought out different tonal colors (disillusion, calm, aggression), which help to
convey the meaning of the song. The intention of feeling good as suggested by the song
title conveys the connotations of the song: to dream for it (wishing), or to fake it (drug
taking). There is another reading of the song, however, which can only be observed in
the video: the third meaning.

Music Video
The music video shows Gorillaz trying to escape their troubles by locking themselves
in the “Feel Good Inc.” tower, but the question that returns throughout the video is,
Have they managed to escape at all? The start of the video focuses attention on a post-
apocalyptic world, connoted by its gloominess, troubled noises, and industrial setting.
The laughter sound is heard, which leads to the image of a very tall and thin tower that
stretches from the ground to the sky. On the tower, there is a sign that states “Feel Good
Inc.,” which suggests escapism from the world below, but inside, the tower looks more
like hell, with its profoundly dark and grim features.
Before this is further explored, another interpretation of the tower is offered, and its
clues lie in the sign “Feel Good Inc.” The tower signifies a form of incorporation—which
belongs to Gorillaz—and implies that Gorillaz are trying to escape the music indus-
try and media by building their own tower—their own music industry—so that they
can create their own music without any interference from music moguls. Building
a high tower is showing a clear message that Gorillaz are maintaining their mani-
festo: to be independent from the industrialized world. This idea may be compared to
Baudrillard’s concept of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers (1993, 2003). He claims
that “Manhattan’s tall buildings had been content to confront each other in a competi-
tive verticality, and the product of this was an architectural panorama reflecting the
capitalist system itself ” (2003, 38). He implies that the design and intention of the Twin
Towers (nonidentical from the other buildings) was to put an end to capitalist rivalry,
simply by being noncompetitive and instead focusing on its monopolies. Like the (once)
World Trade Center, the “Inc.” tower is not comparable with other industries because
“they no longer challenge them nor compare themselves to them” (Baudrillard 1993,
70). The Center “had no facades or communicating vessels which blocked them from
the outside world” (Baudrillard 2003, 29). The “Feel Good Inc.” tower strengthens its
position in competitive capitalism by not conforming to the other towers (industries),
and by being individualistic and resisting communication from the outside world.
The camera then zooms into the tower, which reveals a theater. The people who
made it into the tower are motionless, dead, or zombified except for 2D, Russel, and
Murdoc. At the start of the music, an anxious 2D is sitting on a chair and affirming the
158   Shara Rambarran

words “feel good” to himself. He then preaches through his megaphone to the “melan-
choly” town (the music industry). He accuses the industry of producing music for the
“town that never smiles” (mass market). As the first verse ends, 2D drops his mega-
phone, makes his way to the barred window, and gazes through it at his dreams.27
As discussed previously, the tone of 2D’s vocal is saturated with crackling and tel-
ephonic effects, and is heard as an answer message. The sound effects of the chorus are
important because they contradict 2D’s desire to be free. Instead, signs of him giving
into conformity are implied because the answering machine may be associated with
marketing consumption (e.g., smartphone culture and digital media). Lars Eckstein
(2009) observes the connection when he notices that 2D used his mobile phone to
play the “answer message” (chorus) or a downloaded version during a performance at
the MTV awards (2009, p. 23). In the chorus, 2D sees a windmill on a colorful float-
ing piece of land through the window, a pastiche of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime feature
Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986).28 On this colorful land, there is a windmill and Noodle,
happily playing her guitar and seemingly very peaceful. 2D is yearning to join her
because he thinks he will be free. This would be his ideal way of escaping from both the
world below and the tower; this land would be his utopia. After the chorus, the video
returns to the post-apocalyptic world below, and two black helicopters are strongly
featured; this raises the thought that the world is being monitored.
Back in the tower, the blocked communications from the outside are hacked when
images of De La Soul are transmitted on several large screens. They are broadcast
from the world below and are presented as a hyperscreen, a screen within the main
screen, which neatly puts them in a powerful position because 2D is indulging in their
performance. Though it may look like a special guest appearance, De La Soul play
an important role. Here, Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication (1988) suggests an
interaction with hyperreality, as 2D is being seduced by De La Soul with their obscene
messages—they are the media. Their drug-related rap brings out more significance in
their critique of Gorillaz and society. They are implying that the music industry is pro-
ducing pop music to satisfy (“chocolate attack”) the mass markets (“ladies, homies”).
De La Soul warn Gorillaz that they are killing the “Inc.” (industry) with their views and
music (“yo sound”), and that they will be dropped from the industry if they will not
conform (“bite the dust”). 2D tries desperately to resist the seduction by jumping and
reflexing his hands as a form of comfort, and begins to reaffirm “feel good” to himself.
Multiplane camera effects are used to accompany these images, which correspond with
De La Soul’s presence. The combination of the sweeping movements of the camera on
2D and De La Soul results in a dizzying experience for the viewer, which is suitably
accompanied by the laughter.29 De La Soul remain visible on the television screens
throughout and have no desire to leave Gorillaz alone—just like the media.
When the short interval enters, Noodle is strumming her guitar on the floating
land and is surrounded by two white butterflies. The land carries a utopian feel:
the colorful depiction of nature, which includes green pasture, a tree, and blue sky.
The shape of the land has a similar structure to Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky. Here, the
island is in the shape of an airship and the castle consists of three layers: a gigantic
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    159

tree top, a dome where the deadly technology is held, and the lower portion of the
land, where the earth is crumbling away. The video’s equivalence is the windmill, the
pasture, and the crumbling earth at the bottom. It seems that Noodle has secured her
future on the land. There are no obvious signs on the land to suggest it is a threat to
the world below, but it does raise issues about technology. Miyazaki is not entirely in
favor of world-dominating technology or for it to be more powerful than humans.30
As one of the main themes in Castle in the Sky is technology, could Noodle be the
equivalent? This is where the two white butterflies flying around Noodle in parallel
to the two black helicopters could be significant. It appears that Noodle’s identity may
have been exposed by the government and if it is aware of her identity and deadly
mission, then the helicopters are monitoring her. In this context, the butterflies sig-
nify the protection of Noodle in opposition to the mechanistic.
After Noodle’s scene, 2D recites the final chorus through the window. As 2D moves
away from the window, a close-up shot of Russel enters as he restarts the drumbeat.
After the chorus, De La Soul conclude their rap by restating their authority. 2D ignores
them, steadily walks back to his chair, lowers his head, and continues to affirm “feel
good” to himself. Murdoc emphasizes his role as bassist by maintaining his rock star
image, by appearing seminaked and shaking his backside. Maseo, a member of De La
Soul, completes the song by laughing, and the video ends with the two helicopters
monitoring the floating piece of land.
The third meaning of the video analysis, which suggests that the group’s intention
of the song is to escape from the music industry and media, also implies that they
were not very successful. With this in mind, Barthes suggests that the third meaning
is a “luxury [which] does not yet belong to today’s politics but nevertheless already to
tomorrow’s” (1977, 62–63). Therefore, the desire for Gorillaz to critique and escape from
the industries is challenging to achieve in (virtual) reality. The controllers in the video
(the industry, government, and De La Soul) were trying hard to prevent Gorillaz from
chasing their dream by threatening them and monitoring Noodle. Gorillaz have not
escaped at all. It seems that the only way the protagonists would release Gorillaz is to
let them go, which is concluded in the video of the third single “El Mañana” (2006): the
government catches up to Noodle and kills her.

Conclusion

My chapter has explored the concept surrounding the virtual group Gorillaz. It focused
on its creators, in particular Damon Albarn, whose earlier loyalty to the Britpop scene
was challenged by his dislike of the entertainment industry. As such, Gorillaz can be
interpreted as his creative response to the music industry’s current obsession with celeb-
rity and reality television culture, and a plea for individual artistic freedom. It is also
suggested Gorillaz attracted audiences with their multiple identities inspired by popu-
lar culture and hyperreality, a concept explored by Baudrillard (1993) and applied to my
160   Shara Rambarran

analysis of the Gorillaz quartet—Murdoc Niccals, 2D, Russel Hobbs, and Noodle—and
their home in cyberspace. A close analysis of the music and video “Feel Good Inc.”
offers a further insight into what could be described as Albarn’s hidden agenda: his
attack on the ideology surrounding the contemporary music industry. “Phase Two”
is the most significant in unpacking Gorillaz’ transitional stage. As demonstrated in
“Feel Good Inc.” the characterization is more defined and the music reflects on emo-
tional and social themes. In “Phase Three” (which is represented by the third album,
Plastic Beach 2010), the characters continue to have dark themes within themselves,
their music, and their home. Noodle is resurrected into another cyborg, made by her
DNA from her body remains (Davis 2010, 52), thus confirming that she was killed in
“Phase Two.”31 Space does not permit an analysis of Gorillaz’ live performances (which
are discussed in Conner’s Chapter 8); I would suggest that Albarn’s significance to
Gorillaz is confirmed when he finally reveals himself in “Phase Three.” As observed at
a gig in London in 2010, despite the large projector screen showcasing the images and
videos of Gorillaz it was difficult not to focus on Albarn as he was dominating the stage
and interacting well with the audience. This raised several questions: Why is Albarn
representing Gorillaz? Is he freely presenting himself in the public eye as a form of
retrogression? Is he moving away from the aesthetics of Gorillaz and trying to increase
his economic power by making himself marketable? Although Albarn argues that he
would prefer Gorillaz to appear on stage in 3D, he acknowledges that it would be dif-
ficult because they would need advanced technology to make this possible (Buskirk
2010). It would seem, then, that rather than reverting back to using white projector
screens and silhouettes, or masking his identity by performing under another pseud-
onym, 2D, Albarn is no longer advocating Gorillaz. He is Gorillaz. By performing live
in front of an audience, Albarn displays his true identity. Thus even though the playful
identities earlier displayed in the videos have allowed Albarn the liberation to self-
invention and reinvention, creative control over the music, and the respect afforded
him as a contemporary composer, his gesture may well herald the end of the virtual
pop group Gorillaz.32 He has proved his point to the music industry and the media by
“undisguising” himself as the “real” member of Gorillaz. It is also rumored that Hewlett
became frustrated when his artwork for Gorillaz was relegated to background images
while Albarn paraded himself on stage and controlled the performances in the Plastic
Beach tour in 2010. As Hewlett’s acceptance speech for the 2005 MTV award reminds
the viewers, “Gorillaz Best Group—and we don’t even exist” (Browne 2006, 260). At
the time of writing, the future of Gorillaz remains uncertain (Harris 2012); Albarn’s
mission is complete, for now.

Notes
1. Britpop music is largely characterized by kitchen-sink lyrics, “Mockney” vocal delivery,
and influences from music hall, 1960s pop music, and other aspects of British pop cul-
ture. See Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton (2010) for more information.
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    161

2. For example, the media would highlight his feuds with rival bands such as Oasis, and his
relationship with Justine Frischmann, who fronted one of the very few female Britpop
bands Elastica (Phillips 2001; Garratt 2001; Whiteley 2010).
3. For more information on this campaign, refer to Till (2010).
4. The audio would be similar in terms of quality, and therefore one would not be able to tell
which CD is the original and which the copy.
5. The term virtual reality was coined by Antonin Artaud (1936) in his essay “The Alchemical
Theatre” (Jordan and Miller 2008, 99).
6. Hewlett has expressed his homage to zombies, including the film Dawn of the Dead
(1978), being his favorite. The horror genre was his main influence when creating Gorillaz
(Gaiman 2005).
7. He is not affiliated with the kitchen appliances brand Russell Hobbs.
8. White eyes in horror films also represent zombies. Films include I Walked with a Zombie
(1943) and Evil Dead (1982).
9. The stages and albums of Gorillaz are marked by phases (e.g., Phase One). Cass Browne is
also the drummer in “live” Gorillaz. As the biographer of Gorillaz, Browne (2006) writes
that Noodle learned she was one of twenty-three children who had trained as part of an
elite military team for the Japanese government (this story is similar to the controversial
Japanese film Battle Royale [2000]). The children were taught martial arts, languages,
mechanics, and technologies. Each child had an individual skill; Noodle was a classical
musician. The reason behind the training was to produce a junior army and for them to
bring about mass destruction. Instant mass destruction would be activated by a password.
The plan was stopped by the government, which ordered an envoy to destroy all evidence,
including the children. Apart from Noodle, all were killed. For her safety, her mentor, the
army officer Mr. Kyuzo, then erased her memory, removed all of her skills (except musi-
cal), and dispatched her to England. She has the power to cause mass destruction anytime
by activating the password (Browne 2006, 163–173).
10. Super soldier is a term to describe someone with many skills (warrior, assassin, killer,
soldier, ninja, action hero, and others).
11. Mon is the symbol of a family or company crest, and a warrior form of identity
(Poitras 1999).
12. The look was adopted by Tezuka Osamu, the inventor of manga.
13. Cutismo is a young Japanese girl or woman innocently displaying cuteness (Condry 2006).
14. Shōjo films feature a young girl playing the main role. The character usually undertakes
an adventure or action-oriented story (Poitras 2005).
15. This is common in Hayao Miyazaki’s films, such as Nausicao of the Valley of the Winds
(1984), Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989).
16. Second Life was launched by Linden Research in 2003.
17. Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are virtual computer games played by multiple (or
virtual) users. Games include Second Life, World of Warcraft, Adventure Rock, Lego Universe,
and The Sims Online. Other games such as Halo can also be played by people interacting
with each other via the Internet and game devices (such as Nintendo’s Wii and X-Box).
18. A majority of the analytical findings of the music video was presented as a conference
paper at a Jean Baudrillard–dedicated conference in 2006, and in my Ph.D. thesis (2010).
19. The laugh sounds similar to that of the cartoon character Mr. Magoo, one he would use
in malicious circumstances. The laugh in the song was recorded by Maseo, a member of
De La Soul. The malicious connection will become clear in the music video.
162   Shara Rambarran

20. The tonality of his voice shows a hint of mockney, a Britpop characteristic for which
Albarn used to be known and often criticized (Scott 2008).
21. The retro signifier displays signs of British 1960s music, in particular the Kinks, who
inspired the Britpop movement and Albarn’s works. John Richardson (2012) explores this
musical connection further.
22. A “Care Bear” was a branded cuddly toy in the 1980s. The slogan was “bears who cares.”
“Bumping” is slang to kill, while “heart” (based on “heart-stopper”) means to shoot
someone.
23. Detroit is famous for its motor industry and the first African American music indus-
try, Motown. Unfortunately, various sociopolitical and economic factors have caused
Detroit’s motor industry to decline dramatically. The term “ghost town” refers to a dein-
dustrialized and run-down city such as Detroit, which De La Soul refers to. A song by the
Specials (“Ghost Town” 1981) carries the same connotations and also expresses the bleak
experiences of England during the 1980s. It is worth noting that Gorillaz have collabo-
rated with the Specials’ lead singer, Terry Hall, in the past.
24. “Cheddar header” means being high on cocaine.
25. To “gravitate” means to “come down” from drugs. To “navigate” means playing computer
games while getting high on marijuana. Translations of the drug terminology used in the
analysis can be found in Cloud (1999) and Westbrook (2002).
26. Similar in effect to stoned laughter in Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
27. The design of the window is very similar to the castle’s window (where its main character,
Sheeta, is imprisoned) in Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky.
28. Hewlett, who designed the video, is a great admirer of Miyazaki’s works (Gaiman 2005).
Castle in the Sky is about a floating island containing powers that could destroy the world.
The beautiful island has a secret dome, which houses technology capable of causing mass
destruction.
29. De La Soul are a parody of the “real” De La Soul. They are no longer the colorful group,
because in the video they are in monochrome (in a blue-and-gray haze). The light-
ing effects used on their appearance (lens flare, shutter, and strobe) enhance their new
ghostly, distorted, tough, and powerful identities. The composition of De La Soul and
the television screens are based on two horror films: The Ring (1998; the color of the
film is in monochrome, also in a blue-and-gray haze) and Poltergeist (1982; the visual
effects used in the television screen and paranormal scenes are evident in the music
video). Passion Pictures, which made the video, stated that De La Soul were body-rigged
onto the camera to produce distorted images of themselves (Passion Press Release 2005;
Browne 2006).
30. Although Miyazaki needs it to create his masterpieces, he wants to encourage viewers not
to run their life with technology but instead to educate themselves with nature, literature,
and general knowledge (McCarthy 2002; Cavallaro 2006).
31. The resurrection of Noodle was personally observed at a Gorillaz concert in London,
April 2010: a short animated clip of Noodle’s transformation from her destroyed body
into a new cyborg was shown. The footage has been uploaded on the Internet and can be
viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT4YTLPWpCU.
32. Albarn’s other musical projects include a Mali music project (2002); The Good, the Bad,
and the Queen (2007); Rocket Juice and the Moon (2012); a Chinese musical called
Monkey (2008); and his solo album, Everyday Robots (2014).
 “Feel Good” with Gorillaz and “Reject False Icons”    163

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 PA RT   T H R E E

SE C ON D   L I F E

Second Life was launched in 2003 as an immersive real-time social space. It offered
musicians a new and creative approach to performance, one that involved both live and
prerecorded music, animation and audience socialization/interaction, and so returning,
and reflecting further, on the questions raised in Part One: What is real, what is virtual?
As Trevor S. Harvey observes, “Audiences have long been entertained by—and scholars
and historians have critically examined—the constructed identities and performances of
personae that are fundamental to mass-mediated musical culture” (Chapter 10). Musicians
performing in Second Life are no different, relying on “carefully crafted personages in
mediating live musical performances among global audiences and for establishing suc-
cessful performing careers in virtual worlds” (ibid.). Harvey’s ethnographic exploration
of “Avatar Rockstars: Constructing Musical Personae in Virtual Worlds” offers a personal
insight into the virtual world of Second Life, “where the musical experience is fractured
by the disconnection between the perceived sound (the music) and its paradoxical source
(the unseen person singing and playing the music represented by a 3D avatar within the
virtual world)” (ibid.). His description of live music concerts and interviews with musi-
cians and audience members opens with Collyier Heberle1 visiting “Moonshines, a popu-
lar rock-and-roll and blues club located in the Montego Beach region of the virtual world
of Second Life.” The live musician (Don Ray Houdyshell from Austin, Texas) is perform-
ing as Bluemonk Rau, “a blues and rock-and-roll keyboardist and singer,” while “the audi-
ence of avatars dance—some as couples, some alone—while others stand about or lounge
around in wooden rocking chairs.” Questions are raised as to how and why musicians
are attracted to the virtual world. For some, it seems, it is body image: “Second Life ava-
tars are almost always younger, slimmer, taller, trendier, and generally more attractive
than their real-life counterparts (Loke 2009; Messinger et al. 2008), while nonetheless
adopting certain defining features of one’s real-world identity—what Heider refers to as
168   Part Three: Second Life

the ‘replicant’ effect (2009, 136).” Others blend their real-world and virtual-world musi-
cal personae. Avatars also present “an opportunity for Second Life musicians to virtu-
ally embody the past, present, and future of music,” but as Justin Gagen and Nicholas
Cook caution, although Second Life continues to sustain a substantial musical culture,
the music itself is conditioned by two major constraints. First, it is nearly impossible to
create music in-world, through the real-time actions of avatars, so raising the question of
what “liveness” might mean in a virtual world when “virtually all the music in Second Life
is made in the real world and brought into Second Life.” The second constraint concerns
“the streaming in of sound files … whether prerecorded or live” and is the central topic of
their chapter. “Performing Live in Second Life” is based on a case study of the virtual band
Redzone, which began life as an Internet band in 1997 before making the transition to
Second Life in 2006, and of which Justin Gagen is a cofounder. As such, it provides a per-
sonal insight into both the problems and the pleasures gained from performing in Second
Life. The authors agree, for example, that “the most effective approach to creating liveness
within virtual reality is not to replicate the conditions of live music in the real world, but
rather to recontextualize the signifiers of liveness” through the technological affordances
of virtual reality. As their surveys reveal, “Lag is a permanent dimension of the Second
Life experience.” “There is no single ‘now’ in Second Life: the present moment is blurred,
smeared over a period of several seconds.” Rather, it is the social context, “the network of
interaction between audience members, and between them and performer, [that] repre-
sents a performance of liveness.” As such, in words Gagen and Cook quote from William
Cheng (2012), “Even though the production of the music itself is not live, the produc-
tion of the musical performance in its totality is demonstrably live.” It is also interesting
to note that “most performers in our survey reported a close correlation between how
they performed in and out of Second Life,” but just how easy is it for an opera singer to
engage with the virtual world, and what problems does this present? The problems inher-
ent in playing in “real time” and the dynamic relationship between decisions that are
preplanned and those that are made on the spur of the moment are explored in Marco
Antonio Chávez-Aguayo’s chapter, “Live Opera Performance in Second Life: Challenging
Producers, Performers and the Audience,” which describes in first person the experi-
ence of becoming a virtual opera singer and creating a parallel artistic life. As he discov-
ered, producing live classical music in a global virtual world presents both challenges and
opportunities, not least in the interaction between performer and audiences. There is the
challenge of introducing new audiences to opera, of finding suitable repertoire, and of
establishing a responsive and interactive relationship with an accompanist who can meet
the problems inherent in a virtual performance. Success has meant attracting a new and
dedicated following, and as such, the time and energy involved has opened the door to a
dynamic global relationship between the performer and his audience. Chávez-Aguayo’s
chapter provides a thoughtful introduction for readers interested in becoming a virtual
classical musician in Second Life; how and why this affects developing a relationship
between fans both real and virtual; and how and why his virtual performance differs
from being a real-life opera star.
 Part Three: Second Life    169

Note
1. Harvey’s avatar name in Second Life.

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Cheng, William. 2012. “Role-playing Toward a Virtual Music Democracy. The Lord of the
Rings Online.” Ethnomusicology 56: 31–62.
Heider, Don. 2009. “Identity and Reality: What Does It Mean to Live Virtually?” In Living
Virtually: Researching New Worlds, ed. Don Heider, 131–143. New York: Peter Lang.
Loke, Jaime. 2009. “Identity and Gender in Second Life.” In Living Virtually: Researching New
Worlds, ed. Don Heider, 145–161. New York: Peter Lang.
Messinger, Paul R., et al. 2008. “On the Relationship Between My Avatar and Myself.” Journal
of Virtual Worlds Research 1(2): 1–17.
 chapter 10

Avatar Ro c k sta rs
Constructing Musical Personae in Virtual Worlds

Trevor S. Harvey

Audiences have long been entertained by—and scholars and historians have criti-
cally examined—the constructed identities and performances of personae that are
fundamental to mass-mediated musical culture. Popular musical culture, in par-
ticular, is saturated with projections and perceptions of musicians’ identities, as evi-
denced by performers from Elvis Presley to Madonna, and David Bowie to Lady
Gaga. So fundamental are musical personae, Philip Auslander argues, that “our per-
ception of the music is mediated by our conception of the performer as personage”
(2006, 102). As with the commercially successful pop and rock musicians in the
“real world,” musicians who perform “live” concerts in the virtual world of Second
Life rely on carefully crafted personages in mediating live musical performances
among global audiences and for establishing successful performing careers in
virtual worlds.
In the schizophonic (Schafer 1977)  concerts of Second Life, where the musical
experience is fractured by the disconnection between the perceived sound (the
music) and its paradoxical source (the unseen person singing and playing the music
represented by a 3D avatar within the virtual world), musicians depend on digitally
constructed avatars, instruments, and virtual settings that are vital for articulating
the presence of the performer within the virtual space. Avatars, along with associ-
ated virtual objects and networked communication platforms, provide opportuni-
ties for producing and presenting digitally embodied musical personae in virtual
worlds. Through ethnographic descriptions of live music concerts in Second Life
and interviews with virtual musicians and audience members, this chapter explores
processes of musical performance and digital embodiment within the live music
scene of Second Life.
172   Trevor S. Harvey

Attending a Live Music Concert

in Second Life

Moonshines, a popular rock-and-roll and blues club located in the Montego Beach
region of the virtual world of Second Life, sits among tall southern pines and live
oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. The club is surrounded by boardwalks rising
out of the misty swamp of the Owtagetcha Bayou. To the left of the club, a rusty old
pickup truck rests in front of a detached garage, loaded with jugs of liquor produced
by the distiller hidden inside the deteriorating shelter. A hand-painted sign indicates
the entrance to the small one-room shack that acts as a gateway to the large wooden
deck in the back. Inside the shack, the walls are adorned with musical memorabilia
representing popular musicians in both Second Life and the “real world”: on one wall
hang photographs of Buddy Guy, B. B. King, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, while on another
rest autographed guitars of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Eagles, and other legendary
rock and blues musicians. The wall to the right is covered with images of Second Life
live musicians who have played at Moonshines since its establishment as a virtual live
music venue in 2011.
On the far end of the back deck at Moonshines, a large stage sits precariously over
an alligator-infested swamp (a nearby caution sign warns visitors of the dangers of the
waters below). At the back of the stage a large sign announces the live musician cur-
rently performing: Bluemonk Rau, a blues and rock-and-roll keyboardist and singer.
Bluemonk Rau performs at Moonshines every Friday night, one of three regular, one-
hour gigs he’s booked to play every Friday evening. Sitting at a piano, which he brings
to the performances, Bluemonk plays original blues compositions in addition to cover
songs composed or recorded by musicians such as Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and
George Gershwin. He looks sharp, dressed in his dark-gray, double-breasted suit, the
coat buttoned up over a white dress shirt and straight tie. His long, dark hair drapes
down over his shoulders as his head nods and bobs to the music (although not neces-
sarily in sync with it). Hidden underneath the matted locks of hair, his face is framed
by dark sunglasses and a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. As he plays, his hands
move up and down the yellowed, chipped ivory keys of the old, weathered piano, its
dull veneer splintering away, exposing a rough exterior decorated by a mismatch of
stickers advertising products such as Ma’s old-fashioned root beer and Tylenol. On top
of the piano lies a pile of sheet music for nineteenth-century North American songs: a
march, a two-step, and a minstrelsy-inspired jubilee.
As he sings Quincy Jones’s “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), accompanying himself
on the piano, the audience of avatars dance—some as couples, some alone—while oth-
ers stand about or lounge in wooden rocking chairs. His voice is forceful and ragged,
much like the piano at which he sits. After the third and final stanza of the song,
Bluemonk plays an improvised piano interlude that acts to seamlessly bridge “In the
Heat of the Night” with another song made famous by Ray Charles, “Georgia on My
 Avatar Rockstars   173

Figure 10.1  Entrance to Moonshine’s Rockin’ Blues Club in the swamps of the Owtagetcha
Bayou.

Figure 10.2  Bluemonk Rau performing on the stage at Moonshine’s in September 2013.

Mind” (1960). A few seconds into this second song, someone in the audience whistles
loudly in approval of the song, undoubtedly using the venue’s “whistle!” sign at the
edge of the stage. Along the front of the stage are several signs that, when “touched” by
an avatar, emit audible applause, a whistle, or a loud “wooo!” Next to these signs are
dance signs that, when activated, provide several options for animating the movements
of avatars according to various dance styles. Behind his piano on the stage is Bluemonk
Rau’s “Subscribe-O-Matic,” an in-world kiosk used for connecting with and distribut-
ing content to audiences in Second Life. His kiosk has links to his bio, song list, perfor-
mance schedule, booking information, website, and free gifts. In the upper-right corner
174   Trevor S. Harvey

are the two biggest buttons, one labeled “Tips,” which allows audience members to pay
Bluemonk Linden dollars,1 and the other labeled “Join Group,” subscribing the fan to
announcements and notifications regarding Bluemonk’s performances.
Bluemonk Rau wraps up his Ray Charles medley with Bobby Sharp’s “Unchain My
Heart” (1961) and Charles’s own “Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I)” (1961)
to a round of thunderous applause, hoots and hollers included, that belies the relatively
small number of audience members in attendance at tonight’s concert. The number
of audience members at a given concert can vary greatly. I have been one of dozens of
concertgoers, and I have stood alone on a dance floor with no one else in sight but the
performer on the stage. Most concerts, however, are attended by between fifteen and
thirty avatars.
As the applause dies down, Bluemonk chats a bit with the audience, kindly remind-
ing them with his hospitable Texas twang to tip the venue and the hostess:

Y’all be sure to tip this wonderful venue and do not forget our wonderful hostess,
Lily. She’s the only one whose doin’ any real work around here. So make sure she
gets a nice, generous tip every so often. (Bluemonk Rau concert at Moonshines,
Sept. 6, 2013)

Hosts and hostesses work (or volunteer) for venue owners and are responsible for
ensuring the enjoyment of audiences, which they do by greeting audience members
by name as they arrive at the venue, directing guests to dance balls or posters for ani-
mating their avatars, and assisting the musicians in the smooth operation of the event.
Lily responds to Bluemonk’s audible shoutout with her own text gesture (an automated
ASCII art message that a user can trigger to appear in the local text chat, viewable by
everyone within a virtual thirty-meter radius):

♥(`'·.¸(`'·.¸ * ¸.·'´)¸.·'´)♥
«´·.¸¸.• GREAT Tunes = Free! •.¸¸.·`»
«´·.¸¸.• GREAT Company = Free! •.¸¸.·`»
«´·.¸¸.• Tipping your AWESOME Performer  = Priceless! •.¸¸.·`»
♥(¸.·'´(¸.·'´ * `'·.¸)`'·.¸)♥

As I, or Collyier Heberle (my avatar’s name in Second Life), click the “Tips” button on
Bluemonk’s Subscribe-o-matic, a window pops up in the Second Life interface allowing
me to transfer Linden dollars from my personal account to Bluemonk’s account. When
I complete the transaction, the publicly viewable read-out above the “Tips” button dis-
playing the total number of tips Bluemonk has received during his set at Moonshines
refreshes, adding my tip to the overall tally of L$850. Together with the flat-rate pay
Bluemonk receives directly from the venue owner, these tips constitute his earnings for
playing this one-hour set. He can then convert his earnings to U.S. dollars by transfer-
ring it to a PayPal account and withdrawing it for use in the “real world.”
 Avatar Rockstars   175

Performing Live in Second Life

In “real life,” Bluemonk Rau is known as Don Ray Houdyshell, an Austin, Texas-based
professional blues keyboardist whose forty-year career has included performances
at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic and Farm Aid. In Second Life, Bluemonk
has launched a successful solo career, where he typically plays about eight one-hour
solo concerts a week. While Bluemonk sits at his old, beaten-up piano on the stage at
Moonshine’s Rockin’ Blues Club every Friday evening, the “real life” Don sits behind a
two-tiered keyboard stand in a small room in his home, his microphone clipped to a
boom arm reaching over the top of his keyboards. The lower keyboard is a digital piano
with weighted keys and an internal sample bank of piano sounds, while the upper key-
board draws its sound via MIDI from a Roland VK-8M sound module, a “clonewheel
organ” that digitally reconstructs the sound of classic electromechanical tonewheel
organs, such as the Hammond B3. This setup allows him to play a right-handed piano
solo while accompanying himself with his left hand on the organ, or to play an organ
solo while maintaining a boogie-woogie bass line with his left hand on the piano. As
with most Second Life musicians, Don wears headphones so that he can hear the full
mix of his keyboards, along with his voice and, in the case of some of his songs, a back-
ing bass and drum track, which he himself records in advance of his gigs and plays back
from a digital audio file on his computer during his performances (Fig. 10.3).
Connecting their various instruments and microphones to personal computers
either directly or through a small mixer, live musicians depend on a variety of tech-
nologies to deliver the sound they produce in real time (albeit, with a short delay of
one or two seconds) to the globally dispersed audiences attending their concerts in

Figure 10.3  Don Houdyshell performing for a Second Life audience from his home studio in
Austin, Texas.
176   Trevor S. Harvey

Second Life. From their computer, an audio broadcast application reroutes the music
to a media streaming server, such as SHOUTcast or Icecast, which can then be linked
to a specific parcel within Second Life so that all avatars within that parcel can hear
the audio stream. This audio stream, for which either the musician or the venue owner
must pay (or host themselves on their own server), typically allows a maximum of forty
to a hundred simultaneous listeners, which correlates to the threshold number of ava-
tars that can visit a given region at the same time in Second Life.2
Preparatory to a live concert, the musician teleports (tp) to the location of the venue,
coordinates streaming server URLs with the venue host or hostess, and rezzes (which
means to make a digital object visible) stage props, such as tip jars, posters bearing the
name and likeness of the avatar (sometimes including a real-life photograph of the
musician), and musical instruments, such as a guitar, microphone, or piano. In their
home studios, most musicians sit or stand facing their computer screen so they can
scan the audience (each avatar’s name floating above their head), follow along with the
local chat, and watch for tips and private messages from fans requesting songs or pay-
ing a compliment.

Digital Embodiment
of Second Life Avatars

As the digital manifestation of one’s physical being in the virtual world, an avatar is the
locus of all musical and social interactions in Second Life. The virtual world is experi-
enced through the avatar in which the human agent is digitally embodied. As with our
organic bodies, through which we experience the physical world, Timothy L. Taylor
suggests that participants in virtual worlds “find themselves grounded in the practice of
the [virtual] body” (2002, 42) and thereby are embedded in the lifeworld of the avatar.
The primacy of avatars as a vital aspect to experiencing the metaverse is evident at the
introductory stage of virtual world participation. When registering for a Second Life
account, the new resident is presented first with a selection of prefabricated avatars to
represent himself or herself in the virtual world, even before selecting a name for the
avatar. Although a resident may continue to use this standard avatar, the ability to sig-
nificantly alter the physical appearance and behavior of one’s avatar is an essential part
of the virtual world experience.
When I registered for Second Life in 2007, I initially chose to dress my avatar as the
default “City Chic Male.” As an ethnographer conducting research in Second Life, I ini-
tially leaned toward the observation end of the fieldwork spectrum, viewing my own
avatar as merely a functional necessity of “getting around” in the three-dimensional,
simulated places, even while being intrigued by the diversity and complexity of ava-
tars around me. Fascinated by the visual stimulation of the 3D world and the people
who inhabited it, I paid little attention to my own hair, clothes, or the way I walked or
 Avatar Rockstars   177

stood. I focused on my avatar only enough to mostly avoid bumping into walls and
other avatars. Recently, however, I met Lauren Delvalle at a Zorch Boomhauer concert,
the Second Life avatar of Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter Kinagree Smith. As we
chatted during Zorch’s concert, Lauren told me about her tastes in music, her favorite
musicians in Second Life, and how music in Second Life offers a diversity of style not
available on terrestrial radio. Live music concerts, she explained, are her main motiva-
tion for logging on to Second Life. It was late when Zorch’s concert ended, but as she
teleported (tp’d) out of the concert venue, she sent me another pm, or private message.

Lauren Delvalle:  Mind if I make a small suggestion?3

Collyier Heberle:  Yeah. Go for it.
LD:  would you like any help with your avatar? I know a lot of free options. . . . that
might make you feel more comfortable here

I was certainly not new to Second Life and I had made some changes to my avatar’s
body, adjusting his height, girth, and facial features, in addition to wearing some free
clothing I  had accumulated over the years (mostly giveaways from music venues as
promotional items): a t-shirt, khaki jeans, and leather sandals. But these were rather
basic adjustments, and I had never bothered to do much to counter the fact that I surely
looked like a “newbie,” even years after joining Second Life.

Collyier Heberle::)  Sure! I’ve had a pretty lame avatar for several years now.
Lauren Delvalle::)  cool, was hoping that question wouldn’t offend
CH:  Not at all.
LD:  Ok, give me a few minutes to check the marketplace real quick, you need an
ao :) do you know what an ao is?

I was somewhat embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t familiar with the term “ao” (although
later, in reviewing old field notes, I saw the term come up many times, but I never really
paid much attention to it). I had certainly been in SL long enough to be familiar with
basic terms that separated newbies from more experienced residents. But in my own
mind I justified my lack of attention to my avatar by arguing that my position as an
ethnomusicologist gave me an excuse to focus on the aural aspects of living in SL, and
I had greatly neglected my education of visual components enhanced by prims, aos,
and other customizable aspects of Second Life avatars.

Collyier Heberle:  No. I don’t know what an ao is.

Lauren Delvalle:  it is an “animation override” what this means is . . . you
might notice other avatars that stand more naturally . . . by default your stands are
kind of strange . . . can I send you teleport to show you what I mean?
CH:  yeah

As I accepted her teleport offer, I was immediately taken away from the venue where
Zorch had been playing and appeared in a small, windowless room with sky-blue walls.
178   Trevor S. Harvey

Centered against one wall, a blue area rug covered the wood-plank floor, on which
rested a neatly made bed. On either side of the bed was a bed stand, a lamp on one and
a candle on the other. Lauren stood several feet in front of me, dressed in a white halter
tank top, cutoff jean shorts, and brown, leather, mid-calf boots.

Lauren Delvalle:  Okay so . . . an ao . . . do you notice how I stand . . . the

stands are animated. . .
Collyier Heberle:  ok
LD:  and then how yours are . . . they are static. see what I mean?
CH:  yes
LD:  Ok. . . . I found one on the marketplace that I will send you . . . please watch
for it.
CH:  ok
LD:  I’m purchasing it now, one sec pls

I waited in the small bedroom for several minutes until Lauren returned. She tried
transferring an ao to me, but we were having difficulty getting it to transfer. After
quite a bit of time, we decided to put the ao on hold while we went to go look for new
hair. I accepted her tp again and within a couple of seconds found myself at the Nexus
boutique, which sells various styles of hair. I followed her over to the men’s section of
the shop.

Lauren Delvalle:  if you see any styles you like, click on the “demo” to try them
out. the demo is usually the big picture in the middle. once you get the demo,
right click it in your inventory and “add” to try it on.

The walls were covered with pictures of men’s hair, modeled by avatars. I browsed the
few dozen options and selected the “Tidal” design to try on my avatar.

Lauren Delvalle:  There ya go!:)

Collyier Heberle:  what do you think?
LD:  Maybe try some others. excuse me a sec Ill brb:)

Lauren’s avatar didn’t move, but her message clearly indicated a distraction in “real
life” that drew her attention away from Second Life for a short moment. While she was
gone, I browsed around some more, settling on the “Jackson”: hair cut just above the
ear on the sides, but kept a bit longer on top, parted on one side and swept across to the
other side, keeping the hair off the forehead. Beneath the picture on the wall, a row of
tubes displayed the color palettes available for purchase.

Lauren Delvalle:  back. find one ya like?

Collyier Heberle: How’s that?
LD:  Its nice. Do you Like it? We can look some more:) Ok, what is the name of
that one?
 Avatar Rockstars   179

CH: Jackson
LD:  I gave you the L[inden dollars] for it, just buy the color you like. I’m happy
you found one you like:)

I received a message that I had been given L$250, which I used to purchase the “Jackson”
hair in the “dark blonde” color palette, which contains five shades. After trying two or
three shades of hair, I settled on “goldrush.”

Collyier Heberle::)  Looking much better already!

Lauren Delvalle:  Ok, a suggestion. . . . .?
CH:  Yes. Please.
LD:  lets go get you a good skin!

We continued to shop for nearly another hour, purchasing skin before moving on to a
large shop full of animation overrides. Available for purchase individually or as a set,
animation overrides can alter the movement, stance, and positioning of avatars while
standing, sitting, walking, running, or flying, generally projecting a more natural or
appealing sense of presence in virtual space.
Despite the great flexibility in avatar design that enables Second Life musicians to
look like nearly anything they could imagine, Don Heider notes that most residents
of Second Life choose avatars that look similar to their real life bodies (2009), albeit
idealized representations of their biological selves. It has frequently been noted, for
example, that Second Life avatars are almost always younger, slimmer, taller, trendier,
and generally more attractive than their real-life counterparts (Loke 2009; Messinger
et al. 2008), while nonetheless adopting certain defining features of one’s real-world
identity—what Heider refers to as the “replicant” effect (2009, 136). My selection of the
Jackson Goldrush hair while shopping with Lauren was no doubt an articulation of my
identity formed by embodied features of my biological self. Similarly, Bluemonk Rau
acknowledged to me that his selection of avatar was in part driven by his desire to have
his avatar mirror his long hair in the virtual world, even though, in general, his avatar
does not necessarily look like the real-world Don Ray Houdyshell.
For some musicians, however, designing avatars that faithfully mirror their real-
world appearance is part of a larger effort to seamlessly blend their real-world and
virtual-world musical personae. Several years ago I met Thom Martinsyde, the Second
Life avatar of Tom Drinkwater, one half of the York, England-based folk duo Pillowfish.
Pillowfish entered the Second Life live music scene in 2008, hoping that the increased
global exposure might lead to a more profitable musical career in the real world, a point
Thom was quite transparent about when I talked with him about his motivations for
performing in Second Life.

[I]‌read about [Second Life] somewhere, and logged on . . . met some people . . . and
realised its a great way to get to an audience. Its really mostly promo, but we meet
people from all over the world here, so maybe it will lead to a RL tour sometime too!
(conversation with author, Jan. 23, 2008)
180   Trevor S. Harvey

When I attended a Pillowfish concert, I found Thom, playing Irish bouzouki and acous-
tic guitar, and his partner, Rowanna Sideways, playing fiddle, perched atop tall stools
at the edge of the stage. Behind them a large poster depicted their real-life images—an
uncanny resemblance to their avatars on stage (Fig. 10.4).
Some musicians change the appearance of their avatar on the basis of the venue in
which they are performing. Recently, I attended two back-to-back concerts by Second
Life musician Tom 2.0. For the first concert, at Club P4, he wore dark blue jeans, the
fronts of the legs faded, with a casual, lightweight black jacket over an ocean-blue col-
lared shirt, his sleeves rolled up and the top two or three buttons of his shirt undone.
Two minutes later he appeared at Social Breezes, a beach-party style club, wearing red-
and-white Hawaiian floral swim trunks, his guitar strapped across his bare shoulders
and chest. The whimsical nature of Tom 2.0’s lighthearted shows (at Club P4 he played
a string of 1980s TV show theme songs) is reinforced simultaneously through the musi-
cal performance and the presentation of his avatar. In some instances, he reworks songs
to reflect the experience of living virtually as a digitally embodied avatar, such as the
Second Life–oriented verses he has added to Adam Sandler’s “I Wanna Grow Old with
You” from the 1998 romantic comedy The Wedding Singer:

I’ll clear your cache, if things won’t load.

I’ll install your updates when your viewer gets old.
I’ll be the one who grows old with you.

In a Second Life parody of a Barenaked Ladies hit song, Tom 2.0 sings “If I had 1,000,000
Lindens” as a duet with Tom 1.0, his real-life persona represented by a life-size poster
set on stage next to Tom 2.0. What I find particularly interesting regarding the cutout of

Figure 10.4  Pillowfish’s Thom Martinsyde (Tom Drinkwater) and Rowanna Sideways (Helen
Bell) performing on their own stage in September 2008.
 Avatar Rockstars   181

Tom 1.0 is how this static, representational image appears (both visually and sonically,
in the performance of the song) merely as a sideman for the animated avatar, Tom 2.0,
while simultaneously juxtaposing and fusing the real-world and Second Life musical
personae on the virtual stage.
Through such playful performances and creative use of avatars, clothing, and stage
props, Tom 2.0 has built a devoted fan base. After attending a Tom 2.0 concert, Pen
Dragon, a reviewer for the Virtual Music Services Magazine, remarked:

We were immediately struck with the electricity in the room. Chat was vibrant and
drew us in, the music was fun and upbeat, and the crowd was into the show. Tom, up
on stage playing his acoustic guitar, was interacting with the crowd, making jokes,
talking to everyone and laughing between songs. (Dragon 2013)

Beyond communicating physical attributes of the musician, avatars, together with vir-
tual musical instruments and other attachments, are a means of expressing musical
identity—much as in real life. Heavily influenced by the redneck rock scene of Austin,
Texas, where he has lived and played for forty years, Bluemonk’s blues-oriented perfor-
mances divulge a rootsy Americana fortified by his rustic piano and racially ambigu-
ous avatar. In talking with Bluemonk, I asked him about his piano and the design of
his avatar, and in his answer it became clear to me that his virtual piano, together with
his avatar, is not merely a prop that simply reflects a particular musical genre or per-
formance style; rather it serves to integrate his real-world musical experiences with his
online musical persona.

I always liked uprights because I always had uprights myself, you know. In Second
Life, if you try and buy a piano . . . they’re all grand pianos. And in real life, I rarely play
a grand piano. If I play a real piano, it’s usually an upright over in the corner. . . . but
then this sim where I was renting some property, they had a little boathouse in there
and they had that piano. So I looked to see who the maker was and I went and figured
out how to buy the thing. I get a lot of complements. And see, I like that because that
looks like the pianos I have played on [in real life] . . . some old beat-up, out-of-tune
piano standing up in the corner of a bar. You know, it’s had drunks playing on it, spill-
ing beer on it, maybe getting into a fight and gettin’ knocked into it, names carved in
it. It looks like the one I play [in Second Life]. (Interview with author, Sept. 11, 2013)

Musical instruments can be purchased from shops around the Second Life meta-
verse and are added to the avatar’s inventory once purchased. In order to make them
easy to use in any virtual space, most musical instruments are designed to be attach-
ments, objects that are “worn” by the avatar and thus intimately connected to the body,
like a shirt, jewelry, or hair. But, more than a projection of his real-world physicality,
Bluemonk’s avatar (broadly speaking, and inclusive of his musical instrument) can be
understood as an expression of his musical experiences, influences, and sensibilities.
Live music concerts are sociomusical events where musicians and audiences, each rep-
resented by avatars, gather to listen, talk, dance, sing, and generally socialize within
182   Trevor S. Harvey

visually rich 3D environments, and events that enable processes of virtual embodi-
ment. The embodied presence of the social actors manifested as avatars is a vital dif-
ference between live music events in Second Life compared to real-time Webcasts or
other Internet-based streaming events, such as iTunes Music Festival or NPR’s All Songs
Considered “Live in Concert” series. Despite their use of digital, new-media technolo-
gies, these streaming events are modeled after traditional broadcast systems, delivering
commercially viable musical performances to distributed listeners, whose engagement
with one another generally takes place beyond the spatial and temporal context of the
music event itself. In the 3D realm of virtual worlds, however, where all participants are
digitally embodied in their avatars, musicians and audiences are brought together, both
spatially and temporally, creating a shared social space. In the context of his live music
concerts, Bluemonk, as his avatar, and his audience, through their avatars, collaborate in
a personal and musical performance that bridges both lived and imagined experiences.

Role Playing Through Digital Avatars

The phenomenology of digital embodiment surfaces within the act of play—a key ele-
ment to virtual world socialization. Role playing is central to Second Life sociality, for
both musicians and audiences alike, and is inherent in the basic premise of virtual
worlds in that a participant assumes an avatar as a representation of herself or himself
in the digital space. Avatars may present alternative identities in terms of gender, eth-
nicity, and, almost invariably, age, but role-playing in Second Life is not merely an act
of pretending; rather it highlights the crucial element of “play,” a concept that bridges
both musical performance (“playing” music) and the act of Being “in-world” (playing
through one’s avatar). Second Life residents generally reject any notion of Second Life
as a game and are therefore suspicious of attempts to emphasize play in virtual worlds.4
Nevertheless, the playfulness inherent in the embodiment of digital avatars allow a
reimagining of one’s musical subjectivity.

Rockstar Celebrity in Virtual Worlds

After watching the popular Second Life musician Ictus Belford perform one evening
at the live music venue Crystal Sands (which closed down in 2009), I sent a message
to Ictus requesting an interview.5 He agreed to meet with me the following evening,
and as the appointment approached I received an instant message offering to teleport
me to his location. Accepting the “tp” offer, I suddenly arrived on the sandy beach of a
small, isolated island, where, together with his then–Second Life wife, Carrie Laysan,
Ictus owned an impressive, contemporary-styled home, paid for by his earnings as a
musician in Second Life. As we talked via local chat outside his home, a nearby radio
played a stream of songs from Second Life live musicians, many of them friends of
 Avatar Rockstars   183

Ictus and Carrie. After chatting for a while, they invited me inside. The high, vaulted
ceilings supported by a mostly glass exterior provided a sense of expansiveness to the
home. Interior walls exhibited large portraits of Ictus and other Second Life musicians
performing, as well as original artwork given to them by friends and other Second Life
visual artists. On the massive, stone fireplace in the center of the home, a large digi-
tal picture frame displayed a slideshow of Ictus and Carrie’s wedding photographs—a
seemingly fairy-tale event, complete with a horse-drawn carriage. Outside the front
door to the house was a life-size (relative to Second Life) cutout poster of Ictus, which
was given to him when he was included in a Second Life Music Hall of Fame (Fig. 10.5).
Perhaps it is this type of fame and fortune enjoyed by Ictus and Carrie within Second
Life that makes virtual embodiment so attractive. Foolish Frost, another Second Life
musician, addresses the role-playing possibilities of the virtual rockstar life in his song
“Avatar,” a parody cover song of Nickelback’s 2007 hit “Rockstar.”

I’m through with living real life ’cause nobody cares

And workin my job that’s going nowhere
Ya know real life ain’t quite the way I want it to be. (Tell me what you want.)
I want a virtual home in my very own sim
And a harem I can have Cybersex with
And enough Linden cash for anything I’m gonna need. (Yeah? So tell me what you need.)

In the final lines of the chorus, Foolish Frost substitutes “rockstar” for “avatar,” simulta-
neously juxtaposing and conflating the social conditions of each persona.

And, hey, hey, I wanna be an avatar

Hey, hey, I wanna be an avatar

Figure  10.5  The author (Collyier Heberle) interviewing Ictus Belford and Carrie Laysan in
their home in August 2008.
184   Trevor S. Harvey

The appeal of avatar-oriented virtuality expressed in Foolish Frost’s song fits into
the typical discourses of virtual reality as separate and distinct from our “real lives,” a
self-delusional space in which fantastical desires may be played out in ways impossible,
or at the very least improbable, in the “real world.” In his tongue-in-cheek romanticiza-
tion of avatar rockstars, Foolish Frost underscores a critical point of Beer and Geesin’s
assessment of the live music scene in Second Life, namely that Second Life is becoming
a space where “the divisions and hierarchies of contemporary popular culture [are]
replicated” (2009, 114). Their critique lies, in part, in issues of authentic representation
of musical personages, as expressed in their response to the presence of “real world”
pop musicians in the virtual realm:

There is little way to be sure that the real-world pop stars are actually controlling
their avatars in Second Life (or if this indeed matters). In a Q&A session in Second
Life with a music group such as Duran Duran how can the user be sure that the
avatars’ responses are coming from the actual members of the band and not from a
record industry intern? (Beer and Geesin 2009, 114)

This criticism is extended through Beer and Geesin’s analysis of Second Life tribute
bands, such as U2inSL, a U2 tribute band that has been performing concerts in Second
Life since 2005. In their discussion of U2inSL, Beer and Geesin cite Guy Debord,
concluding that rockstar avatars, like real-world pop stars, are the “spectacular rep-
resentations of human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into
images” (Debord 1994, 38). In the interactive role playing of avatar-based musical per-
formances, however, Second Life musicians and audiences are not merely spectators
within a consumer-capitalist society; they engage in explorations of musical subjectiv-
ity through the digital embodiment of otherness. Within musical events, Second Life
musicians construct what Best and Kellner (1999), in their reevaluation of Debord’s
theory of the spectacle, refer to as “cybersituations,” participatory engagement within
sociomusical settings that resists the passivity and alienation inherent within the spec-
tacle of mass-mediated musical culture.

Tribute Bands and Avatars of Otherness

The case of U2inSL highlights the multilayered process of embodying otherness as
musical avatars role-play “real-world” musical persona. U2inSL differs from most of
the musicians discussed in this chapter in that the band does not perform the music
heard by audiences in Second Life. Rather, U2inSL performs an elaborate visual spec-
tacle, including a complex light show, intricate set design, and actively animated ava-
tars (as opposed to the passive approach of musicians who are otherwise engaged in
performing the music live) in coordination with bootleg recordings of “real life” U2
concerts. In essence, U2inSL are avatar lipsynchers: moving, dancing, and performing
to a prerecorded musical track. As with the band Pillowfish, mentioned earlier, each
 Avatar Rockstars   185

of the avatars in U2inSL are modeled after the real-world bodies of Bono, the Edge,
Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr., the real-life members of the Irish rock band.
I had been aware of U2inSL for several years; I have watched some of their videos on
YouTube and read about them on their website, on blogs, and in magazines. But only
recently did I attend one of their concerts. I teleported to the concert site a few minutes
early and took my time walking around the outside of the stadium before I  entered
through the turnstiles into the concert venue. After passing by security guards, I entered
into the ground floor of the stadium. A seemingly massive venue, the stadium used a
panorama of two-dimensional images depicting avatars in seats, giving the illusion of a
stadium full of fans. One of two large billboards standing at the entrance just inside the
stadium provided instructions on how to set my preferences in my Second Life viewer
to get the best possible experience from the concert. A second billboard listed the names
of each avatar in the stadium along with the amount of scripts attached to the avatars;
those using scripts beyond the allotted amount were marked in red, alerting them that
their scripts may cause too much lag in the system and disrupt the concert experience.
A stream of music by U2 played both outside and inside the stadium prior to the concert,
interrupted intermittently by commercials advertising the “Feed a Smile” campaign for
which this concert was a benefit. As I was looking around, I heard the concert begin and
I found myself rushing around the stadium to get close to the stage where I would have
the best view of both the audience and the four members of U2inSL (Fig. 10.6).
As the music began, I felt a small rush of adrenaline. Approaching the stage, I was
giddy with excitement, energized by the lights, activity, and dancing crowd. Frankly,
I was taken aback by my own excitement in attending this concert. Objectively, I knew
I was merely hearing a prerecorded concert of U2 while viewing animated avatars lip-
synching—virtually, as it were—to the recording. Surely a live music concert in Second

Figure 10.6  U2 in SL’s “The Edge” performing on stage during a “Feed a Smile” benefit con-
cert in Montego Beach.
186   Trevor S. Harvey

Life is far more “authentic” than this! Taking stock of my own reactions, I  solicited
feedback from other concertgoers:

Collyier Heberle:  Hi Ed. You enjoying the concert?

Ed Rhode:  yes. it is great . . . the reason I started in SL was U2inSL! . . . The visual
tricks my mind as [if] it is real. . . . I feel good;) relaxed

I asked Ed how this show compared to live music concerts in Second Life. “This is
the best,” Ed exclaimed. Part of the draw for a U2inSL concert is the complexity of the
avatar movements. Rather than using pre-scripted animations that automate the avatar
through a repetitive loop of motions, the members of U2inSL have the advantage of
focusing their activities directly on the avatars, actively engaging in moving about the
audience and mimicking in every way possible the real-life members of U2. Another
audience member, Shaun, who occasionally plays live music concerts in Second Life
himself, commented that part of the enjoyment of U2inSL concerts stems from his
perception that it “sounds live.” Shaun’s response to the “liveness” of the concert was
not merely commentary on the use of a concert recording for the U2inSL concert, but
that the performance, inclusive of the setting, stage, lights, props, and audience, tran-
scended, to some degree, the levels of mediation required for producing and experienc-
ing the concert.
Through their avatar-based performances, U2inSL exhibit what Michael Taussig
calls “mimetic faculty” (1993, xiii): they copy and imitate U2 in an effort to “become
Other.” In their analysis of U2inSL, through which they critique the capitalist orienta-
tion of the Second Life and “real life” music industries, Beer and Geesin overlook an
essential aspect to the mission of U2inSL: U2inSL concerts are charity events, intended
to raise awareness and money for nonprofit organizations with a presence in Second
Life, including One Campaign, Amnesty International, and Feed a Smile. U2inSL’s
philanthropic efforts not only pay tribute to U2, but further the mimetic process evi-
dent in their concerts, as they draw on the celebrity power of U2 to empower their
avatars, which in turn have an impact on the humanitarian causes taken up by U2.
Through this mimetic process, U2inSL point to the complexity and power of digital
embodiment and self-other relations in exploring and developing musical identities in
virtual worlds.

Avatars, Authenticity, and Live

Musical Performance

When a Balinese actor holds a new mask in his right hand, gazing upon it, turning it
this way and that, making it move to a silent music, he is assessing the potential life
of the mask and searching for the meeting place between himself and the life inher-
ent in its otherness. (Emigh 1996, 275)
 Avatar Rockstars   187

In his study of masked theater within Asian cultures, John Emigh investigates the
ritual process of creating new subjectivities that emerge from self-other dialectics.
As with the theatrical masks of Bali, the virtual body is a potentiality, waiting to
be altered and actuated by a human agent. Acting on and through digitally con-
structed bodies, both musically and socially, musicians in Second Life digitally
embody avatars and other virtual objects, developing what Emigh refers to as liv-
ing amalgams—personae born of an intrasubjectivity emergent from simultaneously
inhabiting multiple social worlds.

This amalgam is at best unstable—based as it must be upon a paradox, ambiguity,

and illusion—but “it” moves, “it” speaks, “it” breathes, “it” is perceived—by the per-
former and by the audience—as having an organic integrity. . . . The process begins
with a respect for the mask’s potential life as a separate entity and proceeds by nar-
rowing the gap between self and other through a process of imaginative play. (275)

The “ambiguity of play” (Sutton-Smith 1997)  in Second Life is rooted in the nature
of avatars and the process of digital embodiment in virtual worlds. Digital bodies are
never fixed, and even though they give presence to the flesh in virtual space, their
constructed nature prompts the ever-present concerns of Second Life residents regard-
ing the identity of the avatars with whom they interact and develop meaningful social
relationships. As Second Life musician Zak Claxton warns performers new to playing
in the virtual world: “That pretty girl dancing in front of the stage might be a fat guy in
front of his computer in his boxer shorts” (Claxton 2012). For many Second Life resi-
dents, however, live music is a force that cuts through the “ambiguity of play” by ensur-
ing an authentic presentation of self. Live music events create opportunities for social
engagement that many Second Life participants advocate as honest, appealing, and
authentic. Twinky Waffle, an avid live music fan and owner of the Second Life–oriented
business Waffles Music Agency, through which she manages the bookings of a handful
of Second Life musicians, explained to me the relationship of music to the presentation
of self in Second Life:

I think the musicians . . . they play in real life and they play in front of a computer
and they’ve got a crowd and that’s no different from real life. . . .So they are them-
selves. I mean, you cannot be someone else playing the music that you play. Music is
an emotion and I really think that the musicians that play in Second Life cannot be
someone else because that will be noticed in the music. (Interview with author, July
30, 2013)

Pen Dragon touched on similar themes of authenticity and honesty in live musical
performances in his review of a Tom 2.0 concert:

In a world where everyone tries to stand-out, tries to carve out their own niche and
stand above the crowd. Where simply performing the music you like, to people who
want to hear it, seems to have taken a backseat to elaborate stage shows, multi-track
188   Trevor S. Harvey

recordings of your own backup band and living the SL life of a rock star, it is truly
refreshing to come across an artist that is just having fun and giving his audience an
authentic show that clearly comes from the heart. (Dragon 2013)

Pen Dragon highlights two key elements to the perception of authenticity in live music
in Second Life: the “acoustic” quality of the performance, which is to say, the music is
performed in real time without the use of prerecorded material, and tropes of the body
as the locus of musical expression. In regard to the former, Bluemonk Rau explained his
own ambivalent feelings of using backing tracks in his performances:

I’m kinda moving away from [backing tracks] . . . [and] I think people seem to like
it better. They’re kinda like me. I’ll go hear somebody using backing tracks and
I’m not sure what part of that they’re actually playing. You just don’t know. “Are
you playing guitar” or “What am I hearing and what’s backing tracks?” Sometimes
you can tell, you know, you hear backup vocals and you know he doesn’t have five
people in the room singing backup. People like the acoustic thing . . . (Interview
with author, Sept. 11, 2013)

In fact, some venues insist on “all-acoustic” (no prerecorded material) shows. Such
is the case with Guthrie’s, a live music venue named after American folk icon Woody
Guthrie. Bluemonk still incorporates backing tracks in some of his songs, but when he
plays at Guthrie’s, those prerecorded tracks are not used. For Twinky Waffle, the “live-
ness” of Second Life concerts is what distinguishes them from the “real world” com-
mercial scene and is a major factor in her engagement with live music in Second Life:

. . . a lot of times on the radio and stuff, [music is] edited with computer software
and all that kind of crap and I just don’t want that. I want the live factor in the SL
music. So, yeah, that moves me. That drives me to listen to SL music. (Interview
with author, July 30, 2013)

The motif of the body is another central theme in evaluating musical performances as
“authentic.” “Honest” music emerges from the body and is received by the body—an
intersubjective process that reconfigures self-other relationships. References to the
body, particularly the heart, are a recurrent theme in group notices and email announce-
ments for live music concerts:

. . . not only is Sweethearts the most romantic venue in SL, but we put our hearts into
EVERYTHING WE DO. Join us TODAY as Ari speaks to your heart, through her
music, in support of the fight against Parkinsons!
Come hear the awesome QPR!!! . . . What makes QPR so different from anyone
else on the grid? He performs every song, in his own unique way, what you hear in
a song from him is from his heart.
. . . Puddy Quan has a voice that will stop you in your tracks. It’s pure & it goes
STRAIGHT TO THE HEART! Add to this either acoustic guitar or piano & you
have some sweet sounds indeed!
 Avatar Rockstars   189

Conclusion

In “real-world” concert venues, the performer is generally thought to be separate

and distinct from the audience members, playing a specific role for the entertain-
ment of nonperforming publics. In Second Life, however, all participants are caught
in a play—performing their avatars within and among themselves. The digital space
recreates real-world venues with raised stages that suggest standard delineations
between audience and performer, but the participants are well aware that the digital
space, in this sense, is illusory. Through their avatars, Second Life participants are
expressive of the multiple subjectivities imagined and experienced in virtual worlds.
Rather than a “second artist persona,” that is, a persona created as a second iden-
tity of the already established (i.e., “real-world”) personality (Hess 2005), musical
personae of Second Life residents, like real-world identities, are constantly in flux
and incomplete, constructed in the process of musical performances (Shank 1994).
It is the very nature of avatars, as flexible and fluid virtual bodies, that allow a range
of embodied expression.
Musical personae in Second Life are not individual, but co-constructed through joint
performances among musicians and audiences, leading to a “rhetoric of identity” that
“humanize[s]‌ … and soften[s] the contradictions that might otherwise spell disas-
ter” (Sutton-Smith 1997, 92). The “real-life” people behind the Second Life musicians
collaboratively create personae that are not individualistic but amalgamations of their
musical influences; the avatars present an opportunity for Second Life musicians to
virtually embody the past, present, and future of music. Live music concerts allow par-
ticipants to play with the process of realizing a complex and fragmented sociomusical
world in a flexible, virtual environment.

Notes
1. Linden dollars (L$) is the currency of Second Life. Although the exchange rate of Linden
dollars is variable, it is typically about L$250 = US$1.
2. Regions are large sections of land that may be further divided into parcels. Each parcel
may be assigned a separate audio stream.
3. As with other forms of instant and text messaging, Second Life participants generally
ignore conventional rules of grammar, particularly in regard to capitalization and punc-
tuation. I have maintained spelling and grammar as they originally appeared in the pri-
vate message conversations.
4. Resistance to characterizing Second Life as a game has been a consistent issue for the
many residents I have met in the virtual world and is a perspective articulated by other
Second Life researchers (see, e.g., Boellstorff 2008, deWinter and Vie 2008). In his article
on Second Life, David Kirkpatrick quotes Linden Lab board member Jed Smith, explain-
ing that Second Life was designed “to be a platform and not a game” (2007).
5. For a fuller account of Ictus Belford, see Harvey (2014).
190   Trevor S. Harvey

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Beer, David, and Beverly Geesin. 2009. “Rockin’ with the Avatars:  ‘Live’ Music and the
Virtual Spaces of Second Life.” In Living Virtually:  Researching New Worlds, 111–128.
New York: Peter Lang.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1999. “Debord, Cybersituations, and the Interactive
Spectacle.” SubStance 28(3), 129–156.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually
Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Claxton, Zak. 2012. “How Do You Play Live Music in Second Life?” The Official Zak Claxton
Blog, Aug. 15, http://zakclaxton.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-do-you-play-live-music-in-
second.html (accessed Aug. 29, 2013).
Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
deWinter, Jennifer, and Stephanie Vie. 2008. “Press Enter to ‘Say’: Using Second Life to Teach
Critical Media Literacy.” Computers and Composition 25(3): 313–322.
Dragon, Pen. 2013. “Tom 2.0:  The Interactive Experience.” Virtual Music Magazine,
http://www.virtualmusicser vices.com/vmsmagazine/index.php?option=com_
content&view=article&id=101 (accessed Sep. 11, 2013) [defunct].
Emigh, John. 1996. Masked Performance:  The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Harvey, Trevor S. 2014. “Virtual Worlds:  An Ethnomusicological Perspective.” The Oxford
Handbook of Virtuality, ed. Mark Grimshaw, 378–391. New York: Oxford University Press.
Heider, Don. 2009. “Identity and Reality: What Does It Mean to Live Virtually?” In Living
Virtually: Researching New Worlds, ed. Don Heider, 131–143. New York: Peter Lang.
Hess, Mickey. 2005. “Metal Faces, Rap Masks: Identity and Resistance in Hip Hop’s Persona
Artist.” Popular Music and Society 28(3): 297–311.
Kirkpatrick, David. 2007. “Second Life:  It’s Not a Game.” Fortune, Jan. 22 http://archive.
fortune.com/2007/01/22/magazines/fortune/whatsnext_secondlife.fortune/index.htm
(accessed Feb. 14, 2014).
Loke, Jaime. 2009. “Identity and Gender in Second Life.” In Living Virtually: Researching New
Worlds, ed. Don Heider, 145–161. New York: Peter Lang.
Messinger, Paul R., et al. 2008. “On the Relationship Between My Avatar and Myself.” Journal
of Virtual Worlds Research 1(2): 1–17.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf.
Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’N’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Vol. Music/
culture, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
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Taussig, Michael T. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York:
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New York: Springer.
 chapter 11

Perform ing L i v e
in Sec on d  L i fe

Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

Music in Second Life

Those were the glory days. The online world Second Life launched in 2003 and for a few
years it was the media’s darling. Everybody with a claim on hipness logged on. There
was talk of online millionaires. International corporations piled in, if not with a proper
business plan then to make sure that, if there was something in it, they wouldn’t miss
out. In 2006 Sony BMG acquired their own island, and folk rock singer Suzanne Vega
gave a concert in Second Life, generally seen as the first by an established real-world
musician.1 The following year Deutsche Grammophon mounted a much-publicized
concert by Lang Lang, complete with custom-crafted avatar.2 It was also in 2007 that
the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra recreated the Philharmonic Hall in Second Life,
presenting a mixed program of twentieth-century music on September 14.3 And at the
same time a vigorous participatory culture of live music developed, encompassing a
surprising amount of classical music in addition to popular music in a wide variety
of styles—much of it the work of musicians who became better known in Second Life
than in the real world.4
We described the Lang Lang concert as much publicized—there were broadcasts and
webcasts around the globe, and extensive media coverage—but for whatever reason,
only a handful of avatars attended it (Wennekes 2009). Even if the venue had been full,
however, it would still have been tiny by real-world standards:  technical constraints
inherent in Second Life mean that no more than around forty, or in exceptional cases
a hundred, avatars can be in the same place at the same time. (There were more than
eighty at the Liverpool Philharmonic concert.) The value the music industry saw in
Second Life, then, lay in its fashionable profile and potential for online sales rather than
replication of the profitable real-world business of live music—and predictably, Second
Life could not go on being fashionable forever. The financial collapse of 2008 prompted
192    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

international corporations to review their Second Life presence, and the result was a
mass exodus. Meanwhile the media dropped Second Life like a hot potato. And if after
a year or two they started running items on it again, the headline was usually some
variant on “Whatever Happened to Second Life?”
If Second Life failed as a platform for the music business—as for business more
generally—it continued to sustain a substantial musical culture. A  browse through
the extensive lists in which Second Life residents have discussed such matters over
the years confirms that audiences diminished and became less generous; perform-
ers who had been able to make some kind of living on Second Life before the crash
were reduced to playing for tips, and as the recession set in, the tips became smaller.
(Concerts in Second Life almost invariably have a tip jar, the equivalent of the busker’s
instrument case: audience members click on it and select Pay.) Despite this, live music
continued more or less unabated. Duran Duran, who had been talking about establish-
ing a presence in Second Life since 2006, actually did so in 2011.5 And performances
in classical and popular styles were increasingly complemented by more experimental
work, taking advantage of the ease with which different media can be combined in
Second Life, free from the practical constraints of the physical world (Morie 2010).
A  representative example, going back to 2007 but continuing to this day, is Avatar
Orchestra Metaverse, an internationally based group of engineers, artists, performers,
and composers—among them Pauline Oliveiros—who create music telematically, in
other words with the musicians playing in various parts of the globe, and accompany it
with abstract animations (Pearson 2010).
Music in Second Life is conditioned by two major constraints. The first is that it
is nearly impossible to create music in-world, through the real-time actions of ava-
tars. Discussions about how this might be overcome go back at least to 2005, when a
blogger suggested that Linden Labs (as residents call Linden Research, the developers
and owners of Second Life) should incorporate General MIDI into the Second Life
viewer—that is, the software you use to participate in Second Life—on the grounds that
you could then “have a Second Life Band that can actually perform live in-world.”6 Six
years later a contributor to Second Life’s Art, Photography, and Music Forum was still
saying much the same, though this time the proposal was to incorporate a synthesis
language.7 There are, however, just a few exceptions, among them Avatar Orchestra
Metaverse: they create instruments in the form of HUDs (on-screen displays) worn by
avatars and triggered in real time, whether by the real-world musician who controls the
avatar or through the action of other avatars.8 It will, though, become clear that the idea
of real time is not straightforward when applied to Second Life.
This kind of in-world sound production corresponds to what is called the “freestyle”
mode of music production built into Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), as opposed to
the “ABC” mode, which enables users to trigger precomposed music files. As William
Cheng explains, some LOTRO players believe the ABC mode lacks the authenticity
of freestyle; Cheng (2012, 38) quotes a player who complains that triggering a file “is
not playing music. There is no creativity involved, there are none of the dynamics that
happen when a band plays live, nor the satisfaction of a job well done based on long
 Performing Live in Second Life    193

practice at a craft.” If such a criterion were applied to Second Life, we would have to
conclude that to all intents and purposes there is no such thing as performing live in
Second Life; even Avatar Orchestra Metaverse come uncomfortably close to the ABC
mode in that their instruments trigger samples. Yet there are obvious distinctions to be
made between the various musical events that happen in Second Life. As we will see,
the issue of what liveness might mean in a virtual world is one that Second Life resi-
dents have been debating for a long time.
In one sense or another, then, virtually all the music in Second Life is made in the
real world and brought into Second Life. One form of this is objects that trigger sam-
pled music when an avatar clicks on them, most obviously musical instruments. In
most cases instruments come with a limited selection of built-in musical pieces; but
there is a Second Life piano that plays back music separately purchased from a more
extensive library of light classical music,9 thus replicating in Second Life the business
model of the early-twentieth-century reproducing piano. More important, however,
is the streaming in of sound files from the real world, whether prerecorded or live.
Second Life is full of environmental music, streamed from Internet radio and similar
sources into individual parcels of land (unlike in the real world, residents who dislike
canned music are able to disable it). Streamed music is also the basis of virtually all the
live musical events that take place in Second Life and form the topic of this chapter.
As we said, musical events cover a wide range of genres; according to a survey that
admittedly dates back to 2006 and is based on the less-than-satisfactory categories of
the BIA Media Access Pro database, all genres were represented apart from Christian
and Top Forty, although—remarkably in view of the supposedly international spread
of Second Life—there was only one example of the “Ethnic” category, and that was
European (Panganiban 2007). Events take place in a variety of settings, ranging from
formal venues—including reproductions of real-world churches, such as Santa Maria
del Pi in Barcelona—to nightclubs and outdoor settings. Avatars mime the actions of
performance as the streamed music plays, though the use of looped playing animations
means the correlation between what is heard and seen can never be precise (we shall
see there are other reasons for that, too). And a range of merchandise is available to
support these virtual performances:  there are microphones and stands with built-in
animations for waiting, singing, and bowing, while a range of electric guitars include
not only a wide variety of left- and right-hand animations but also built-in pyro effects
(flame thrower, exploding body, and entire guitar catches on fire).10
Despite the limited number of avatars that can be accommodated in one place, there
have been large-scale performances in Second Life, such as the Leeds Sinfonia’s per-
formance on February 9, 2008, of symphonies by Mozart and Shostakovich, which
involved twenty-five avatars (Wennekes 2009, 54)—much fewer, of course, than are
necessary to perform such music in real life. (There was a similar problem in making
orchestral recordings during the acoustic era, though of course for different reasons.)
But such large-scale events are highly exceptional. The vast majority of live music
in Second Life takes the form of one singer with a guitar, performing either original
material or covers, with the real-world musician streaming in the music as she or he
194    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

makes it, sometimes with the addition of a prerecorded backing track. A series of rep-
resentative examples is furnished by what was happening in Second Life on August 7,
2013, between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. SLT (Second Life Time, otherwise known as
Pacific Time).11
Most of these events aim at more or less realistic reproduction in terms of both the
venue and the performance itself. Ian Bleac, a singer who specializes in jazz standards,
is performing at the Cellar Jazz Club, which styles itself as “reminiscent of jazz clubs of
the 1950s”12: a small, dark room with a bare wooden floor, one wall taken up by a bar,
and a low stage on which there are a grand piano, bass, and drum kit. The audience
is small and spread out, most are dancing individually, and there is little atmosphere.
Over at Krum Texas, Noma Falta is performing her signature blend of soul and rock at
Little Mary’s. This is a large room with a bar at the back, chairs and tables around the
walls, and a pool table in the corner, leaving the rest of the floor clear for dancing. The
crowd is much larger than at the Cellar Jazz Club, with plenty of dancing and typed-
in chatting (the normal means by which Second Life residents converse); you get a
buzz as soon as you walk in. Falta’s animations are as dynamic as her music, involving
the whole of her body, in addition to the usual looped animations for guitar playing;
through some glitch she has lost her left hand, but luckily it does not affect her play-
ing. It is a shame, though, and a limitation of Second Life, that her facial expressions
cannot match the emotion of her singing. Meanwhile Joaquin Gustav, who in real life
comes from Buenos Aires, is playing jazz guitar at the Café Casablanca on the Isle of
Genesis: the oriental decor combines with small tables, each with a white tablecloth
and lamp, to create a more formal ambience that matches Joaquin’s attire. He plays an
intricately reproduced jazz guitar, the left- and right-hand playing animations comple-
menting a strikingly realistic animation that makes him look down at the fingerboard,
as guitarists do—though not in the same, regularly looping rhythm as Joaquin’s avatar.
Unfortunately there are only three people in the audience, including a hostess and the
ethnographer avatar.
All this time a double set of a very different kind is in progress at Destiny’s Pearl,
featuring two of the biggest names in the Second Life music scene, Frogg Marlowe and
Russell Eponym. The venue is an underwater fantasy. The lighting is blue and green,
fish swim around and bubbles rise; at the back there is a kind of loggia with classical
columns, while at the side of the stage is the figure of a recumbent Neptune, complete
with trident. Marlowe’s presentation incorporates elements of depiction (Fig. 11.1): he
has a guitar, which he plays with the usual animations, together with a harmonica,
which matches the streamed music. He also has large green feet, one of which he taps
up and down as he performs, though not necessarily in time with the music, and it is
noticeable that he goes on tapping even when the song has finished. Like other Second
Life performers, such as Falta, he lacks the facial expressions that are so important a
feature of real-world music—but in Marlowe’s case this seems to matter less, since he is
a frog. Eponym, who follows Marlowe, takes the underwater theme that much further:
his avatar is a merman. Some of the time he stands on his tail, much as a human per-
former might, but sometimes he swims lazily through the water above the stage. He has
 Performing Live in Second Life    195

Figure 11.1  Frogg Marlowe performing at Destiny’s Pearl, Aug. 7, 2013.

a guitar round his neck, but makes no use of the normal playing animations; when he
stands on his tail his arms hang at his side, at other times they engage in vague swim-
ming motions.
All these performers talk between numbers, streaming in their voice rather than
typing in chat. But this is not all that is happening. During the songs the audience
members—who sometimes stand still to watch the performance, and at other times
dance either singly or in couples—text in comments; everybody can see, or in polite
Second Life parlance “hear,” this. (They may well be instant-messaging one another as
well, but unless you are part of the conversation you cannot tell.) Audience members
greet friends, repeat a striking phrase from the song lyrics, crack jokes or type LOL
when other audience members crack jokes, make appreciative comments about the
performance, applaud when songs end, or thank the performer and announce their
departure. As in the Café Casablanca, most venues come with a host or (more usually)
hostess who greets newcomers as they arrive, offers advice on technical issues when
required, leads applause, encourages audience members to contribute to the perform-
er’s or venue’s tip jar, and in the case of the latter thanks them when they do so. Most of
the interventions I have listed are responses to what someone else has said or done. The
result is an interweaving pattern of real-time interaction between the participants in
the event, and it is more than anything this interaction that makes music in Second Life
a social experience. You may be sitting in your living room but you are also part of the
crowd at Little Mary’s or Destiny’s Pearl. A respondent to a survey carried out by one of
196    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

the authors drew a comparison with listening to conventional streamed music, during
which it is easy to find yourself “cleaning off the top of a desk, balancing a check book,
etc. You aren’t completely transported to the event as you are in SL.”13
We spoke of real-time interactions, but we have already suggested that the idea of
“real time” has to be heavily qualified when applied to Second Life. We also spoke of
how Frogg Marlowe went on tapping his foot after the music stopped, and the same
might be said of other performance animations, or of audience members’ dancing.
A newbie (as longstanding residents call someone new to Second Life) might wonder
why, having put so much effort into the attempt to replicate the details of real-life per-
formance, people are so sloppy about these obvious but telling details. All this reflects
the second major constraint that conditions the practice of music in Second Life: lag.

Liveness in an Unpredictable Medium

When someone performs live in Second Life, he or she is logged into the viewer and
controlling the avatar in the same way as everyone else. But a lot more is going on. First,
the live audio generated by their performance is encoded into a streaming format such
as mp3. Second, the encoded stream is sent to an audio streaming server. Third, it is
sent from the server to the parcel of land where the event is taking place (this is done
by adding the server URL to the land plot properties). Finally it is sent to the audience
members’ computers, where it is decoded and played back.
The last three stages involve the Internet, resulting in delays that add up to thirty sec-
onds between the musician playing something and the audience hearing it. There are
other situations where musicians have to cope with a delay between action and percep-
tion, such as playing the organ in a large hall or church. But what makes the problem
worse in Second Life is its unpredictability. It depends on in-world factors such as the
number of avatars in the audience, the number and nature of the animations and other
scripts they are running, and the design of the venue. And even though other aspects
of the Second Life experience—for example, triggering a performance or dancing ani-
mation, or typing in chat and its appearance in-world—are also subject to lag, the data
transfer is different (from the user’s computer to the Linden server and back), and
so the delay is dissimilar: the relationship between these and streamed audio is itself
unpredictable. On top of that, as with Internet lag in general, it depends where you
are: audience members in various parts of the real world hear what is played at differ-
ent times. The net result is that everybody is experiencing something slightly different.
There is no single “now” in Second Life: the present moment is blurred, smeared over
a period of several seconds. The apparently sloppy failures of synchronization to which
we have just referred may be obvious, but they are neither straightforward nor soluble.
Lag is a permanent dimension of the Second Life experience. Residents constantly
talk about it, conventionally preceding the word with an expletive; as Tom Boellstorff
(2008, 102) observes in his ethnographic study of Second Life, you talk about lag much
 Performing Live in Second Life    197

as people in other worlds talk about the weather. You become adept at holding con-
versations in which there are multiple overlapping threads, because by the time your
interlocutor “hears” what you say, they have already said something else. But the lack
of real-world temporal resolution does not diminish the social or interactive nature of
the experience. And whereas there are some who treat Second Life as a form of virtual
tourism, any ethnographical study or user survey will reveal the importance that most
residents, especially long-term residents, attach to the social dimension. Music is no
exception. In the survey to which we have already referred, audience members referred
over and over again to the sense of community that Second Life engenders: “There is
an intimacy and sharing with live performance in SL that I have never seen or felt in
RL,” one respondent said, adding, “I suppose primarily because we can talk without
‘interrupting’ the performance, even when we talk directly to the performer.” Another
respondent enlarged on the comparison with real-life concerts, where “crowds can be
uncomfortable and oppressive, and it’s harder to feel any sense of communal experi-
ence when it’s impossible—and rude—to communicate in any way.”
Performers reciprocate these feelings. In an interview Russell Eponym speaks of the
“exchange of energy between me and my audience,” and continues, “I greet everyone
personally who comes to my concerts, and say thank you to each at the end for having
taken the time to come. I watch local chat and always feel part of what is happening.”14 As
another informant says, chat means that “In SL you can ‘hear’ what the people in the back
are talking about”; one of the principles of good venue design is ensuring that everyone in
the audience is within chat range.15 And in answer to a posting on the Second Life Music
Community (SLMC) Forum from a novice performer, Silas Scarborough advises setting
your viewer to show avatar names, so you can address audience members individually.16
Survey respondents echo all this. One performer says “It’s much more intimate than RL,
much more,” another that “In RL I seldom have people talk to me about the lyrics after
a show but in SL it is an ordinary experience.” In fact, for one respondent the level of
interaction that is expected in Second Life can become overwhelming (do note that the
orthography of all web posts is unedited): “The SL audience is more demanding, in terms
of requests & total access to the performer via the IM chat—there is no ‘backstage’ to
retreat to in SL … . this can be quite an emotional challenge.”
Within this social context, the network of interaction between audience members,
and between them and the performer, represents a performance of liveness:  partici-
pants are authenticating their presence in the same sense that Auslander (2008) sees
rock musicians as authenticating themselves through performing live. As Auslander
makes clear, such practices embody beliefs as to the nature and value of liveness that
are generally tacit, becoming explicit only when they are breached; famous real-world
examples are the Milli Vanilli and Ashlee Simpson scandals, both involving lip-synching
to prerecorded music in what had been assumed to be live acts.17 But if it can be hard
to tell the difference between live and recorded sound in real-life concerts, it is that
much harder in Second Life. Prerecorded music, whether generated through synthesis,
sampling, or instrumental and vocal performance, can be streamed into Second Life in
just the same way as live music.
198    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

The official Second Life wiki page on live music says that “Playing back a previously
recorded performance … is generally not considered to be a live performance if there
are no live elements performed while the audience is watching the show (although
even this definition will likely raise some ‘discussion’ from some corners).”18 The
last clause hints at the extensive debate that Second Life residents have generated on
this issue, much of which can now be accessed on the Second Life Forums Archive.
Nobody takes the self-defeatingly hard line of the LOTRO player quoted by Cheng.
The issue is not whether audio should be streamed into Second Life; it is whether the
audio is being generated as it is heard (subject, of course, to lag). For example, a blog
from 2010 by Delinda Dyrssen, entitled “Attention Virtual Musicians! Is It Live or Is
It Memorex?” recounts a supposedly live event at which “you could hear the musician
mistakenly talk over their own recorded vocals”19; this is the Second Life equivalent
of the playing of the wrong song that sparked off the Ashlee Simpson scandal. And a
particularly extensive Forum thread from the previous year, entitled “live music my
arse,” began with a posting by Anya Ristow about a concert where there was no inter-
action between performer and audience, which concluded: “Have bots taken over the
live music scene, too?”20
Ristow’s question touched a raw nerve, and many commentators responded to it.
Bots are pseudo-avatars: they look like avatars, they may talk like avatars to the extent
of being preprogrammed with a number of stock responses, but there is no real per-
son behind them. In this way they represent the antithesis of what most residents see
as the core of the Second Life experience:  the construction of community through
social interaction. Ristow makes this clear in a posting from the following day: “Bot
farms continue to find new ways to suck the life out of everything in SL. Re-visiting
the venues in my database is a depressing waste of time. I really do think SL is dying.”
(Conservative discourse is much the same whatever world you are in.) Ristow, then, is
suggesting that some or all of the audience members at the concert she refers to were
not genuine avatars but bots, so that the concert was not the live, communal event it
made itself out to be but rather a fraud.
Residents responded to Ristow in a number of ways. Ayesha Lytton says she goes
to many concerts and indeed owns her own venue, but “never, not once, have I seen
anyone in the audience who I suspected to be a bot.” Qie Niangao accepts that there
are audience bots but justifies them as a means of creating the atmosphere that attracts
genuine avatars: “without them, you’d never get anybody to stick around long enough
for others to gather.” And Alarazin Mondrian explains that, as a Second Life musician
himself, he uses bots on stage:

I made a decision a couple of years ago to move away from the “avatar-on-a-stage-
strumming-a-guitar” syndrome and start using the possibilities in SL. I wrote my
music to sound like a band. I recorded my music to sound like a band. I perform my
music to sound like a band. So why shouldn’t I present it to look like a band?
In the same posting Mondrian justifies his use of backing tracks, which are seen
as raising the same concerns about authenticity that are triggered by bots:
 Performing Live in Second Life    199

Why do I use backing tracks? Simply stated: I don’t have enough limbs to play my
compositions in their entirety live. I have to make choices as to what parts to play,
and which parts to leave to my backing band, Mssrs Cubase & Computer.

Mondrian complains that he hears “constant griping and whining from the SL ‘realos’ ”
about his use of backing tracks, but the majority view is with him. Lear Cale writes
in the same forum that “the use of backing tracks is a very reasonable compromise
for SL,” and adds, “Of course, many folks drag their RL sensibilities along with them.”
And Graves Stoanes, in a thread on the SLMC Forum entitled “Not quite live …,”
echoes Mondrian’s views, asking, “What the heck? Why does it bother y’all so much?”
and adding “This seems to mirror a lot of RL music snobbery.”21 Perhaps the simplest
definition of liveness in Second Life, and one that many residents would agree with, is
offered by Trinity Thibaud in a thread from the previous year: “As long as some one
talks and or plays along, it is live.”22 This resonates with the conclusion that Cheng
(2012, 46) comes to in relation to LOTRO: “Even though the production of the music
itself is not live, the production of the musical performance in its totality is demonstra-
bly live… . Music cannot be regarded as the sole—or even central—component of a
musical performance.”
Precisely because you cannot tell live from Memorex, the issue of liveness as dis-
cussed by Second Life residents is less a matter of aesthetics than of ethics, so con-
firming Sarah Thornton’s historical claim (1995, 42) that “the expression ‘live music’
soaked up the aesthetic and ethical connotations of life-versus-death, human-versus-
mechanical, creative-versus-imitative” (hence the link between bots and backing
tracks). Claims that the issue is fundamentally one of honesty are ubiquitous in forum
discussions. As Ray W. says in the “Not quite live …” thread, “I think the only rule in
SL music is ‘honesty’.” But perhaps the most eloquent expression of this view comes
from Dyrssen’s blog: “We cant see your real face. Please please please. If your going to
say your live, be live. Or just tell everyone your going to play a recording. It's all good.
There is no need to try and fool anyone.”23 In line with this, dedicated events have been
established where artists can play their MP3s “under honest conditions, not under false
pretenses.”24
In short, to present music as live rather than recorded is to enter on a kind of social
contract, as Auslander (2013) has recently argued of the distinction between impro-
visation and the performance of precomposed music. As with improvisation, so “the
word ‘live’ is not used to define intrinsic, ontological properties of a performance …
but rather is a historically contingent term” (2008, 60). Its meaning requires negotia-
tion within each situation of technological mediation, and the debates conducted by
Second Life residents illustrate such negotiation in action. Debates over liveness in
Second Life also confirm Auslander’s claim (2008, 65) that “the sense of community
arises from being part of an audience, and the quality of the experience of community
derives from the specific audience situation, not from the spectacle for which that audi-
ence has gathered,” to the extent that, as we have seen, audiences perform liveness. But
Auslander’s final clause is more debatable. To say audiences perform liveness is not to
200    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

say performers do not also perform liveness; in its entirely pertinent demonstration of
the socially constructed nature of liveness, Auslander’s approach might be criticized for
deflecting attention from the particular qualities of musical performances that afford
constructions of liveness. And in Second Life the particular qualities of musical perfor-
mances that afford constructions of liveness have a lot to do with lag.

Reconstructing Liveness

Paul Sanden (2013) has voiced a similar complaint about how Auslander’s emphasis on
social and ontological factors, and on the role of the audience in constructing liveness,
“allows little room for realizing the theoretical potential of understanding just how the
concept of liveness itself is formed in all its flexibility and diversity.” Sanden’s solution is
to focus on what it means to perceive a given performance as live. As he says,

the perception of liveness depends not necessarily on the total eschewal of elec-
tronic mediation but on the persistent perception of characteristics of music’s live
performance within the context of—and often with the help of—various levels of
such mediation. Liveness represents a perceived trace of that which could be live in
the face of the threat of further or complete electronic mediation and modification.
(2013, 6)

It is of course just such a perceived threat that conditions the concerns over liveness
among Second Life residents. And among the characteristics that Sanden (2013, 11) lists
are those of co-temporality (“Music is live during the time of its initial utterance”) and
co-spatiality (“Music is live in the physical space of its initial utterance”). Live perfor-
mance in Second Life conforms at least to some degree with the first of these, but not
with the second except in those rare cases where music is made in-world.
Others of Sanden’s categories are more directly relevant. One is interactive liveness
(“music is live when it emerges from various interactions between performing partners
and/or between performers and listeners/viewers”); this is the key dimension in which
performers and listeners in Second Life work together to produce liveness. Another is
corporeal liveness (“music is live when it demonstrates a perceptible connection to an
acoustic sounding body”). Sanden (2013, 39) extends this to encompass the embodied
actions of listeners, including “swaying, humming along, air-guitar playing, and other
physical responses,” and whereas some of these go beyond the technological capacities
of Second Life, audience dancing falls into this category. Of course it is the dancing
of pixels and not of real bodies, and yet—as Wennekes (2009, 52) observes—music in
Second Life is “not perceived as disembodied”; indeed, Denise Doyle (2009) has argued
that embodiment is a fundamental dimension of the relationship between player and
avatar, while Boellstorff (2008, 134) goes so far as to describe it as “central to online
selfhood.” It is, then, no surprise that Sanden has a further category that specifically
 Performing Live in Second Life    201

covers such phenomena, as well as Second Life’s particular version of co-spatiality. This
is virtual liveness, according to which “music can be live in a virtual sense even when
the conditions for its liveness … do not actually exist. Virtual liveness, then, depends
on the perception of a liveness that is largely created through mediatization.”
But even if the experience of live music in Second Life can clearly be understood in
terms of Sanden’s characteristics, how do they relate to the ever-present issue of lag?
As we have seen, chat is subject to lag, but this form of lag is relatively minor (though
less so under the conditions of a crowded concert). And in any case, the very fact
that people are communicating via text rules out the fine-grained temporal interac-
tion that characterizes real-world conversation, for example through the pacing of
speech or the timing of an interjection. Interaction through Second Life chat may
then be crude by comparison with the real world, but it still constitutes an effective
and relatively unproblematic medium for socialization. But with streamed sound the
situation is quite different, since as we have seen the data flow is much more complex
and the lag correspondingly greater. This applies as much to streamed speech, such
as when performers talk between songs, as it does to music. The advice offered to
the novice performer who asked for help on the SLMC Forum included this from
EvaMoon Ember: “One of the real tricks is learning how to connect and chat with
your audience with a 20–30 second lag between what you say and when they hear it.
That takes some getting used to. You have to acknowledge applause you haven’t heard
yet and trust it’s forthcoming.” In this way, in Second Life, as apparently straightfor-
ward an interaction as applause and its acknowledgment reflects a specific skill on
the performer’s part.
Like conversation, but more crucially, music depends on fine-grained temporality.
Of course, streamed music does at least retain its internal temporal organization: audi-
ence members can entrain with a beat even if they hear it fifteen or twenty seconds after
the performer, just as real-world clubbers entrain with the beat of recorded music. The
difference is that in the real-world clubbers also entrain with one another, communi-
cating their shared temporal experience through dancing or eye contact. Second Life
listeners may be hearing the beat at different times, and even if that were not the case,
they would have no way of communicating their temporal experience to one another.
Like the fine-grained dimensions of real-world conversation, this is an aspect of real-
world musicking that does not survive the transition to Second Life.
But there is a further aspect of live music’s presence in the real world that depends
on fine-grained temporality, and that is the coordination of different media. The most
obvious and basic example is the sound and sight of vocal or instrumental perfor-
mance:  even slight dislocation between sounds and moving images in a filmed per-
formance destroys the sense of presence, fragmenting the experience into its parts.
For Wennekes (2009, 52), this is exactly the effect of the inevitable mismatch between
streamed sound and player animations in Second Life: “Seeing an avatar a-rhythmically
and structurally near-missing the keyboard,” he writes with particular reference to Lang
Lang, “immediately catapults me back to Real Life, where I suddenly find myself sitting
behind my laptop again.” In this way the attempt to create liveness in Second Life by
202    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

replicating the conditions of liveness in the real world can end up having the opposite
effect to what was intended.
One way out is to design music for the particular conditions of Second Life. Problems
of liveness arise in performances of electroacoustic music, where visible performer
actions may not link perceptibly with sonic outcomes (usually because sight and sound
do not match, though delay can also be a problem). The solution, says John Croft (2007,
64–65), is to limit yourself to certain relationships between action and sound that are
well adapted to such circumstances. In the same way, Avatar Orchestra Metaverse’s
performances frequently use sonic and visual elements that lack strong temporal deter-
mination. Sounds are sometimes arrhythmic, abstract, and slow-moving, the last two
qualities being shared by visual elements, including the HUDs worn by the avatars; at
other times sounds and images share a quality of frenetic activity, but without depend-
ing on specific points of synchronization between them.25 In either case the result is
that the audiovisual whole is successfully lag-proofed. It has to be: as an ensemble of
musicians playing together from different real-world locations, and with its techniques
of in-world sound generation, Avatar Orchestra Metaverse works under temporal con-
straints that are extreme even by the standards of Second Life. Indeed, their website
explains that under such circumstances lag becomes a compositional parameter in its
own right.
As we said, however, most music in Second Life is not in this experimental, avant-
garde vein but instead draws on vernacular traditions of popular music, the sort of
music that is heard in small clubs and pubs across the developed world. This is not a
matter of more or less progressive styles. It is a matter of who makes the music and why.
Most if not all the performers who contributed to the previously mentioned survey had
played in both Second Life and the real world. One saw it as a way to try out new musical
ideas before exposing them in real life, or to “practice with some pressure, not just my
dog listening.” For another, who was not currently performing in real life, it was a good
way of keeping up the habit. But for several it was a source of income, with live concerts
in Second Life helping to publicize materials that could be purchased as downloads in-
world, as well as through iTunes or other real-world vendors. Just as most Second Life
performers have their own in-world groups—in effect, Second Life email lists through
which concerts and new recordings can be publicized—so they maintain websites, or
pages on MySpace or ReverbNation, that provide details of both their in-world and
real-life identities, meaning there is a cross-flow of publicity between them. (There
is a Russell Eponym fan page on Facebook.) In short, they have careers that span the
virtual and the real worlds—and an important consequence of this, though not one on
which we can enlarge here, is that the relationship between their virtual and real-world
identities is quite different from that of the majority of Second Life residents, who are
engaged in role play of one kind or another, and whose Second Life profiles provide
little or no information on their real-world identities.
Given all this, it is hardly surprising that most performers in our survey reported
a close correlation between how they performed in and out of Second Life. One said,
“There’s very little difference between my RL and SL lives”; another responded, “Me and
 Performing Live in Second Life    203

my guitar in RL … so in SL!” A third reported that he was endorsed by a real-world

guitar manufacturer, and consequently played an exact replica in Second Life. All this
leads performers down the route of literally replicating their real-life performances.
Yet, as Wennekes observed of Lang Lang, the inevitable result is jarring mismatches
between what is seen and what is heard. Among the performances described in the
first section of this chapter, perhaps the most successful solution—or evasion—of the
problem was Russell Eponym’s. As a merman, his vague swimming motions did not set
up well-defined points of synchronization. Moreover the fantastic rather than realistic
milieu made it easy to accept the fact that, although he had a guitar around his neck,
he made no show of playing it via the normal performance animations. As richdesoto
posted to another SLMC Forum, “SL audiences are quick to adapt to the environment
presented. They accept as little or as much as you provide.”
But you cannot be a merman all the time (and Eponym’s performances normally
follow the Second Life model of me-and-my-guitar realism). Another solution is sug-
gested by Redzone, a band that has been performing in Second Life since 2006. A duo
whose performances are sometimes supplemented by one or two additional members,
the band—which was co-founded by Gagen—generally performs at its own venue, the
Atropine: this is a derelict military helicopter located in the Wastelands, a region with
an alternative cultural orientation and a post-apocalyptic theme. Like Second Life’s
many solo performers, Redzone draw on elements from real-life practice (the core
members played in London-based bands before transferring their operations to Second
Life). Their Second Life instruments are more or less like those they actually play on, as
are the onstage effects pedals. They also use looping performance animations, custom-
designed by Ami, the other member of the core duo. Each performer is represented
by an avatar, and sometimes the avatars bear a certain resemblance to their real-world
counterparts, though on other occasions their appearance is more fantastic (Fig. 11.2).
Overall, however, the band’s ethos is that, as Ami puts it, “We’re a real band in SL.”26
If in these respects Redzone conform to the normal conventions of Second Life
performance—what might be termed the paradigm of reproduction—then they com-
bine this with an approach similar to Avatar Orchestra Metaverse’s. Many of their per-
formances employ streamed video, sometimes based on natural effects (for instance
waves crashing into the shore), sometimes purely abstract. These may be coordinated
with particle effects, the technology used in Second Life to recreate waterfalls and lit
candles, as well as guitars bursting into flames, but also capable of more abstract effects.
Videos, particle effects, and animations for each avatar are pre-programmed and trig-
gered in the real time of performance through use of MIDI control files, while (unlike
Avatar Orchestra Metaverse) the band members play together in a single real-world
studio and stream the sound live into Second Life.
Like Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, but in a different way, Redzone build lag into their
musical style. The principal way they do this is by structuring the music around large-scale
dynamic gestures that unfold over a period of several seconds or even minutes. Media
Example 11.1 (see Companion Website), taken from a concert that Redzone gave on August
10, 2013, is a simple illustration. The music consists of a minor-mode stepwise rising phrase
204    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

Figure 11.2  Redzone performing at the Atropine, Dec. 21, 2012.

repeated four times (apart from the final note). What gives larger directionality to the
repeated pattern is the video, which is entirely abstract and consists of a continuous out-
ward motion on both the left and the right of the screen. Through this audio-visual coor-
dination the musical phrases are, as it were, welded together into a single dynamic gesture.
And the point is that this does not depend on precise coordination between audio and
video; the effect will work whatever the exact alignment turns out to be.
Another song from the same set provides a more complex example (11.2 in
Companion Website). Here the melody creates a single though irregular gesture,
beginning with Ami’s intoning on b, continuing with the suggestion of a sequence as
she intones on c-sharp1, and then rising (via g-sharp1 and a detour to g-natural1) to
c-sharp2. The instrumental accompaniment gradually increases in volume over this
passage, its timbres becoming increasingly bright and metallic. Again, the video con-
tributes crucially to the overall effect of intensification. It is up made up of several con-
trasting segments, but its central section, corresponding to the melodic rise, creates an
effect of motion toward the viewer, whether through expanding patches of light or the
steady advance of the avatarlike figures. Working together in this way, sound and sight
create a strongly gestural quality—something akin to Daniel Stern’s “vitality affects”
(2010)—that invokes Sanden’s corporeal liveness at a deeper level of embodied experi-
ence than that of dancing avatars.
 Performing Live in Second Life    205

It so happens that in Media Example  11.2 the coordination between the streamed
music and video on the one hand and the onstage avatar animations on the other works
rather nicely: Ami’s avatar starts a new animation, shifting weight from one foot to the
other, at just about the same time as she starts singing (0’05”), she raises her violin as
she starts intoning on c-sharp1 (0’19”), and begins throwing her head back and forward
more or less in time with a new vocal phrase that alternates between c-sharp2 and
a-sharp1. The film was shot by Cook and represents what his avatar heard and saw.
In other words, the fit was a matter of good luck, though the number of potential hit
points in most sound or moving image streams is such that good luck is easily come
by. All the same, the familiar mismatches resulting from the use of looped performance
animations are still there. There is no relationship between the guitarist’s strumming
or the electric bass player’s bowing and what is heard, while Ami’s avatar does not
actually play at all during this passage. People may have differing responses, but to the
authors it seems that the effect is not jarring in the way it can be in straight me-and-
my-guitar presentations. Just as the fantastic milieu made it easy to accept the fact that
Eponym’s avatar was not actually playing his guitar, so the focal role of larger dynamic
gestures displaces these elements of literal replication to the periphery of the viewer’s
experience.
But the argument can be taken a step further. It is not that the performance ani-
mations stop signifying real-world music making. They stop doing so as integral
elements of a multimedia discourse hierarchy predicated on the paradigm of repro-
duction. It is like the bottles, fruit bowls, and violin F-holes of cubist still lifes, which
are not incorporated within a perspective-based composition—painting’s version of
the paradigm of reproduction—but rather serve as discrete signifiers: they reference
aspects of real life, thus triggering a range of associated connotations, at the same
time as they function as abstract design elements. You don’t worry that Picasso’s fruit
bowl might fall off the table, just as you don’t worry when the Redzone avatars don’t
play in time with what you hear. And what applies to the representation of the real
world in painting applies equally to the representation of liveness under conditions
of technological mediation. We might say that, in real-world performance, the signi-
fiers of liveness are configured in a fixed manner that reflects the contingencies of the
material world. But that configuration may be incapable of satisfactory translation
into the quite different system of affordances and constraints that defines a particu-
lar mediation. It follows that the most effective approach to creating liveness within
virtual reality is not to replicate the conditions of live music in the real world, but
rather to recontextualize the signifiers of liveness, configuring them anew in light of
the affordances and constraints of the new medium—what Mark Butler would call a
new performance ecology.27
That is what happened in the case of sound recording. A recording from the acous-
tic era (up to the mid-1920s) is in essence the trace of a performance event. The event
in question was often very different from music making outside the studio. For exam-
ple, a composition might be arranged for a more recording-friendly ensemble, while
the spatial configuration of the musicians in the studio might reflect the demands
206    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

of the technology at the expense of eye contact and other important dimensions of
real-world performance. For all this, the aim was that the recording should reproduce
the experience of live music in the most literal manner possible; Fred Gaisberg talked
about “sound photographs” (Schwarzkopf 1982, 16). But the introduction of tape edit-
ing prompted a change of paradigm. Elements recorded at varying real-world times
could be reconfigured in order to create a new, virtual temporality. Multitrack record-
ing extended this and enabled the creation of virtual spaces. In these ways recorded
sound was broken down into elements or signifiers that could be combined contra-
factually in order to create a specifically phonographic experience that sometimes
seemed more real than the real thing. The paradigm was no longer one of realism in
the sense of literal replication, but rather one of hyperrealism. Advertisers and con-
sumers still talked of reproducing the concert experience, but in practice the signi-
fiers of liveness had been reconstructed in terms of the affordances and constraints of
sound recording.
Michael Veal (2007, 218)  has written that “virtual technologies such as sound
recording and film were often misunderstood in their early days as serving purely
documentary functions; their creations were often dismissed as inferior simulations
of reality.” Even today the idea circulates in some classical music circles that sound
recordings can be no more than an ersatz version of “real music, music-as-performed”
(Abbate 2004, 532), a way of thinking that figures the most characteristic qualities of
recordings as deficiencies (Sterne 2003, 218). Looked at in the same way, Second Life
is equally deficient: When is the last time you saw speech bubbles in real life? One
might say that, in aiming at literal replication of the particulars of real-world con-
certs, many Second Life musicians are thinking in the same way that Veal describes.
But as in sound recording, so in virtual reality there are other possibilities. The quo-
tation from Veal continues, “A more expansive take is that creative manipulations of
these technologies create new forms of reality (that is, new ways of ‘hearing’ the world).”
In other words, the virtual realities made possible by new technologies are meaningful
because they reference the actual world that underlies them, in the final analysis the
only world there is. But this reference need not take the form of a literal replication that
is never actually achievable. Boelstorff (2008, 201) advances a similar argument in rela-
tion to the social dimension of Second Life. “Virtual worlds are not secondary repre-
sentations of the actual world,” he says; they “draw upon many elements of actual-world
sociality, but … reconfigure these elements in unforeseen ways.” And it is in the same
quality of the unforeseen—in its capacity to create new meaning—that the potential
lies for virtual performance to be a creative practice in its own right.

Notes
1. See e.g., “Sony BMG Jumping into Second Life.” Business Communicators in Virtuality,
Oct. 2, 2006. http://freshtakes.typepad.com/sl_communicators/2006/10/sony_bmg_
jumpin.html. All websites accessed Aug. 10, 2013.
 Performing Live in Second Life    207

2. A promotional video, featuring remarkably little of Lang Lang’s playing, may be seen at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYyukE8qF5I.
3. http://www.liverpoolphil.com/1367/second-life/liverpool-philharmonic-in-second-life.
html, where a video of part of the concert may be downloaded. The venue no longer
exists in Second Life.
4. The authors thank Paul Sanden and David Trippett for their comments.
5. Tateru Nino. “A Second Life for Duran Duran.” Dwell on it, June 16, 2011. http://dwellonit.
taterunino.net/2011/06/16/a-second-second-life-for-duran-duran/.
6. Kenneth Radliff. “Fear of Music.” SLOG, Nov. 17, 2005. http://secondslog.blogspot.
co.uk/2005/11/fear-of-music.html.
7. Inventor Alchemi. “Why No Music Notation Tools.” Dec. 4, 2011. http://community.secon-
dlife.com/t5/Art-Music-and-Photography/Why-no-music-creation-tools/m-p/1267621/
highlight/true#M2177.
8. “How.” http://www.avatarorchestra.org/how.html.
9. Available from MadameThespian Underhill’s Fine Instruments & Furnishings. https://
marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/531.
10. OD Designs—Musical Instruments—Stage and Club Gear. https://marketplace.secon-
dlife.com/stores/40702.
11. To find live music after registering in Second Life, open the search window, click on the
Events icon at the left hand side, and in the Categories drop-down list select Live music.
12. Second Life place profile.
13. Unpublished web-based survey, described in Gagen (2012, 19).
14. “Russell Eponym and the Eponymous Family—March 2011” [interview with Gold Sazalet].
Live Music in Second Life, Mar. 7, 2011. http://livemusicinsl.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/russell-
eponym-and-eponymous-family.html#more.
15. For the remark about people in the back, see Gagen (2012, 36); for venue design,
see Will Ross, “Live Music in Second Life:  Part Two.” The Street, Aug. 31, 2007.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10376748/1/live-music-in-second-life-part-two.
html?puc=relatedarticle.
16. Posting to “What Do I Do During the Show?” thread, Oct. 16, 2008. http://slmc.myfast-
forum.org/about2099.html&highlight=during+shows. Registration required.
17. As Auslander (2008, 73 and 125) explains, the award to Milli Vanilli of the 1989 Best New
Artist Grammy was rescinded after their producer admitted that they lip-synched, while
in a 2004 television performance by Ashlee Simpson a recording of her singing the wrong
song was played—making it obvious that it was a recording.
18. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Live_Performances.
19. afk .  .  . but not for long!, Sep.  2, 2010. http://delindasdiary.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/
attention-virtual-musicians-is-it-live-or-is-it-memorex/.
20. Dec. 30, 2009. http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/327/29/353362/1.html. The thread
extends over four linked pages, in which all of the following quotations may be found.
21. Dec. 14, 2009. http://slmc.myfastforum.org/about3105.html&highlight=quite+live. Regis­
tration required.
22. “  ‘live’ music? FALL OUT,” Jun. 2, 2008. http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/327/
88/262419/1.html.
23. Please remember that the orthography of all web posts is unedited.
24. Brill Ridler describing his Lipsync Theatre in “Got mp3s? A New Kind of Show Concept
at Second Life.” Second Life and Arts Forum, Aug. 26, 2010. http://community.secondlife.
208    Justin Gagen and Nicholas Cook

com/t5/Second-Life-and-Arts/Got-mp3s-A-new-kind-of-show-concept-at-Second-Lif
e/m-p/335404/highlight/true#M406.
25. This combination of styles is illustrated, for example, by a recording of AOM’s performance
at the Spirit Fens Art Festival (May 19, 2007), accessible on YouTube at http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=ci63eJYusEg&list=PLA8635C194A3D0D95&index=1.
26. Gagen (2012, 30), where Ami is referred to as “Sarah.”
27. Butler (forthcoming), citing John Bowers.

References
Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30: 505–536.
Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness:  Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed.
Abingdon: Routledge.
———. 2013. “Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement.” In Taking it to the Bridge: Music as
Performance, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill, 52–69. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Boelstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually
Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Butler, Mark. Forthcoming. Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and
Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cheng, William. 2012. “Role-Playing Toward a Virtual Music Democracy in The Lord of the
Rings Online.” Ethnomusicology 56: 31–62.
Croft, John. 2007. “Theses on Liveness.” Organised Sound 12: 59–66.
Doyle, Denise. 2009. “The Body of the Avatar: Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in
Virtual Worlds.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 1: 131–141.
Gagen, Justin. 2012. “Metaverse, Metachorus:  Virtual Live Music Performance in Second
Life.” M.Sc. diss., University College London. http://vp.phasechange.info/MVMC/pdf/jga-
gen_mvmc.pdf.
Morie, Jacquelyn. 2010. “A (Virtual) World Without Limits: Aesthetic Expression in Second
Life.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 2: 157–177.
Panganiban, Rik. 2007. “Your World, Your Music:  An Exploratory Study of Musical
Diversity within the Virtual World of Second Life.” http://www.rikomatic.com/
SLmusicstudy0307.pdf.
Pearson, Tina. 2010. “Visions of Sound:  Avatar Orchestra Metaverse.” http://tinapearson.
wordpress.com/groups/avatar-orchestra-metaverse/visions-of-sound-avatar-orchestra-
metaverse-musicworks/ (originally published in Musicworks 106).
Sanden, Paul. 2013. Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology, and the Perception of
Performance. New York: Routledge.
Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth. 1982. On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge. London: Faber
and Faber.
Stern, Daniel. 2010. Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology and the
Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
 Performing Live in Second Life    209

Veal, Michael. 2007. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Wennekes, Emile. 2009. “Brief Encounters of a Third Kind: First Life Live Concerts Animated
in Second Life Concert Venues.” In Space and Truth/Raum und Wahrheit, ed. Thea
Brejzek, Wolfgang Greisenegger, and Lawrence Wallen, 48–57. Zurich: Zurich University
of the Arts.
 chapter 12

L ive Opera Performa nc e

in Sec on d  L i fe
Challenging Producers, Performers, and the Audience

Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

Second Life (SL) is a three-dimensional online platform where individuals located in

various parts of the world can interact with other users through “avatars,” graphic rep-
resentations of themselves. Although this platform has the appearance of a videogame,
it has some differences from other so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing
games (MMORPGs) because in SL there are no game script, goals to accomplish, or lev-
els to reach toward ending the game. Most of the content in SL is built by the users and
many aspects of it are customizable, such as the landscape and the avatars’ appearance.
The SL platform’s unique characteristics—its real-time social immersive
space—distinguishes it from other technological applications such as social networks
(e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and have been applied to various professional,
educational, academic, social, and even art fields that are still being explored, analyzed,
and systematized. One of these is the ability to provide live concerts to users. This also
involves the intervention of cultural managers who collaborate to produce this kind of
artistic manifestation. There are several musicians regularly offering live music for the
international audience of SL, either as instrumentalists or as singers. A very small num-
ber of them are classical musicians, and among them, even fewer are opera singers.1
The aim of this chapter is to analyze this kind of musical performance, especially the
performance of opera, its characteristics and scope, through a particular experience
lived in first person as a singer of live opera recitals in SL.2
In addition, three questions will be addressed:

1. What is the difference between performing, performing live, and performing live
opera in “RL” (defined here as the physical world) and in SL?
2. What is the difference between producing opera recitals in RL and in SL?
3. What is the difference between attending a live opera concert in SL and in RL?
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    211

My analysis is systematized on the theoretical grounds of cultural management and

takes on board the perspective of the roles involved, such as the performer/artist and
the cultural manager, as well as that of the audience. The experience is addressed in an
exploratory manner and is framed within a qualitative paradigm, which explores the
implications of performing live through a virtual platform. It takes a phenomenologi-
cal approach, which emphasizes subjective personal experience and interpretation, and
which follows an action research methodology, where the researcher is, at the same
time, the subject of research (see Schön 1983, Carr and Kemmis 1986, O’Brien 1998,
among others). Although it is recognized that in this case action research does not
seek to address a particular social problem, it is aimed at fulfilling a social need: provi-
sion of cultural products for consumption by an audience connected through a virtual
world. It is considered that this approach, whereby the researcher, moved by curiosity,
ventures into a virtual world to live an experience that will later be systematized, will
promote generation of more questions and more subsequent research.
One of the most significant features of this kind of virtual platform is its contribution
to cultural democratization and how it facilitates the access of artists to the audience
and vice versa (see Chávez-Aguayo 2009 and 2012). For this reason, one of the motives
leading to my research was to test the ability of this medium to bring together the
artist—who in this case is an opera singer—and the audience.
In the case of opera, the limited offer of live concerts of this kind of music in SL
suggested that it was less popular than other genres. As such, an additional challenge
in producing and managing opera events is to offer them both to those people already
interested in this kind of music and to those for whom these concerts are their first con-
tact with the genre. As both an artist and a cultural manager, I was interested in offering
information to the audience that would help them better understand the operatic lan-
guage, so they could continue attending this kind of event. Thus, this exercise involved
audience development actions aimed at offering opera to new audiences.
In order to carry out this activity in SL, I decided to make use of the cultural orga-
nization that I am the director and founder of, Ópera Joven in Mexico, and to make
use of the resources that this organization already had, namely, human resources and
some technical equipment. This is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that
has staged several operatic plays in Mexico but has no regular funding and as such is
aimed at being self-sustaining from its activities. Hence, an additional motivation for
venturing into SL was to make it a self-sustaining project with an efficient manage-
ment of minimum resources. This intention presented particular challenges for us that
may not be the same for a profit-seeking company, or for an institution with regular
funding, either public or private, where funds can be used to invest in equipment and
infrastructure or to increase their workforce with technicians, soloists, and accompa-
nying musicians, for example. Thus, the idea of efficiently using minimum resources
for production and management of these cultural events was also to test the ability of
this virtual platform to enhance cultural democratization by allowing nonprofit com-
panies to reach a wider and more international audience without monetary investment.
Since SL allows economic trading of goods and services by means of a kind of internal
212   Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

currency that is exchangeable for RL currency, it is possible to receive an income for

performing in the form of a wage or tips. However, SL incomes are very low compared
to those earned in RL. One gig can mean US$10–30 of income for the artist, and this
can be used to invest in more supplies both in RL (technical equipment, music tracks,
music sheets, server rental, etc.) and in SL (clothing, avatar garnish, animations, stage
accessories, etc.).
I did not venture into SL to perform live opera, or to involve Ópera Joven; this was
accidental. Rather, I was moved by curiosity when I heard—through casual conversa-
tions and news about the features of this virtual platform—about the various kinds
of activities that people were able to do in SL that seemed impossible or unlikely in
RL. After joining SL, I realized that there were live music performances to attend, and
I started wondering if it was possible for me to perform live also, as an opera singer. It
took a long time to learn the various skills, mostly technical, to perform in SL, a subject
that was not included in any school or university course that I attended. There was no
such course in SL either.3 It was then that I started reflecting about this experience,
while discovering the many differences between performing and managing a cultural
event in RL and in SL.
An SL user I met during my first few weeks in SL, who had a music business in RL and
was an artist manager, encouraged me to perform live opera in SL and to work for her.
However, as I was more interested in experimenting in person, with being both an opera
performer and a cultural manager (as the director of my organization and producer of my
concerts) in a virtual world, with my own team and organization, her offer was declined.
I also considered it relevant to later analyze this experience from an academic perspec-
tive, since I had never heard of any previous case study or read any literature on this topic.

Challenging Performers

At the time of the show it is difficult to split the role of singer and producer, particu-
larly one with minimal resources. However, as I discovered, there are many circum-
stances that interfere with the performance. Thus, my first analysis will be from the
perspective of the artist who performs opera concerts in SL and the particularities of
this performance.

What Does Performing in SL Involve? Differences

Between Performing in RL and in SL
Obviously, singing in SL is not the same as in RL. It is, then, necessary to experience
this to know exactly what it means. Feelings like waiting backstage at the beginning of
the concert, hearing the murmur of the audience inside, anxiousness for the concert to
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    213

start, the excitement of the moving curtain that unveils the audience to the performer,
the shower of the stage lights, hearing the applause and having a visual connection with
the audience: all of these are not enjoyed in SL. Yet even though the stress of perform-
ing for an online audience on a virtual stage through a platform such as SL is different
from the stress of a RL presentation, both can affect the performance. In addition, in
both RL and in SL the performance is addressed to a live audience, but the manner in
which this audience is perceived and interacted with differs greatly from RL to SL.
The fact that in SL the performer is not face to face with the people does not mean
that he or she is not in front of an audience. Though it might be considered a “loss” to
not have this personal contact with the audience, this is compensated by the “gain” of
gathering together at the same time people from around the world who can listen to
the live performance.
SL also allows the performer to overcome physical barriers. The performing artist
can be comfortably singing at home and does not have to be physically present in a con-
cert hall, or be groomed. At home, in front of a microphone and after certain technical
requirements have been attended to, his (I shall go on referring to the performer with
masculine gender, as applicable to my case) voice can travel through the Internet. The
scope of his performance is also widened as it is not limited to people who are actually
physically present in a concert hall, thus facilitating access to a global audience—one of
the features most valued by artists in SL. In addition, it is not a one-way transmission.
He does not perform to a passive audience, but rather to an audience that can interact
and react in real time as well. They can applaud, comment, and speak directly with the
singer and even contact him outside the context of the concert, which is very difficult
to do in RL.
Physically, the performing artist does not need to dress up, although his avatar does
so within SL. Addressing the details and pursuing realism is always something appre-
ciated by SL users. Thus, he must dress and groom his avatar appropriately for the
situation and choose appropriate clothing for the concert (e.g., a suit or a tuxedo for a
formal venue). There are also animations available on the SL market that can be used to
make the avatar carry out singing movements (these make it move its mouth and make
expressions with the arms) and others that make it bow (for the applause). Additionally,
a special light can be used to illuminate the avatar’s face while playing. Stage accessories
and other details must also be considered, such as having a piano as decoration or rep-
resenting the piano that will be heard in the accompaniment. Stage lights also need to
be installed if there are none already on the stage.

What Does Performing Live in SL Involve?

Live vs. Playback
One of the most interesting things about an experience like this is not merely sing-
ing in SL, but also doing so live, precisely because performing live involves many of
214   Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

the fascinating and exceptional aspects that this kind of platform brings. Though it
is impossible to prove 100 percent that the show is indeed live, the singer can always
resort to greeting those who come, thanking them for the tips, telling the time, interact-
ing with the audience, and so forth.
Playback singing removes the most interesting aspects that a performance can have.
Indeed, it is not a “performance,” but rather a simple reproduction of a recording, which
is usually edited and chosen as the best among many trials. The artist’s role is reduced
from being an active performer to being a finger that clicks the play and pause buttons.
The person attending the performance is deprived of spontaneity, uniqueness, and the
value of a live performance. As such, attending a SL playback “concert” is no differ-
ent from when the user plays music on an MP3 player, or through iTunes, Spotify, or
YouTube. This greatly reduces the interaction in which the singer influences the public
and the public influences the singer by means of a unique performance. Indeed, losing
this interaction means losing the most interesting ingredient that SL adds to this way of
performing.
From the point of view of cultural management, the merit of performing live in SL
means facing a number of technical constraints, which must be constantly monitored
in order to achieve a smooth and consistent experience. Meanwhile, from the singer’s
point of view, performing live means adapting his performance to this new technologi-
cal context, which transmits his voice beyond the walls of a concert hall and still allows
real-time interaction with the audience.
After being a user of SL for some time and having attended several concerts, one
realizes how easy it is to sell a concert as being “live” when it is actually a playback.
Besides being dishonest, this is difficult to maintain as a lie. As a live performer,
one develops expertise in distinguishing live concerts from playback fakes sold as
live. One can question the singer’s passion, authenticity, or talent if he already has
everything connected and ready to sing live but prefers rather to play a recording,
using his voice just to speak between played-back songs, to offer greetings, or to
thank his audience for tips. I would also add that it is necessary to pay close atten-
tion and be very skilled while doing playback to avoid, for example, overlapping
recorded singing with the live speaking voice, thereby revealing the fraud. Similarly,
a performer who is singing live is obviously unable to answer private messages or
friendship offers that attendees send while he is singing. Clearly, the authenticity of
a live concert is doubtful if the artist is able to handle several conversations while
he is performing.
In this sense, the little imperfections of a performance are what give the touch
of spontaneity, uniqueness, and being live. Little technical errors, such as volume
changes, interruptions in the broadcast, external noises that slip in, and so on, can
be evidence of the authenticity of the live concert. Furthermore, interaction with
the public is something that cannot be faked, and it is considered disgraceful to
happily interact with an audience while cheating them by saying that the perfor-
mance is live.
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    215

What Does Performing Live Opera in SL Involve?

Peculiarities of Performing Opera in SL
Singing live opera arias also presents some interpretative challenges, depending on the
level of risk the artist wants to take. If he chooses to sing arias with virtuosity, vocal
agility, wide range, upper register, high notes, and so forth, it is an incentive for the
audience but a challenge for the singer. Yet the way one performs these arias and the
resulting successes or failures are indications that it is a live performance. It is highly
unlikely that anyone would intentionally reproduce a recorded aria with faulty perfor-
mances! It is also these “flaws and feats” in the performance that give the arias their
exceptional mark and the exclusive character that is difficult to reproduce, hence show-
ing that the performance is unique. When singing over a music track, for example,
it is usual to get a bit out of rhythm, to sometimes be slightly further away from the
microphone, for breathing to be more or less loud, to hear the sound of the score sheet
changing in the background.
In fact, one of the pleasures of an opera singer is to give power to the voice issuance
and listen to it reverberate in a space with resonance. In this sense, this vocal power
makes using microphones and speakers to amplify the voice unnecessary in a concert.
More specifically, in an opera performance it is desirable to hear the naked voice, to
distinguish the singer’s vocal and interpretative nuances without any electronic or tech-
nological enhancement. Unfortunately, in order to perform in SL, using microphones
and other technological resources is absolutely necessary for the singer to be able to
broadcast his voice. Undoubtedly, this takes a very important element away from the
performance (the test of the naked voice), but in turn it allows the singer to be heard in
real time from anywhere in the world. Technological intervention can thus be seen as
both a concession and an advantage, and although some things can be supplemented
by technological intervention, such as adding reverberation and equalizing the audio
signal with an audio mixing console, it would never be the same as listening to the
naked voice live.
However, in this era of information and communications technologies (ICTs), the
music people listen to every day is rarely live, or produced without technology, and it
is assumed that the SL user is accustomed to hearing previously recorded music and is
not bothered by technological interventions, or has attended RL concerts where micro-
phones and speakers are involved. It is also acknowledged that the opera pieces a regu-
lar user can hear everyday are mostly recorded and it is rare to hear them live, except
by attending an RL concert. Consequently, this “loss” in listening to the operatic voice
is quite usual in everyday life and not just typical of SL.
In addition, not only for aesthetic reasons but also for self-monitoring reasons, the
singer has the need to listen to himself while singing. However, with headphones on,
the signal heard is not exactly his naked voice, but rather his voice with the intervention
of technology. This can confuse him in some way and force him to adapt to listening to
216   Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

his voice in this way. It is not something that cannot be overcome, and the opera singer
must get used to the circumstances involving virtual live performances, such as the tech-
nical situation and the way of interacting with the audience through this platform. It
cannot be compared, for example, to being in a recording studio, however professional
it may be. He cannot just close his eyes and sing to the microphone; he must be aware
that he is “in front” of a “virtual” audience. He must follow the reaction of the attending
public and know how to interpret the animations and applause sounds that the virtual
audience sends.
Finally, to give an example of how unusual opera concerts are in SL, among the many
animations used for singers who perform on SL, only a few are compatible with an
operatic performance. Most of the animations in SL involve holding a microphone,
dancing while singing, or playing the guitar, the piano, or another instrument. There
are very few animations available for singers that may be compatible with what actually
happens in an opera concert.

The Musical Accompaniment

As an opera performer, I do not play a musical instrument while singing, as other per-
formers do. Therefore, one of the artistic problems I had to solve to perform live in
SL was the need to obtain the music over which I could sing (i.e., the music tracks).
I  discovered four possible options to address this, presented in descending order of
difficulty:

1. Engaging or hiring an instrumentalist (i.e., a pianist) who would also accompany

me playing live in concerts
2. Recording the instrumentalist and playing the music tracks at the concert to sing
over them
3. Obtaining or purchasing prerecorded audio files of music tracks
4. Playing MIDI files as music tracks

Thus, according to the purpose of this incursion into SL, I started to explore every-
thing from the simplest option. Across the Internet, there are many MIDI file database
websites offering a number of opera pieces. These files can be played by almost any
device and computer, but their sound is very artificial, mechanical, and unyielding.
Therefore, I used them as a last resort.
In contrast, prerecorded music tracks of opera arias to sing over can be found on
the market and on the Internet. Some must be paid for and others are free to distribute
and use. Some are with piano and others are orchestral recordings. The main limita-
tion of this option is that very few pieces are available. In fact, they are mainly only the
“all-time greatest hits” of opera history and the “arie antiche” (“old arias” in Italian),
used at the first stages of vocal training. This leaves a singer very little room to choose
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    217

a repertoire intended for his voice. In this scenario, the singer can opt to move out of
the suitable range of his tessitura subtype, or even to other tessituras. Similar to MIDI
files, these tracks offer no flexibility for singing, since it is the voice that must follow the
track and not vice versa. If both music and voice were live, the accompaniment would
follow the voice. Because of this limitation, the singer is not free to give a personal
touch to his performance.
After a few years of gigging I  thus decided to find a pianist to record new music
tracks. This allowed me to choose a more suitable repertoire for my voice tessitura and
to give my singing a more personal performance. After we recorded the new music
tracks, the pianist asked me what I wanted them for, and I told him about our project in
SL. Luckily, he had a relative participating in an educational project in SL and therefore
he already knew about this platform. Thus, I invited him to do a live concert together,
and he accepted. This was an experience where I could be more flexible and give a more
personal touch to the performance.
He interest also gave me the opportunity to learn how to make the changes
necessary in involving a new member, and thereby offer a different experience of
live opera performance in SL. On that occasion I was not forced to adhere to the
rigor and lack of flexibility of a music track or a MIDI file, since with this pianist
I had a real accompanist who followed me in my performance. On the one hand,
it was an improvement from the artistic point of view, because the experience was
more complete, but on the other hand, it involved many technical adjustments and
double complexity, from connecting the keyboard to the audio console to having
another computer running the platform with the pianist’s avatar, which he had to
create and customize and groom for the occasion, including execution of piano-
playing animations.

Lag and Glitches

As will be detailed in the section “Challenging Cultural Managers,” technical faults are
something that must be monitored constantly during concerts.
Although the singer is meant to interact with his audience, absolute real time is
impossible. Lag is the delay generated along the broadcasting system (the emission,
transmission, and reception chains, which will be described later). Typically, all of this
process generates a delay of usually two to ten seconds. Thus, when the singer asks the
audience something or finishes singing a song, the answers, applause, or reactions do
not arrive until after a few seconds have elapsed. This can be somewhat confusing at
first, because it may also happen that the audience is not reacting because of a problem
with the transmission, and not just because of the lag.
Despite all of the problems and characteristics associated with virtual concerts, it is
possible and very satisfying to have a smooth interaction with the public, once the artist
gets used to these situations.
218   Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

The Resource of Creating a “Virtual Persona”

of the Singer
It is usual to finish a concert—in addition to being physically and mentally tired—with
a bunch of friend requests, private messages, and invitations to groups. The singer, or
rather the singer’s avatar, becomes someone that the audience wants to be in touch
with and to know more about. People wonder where is he from, where he lives, where
he trained or studied, when he started singing, etc. They want to know about his life
and his CV. People approached my avatar with a kind of admiration and respect, and
eventually they attached a halo or aura of idealization to it. I wondered if it was because
I was an opera singer and whether other kinds of musicians are viewed in the same way.
My avatar, named Brent Renard—who looked like a groomed and good-looking
human being, a tall and slim male with formal dress (i.e., a suit or tuxedo) and proper
and polite behavior—became a “virtual” celebrity with a certain cachet. He was invited
to exclusive parties, special celebrations, and select VIP groups. He was sought out to
appear on SL radio and TV shows, to be interviewed for digital magazines and blogs,
and to make graphic and written reports about it, including YouTube videos. Thus it
became necessary to build a persona around my avatar and open a fan club.
Many people decide to use fantasy to create a persona for their avatars, such as giv-
ing them noble titles, superhuman characteristics, or some other feature different from
RL (hence the name “SL”).4 However, artists usually turn to their RL curriculum vitae
and life story to transfer it to their SL avatar. In my case, I opted for the second option,
transferring my RL training, experience, and history to my avatar, as the virtual version
of myself, except for the nickname and the appearance. In this sense, for many artists
who perform in SL, this is not their “SL” but an extension of their “first life” (or RL).
They use SL to promote their RL activity and turn to their real-life CV to support their
SL activity. However, this always remains an individual choice.5 Either way, it is diffi-
cult to verify the information provided by artists about themselves, and of course, the
strongest evidence is the performance itself.
In RL, my virtual persona also faced suspicion and jealousy from other fellow profes-
sional managers and singers performing through the same platform, who questioned
my authenticity, my background, my education, and my style of performance.

Challenging Cultural Managers

According to one approach of cultural management, the role of the cultural manager
should be as mediator between production and cultural consumption, that is, between
creator and audience. For this, the better the cultural manager’s understanding of the
characteristics of the product he/she manages, the more likely he/she is to achieve a
more effective management.
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    219

In the current literature on cultural management, there is not enough work regard-
ing new technologies and ICTs, and even less about virtual worlds, perhaps because it
is still largely unexplored territory and because it is even less systematized. The expe-
rience of live opera singing also allowed me to experience many specific aspects that
a cultural manager, as facilitator of such innovative cultural products, can acquire by
producing opera concerts in this virtual world.
My role of cultural manager—and therefore, of the producer—was performed
mainly from backstage. For example, the artist must decide which pieces to sing, but
the producer must obtain the music tracks. The artist decides what kind of track suits
the artistic requirements, but the producer needs to ensure the feasibility of its use.
However, during the concert, while I was singing, a good part of my mind was dealing
with issues related to production and cultural management. There are times when it is
impossible to distinguish between these roles.

The Production
Apart from negotiating the concerts with venue managers, or organizing them on
our own, most of the production work involves managing and solving many techni-
cal issues, among them preparing the broadcasting set. Many artists who perform in
SL are also their own managers and producers. Therefore, they should learn the basic
technical knowledge of production, mainly everything related to the broadcasting pro-
cess, detailed below.
After plugging in the microphones and the music track player device (an MP3 player)
to the audio console, it is necessary to adjust the equalizer for each input and to plug
in the audio console output to the PC that will work as a broadcasting station. This PC
station must be connected to the Internet, to a remote server called a “stream server,”
which must be previously leased from a provider. What is leased is a given server port,
through which the audio signal is broadcast from the physical location where it is gen-
erated to the physical location of the attendee’s PC. Special software installed on the
PC station with the configuration data of the stream server is needed to broadcast the
audio signal to cyberspace.
The stream server URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or IP (Internet Protocol) must
be set in the SL virtual location that is to be the venue of the concert, so that all
attendees can access the audio signal through the player included in the SL viewer.
The configuration of the SL virtual location can be changed by its owner, or by any-
one to whom the latter may have transferred this ability. Sometimes this permission
is granted to the venue’s staff, and sometimes it is given directly to the performer’s
manager.
The entire structure is very fragile, and any link in the transmission and reception
chains of the broadcasting system can fail at any time. These include the PC station per-
formance, its local Internet connection and speed, the local Internet provider service,
the remote stream server, the SL servers, the attendee’s local Internet service provider,
220   Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

the attendee’s Internet connection and speed, and the attendee’s PC performance. This
chain is what produces lag back and forth.
The producer must ensure good operation of the broadcasting system before and
during the concert. This includes paying attention to the audience, which can provide
feedback on how the signal is being received and warn of any error. At any time dur-
ing the event, any link in the chain may become overloaded and crash. The producer
must detect and fix the source of the problem and recover the failed resource as soon
as possible.
If the SL server where the virtual venue is located crashes from overload, everybody,
including the performer and all of the attendees, is disconnected from SL, since the
server is physically rebooting. The rebooting process takes a few minutes—a time span
that is crucial for a concert—and makes the attendees who are trying to reconnect to
SL wait a while before they are able to come back. This can result in losing many people
in the audience who may not want to, or be able to, come back.
Another possible problem to be addressed is that of “griefers.” These are people who
attend events with the intention of boycotting them and causing them to crash. This
“griefing” can take the form of annoying or harassing the performer or the audience,
interrupting the performance, bounding onto the stage, making noise, or spamming
the public chat.6 In these cases, there is an option for the location owner (which can be
transferred to the venue’s staff and the performer’s manager) to allow the griefer to be
“frozen” (temporarily paralyzed or unable to perform any action) or ejected from the
location.

Public Relations and Marketing

In addition to dealing with the technical issues, the cultural manager must address
advertising and marketing tasks, and public relations. Both within and outside the SL
platform, there are numerous ways and applications used to promote and advertise
an event. One can subscribe to groups within SL to receive news and participate in
a group chat. There are also similar groups in SL that use RSS fonts and feeds to dis-
tribute posts. Outside SL, the most usual application is Facebook, but Twitter, forums,
and other social networks are also used. Our strategy was to create a Facebook profile
for everyone: the artist, the manager, and the organization, because it allowed ways of
communicating through other channels.
Although the virtual persona is about the artist, the manager has the task of coordi-
nating his/her strategy with the artist. It may be best to keep some aspects of the per-
sona a mystery and respect the halo or aura around the artist, so that he does not need
to become involved in money negotiations or deal with technical requirement requests.
These must be managed by the manager. In my case, the manager’s intervention was
essential to negotiate wages and technical conditions and to receive feedback regarding
concerts. Thus, the artist was seen only as the performer and the director of the projects
of Ópera Joven.
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    221

Challenging the Audience

Part of the curiosity that led me to venture into SL as a singer and cultural manager
was to discover the difference between attending a live opera concert in SL and in RL.
At a concert in RL every attendee must travel to the venue, but in SL, they simply need
to connect to the SL platform from no matter where and teleport to the venue. They
can dress up with attachments to their avatar’s body, while physically remaining in the
comfort of their own home dressed in any kind of clothing. The formalities are reduced
to a little computer programming to make the avatars look presentable.
My style of performance was not only to sing but also to foster an interaction with
the audience. Hence, I care a lot about their reactions, their comments, and what was
happening in the virtual venue. My experience as an opera singer in RL and the kind
of audiences that I have addressed before made me aware that, for many attendees, my
concerts may be their first contact with opera. Therefore, it was an opportunity—from
the perspective of audience development—to make this experience enjoyable and
rewarding and to show them the language of opera so that they could develop a taste
for it and change their perception of it as an elitist and classist form of artistic expres-
sion. For me, it is important to show them that opera is something whereby they can
learn their language, history, and tradition and which they can begin to appreciate.
Therefore, I tried to provide didactic comments about the context of the pieces that
I  performed for the audience to appraise. I  addressed them in English and Spanish,
with some phrases in other languages, to get a little closer to people of various nation-
alities who were online.
As mentioned previously, we eventually opened fan clubs in SL groups, outside
groups, and Facebook for marketing and public relations purposes. Gradually, I started
to acquire loyal followers, who never missed a concert and who I  could recognize
among the audience in a concert. Some of them spoke to me after the concert to con-
gratulate me, others contacted me outside the concert context, and still others never
got any closer or talked to me. However, my growing interaction with some of them
led them to become unconditional fans who liked the project to the extent of finally
collaborating with us as staff, or as part of our team. We know only the SL names and
appearances of our colleagues; we have never met them physically in person, despite
years of collaboration.
I had the opportunity to ask them about their perspectives regarding the meaning
of attending my concerts, as well as other kinds of concerts. One of the most signifi-
cant answers was that SL provided access to a large variety of quality music, without
the physical need of transportation. They could go from gig to gig, enjoying artists
with good-quality performance from around the world for free. This is, of course, an
example of cultural democratization. In addition, they related that my style of concert
helped them understand and appreciate opera better, that this was their first contact
with opera, following which they became fans of opera. Also, they were impressed
222   Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

because SL allows a high level of interaction between the artist and the audience and
brings them together to a degree that is unimaginable in RL. One can directly contact
the artist, during and after the show, chatting directly and meeting with him and even
offering friendship. Finally, being able to attend live concerts was amazing to them,
because the fact that every concert was exclusive and unique, just for them, was exciting
and gave them a feeling of intimacy with the artist, whose performance they can affect
with their interaction in real time.
There are many ways of interacting on the Internet, through many social networks
that bring together diverse people. However, the interaction that occurs between peo-
ple in SL can be considered anthropomorphic. There are three-dimensional represen-
tations of human bodies (mostly) with realistic appearance (i.e., skin, hair, movements,
clothing), who behave in a similar way to reality: they sit, stand, walk, run, jump, clap,
and gesture. However, they also do things that are impossible in RL, such as fly and
teleport. Thus the SL interface allows socialization in an immersive way, with anthro-
pomorphic representations that give the impression of being in the presence of other
persons. This level of proximity is somehow different from that achieved when some-
one follows a celebrity on Twitter. In SL, the user is in the virtual presence of the artist
and not simply reading the celebrity’s posts or sending tweets that the celebrity may
not read.

Conclusion: So, What Is Virtual Here?

After this review of these experiences of producing and performing live opera concerts,
other related questions arise regarding the relation between music and virtuality, the
objective of this OUP handbook: What is virtual in these experiences? What is the role
of virtuality in this kind of performance? What brings virtuality to both areas, cultural
management and performance?
To begin with, it is necessary to point out what is real. In the first place, the per-
former is real. It is a person somewhere in the world connected to the SL platform, who
is actually singing at the time when he is being listened to. It is a person trying to com-
municate to an audience through his music. Thus, the music played live and the audi-
ence hearing it in real time are not virtual either; they are also completely real. Even
though the music track is electronically reproduced and its sound may appear artificial,
the voice heard over the music track is human and is emitted at that very moment. In
fact, the intention of producing concerts is to offer them live and for them to be enjoyed
as real, as they are. In turn, the production is also real. The actual work of producing is
also real because it involves human labor and performance of a series of tasks to carry
out the production. The broadcasting system is a real structure comprising intercon-
nected hardware that communicates through the Internet and allows production of
the cultural event. Similarly, the audience is also completely real. They are people con-
nected to the platform who are truly consuming a cultural product, which in this case is
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    223

a live opera concert. It is people who react, who are stimulated, and who respond. The
experiences of both singing and listening to the performance are equally real.
So, if all of this is real, what does the virtuality reside in? What among all of this is
virtual, and what is the role of virtuality in this experience?
After some time performing, I started using one PC to run SL and to run my avatar
with its animations and to view and read the audience’s reaction, and another PC as
a broadcasting station. Sometimes, the PC connected to SL crashed and hence I was
disconnected from the platform, and therefore my avatar disappeared from the stage;
however, my voice and the music were still being heard. Until we could reconnect my
avatar and place it in its singing position again, the music and voice were perceived
in SL as “coming from nowhere,” as was mentioned to me. Of course, people could
understand what happened, but this situation cannot be maintained for long, since it
detracted from the experience of a virtual concert. There was a need to see my avatar
“singing,” and this caused us to hurry to make it appear again.
On another occasion, we posted the URL of the stream on Facebook so that people
outside SL could listen to the concert live. Some people did, but we never knew. It was
up to them to access to the broadcasted signal through the stream server—as an online
radio—but there was no interaction at all during the concert between them and me.
I only knew whether some people had listened to me when they told me so. There was
no experience of anything virtual in this version.
Both experiences made clear that live opera concerts in SL are not like listening to
the radio. The audience in SL does not attend only to hear a voice. They also require
the virtual presence of the artist through his avatar, the anthropomorphic digital rep-
resentation of the singer who sings for the anthropomorphic digital representation of
the attendees.
Consequently, it can be concluded that what is virtual in this experience is the means.
It is the “place” where things develop, the platform where all the people gather and
interact. What SL offers is precisely the structure that facilitates the meeting. Inside SL,
a “virtual experience” of singing and attending a performance is lived immersively. This
platform allows users, represented by their (mostly) anthropomorphic avatars—which
are the only things that others have access to—to live this “virtual experience” of being
in a nonphysical space in which they perceive an experience that is real at the place
where it is generated, but that is not physically present in the same space where they
are. This is the virtual factor of the experience that the platform provides. In this sense,
the virtual platform is where physical rules are broken for this new experience to
take place.
Virtuality, then, lies in the capacity to gather together people in a nonphysical
medium around production and consumption of a cultural good, which allows a
complex interaction with very different implications. Therefore, the virtuality of the
medium (and not of the production, the product, its characteristics, or its exchange)
is the ingredient that imparts novelty. Because of the application of ICTs, the artist
and the audience are brought together innovatively. It facilitates and brings challenges
to the tasks of the cultural manager, generates new ways of cultural consumption, and
224   Marco Antonio Chávez-Aguayo

helps to break physical barriers, all of which should be studied further and should be
the object of future theoretical systematization.

Notes
1. Many of the classical musicians who perform in SL play piano, guitar, or violin. Other
instruments played are string instruments (e.g., harp, cello, or lute) and wind instruments
(e.g., saxophone, flute, clarinet, or oboe). A very small percentage of the performing clas-
sical musicians in SL are singers who perform operatic pieces.
2. Live opera performance in this chapter does not refer to the staging of entire operas or
fragments, but rather to the presentation of recitals where operatic arias are performed by
a soloist with accompaniment.
3. SL is a place where many people and institutions offer courses on many subjects, includ-
ing courses on how to create content in SL, programming courses, language courses, etc.
Some of these are free, others are not. Some of the institutions offering courses exist only
in SL, while others are RL institutions with virtual offices or franchises in SL, such as RL
universities. When I was starting in SL as a user interested in performing live concerts,
there were no courses to teach how to perform in SL, either as an instrumentalist or as a
singer. As far as I know, at the moment of writing, there are no courses on this yet.
4. Some users design themselves as nobles of the land or place they own, rent, or man-
age, as if it were their realm; others assume superpowers such as a superhuman strength
or velocity, or superhuman characteristics like being a living dead. Most commonly,
some users decide not to transmit to their avatars their actual RL characteristics. Hence,
they may give to the avatar a different gender, skin, hair and eye color, height, weight or
complexion, etc. Also, there are users who give to their avatar an appearance of a robot,
anthropomorphized animal, or object.
5. Examples of this can be found in Corbett (2009) and Lüthy and Aucouturier (2013).
6. This kind of behavior is not undertaken as a protest or related to any kind of activism.
The motivation behind this act is often the interruption or disturbance of the event just
for the griefer’s amusement.

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Carr, Wilfred, and Stephen Kemmis. 1986. Becoming Critical:  Education, Knowledge and
Action Research. Basingstoke: Falmer Press.
Chávez-Aguayo, Marco Antonio. 2009. “Democratization of Creativity and Cultural
Production in Virtual Worlds: A New Challenge for Regulation and Cultural Management.”
In Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Games Based Learning, ed. Maja Pivec,
103–109. Reading: Academic.
———. 2012. “Créativité et Mondes Virtuels: Sur le Potentiel Artistique et Culturel de Second
Life.” In Les nouveaux enjeux des politiques culturelles, ed. Guy Saez and Jean-Pierre Saez,
321–334. Paris: La Découverte.
 Live Opera Performance in Second Life    225

Corbett, Sara. 2009. “Portrait of an Artist as an Avatar.” New York Times, Mar. 31, http://www.
nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08fluno-t.html (accessed Jan. 1, 2014).
Lüthy, Marco, and Jean-Julien Aucouturier. 2013. “Content Management for the Live Music
Industry in Virtual Worlds:  Challenges and Opportunities.” Journal for Virtual Worlds
Research 6(2), doi:10.4101/jvwr.v6i2.5958 (accessed Jan. 1, 2014).
O’Brien, Rory. 1998. “An Overview of the Methodological Approach of Action Research.”
http://www.web.ca/~robrien/papers/arfinal.html (accessed Jan. 1, 2014).
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New York: Basic Books.
 PA RT   F O U R

AU T HOR SH I P,
C R E AT I V I T Y,
A N D M U SIC IA N SH I P

As Conner observed in his chapter, “Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and Beyond,” “although
appearing to be singular personalities with agency, today’s characters—like so many
who have come before—are made available for cultural consumption through a com-
plex production process involving a large body of labor (including, in Miku’s case, the
contributions of the consumers themselves)” (Chapter 8). The focus on nonexistent
bands and creative participation by fans reveals a striking thematic and interpretative
resonance with Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild’s exploratory chapter, “We Are, The
Colors,” an experimental music project conceived and realized primarily by Ilsar as
an activity hub for fans to act and interact, with the aim of confronting notions of
ownership and power over the creative process: “The goal of the Colors project was
not simply meant to enact an online narrative hoax. It was to use the space created
by this hub of virtual collaboration to challenge and even change prevailing concep-
tions of creative collaboration beyond the digital hub” (Chapter 13). As Jordà observes,
“the Internet has encouraged these collaborative techniques because it not only favors
‘the omnidirectional distribution of information, but also promotes dialogue among its
users’ by enabling ‘both collective creation and the production of open and continu-
ously evolving works’ ” (1999, 5, cited in ibid.). Although many have engaged with such
collaborative music-making devices, the Colors were unique in framing their collective
collaboration within a fictional storytelling element: formation of the Colors Collective
228    Part Four: Authorship, Creativity, and Musicianship

by brothers Alex and Isaac Moler and their call-to-arms song “We Are, The Colors,”
allegedly dating from 1958. “Through this scanty narrative, the Colors [became] a
kind of virtual empty vessel whose key markers outlined an alternative history of post-
war popular music. The narrative framework of this project leaves the field as open
as possible for fans, writers, musicians, or even academics to construct, contest, and
continually transform the legacy of the Colors, including and especially the wholesale
reinvention of their music. In this sense, the Colors only existed in the creative relation-
ships the idea of their existence might facilitate.” The merging of the concept of a cyber-
band, which included interactive music, real-time collective composition, collaborative
music production, remixing, and open-source software, with the storytelling of fans on
tribute band websites, forums, blogs, wikis, and social media [made] the Colors’ hub
a distinctly engaging experience for fans and musicians alike,” and throughout its sev-
eral-year lifespan it became a tool for creative collaboration beyond the control of the
people who started the project: “It was a deliberate and unreasonably idealistic endeav-
our, just like the musicians whose lives, careers, and values it pretended to chronicle.”
Chapter 14, “Music in Perpetual Beta: Composition, Remediation, and ‘Closure’,” is
also project/process-based and explores Paul Draper and Frank Millward’s collabora-
tive compositions on the World Wide Web. More specifically the authors examine the
significance of narrative as a generative process in their own practice-based work: new
music created through asynchronous file exchange, from improvisation to some degree
of assembly/composition. The immersive qualities of their collaborative composition
e Strano, for example, “draws one into a narrative waiting to be created by the listener.
To listen and in the mind’s eye see a virtual time and space made in some way real by
the attributes of a sonic image” (Chapter 14). Music in perpetual beta makes a valuable
contribution to the debate as to whether, in today’s virtual world, “a composer may be
in fact one who intentionally relinquishes control in a world where technologies offer
audiences to be collaborators.”
Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen is also concerned with the concept of authorship. As she
states in “Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot: Consumption as a Mode of Production,”
Chapter 15: “I believe …, as Michel Foucault (1991 [1969]) and Roland Barthes (1977)
argued in the late 1960s and mid-1970s, that the figure of the author—and, in effect,
how we understand concepts such as creativity, originality, and musicianship—is his-
torically conditioned and discursively defined. If the figure of the author is a con-
struct, then the content that we invest in it is also prone to alteration.” Not least, the
author function may well disappear. She cites “American scholar David Gunkel (2011)
[, who] believes that this moment has come and argues that mashup music ‘pro-
vides a persuasive illustration and functional example of an alternative configuration
of artistic creativity after the passing of the figure of the author’.” More specifically,
she says, Gunkel contends that “the mashup producer functions more as a scripteur
than an author, in the sense that his/her task involves mixing and remixing ‘scripts’—
that is, existing recordings—instead of creating something from nothing” (2011, 16,
quoted in Chapter 15). Unlike Gunkel, however, Brøvig-Hanssen considers that “even
 Part Four: Authorship, Creativity, and Musicianship    229

within this ‘configuration of artistic creativity’, the author remains a central and func-
tional figure—if, that is, we rethink the traditional notions of authorship, creativ-
ity, and musicianship with which we are working.” As she explains, “virtual studios
… [encourage] those who once thought of themselves as strictly music consumers
to become music producers as well. In the act of mashing two musical tracks, the
‘masher’ goes from being a consumer of these tracks to becoming the producer of the
mashup.” Hence, “if one tries to understand mashup music through this author-based
lens, it will be rashly reduced to uncreative copying, outright stealing, plagiarism,
and consequently copyright infringement.” As Conner previously argued, authorship
in today’s virtual world has become discursive, and as such, says Brøvig-Hanssen,
“decontextualizing and recontextualizing” tracks in mashup can be considered “a
perfectly legitimate mode of artistic production and creation that involves both a
creative and an interpretive act of appropriation,” thus encouraging us to rethink
what musical authorship, creativity, and musicality mean to us today. Here, Brøvig-
Hanssen provides the reader with an interesting insight, contending that mashups
are “often based on two key concepts: musical congruity and contextual incongruity.
Mashups are often intended to violate the conventions of otherwise established cat-
egories, such as high and low, serious and playful, black and white, mainstream and
underground, or rock and pop.” As she further explains, “Put simply, the art in the
mashup lies often in its juxtaposition of samples to produce a coherent piece of music
that at the same time generates a feeling of incongruity. It is often the experiential
doubling of the music as simultaneously congruent (sonically, it sounds like a band
performing together) and incongruent (it parodically subverts socially constructed
conceptions of identities) that produces the richness in meaning and paradoxical
effects of successful mashups.” “The fact that mashup bands exist only virtually is
made obvious not just by the recognizability of the individual tracks incorporated but
also by the unlikelihood that the mashed artists would ever perform these mashups
as such.” It is an observation that is made explicit in her case study of “Psychosocial
Baby” and its mashup of “the wolf pack” with the “pop idol,” so creating “the doubled
pleasure of the palimpsest: more than one text is experienced—and knowingly so”
(citing Hutcheon 2006, 116).
Brøvig-Hanssen has described Bieber and Slipknot’s mashup as “intertextual play
that converges existing meanings in order to form a new one”; Cora Palfy argues in
her Chapter  16  “Human After All:  Understanding Negotiations of Artistic Identity
through the Music of Daft Punk” that Bangalter and de Homem-Christo’s insis-
tence on their robotic personae is subverted by their music, which “contains ele-
ments that betray the artists’ original humanity,” hence co-constructing “Daft Punk’s
identity through authorial mediation.” Her initial discussion contrasts strongly with
earlier discussions on Hatsune Miku, where fans assumed an important authorial
responsibility, reminding the reader that a more traditional analysis of the musi-
cal artist depends on an authorial mediation whereby small chunks of second-hand
230    Part Four: Authorship, Creativity, and Musicianship

information are communicated to the consumer, forming “behavioral markers” of

artistic identity (ibid.). Having set the stage, she turns her attention to Daft Punk,
where the band’s assumption of robotic bodies and refusal to reveal their private
identities is undermined by interview references “to their humanity, the passion and
emotion of their music” (ibid.), which creates a “conflict between their technological
and human selves”—a mediation inconsistency. This, in turn, “prompts the listener
to consider not only the larger relationship between technology and man, but also the
artistic identity in question.” As Palfy points out, the duality of Discover and Human
After All, the titles of which suggest a human sensibility under a robotic body, are
further constructed in the commingling of mechanical, interlocking rhythmic pat-
terns and unchanging repetition in the tight groove of the loops, and vocals that
draw attention to an embodied speaker, a sentient being with a voice, to represent
respectively the robotic and the human. As she asks, given this conflict of identity, is
Daft Punk human or robotic?
The authorial voice next moves to the circus train and Dave Tough’s “Virtual
Bands:  Recording Music under the Big Top.” The focus here is on Tough’s inter-
views with Chicago-born musician/singer/songwriter Ryan States and the journey
he undertook to create his own personal music, recording virtual musicians via the
Internet, and completing and releasing his project Strange Town in 2010. What makes
States’s process unique is that he completed his entire eleven-track CD “virtually”
while on board a moving circus train. Tough’s discussion provides valuable insights
into new methods of recording, virtual collaboration, and creating and producing
on the Internet. As he observes, “The growth of the speed of the Internet and per-
sonal computing power continues to point toward more unique ways in which artists
are collaborating with each other anonymously and by asynchronous means. Entire
albums are now being recorded by exchanging files across the Web” (Chapter 17). It
is also interesting to note that States wanted his album to be very personal and intro-
spective, presenting his unique voice as a gay man, writing songs about his journey
across the United States of America. “It’s a throwback to the 80s where gay artists
weren’t as out as I would have wanted them to be. I wanted to be a voice for ones that
grew up in that time, and this is the music I would have wanted to hear.” States also
offered several good pieces of advice when recording “virtual” musicians: “Don’t hire
musicians based on your belief or hope that they can play the kind of music that you
want. Make sure you’ve already heard examples of them playing the specific instru-
ment in the very style that you need. If it begins to look like they can’t deliver, either
musically or the studio isn’t up to snuff, bail out. Don’t try to force something, it’ll
only waste time and make people feel bad. … Stick to highly motivated profession-
als who can meet deadlines.” As Tough concludes, “Even though the entire recording
process for Strange Town was completed virtually, [the] inspiration for the album
came from truest parts of his being.”
 Part Four: Authorship, Creativity, and Musicianship    231

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana.
Foucault, Michel. 1991 [1969]. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader: An Introduction
to Foucault’s Thoughts, ed. P. Rabinow, 101–120. London: Penguin Books.
Gunkel, David J. 2011. “What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking? Authorship, Authority, and the
Mashup.” Popular Music and Society 35(1): 16.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Jordà, Sergi. 1999. “Faust Music on Line: An Approach to Real-Time Collective Composition
on the Internet.” Leonardo 9: 5–12.
 chapter 13

“ We Are, The C ol ors ”

Collaborative Narration and Experimental
Construction of a Nonexistent Band

Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild

In February 1966, Alex Moler, a founder of the “proto-seminal” band the Colors, wrote
a passionate letter to his younger brother Isaac, with whom he started the band. The
brothers’ childhoods had been steeped in a marginal but profoundly influential philos-
ophy of music impressed on them by their idiosyncratic father, Aaron, an accomplished
violinist and pianist who insisted on the holistic divinity of music and instilled in them a
refusal to accept the concept of musical ownership. Formed in the late 1950s, the Colors,
like most bands, strived for success in the form of an expanding fan base and endless
pursuit of hit singles. But owing to a continued string of mishaps and sheer bad luck,
they kept losing record deals, gigs, band members, and momentum (see Documentary
available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 4igegrpK8As). They took on
many names and directions to reignite their career, but after a few years they simply
became indifferent to success. Alex Moler’s heartfelt plea to his brother was cast as an
epiphany and imagined a whole other way making the music they wanted to make:

The present doesn’t seem sacred anymore, I  rarely feel like I  am in the moment.
I think this is because we are always striving for more with our band, but why? Can
we not live happy lives without success? I have decided, and I hope I can convince
you of my stance, to never record our music again! To let go of any connection we
have to the making of our art in the hope that more creativity could come through
us, and make us always feel present and joyful, regardless of our state of affairs. To
relinquish any ownership over our ideas; let them float in the air for them to be nur-
tured by others as we nurture theirs, creating a world where everyone owns nothing
and everything at the same time. More practically, what I am saying is let’s start a
collective with these principles. Where anyone can use our name, and us theirs,
where everyone is welcome to be part of our band, our collective. Where every space
can be our stage, and every sound our song. Let’s form the Colors Collective and
234    Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild

forget about our ambitions for money and fame. And let us hope that others will fol-
low and that the world will begin to slow down. It cannot accelerate forever! (Cited
in Ilsar 2011)

The Colors Collective became a way of life for core members and brothers Alex and
Isaac Moler. They began to produce a wealth of music, art, and lyrics that was only to
be passed down orally and aurally. Their first work under their new guise was “We Are,
The Colors’,” a song that allegedly dates from 1958. Although continuously reworked by
the Colors, this song always stood as a call to arms for anyone who wanted to join the
commune. The original version was written as a bossa nova, but there are versions from
1963 and 1969 that have more psychedelic and electronic tones to them as well. Its title
was chanted at gigs by the audience as well as played by the band in the genre of the
audience’s choosing. The rest, as they say, is—well we don’t have to say it.
The twist in this tale is that the Colors do not and have never existed, not even as a
coherent fiction. Instead they exist only as a spur to creative collaborative action through
an online hub. The Colors website was conceived and realized primarily by Alon Ilsar.
Ilsar established an Internet domain name through the usual means and then bartered
and negotiated with peers and friends, fellow musicians, and artists to give something
to the project. The primary rule was that they couldn’t profit from the site. The mon-
etary costs were low. The website was never commercialized, and nothing uploaded to
it was ever monetized. Throughout its several-year lifespan, it acted only as an activ-
ity hub for fans to act and interact. The Colors website combined devices commonly
used by fans of all kinds (fan fiction blogs, digital storytelling, social networking, and
wiki software) with those often used by musicians (open-source software, interactive
music, real-time collective composition, and collaborative music production) to cre-
ate an alternate reality musical game. This hub enabled open and direct communica-
tion between fans and musicians, and encouraged participants to engage with diversely
alternative notions of ego, intellectual property, capitalism, pop stardom, and recorded
music while highlighting creative collaboration, process over product, slowing down
of consumption, temporary art, and the beauty inherent in both intentional and non-
intentional sounds. It was a deliberately and unreasonably idealistic endeavor, just like
the musicians whose lives, careers, and values it pretended to chronicle.
Users began with only the barest of narrative outlines of the story of two broth-
ers whose incessant travels routinely found them present at the creation of influential
music at moments of particularly verdant musical collaboration. Through this scanty
narrative, the Colors become a kind of virtual empty vessel whose key markers outlined
an alternative history of postwar popular music. The narrative framework of this proj-
ect leaves the field as open as possible for fans, writers, musicians, or even academics
to construct, contest, and continuously transform the legacy of the Colors, including
and especially the wholesale reinvention of their music. In this sense, the Colors existed
only in the creative relationships the idea of their existence might facilitate.
In this chapter, we place the Colors experiment within the context of the robust
history of experiments in open, compositional procedures, connecting these to the
 “We Are, The Colors”    235

contemporary literature on fan cultures and digital music cultures. The goal is to
explore the possibilities and limits of online creative collaboration in an economic con-
text in which what were once thought of as digital commons are rapidly being enclosed.
Every “seemingly private act of media consumption” we make online is being trans-
formed into the “non-exclusive” intellectual property of our “increasingly surveillant
media” (Briggs 2010). The Colors project is meant to express avowedly, if unreasonable,
utopian ideals that many have long regarded as consonant with the history of myriad
musical cultures, and then attempt to point to unrealized futures beyond the unstable
present.

Fandom and Contextualizing

the Colors

At the heart of this project is a particular conception of the idea of a “fandom.” As

Jenkins argues, a fandom as a “sub-cultural community … [that] provides escape from
the real world and a utopian space where acceptance and creativity flourish” (quoted in
Damian 2008, 5). Yet, as Damian suggests, fans must accede to certain demands to earn
this acceptance, such as engaging in

(1) close and critical reception, in which fans view that text multiple times to scru-
tinize details and discuss and debate the meanings of these details with other fans;
(2)  interpretation, in which fans “work to resolve gaps, to explore excess details,
and undeveloped potentials” in the text; (3) consumer activism, in which fans com-
municate their needs and opinions concerning the text to its producers and dis-
tributors; (4)  cultural production, which involves fans’ appropriation of material
and their creation of art, fiction, music, and video based on the media text; and
(5) membership in an alternative social community. (4–5)

With the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, many have heralded the supposedly novel
“prosumer” and “produser,” neologisms often used by fan scholars to “exalt the fan as the
epitome of the active audience member, or the productive consumer” (Booth 2009, 2).
As Baym also notes, digital fandoms “are often highly creative, a phenomenon the
Internet has brought to the fore and enabled in new ways” (Baym 2007). The vessels
into which these “new” kinds of digital fans can pour their own labor are numerous,
and the tools to reread, rewrite, and reproduce the work of others are widespread.
There have been many artists who have embraced the prosumer fan culture, such
as Beck and Radiohead releasing their music online as stem files for fans to remix, or
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails asking video editors to cut up footage from a live con-
cert for an official release. Comedian Ze Frank has created collaborative projects for his
fans, projects that see many fans recording themselves singing over a track he wrote, all
sending their versions to him to create a full choir. In Frank’s case he is simply inviting
236    Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild

prosumers to be part of his creation, to help create a sense of community around his
projects and his website. He merely curates—or finds ways for people to collaboratively
create—these works.
Although many celebrate such efforts as a new dynamic in popular culture at large, it
is hard to deny that the new digital tools have also allowed the music industry to follow
fans’ activities more intently and exploit fan engagement more thoroughly, often trans-
forming these activities into an informal, low-cost system of labor used to enhance the
brand value of artists, most frequently through the increasingly intense cultivation of a
populist cult of personality surrounding the figure of the artist (see Fairchild 2008). As
Palano (1998) argues, this is one aspect of consumerist culture that some fan scholars
usually ignore or at the very least downplay:

The cult of personality is a consumerist notion that there are people who are larger
than life and that they can entertain you from afar better than you can locally your-
self. “Personalities” by their existence are disempowering. If those who entertain us
well are larger than life, then obviously we cannot have as much fun making music
or playing with friends. After all, the quality of our enjoyment is greatly improved
when the source of entertainment is bought and sold. (1)

Though fans now have more accessible technology for making and sharing their
own creative works, pop icons still govern the main spark for many of these creative
works, and constantly put a price on their expertise for entertaining the masses. Gray,
Sandvoss, and Harrington (2007) note:

As we have moved from an era of broadcasting to one of narrowcasting, a process

fueled by the deregulation of media markets and reflected in the rise of new media
technologies, the fan as a specialized yet dedicated consumer has become a center-
piece of media industries’ marketing strategies. (4)

As much as fan scholars would like to avoid the old image of the fan as a “philistine …
someone, usually with money, who took the assumptions of capitalism with him into
the realm of culture” (Eisenberg 2005, 11), it is difficult to avoid the “beastly and benefi-
cent” (Fairchild 2008, 2) tactics used by the music industry to harness fans’ engagement
and labor for their own ends. As Fairchild argues at length, this is a surprisingly over-
looked aspect of the music industry’s often highly successful adaptations to new media
environments (Fairchild 2008; Furgason 2008; McLean, Oliver, and Wainwright 2010).
The Colors project tries to avoid such pitfalls by not allowing a cult of personality
to develop through music as there are no original recordings of the band and no com-
munication with producers and distributors is possible, since of course they don’t exist.
This means that to be a Colors fan one must be an interpreter of previously “reinter-
preted” text, or a producer of new work, or a part of an alternative social community
constructing a context for the activities of that community. Information about the band
can be attained only from members of this same community. Fans willing to project
their own ideas of their utopian band will enable their own creativity to flourish, and
 “We Are, The Colors”    237

in so doing reclaim the power in the producer-consumer relationship, relieving them-

selves of the need for a distinct producer. Importantly, this reclamation of expressive
power has been a driving force in fan studies (see Cavicchi in Gray et al. 2007, 1). Fan
scholars draw a distinction “between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of
the disempowered” (Gray et  al. 2007, 1), in this case those of the music industry as
opposed to those of the fans. Gray et al. claim that “the consumption of popular culture
of popular mass media [is] a site of power struggles and fandom the guerrilla-style tac-
tics of those of lesser resources to win this battle” (2007, 1–2). There is more to being a
fan than simply being part of a fandom. In this respect, fandom is “a collective strategy,
a communal effort to form interpretive communities that in their sub-cultural cohe-
sion” (1–2) reclaim the power away from popular media.
By trying to enable these tactics to the greatest extent possible, the Colors became a
projection of a fandom’s desires rather than merely a fictional history of a failed band
made the subject of a familiar sort of collective reclamation project. With very little
original material about the Colors provided, their stories could be told only through
their fans rather than through the music industry’s marketing professionals or the band
themselves. Thus, these stories remained a community resource. Fans had to invent
new narratives, embroider existing ones, spread rumors or even lies, and in so doing
create and enhance their own vision of the band in collaboration with other competing
or complementary visions. This type of organizing of fans’ differing talents, whether
they be writers, musicians, filmmakers, or artists, merely asks fans to be willing to par-
ticipate in a common goal. This collaborative model of online creativity decentralizes
the role of a producer, curator, or composer, and lets the fans do what they do best: set
out their own challenges for other fans. There is no trail of material artifacts to collect
and fetishize and no cult of personality to celebrate as there is no celebrity to gather
around. There are only the social and aesthetic relationships facilitated by the idea of
the band and a particular model of creative collaboration.

The Colors’ Ideals of Creative Collaboration

The Colors project was meant to provide the space for an ideal form of creative col-
laboration. As many scholars have suggested, the idea of creative collaboration is a
complex and multifarious one. As John-Steiner argues, “Western belief in individu-
alism romanticizes the perception of the solitary creative process—when the reality
is—that scientific and artistic forms emerge from joint thinking, passionate conversa-
tions, emotional connections, and shared struggles” (2000, 3). A few values drawn out
of these arguments have definitively shaped the Colors project:

The principles in a true collaboration represent complementary domains of exper-

tise. As collaborators, they do not only plan, decide, and act jointly, they also think
together, combining independent conceptual schemes to create original frame-
works. Also, in a true collaboration, there is a commitment to shared resources,
238    Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild

power, and talent: no individual’s point of view dominates, authority for decisions
and action resides in the group, and work products reflect a blending of all partici-
pants’ contributions. (Minnis, John-Steiner, and Weber, 1994, C-2, cited in Elliott
2007, 30)

This form of “thinking together” has been placed at the center of the Colors project.
The goal has been to construct a context in which resources, power, and talent are
shared in the pursuit of combining otherwise independent conceptual schemes of what
the Colors actually are. In doing so, the Colors’ philosophy questions the very notion of
having any separation between the artists and their fans. Anyone can lay claim to being
part of the Colors and share their resources and creativity.
This framework for creative collaboration was inspired by various experiments from
a number of points in the postwar era. Experimental musicians such as John Cage and
Brian Eno, for example, “made a point of being more concerned with how things were
made—what processes had been employed to compose or perform them—than with
what they finally sounded like” (Eno 1999, xi). As Eno recalls:

It was a music, we used to say, of process rather than product. . . . On the one hand,
we applauded the idea of music as a highly physical, sensual entity—music free of
narrative and literary structures, free to be pure sonic experience. On the other
hand, we supported the idea of music as a highly intellectual, spiritual experience,
effectively a place where we could exercise and test philosophical propositions or
encapsulate intriguing game-like procedures. (xi–xii)

But not only was this movement interested in music being made by everyone, it was
just as interested in the music being made by no one. Perhaps the signal example of
the implementation of such a philosophy of music composition was John Cage’s turn
to Zen:

For Cage’s Zen sensibilities, this release of control was a spiritual and ethical, even
a political, imperative; one that led him to abdicate the role of composer in order to
become an improviser and collaborator. “When you get down to it,” said Cage, “a
composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I’d like our activities
to be more social—and anarchically so.” (Cox 2002, 37)

What places the Colors within this lineage of experimental musicians and philosophers
of the 1960s is the narrative conceit of the bands’ complete refusal to record sounds or
to assert any form of ownership over their work. Like Cage, the Colors questioned the
intention of humans to make music instead of simply celebrating the nonintentional
sound that surrounds us. Eisenberg (2005) notes that

for as Cage says . . . “It is evidently a question of bringing one’s intended actions into
relation with the ambient unintended ones.” Records are too intended, and their
 “We Are, The Colors”    239

intention comes from too long ago; they cannot come into relation with present
events. Records are framed. (63)

Attributing to the Colors the belief that recording music and claiming ownership over
would trap that music implicitly enthroned the idea that music should be free as the
necessary precondition to the collaborative space embodied in the digital hub.
This attention to the Colors’ refusal to fix their music in any recorded form, in turn
brought up the prospect of a live Colors show, and specifically a tribute band whose values
and activities would be of a piece with those of their chimerical “idols.” Ultimately, this live
show took the form of an interactive musical game piece where the audience as a whole
could control and conduct the performers. It is only with this direct communication with
the audience and the relinquishing of the performers’ egos that the Colors project could
facilitate the forms of creative collaboration its creators sought. As with the online hub,
the goal of the live shows was also to remove the cult of personality from the artwork by
removing the personalities, a view also shared by Cage, here explained by Hamilton.

[Cage] wasn’t interested in the idea of performers expressing themselves, because

he wasn’t interested in expressing himself. His denial of self-expression is the out-
come that chance ultimately leads to. But few composers or improvisers are egoless
enough to follow the Zen master the whole way. Art, and the intention that goes
with it, proves almost inescapable. (2002, 221)

With the Colors project, or game, the fictional band is used as an excuse to invite
fans to actively create their image, songs, art work, and stories around them. With the
framework of the Colors narrative in place, fans can create their own real or virtual
scene with like-minded individuals producing an ever-growing collection of tribute
songs, stories, and so on. The traditional boundaries of the relationship between fans
and musicians are broken by shifting the output completely to the fans. No specific
intended outcome is prescribed by the composer, and it is the process rather than the
product that is celebrated.
The question of how the Colors project might work both in practice and in perfor-
mance, and on the virtual stage of an online collaborative hub, with all of the com-
plex of social relationships these two portals entail, was the final piece to the puzzle.
This is because the goal of the Colors project was not simply meant to enact an online
narrative hoax. It was to use the space created by this hub of virtual collaboration to
challenge and even change prevailing conceptions of creative collaboration beyond the
digital hub. As noted, the Colors is a kind of game, one that fans are not only expected
to play, but required to play. This game has grown to facilitate creative collaborations
outside the context of the traditional music venue, and the ethos and philosophy of
the Colors has developed alongside it. We will conclude here with a description of the
online hub and the possibilities of the forms of creative collaboration around which it
is structured (Fig. 13.1).
Figure. 13.1  Flyer from the Colors Tribute Band gig, Melbourne, ca. 2010.
 “We Are, The Colors”    241

From a Virtual Stage to the Real World and Back Again

The live experience of the Colors takes the form of “The Colors Interactive Comeback
Show,” a live show described here by one perceptive reviewer:

The program blurb is quite deceptive—it tells you, The Colors is a legendary, long
forgotten band who never released a record now making a comeback . . . and are
notoriously late to shows. Which would explain why they never turned up . . .
instead, a very embarrassed manager is forced to stall for time after their explana-
tory film breaks down. Luckily the drummer from The Colors tribute band is in
the audience—and one by one, he’s joined by the rest of his band. See where this
is heading? It’s all a ruse—there is no band and the whole show revolves around
the chaos which emerges when they leave their audience hanging. What happens
next is an inexplicable melange of happenstance and bizarrisms tricked out to tell
the myth of The Colo[u]‌rs—including full frontal nudity (from an audience mem-
ber), each band member playing a different song at the same time, mocking covers,
guest performers (who looked very surprised to be there), impromptu music con-
jured from all over the world, and much more; with the audience playing a decisive
role throughout. Every show is so open to chance and the ability of the audience
to take the concept and run with it, that no two will be the same. It turns being
utter crap to its advantage like nothing you’ve ever seen—and I laughed myself silly.
(Nassari 2009)

These “bandless” gigs often became impromptu fan conventions, frequently sparking
different tribute performances for the band to emerge from the audience. In a sense,
the Colors guide their fans through the process of creative collaboration from afar. The
live shows are meant to extend the concept of the Colors as a tool for creative collabora-
tion into the real world and give us a sense of how collaboration can flourish and new
relationships can develop both within and beyond the online hub.
In his 2008 book Here Comes Everyone, Shirky outlines the benefits of these new
forms of online collaborations that have emerged over the last decade by noting
these “new tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinan-
cial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution” (109).
Similarly, Lessig marvels at the capabilities of the Internet, claiming that the Internet
says “if you are musical, if you are artistic, if you are visual, if you are interested in
film … [then] there is a lot you can start to do on this medium. [It] can now amplify
and honor these multiple forms of intelligence” (2004, 46). Indeed, musicians and
Internet artists have been exploring the concept of a cyberband, a group of musi-
cians who use the Internet to connect to each other and collaborate on making music
either in real-time or by sending files back and forth over time. Perhaps the earliest
of these cyberbands were the Hub, formed in 1986, renowned as the earliest pioneers
of networked computer music (Duckworth 2005). The technological advancements
that have occurred since the days of this project have made many Internet artists
“envision more interactive experiences and the possibility of a worldwide cyberband
242    Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild

connecting a global artistic community online” (xv). The Internet has encouraged
these collaborative techniques because it not only favors “the omnidirectional distri-
bution of information, but also promotes dialogue among its users” by enabling “both
collective creation and the production of open and continuously evolving works”
(Jordà 1999, 5).
Yet many collaborative music-making devices lack the one thing the Colors could
not do without: a fictional story element that may allow other fans and other artists to
collaborate very differently. There also seem to be few digital storytelling websites or
fan fiction blogs that tell the story of a fictional band. The Colors Tribute Website was
an attempt to combine these devices used by fans with those used by musicians. It rep-
resented the merging of the concept of a cyberband, which included interactive music,
real-time collective composition, collaborative music production, remixing, and open-
source software, with the storytelling of fans on tribute band websites, forums, blogs,
wikis, and social media, making the Colors’ hub a distinctly engaging experience for
fans and musicians alike. For example, a piece of fictional narrative on the hub could
be used to inspire musicians to create the music that would fit in with the cyberband’s
fictional narrative. As Booth explains,

Fan fiction written on a wiki develops out of a relationship between the narrative of
the object of Fandom and the interactivity of the group of Fans’ writing on the wiki.
This narractive relationship describes the process by which small contributions by
a large population can help create a new form of narrative structure, the narrative
database. (2009, 6)

Adding musicians and artists (across any art form) to this process meant that the fic-
tional narrative could inspire the creation of music, lyrics, images, and film that fit with
this narrative database. In turn this music and these lyrics, images, and films could
inspire further fan fiction, and so on. In other words, the Colors Tribute Website is the
Colors’ reconstructed digital story, which invited fans, musicians, and artists across any
art form to construct the band’s entire history and the music, lyrics, images, and films
that pay tribute to it.
Since “The Colors Interactive Comeback Show” can be considered a game piece,
one that takes inspiration from the chance and gamelike procedures developed by the
experimental musicians of the 1960s, it makes sense to see the expansion of this musi-
cal game piece to the Internet as a game also, leveling the playing field between fans
and musicians. One very useful function of alternative reality games such as the Colors
Tribute Website is that they have a “This Is Not a Game” aesthetic, an aesthetic that
attempts to hide the fact that the game is in fact a game. Using the disguise of a Tribute
Website, the Colors’ hub invites the user to contribute to their own utopian community
cyberband. A collective utopian idea of this cyberband would then emerge from all the
users’ contributions.
Importantly, the role of the “composer” or “producer” on this collaborative hub was
to create an environment
 “We Are, The Colors”    243

that encourages a diversity of perspectives. Effective whole system thinking needs

participants who are really good at asking questions and do not have an ego invest-
ment in the answer. The collaborative leader celebrates that critical thinking skill
and honors and rewards people who do it well. (Abele, 2009)

The problem the hub’s composer, or puppet master, faced is what framework to put into
place to best encourage this diversity of perspectives, while still giving the users the
freedom to keep changing the content on the hub. Ideally, once the framework for the
hub was constructed the job of composer would be reduced to making small changes to
fix unanticipated problems. This is why Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, gives
himself the title of monarch, claiming that he is “sort of like a British monarch … [hav-
ing] steadily declining powers over time” (Wales, 2005). The hub should otherwise take
care of itself.
In the case of the Colors Tribute Website, the framework was the Colors’ mythology
and philosophy, outlined through the current collection of their music, lyrics, images,
films, and stories. This framework was based around the Colors’ ultimate goal of facili-
tating creative collaboration before the conception of the Internet. The framework also
highlighted the intention of the Colors’ fandom to attain this goal by maintaining a vir-
tual space where users can upload tributes to the group’s lost relics. These can take the
form of music the user has recorded, lyrics they have “found,” or indeed any uploadable
item the user may want to create about the Colors to piece together their story, a story
the fandom feels must be told through the website in spite of the complete dedication to
their oral and aural tradition. Core elements of this story are the Colors’ invitation for
anyone to join the band, as suggested in the song “We Are, The Colors,” their philoso-
phy of connectivity, and their refusal to record their music. Here lies an inherit paradox
in the game in the form of a trailhead or clue. On the one hand, the user is asked to seek
out and upload tributes to the band, and in doing so take up the Colors’ invitation to be
part of the band. On the other hand, if the user is really going be part of the band, he
or she must, according to the Colors philosophy, refuse to record any music at all. This
paradox, and the many like it inherent in the framework, are intended to question the
user’s notions of technology, ego, intellectual property, capitalism, and pop stardom.
This use of paradoxical situations is a technique taken directly from the legacy of
Dadaism, in particularly by artist Marcel Duchamp, to question and form a resistance
to “modernism in art, particularly in regard to the relationship between art and tech-
nology” (DADA Companion). Cage, a close friend and colleague of Duchamp, also used
this technique to great effect throughout his career, particularly in his infamous 4’33”.
Indeed one of Cage’s most favorite quotes, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it”
(Cage, John Cage Sayings), takes the form of a paradoxical “koan,” a Japanese word that
implies a formula, question, or problem that seems rational, yet has no rational solu-
tion (Berendt 1983). In 4’33” Cage uses the context of a concert theater, a place where
people go to listen to music, and provides the audience with no music at all. He makes
the audience ask the rather rhetorical question or koan “What is music?” by taking
away the very music that they came to listen to. But when sitting through the “silence,”
244    Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild

they realize that there is in fact no such thing as silence, there is sound and hence music
all around them. Similarly, in the Colors Tribute Website, the user entered the context
of the website to pay tribute to the Colors, who seem to have never existed, but have
the story, music, lyrics, and images to suggest that they do exist. This makes the user
ask the question, “What is a band?” If the user is now part of this band, then “Who
are the fans?” It is only with the users asking these questions for themselves that they
might go out and explore the answers as a group, and reap the rewards of collaboration,
described by Littleton and Miell as nothing less than “the potential to change the way
people conceive of themselves” (2004, 2).

Conclusion
Among the main goals of this project were to help users of the Colors Tribute Website
experience these ideas rather than simply be told about them, to question the very rela-
tionship they have with music, and to use creative collaboration to learn about them-
selves and those to whom are connected. The Colors were not just the creation of those
behind this project. They were a constantly evolving collaborative work in progress.
Each of the Colors’ stories on the Tribute Website could be compared to a Wikipedia
article, “a process, not a product [that] is never finished” (Shirky 2008, 119). Like
Wikipedia, the Colors Tribute Website had a reward system put in place for each story,
where those users who are the most obsessive about a particular phase of the Colors’
career will win power over that story, although this power was always contingent and
fragile. Most of stories on the Colors Tribute Website were meant to simply entertain
and facilitate small collaborations, although some may have inspired the user into look-
ing at things in a new way, but once put together, these stories form a vast collaborative
ethos that, like Wikipedia, embodies and experiments “with the utopian notions asso-
ciated with Internet group behavior” (Rafaeli and Ariel 2008, 2). Indeed, it is surprising
how quickly utopian notions of the Internet have been set aside or simply forgotten. Yet
is really hasn’t been all that long since the usually rigid and staid Al Gore counseled us
that the users of the “Information Superhighway,” as it was once called, will

entertain as well as inform. More importantly, they will educate, promote democ-
racy, and save lives . . . [they will] renew community by strengthening the bonds that
connect us to the wider social world while simultaneously increasing our power in
that world. (Gore, 1993, cited in Smith and Kollock 1999, 4)

The Colors Tribute Website was a celebration of our willingness to exercise our con-
sumerist power to trade in the power of creative collaboration. When a user contrib-
uted a creative idea to the hub, he or she laid it open to anyone on the site to transform,
append, or ignore as they pleased. The user relinquished any permanent authority or
ownership over that idea. The idea no longer belonged to him or her, it belonged to
no one and everyone at the same time. There was no facility to monetize anything
 “We Are, The Colors”    245

submitted to the site, and no efforts were ever made to do so. Part of the experimental
nature of the Colors Tribute Website was to see what kind of music would be added to
the hub, given that no one could take ownership or financial claim over the work they
uploaded. Those who contributed a work had to experience the notion of process over
product and the feeling of detaching their ego from their piece of art. The creator of
the work also had to realize that in return for contributing creatively to the hub, he or
she could take inspiration from any of the other works on the hub, for free, as long as
it remained part of the hub. Users had no experts or professionals guiding their experi-
ence on the hub. They had to make up their own minds about what they value and what
they liked or cared about (Boon, 2009), ideally coming to the conclusion that Cage
reached when he claimed that

our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest
improvements in creation but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which
is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act
of its own accord. (Cage, John Cage Quotes)

We understand that utopian claims of this sort can and probably should be taken with
a great deal of skepticism. There have been far too many cyber utopians shilling their
way through the corporate lecture circuit and blogging their latest book-length prog-
nostications up the bestseller lists not to feel at least a little bit suspicious of the direc-
tion Web 2.0 can appear to be taking. These digital impresarios are able to translate
their reputational advantages into a comfortable existence as seers, if not doers. One
might suggest that, in the same way, the Colors Tribute Website might have afforded
the same opportunities to accrue reputational and cultural capital, despite the lack of
any actual money ever changing hands. But this project was meant, at the very least,
to provoke a challenge, if not a counterexample, to the often far-too-simple equation
that necessarily and casually links the elusive abstractions of cultural capital with some
inevitable payoff in actual money. As we have noted many times, this was a deliberately
and unreasonably idealistic project. It was meant to create a structured space for people
to use as they pleased. It has its contradictions, to be sure; we hope we have cited them
honestly and clearly.
Something did happen because of the Colors project that suggests we have cause for
some optimism. As a result of the live shows, other musicians beyond those involved in
the live show contributed to the project. Artists also started creating old poster designs,
and writers started making up stories. The Colors were becoming a tool for creative
collaboration beyond the control of the people who started the project. The creativity
did flow. What had begun as a tool for creating interactivity within a musical game
piece performed in a traditional music venue expanded to become a musical game
piece in and of itself, to be played and performed anywhere. The audience, or now per-
haps a more appropriate title would be “the fandom,” did construct not only a piece of
music, but a whole wealth of music, and all the stories and other art forms that go with
the construction of a band. The Colors had become a collaborative story of a band, and
246    Alon Ilsar and Charles Fairchild

a fandom had formed with no real producer. The people who started this project did
so because they wanted that elusive something else, a shimmering vision of a different
way of relating to each other through other people’s music. In this case, they themselves
must come face to face with the self-conscious acknowledgment that there is nothing
in the middle of the circle of Colors fans holding things together except themselves.

References
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 chapter 14

Music in Perpet ua l  Beta

Composition, Remediation, and “Closure”

Paul Draper and Frank Millward

We, the authors of this article, have strikingly similar histories in that for the earlier
part of our professional careers we worked in composition, performance, recording,
and film industries—sometimes together, more often not. Our latter “second lives”
involved a shift into the higher education sector to assume teaching and research
responsibilities in these same musical fields. We are now both university academics,
one (musician “AU,” as explained in the section “Phase Spaces”) located in an Australian
conservatorium, the other (“UK”) at a British fine art school. We are “boomers” who
have transitioned the so-called dot-com bubble, and throughout this piece we there-
fore incorporate related reflexive insights where useful. Accordingly we firstly present
a brief review of our interpretations of recent music-making history before turning to
frame the exact aims for this project. As ever, we continue to create original music in
all its guises and as such our focus is practice-based, that is, our work is concerned with
the deeper understanding of our own music making.

Notions of Virtual

In our earlier freelance careers during the 1970s and 1980s, we spent much time in com-
mercial recording studios, composing, tracking, producing, and performing as session
players. The rise of global music industries evolved a widespread doxa of process, func-
tion, and form with recordings now as virtual music, thus propelling quite a different
relationship with audiences from that before the invention of the phonograph in the
late 1800s. Numerous commentators have offered insights into such seminal changes
across the twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1968) to a plethora of reevaluations in recent times
where some infer a return to form; that is, barring only quite recent activity, music has
 Music in Perpetual Beta    249

always been ephemeral, noncapturable, social, and live (Sterne 1993). Yokai Benkler
writes,

Music in the nineteenth century was largely a relational good. It was something
people did in the physical presence of each other . . . a new, more passive relation-
ship to played music was made possible in reliance on the high-capital require-
ments of recording, copying, and distributing specific instantiations of recorded
music—records. (2006, 51–52)

Yet access to recorded sound forever changed musicianship; artists reflected on record-
ings in unexpected ways because until this point in all of history, musicians never had
the opportunity to relisten to their own performances. This fundamentally altered how
we approached our craft to accentuate new techniques, and to develop performance
styles or instruments and sound sources based on this artificial representation of music
(Chanan 1994). A culture of interpretation and improvisation evolved and prospered
through an aural tradition of sound recordings that could be easily shared and mim-
icked irrespective of literacy or social setting. In parallel, until the early twenty-first
century, recording and publishing industries increased their stranglehold on this same
dissemination of most, if not all, musical products. Of course we saw this as a fine thing,
given that a significant share of our income was derived from royalties, original scores,
and commission fees. However a perfect storm was coming, and with the launch of the
first CD in 1982 (Billy Joel’s 52nd Street), the “digital genie” was let out of the bottle, to
be soon followed by Internet file sharing and the slow death of the professional music
world as we knew it. Virtual music became viral.
Christopher Small’s Musicking:  The Meanings of Performing and Listening (1998)
reminds us that music is not a thing but rather an activity, where he outlines a theory
of “musicking” as a verb to encompass all musical practices. Similarly in Noise:  The
Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali (1985) asserts that music is both a mirror and
a prophecy, a vision of a future in which he outlines revised implications for “compos-
ing.” Like Small’s musicking, Attali presents music as action:

Composition thus appears as a negation of the division of roles and labor as con-
structed by the old codes . . . to listen to music in the network of composition is to
rewrite it: to put music into operation, to draw it toward an unknown praxis. . . .
The listener is the operator . . . to compose is to take pleasure in the instruments,
the tools of communication, in use-time and exchange-time as lived and no longer
as stockpiled. (ibid., 135)

By the 1990s increasingly powerful computers began to model many of the attributes of
the recording studio and its divisions of labor within software. We began to feel the pull
of independent, home studio production along with experimentation in pattern-based
sequencing, the nonlinear remix, and early file sharing as musical collaboration. This
quickly became standardized, and the modern software format was born: a tape-based
workflow emulation to include transport, punch-in, and the familiar horizontal time
250    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

and vertical track axes. With very few exceptions, every contemporary digital audio
workstation (DAW) now follows a skeuomorphic aesthetic resplendent with drop
shadow, wood trim, metal fascia, meters, and rotary knobs—virtual music as record-
ings generated in bedroom-based DAWs as virtual instruments and virtual studios.
Similar to the impact of the phonograph on contemporary musicianship, DAWs
allow the manipulation of musical attributes: pitch, timbre, tempo, dynamics, acous-
tics, and arrangement are all central to music making, yet until only quite recently,
independent musicians never had the opportunity to interact so immediately in the
creation of their own works. Production tools are modeled within software to enhance
visual literacies where musicians may directly manipulate sound via score, waveforms,
pianola-roll editing, synthesis, sound processing, and automation. Digital editing is
exponentially more powerful and immediate than earlier Fordist recording assembly
lines; we can now arrange, remix, and undo “on the fly” and so random-access produc-
tion truly allows improvisation, composition, performance, and listening all to become
a fluid and interactive process.

Rethinking Music Making

Historically, composers have achieved by additive construction. Their training has

centered on the control of clearly characterized relationships that were built up
according to prevailing values and techniques. . . . We can now begin with a sur-
feit. Such abundance is perhaps the most genuinely new resource with which we
are faced. Now, in a demanding, clangorous environment, one may select rather
than construct, sample differently, rather than develop. Working in this way, one
could seek an enlarged sensitivity to trends and concurrent streams of eventuation.
(Reynolds 2005, 158)

Speaking of the implications of abundance, this extract from Roger Reynolds’s insight-
ful Mind Models (2005) strikes a resonant chord. Certainly contemporary musicians
are now able to access an almost infinite range of information, technologies, and rhi-
zomatic operating arrangements. Elsewhere, much thought has been devoted to “net-
worked music” (for example, Renaud, Carot, and Rebelo 2007) but notably there is a
fascination in solving the problems associated with latency in order to “get as close as
having geographically displaced musicians feel like they are playing in the same space”
(ibid., 1). Just like the DAW emulations, burgeoning nostalgia and celebrity industries
continue to remind and impose certain preconceptions on music making despite a
multitude of new opportunities that are available.
To be specific: when we play together in the same physical space, “in the moment(s)”
happen together quickly, apparently simultaneously, but most evident in significant
improvisational flashes of performance pleasure as often en route to formalized arti-
facts as compositions. It is the transitional moments in these interactions that David
Borgo argues are centrally important to what he terms “decisive musical phase spaces”
 Music in Perpetual Beta    251

(2007, 62) of negotiation, response, direction, and form, which “[appear] to be both
locally unstable and, in intriguing ways, globally comprehensible” (ibid.). In our expe-
rience this is variously driven by context, for example, in concert performance—by
sound, staging, eye contact, audience interaction, adrenalin, and so forth. In the record-
ing studio, although under the microscope a little more, we are still informed by live
negotiations with musicians, producers, engineers, and instantaneous acts of “punch-
in, punch-out.” With virtual networks, then, what other dynamics might apply?
In this project we wish to both investigate and disrupt this. Broadly, we draw on
what Borgo refers to as the “phase space of improvisation” (ibid., 69)  to explore a
number of our own file exchange experiments as a multidimensional map or geom-
etry of possibilities. However, aspects of Borgo’s context differ notably from our proj-
ect here: (1) phase spaces and their significant “transitional moments” are seen as live,
together; and (2) recordings (and notation) have an ambivalent relationship with the
improvisation traditions whose essential attributes are spontaneous, embodied, and
elusive. Therefore, by deliberately positioning physical separation and time displace-
ment between us as a feature, we wonder if and how psychological challenges might
mitigate otherwise because the usual complementary modal indicators are missing.
We are intrigued about how interactions might alter—simultaneous, out-of-sync,
or otherwise—or effect our performance roles, proactivity, reactions, and of course
the music that would be “composed” in the process. In this case, then, asynchronous
Internet collaboration is framed as a platform to undertake our research-on-praxis.
Our overarching inquiry is concerned with “slowing down” to better understand our
music-making processes through development of new music across times zones, work-
ing environments, or technical boundaries.
Our exchange framework remediates familiar musical accoutrements, including
recordings of guitars, keyboards, samples, and so on. However, even though both our
home studios are reasonably well resourced, equipment and DAWs are unalike, there-
fore encouraging transparent technical arrangements. This is accomplished by borrow-
ing from film sound traditions through the assembly of certain submixes into audio
“stems” to be exchanged. Each file share then becomes part of an action cycle, a viral
process where calls and responses can be taken up, added to, cut, pasted, or reordered
to be restemmed and cycled forward to indeterminate outcomes.

Phase Spaces

In order to establish an “insider” sense of the interactions that occurred throughout the
six months of exchanges, relevant material is presented in first-person diary form and
labeled as musicians “AU” and “UK.” Interspersed with this are a number of interludes
where we join and register to reflect from time to time. In all, six phases of the process
have been collated and identified throughout, and where useful, indicative renderings
have been made available online as sound files (see Audiovisual Material).
252    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

#1: Setting the Stage
UK:  I take the initiative and use field recordings, found sounds, voice recordings,
and studio recordings of piano pieces I had previously written and produced
as standalone works. I send these as a series of three audio files to AU as email
attachments over time.
AU:  I open the first piece, Beast in Swamp , to find an interesting but abstract
soundscape—evocative, but within itself a little repetitious; predominantly
synthesizer together with samples; and overall, perhaps inviting a very specific
kind of response? To this point, the only explicit communication about any
so-called intent was in the sound recording itself. My response becomes one of
“record production,” that is, to resequence and add some variants on form, in
some cases work up a kit/percussion groove, add a few samples here and there,
or some guitar playing. Overall, perhaps a return to form—to mix and produce a
track that mimics my recording studio methods.
UK:  When I hear Swamp Thing returned with guitar added I am perplexed as
to why the strength of my original idea had not endured but had apparently been
appropriated to service a totally new work. The piece had gone from ambient
sound art to guitar feature and my first thoughts are about loss of control. As
a composer and producer I have lived in the world of making work where the
choice of its final framing was always mine. In exchange mode, once a track
leaves “home” it is inevitable that it be “used” or become part of something else.
I do not add anything to this first exchange, but instead send another track, Mind
The Gap  .
AU:  Swamp Thing is the most satisfying to me in terms of my own approach,
notable in that once “arranged” or remixed, it sets up a space to allow me to
overdub a range of guitar improvisations. For me, all three tracks imply a film
sound space. The pieces do not go any further than a single exchange, rather, they
provide a staging post for thinking and talking a little more about how we are to
proceed.
UK:  Mind the Gap (again) was returned with new material added—beats
and some string samples toward the end of the piece. My thoughts are that the
original soundscape nature of the track in this case had been progressed. Again,
I do not add further but send yet another piece, Not Much Changes the Beat .
This is again returned enhanced, introduction extended, samples added . These
initial exchanges make me think about the nature of the process more thoroughly
and I decide that the giving up of expectations as to outcome is essential. Next
therefore, I plan to send raw materials—tracks that are not produced, but rather
one-off improvisations recorded direct to disk.

Given AU’s research leave in early 2012, we spent a week together in England to work-
shop and refine some ideas as to how to further progress our project. This included
agreement about technical arrangements for larger files via YouSendIt, file formats,
sample rates, and so forth, with the supposition that early (and smaller) audio codec
stems be later replaced with full bandwidth material—at this time, perhaps an unspo-
ken expectation of commercial dissemination in one way or another? For the next
 Music in Perpetual Beta    253

iteration we decided to focus on musical improvisation, while doing our best to attend
to record-keeping protocols in mind of tracking the interactions as data with later
research publications in mind.

#2: Improvisation Exchanges
AU:  On returning to Australia from two months in Britain and Europe, I set
to work in my home studio by quickly recording a number of live guitar
improvisations. These imagine my various travel experiences while also seeking
to communicate with both new and old friends. As yet unknown to UK, there is
now a wider group of colleagues about to participate in the asynchronous musical
experiments. My recordings go out into the world, come back and shape up
according to various musical themes. I send one of these, Nice to Be Home (solo)
 to UK.
UK:  I play and record my response without pre-listening to the track in support of
the idea of performing in a kind of virtual mode. I imagine that I am interacting
with AU playing face to face. However, it quickly becomes clear that the
interaction is one way—I am improvising to a “backing track” in playback mode.
AU does not and cannot interactively respond. It strikes me that—unlike Borgo’s
idea that the critical moments in an improvisation occur in those negotiations
and transactions that have an impact on the music being made by propelling
it into new domains or directions—in our case, these very phase spaces are
displaced via asynchronous virtual performances now, in fact, in an “out of
phase” space.

When we examine all the sound file variants involved in the Nice to Be Home series
(14.2.1a, 14.2.1b, 14.2.1c), the development of ideas can be clearly traced. The beginning
of UK’s first response Nice to Be Home (underscore) , for example, was devised to
answer as a synthesizer and rhythm bed. Overall, there was a surfeit of material to offer
options for “pick and remix” to produce further workable outcomes. Exchange stems
were edited, sampled, processed, and rendered into a varied array of possible “finished”
tracks, Nice to Be Home (remix) being just one variant. This reminded us of times
working as producers in studios when we hired musicians and singers to arrive one
after another to contribute to what was preprogrammed on a sequencer—the additive
processes of commercial structuring in a Fordist production line. Had we in fact always
worked in the virtual?

UK:  My reactive response is to play into this process. Next, I record a blues, CageN
—three parts consisting of harp (mouth organ), accordion, and keyboard
synthesizer to provide a bass and drum groove under. The combination is
deliberately quirky to say the least—not a strict blues, not always in strict time,
not at all “produced.” Each track is a first take overdub, and notably for me the
(first laid) accordion part is recorded by playing it as a percussion instrument,
using the pulsation of the bellows to make a rhythm bed.
254    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

AU:  Somewhat surprised, I felt that a new dimension had been introduced in
this “retro” blues approach and for some reason I begin to decrease the tempo
for each iteration. Being a recognizable R&B form, to me this seemed a little
more profound as I continued to slow it down over exchanges, instruments
were removed, new ones introduced and in these ways different kinds of
remixes emerged. Son of CageN with a country influence, and the final
slowest variant as Son of the Son of CageN , an earthy, blues jam with classic
nasty telecaster, roaring Hammond organ, and funky back beat (the latter,
admittedly, programmed on a virtual Native Instruments drum kit).
UK:  The transformation is disappointingly more of the same for me, more
Ford in the record production assembly line. That said, it sounds good but
simultaneously loses all manner of quirky. Most important for me is the loss of
what I might call “analogue feel”—the accordion breathing with all its timing
imperfections and implied humanity.

When considering the real versus virtual, we understand that “the virtual” does not
always translate individuality or the identity of “the real” in all its idiosyncrasies. What
becomes important is to consider the structural limitations rendered in the virtual,
how the real and virtual continue to conflate in our perception, and how we learn to
accommodate their coexistence. These thoughts return us to the idea of abundance
(Reynolds 2005) and how we now feel inundated with virtual objects and their many
echoes, in digital phase “n”—covers of covers of covers. The original musicking is easily
forgotten or buried in unheard spaces and file shares.

#3: I Feel Like I’m Making a Record!

Something else began to happen by this point—a niggle, something not quite right
in the communications, and to date we were perhaps still being a little too (distance/
virtual) polite while simultaneously “following our noses” in the tradition of impro-
visation. It also began to get much busier for both of us: UK with a number of other
demanding artistic projects in play, AU in receiving and interacting with other dis-
tance musical responses to a range of materials. Versioning of stem exchanges became
a major issue to manage, and because of similar time and work displacements for oth-
ers, a number of arrangements for a single theme tended to be in play simultaneously.
Although a degree of systematization was useful in terms of the analysis presented here,
Small’s idea of musicking (1998) in conjunction with distance proved to be unwieldy.
Asynchronicity now meant more than simply file sharing across time zones; all of our
own local imperatives, displacements, multitasking in parallel projects, and work com-
mitments came to bear.

AU:  I begin to send stems to UK that include inputs from other musicians, in
particular, now from Prague didgeridoo player DB whom I’d met on my recent
trip. In the case of Pulse Two , DB’s solo piece was reworked over time as
 Music in Perpetual Beta    255

Pulse Two (remix) with electric guitar, audio loops, new arrangements, and
electronic rhythm effects from another virtual collaborator, drummer BP in
Australia. Various stems and versions were sent back and forth to UK, who
returned keyboard parts and atmospheric synthesizer pads. Go Fish (Pulse Two
remix-remix) is another variation, its title deliberately intended to convey its
exploration of asynchronous inputs and remixes. By using the stem approach
to mute key parts, here I intend to recognize the compositional inputs of all
collaborators, albeit tacit or implied as influential “shadows” in order to create a
new work.
UK:  All of this is intriguing, novel, but overall somewhat confusing given these
new pieces appear without warning. Why is there didgeridoo? And AU says he’s
from Prague? These things are changing shape far too often and is beginning
to feel like some recording studio project. I dutifully respond at first, somewhat
preoccupied with a couple of other important projects I have on at my university.
Nonetheless, this work now seems to be tending to a one-way conversation. Am
I now only a session musician?

Around this time, UK finally exclaimed, “I feel like I’m making a bloody record!”—a
huge surprise to AU, who was enthusiastically carrying along doing exactly this, true to
the rather forceful kinetics of local academic/professional setting as a record producer.
We began to talk and reframe our thoughts once more via a series of Skype exchanges.
What came to our attention were the other asynchronous aspects of our distance rela-
tionship, which pre-dated this project, that is, in relation to our respective life experi-
ences, which had continued to shape our creative practices since working together in
Australia now more than a decade ago. Although AU continued to work in conserva-
toire recording studios, UK had transitioned into a school of fine art. It became clear
that UK’s intentions were to explore creative communication more abstractly than AU
had first imagined. UK’s provocation was now to interact via sound communication
only, and most notably different for this next phase space, not to multitrack, not to mix
things together, not to “make a record.” The project proceeded anew.

#4: No Mix
UK:  I record a track in my DAW using two record players working together, one
an old 78rpm windup, the other a classic 1960s auto drop-down player. On the
78rpm turntable I played e Strano from La Traviata, on the other I simultaneously
recorded a record dropping followed by the needle at the end of the recording
repeating. The length of the recording was determined by the wind down of the
78 player, that is, until it stopped after an appropriate decelerando. I attach and
send as e Strano (question)  to AU.
AU:  It turns out that this first track in the series is attached to an email where the
subject field and text have little to do with the file itself (another topic altogether).
I don’t understand the Italian title (prophetically translating as “made more
strange and illogical”). On the face of it, this is a 78rpm recording of a female
256    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

opera singer, complete with needle drop and perpetually bumping turntable
arm at end, the unexplained Italian lyrics in the later body of email. To which
I respond, “scratchy old record—NFI!” (no-f-idea what you mean).
UK:  Oh, “not-f-interested” . . . never mind then.

And so this exchange temporarily stalls. Despite our best planning, email commu-
nications often went awry. Conversations, attachments, subject fields, intentions,
competing demands all were at odds, it would seem, and only after some detailed ret-
rospective analysis did we begin to make better sense of this, and indeed “sharpen up
our act.” A magnification of explicitness in all email communications would seem to be
de rigueur for such distance work and especially in light of the multiple functions that
email now takes—from sheer spam to work demands to the eventual de-sensitization
that would seem to occur.

AU:  I finally respond to e Strano (question) and indeed find this to be a rather
liberating and enjoyable experience. I lay up UK’s track in my DAW and then
follow the time axis in a conventional way, by adding samples, recordings, and
overall form that parallel the original—in this case not via obvious musical or
sound arrangement, but in terms of what sort of abstract associations come to
mind. Like a conversation perhaps, we don’t talk at the same time. UK’s first stem
is muted and I return as e Strano (answer) .
UK:  I love this! This is a very different kind of sonic experience from the
others—more immersive in nature. It draws one into a narrative waiting to be
created by the listener. To listen and in the mind’s eye see a virtual time and space
made in some way real by the attributes of a sonic image. This time I include
some subtle references to the early stems, both from this phase space and earlier
as e Strano (conversation) .

This third and final item in the series we found enlightening, and hope sets the stage
for a future phase that offers much by way of improvisational/compositional process. It
takes its stem ancestry into account by referencing these in subsequent iterations and,
somewhat surprisingly, by also drawing on our first encounters, in particular certain
elements of Swamp Thing . However, where earlier spaces were more about impro-
visations being summed and remixed into “songs” via an additive process, this space
became a generative one, remediated less so by technical means but more so via impli-
cation and explorations of the imagination.
The next two phases are what might be best termed “outliers.” In terms of the text
here, this is necessarily linear as a traditional research vehicle (always a representa-
tional dilemma in our experience when attempting to write up interactive and unfold-
ing practice-based work). However, we position these insights last in the series of phase
spaces because they represent additional considerations and possible implications for
our future work.
 Music in Perpetual Beta    257

#5: A Brief Encounter with Social Networking

Dub 4 was a simple improvisation of groove, synth, and FX sent from AU to UK.
At a later point some electric piano reactions came back during the “#3 Feel Like I’m
Making a Record” moments. Like earlier approaches, this in turn became a remix where
some of the original parts were removed, while UK’s new parts became the basis for a
new form and repeating structure. The parts were manipulated in length, repetition,
location, and pitch to do so via Dub 5 . At this point our own exchanges were paused
while we considered possibilities for the so-called cloud DAW (Home Studio Producer
2012). Dub 5 stems were uploaded to Ohm Studio (2012), a French-based initiative at
the forefront of a trend that some commentators consider to be “the best model of ‘the
studio’ that we presently have for confronting the new economic and cultural realities
at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (Théberge 2012, 90). That is, Ohm Studio
offers sophisticated options for multitrack projects where hybrid DAW-social-network
technologies allow versioning, mixing, multiway chat, and project management across
an international network of musical inputs.
This was an option we had assumed, perhaps deriving from media fascination
about recording artists offering audio tracks to the Internet for remix by audiences
(for example, Nine Inch Nails Remixes, 2013). However, it quickly became clear that
the interactions we received were inconsistent with our experiments here; nor did our
abstractions seem to fit well with Ohm’s mainstream populist community (“umm …
what chords are those man?”) and our now increasingly revealed tendencies to try to
“control” the situation(s). Nonetheless, this exploratory phase was indeed useful in that
it clarified that this was not a way we wished to spend our time in the shorter run given
some emerging insights (more on this later).

#6: On Live Performance

Il Polpo (the octopus) was another early project developed upon AU’s return from
England and Europe. This reflected on some of those events, including inspirational
meetings in Prague with Ph.D.  student and didgeridoo player DB, along with some
time in Venice. The music moved to its first iteration in Il Polpo (bed) with AU’s
Telecaster Thinline guitar and delay effects responded to by DB’s processed underwa-
terlike sounds, then shared with UK. This resulted in other variants, including Il Polpo 2
with UK on synthesizers and Il Polpo 3 with all performers reworked together
by AU, in an odd viral relationship with DB and UK unaware of each other’s inputs.
The final piece in the series, Il Polpo (live) , is a rendering of a much later Brisbane
concert performance by AU and the Comprovisers (2012), a four-musician ensemble
three of whom had no connection with the original project. They were given a rough
brief to interpret the original idea, then bought to bear their own improvisations via
258    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

prepared piano, iPad sampler, guzheng, and AU’s performance on the same Telecaster
as acknowledging a link to the first bed .
Of all the spaces explored throughout, this trajectory had the greatest pull and sat-
isfaction for both authors. In recent face-to-face interactions in Britain, we easily and
comfortably returned to form in improvisation/performance events. This returns us
to important considerations in that many of our composition, production, and virtual
interchanges (both here and in the past) may have in fact been creative preparation
for relinquished control, challenge, and further inspiration via live events. “Closure”
would seem unlikely because we remain in transition between the digital-as-virtual
and analogue-as-real—composition/control versus interpretation/reaction—the music
further remediated across ensemble and audience contexts and increasing our access to
artistic resources, reflections, and influences.

Reflections and Conclusions

Overall, we believe that our virtual phase spaces simultaneously challenged and clarified
many of our understandings, not only about the musical processes and outputs, but as a
reexamination of our personal identities as musicians. Consequently we begin to frame
additional considerations: Where were the connections? What is a composer? Why were
we sending audio files off into the ether? Overall it would seem that whereas we needed
a sense of artistic play and trust “in the process of becoming,” when disconnected there
were few familiar collaborative markers to support our willingness. How might “we”
trump the “I”? When we exchange files, do we offer an option of closure to the other, or
are the endless digital iterations where we seek to understand what Marshall McLuhan
once described as “the difference between marching soldiers and ballet” (1964, 161)? On
the basis of our early work in this project, we now explore these ideas further and begin
to theorize on this exchange with future collaborations in mind.

Disrupting a Fantasy of Control

In the past, our primary mode of operation had to do with finishing and perfecting,
being in control of the outcome, and making good on a final mix for the record com-
pany, television, or film paycheck as driver. In this project, somewhat different from
earlier form, we had no destination in mind other than interaction and analysis. In the
“warts ‘n’ all” presented here, what became most fascinating to us was that the asyn-
chronous disruption of implied musical/professional exchanges consistently forced a
retreat into a “fantasy of control” (Auslander 2013, July 7) via older variants of self-
image. For UK, this led to thoughts and assertions about exactly what a composer is
and, somehow, that AU’s responses were interfering with these (formerly solo) aspira-
tions, for example:
 Music in Perpetual Beta    259

uk: When I hear Swamp Thing returned with guitar added I am perplexed as
to why the strength of my original idea had not endured but had apparently been
appropriated to service a totally new work. The piece had gone from ambient
sound art to guitar feature and my first thoughts are about loss of control.

On the other hand, when presented with an abstract “No Mix” musical commen-
tary, this kind of material was acceptable because it positions the “listener” as virtual
“composer.”

UK:  This is a very different kind of sonic experience from the others. . . . It draws
one into a narrative waiting to be created by the listener. To listen and in the
mind’s eye see a virtual time and space made in some way real by the attributes of
a sonic image.

Similarly for AU, many of the assumptions, twists, and turns appear to have stemmed
from previously working as a sound engineer and record producer on past projects
where “collaborative composition” often arose in the context of popular music: band
members and producers co-contribute ideas in multitracking processes to often share
credits and points in recorded works. Closure is to be achieved and the work may be
transactionable. Displaced by distance, AU’s workflow consequently ran on autopilot,
for example:

AU:  Swamp Thing is the most satisfying to me in terms of my own approach,

notable in that once “arranged” or remixed, it sets up a space to allow me to
overdub a range of guitar improvisations. For me, all three tracks imply a film
sound space (and methods).
AU:  I begin to send stems to UK that include inputs from other musicians . . .

As discussed earlier, it was exactly these solo expectations and habitual patterns that
led to the “I feel like I’m making a bloody record!” moment. Subsequent renegotiation
usefully led to a number of other experimental phases, but what is most revealing here
is that without so many of the usual complementary modal indicators, we lost much
in what was so central to our usual face-to-face musicking. As Borgo (2006) suggests,
there was no “sync.” When we improvise together the outcome may indeed become
“final” or a “composition,” but there is little questioning about authorship or input. The
decision-making processes are fluid, seemingly automatic. Similarly, when we perform
live together, “closure” may appear as such to the concert audience, but we embrace
each iteration as part of an artistic continuum that endlessly evolves.

On Musicians and Machines

Here we are drawn to reflect on our relationships with our instruments. In truth, by
engaging in distance, time-delayed exchanges, our musicking became more concerned
260    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

with walking into our bedroom studios alone, powering up the equipment, and then
attempting to invoke intimate creative conversations with our DAWs. This is not to say
that we were in any way unfamiliar with any of the technological actors that constituted
our “recording studios.” To the contrary, we were very comfortable and experienced
with such tools for professional music making (and higher education for that mat-
ter). Rather, it was our asynchronicity that increasingly became the single, confounding
concern for this project. Otto Laske’s thoughts about “composition with computers as
objectifying compositional process” (1999, 50) reflect on early computer music ideas
that have resonance. It (a computer system) imagines us by externalizing constraints
that are otherwise implicit, it reveals interactions that otherwise cannot be distinguished
and therefore are effectively invisible, it “force[s]‌us to objectify ourselves by making
us explicitly encode the processes by which goals and designs are to be imagined and
realized” (ibid., 50). It was within the DAW where our improvisation/composition took
place—between the musician and machine, then between machines and translational
network agents with “no compulsory paths, no strategically positioned nodes” (Latour
1999, 369) and where “the surface ‘in between’ networks is either connected … or non-
existing” (ibid.). Embedded within our choices were tacit preconceptions and individ-
ual cultural/professional preferences that marked our decisions—what was kept, what
was considered, what annoyed. The machine in its complex manifestation was the stu-
dio, and it is within this virtual space that “collaborative” work took place as connected
negotiations between musician, machine, and its noises, but where the distant human
partner in fact ceased to exist, the work itself as “intermundane … paradoxically, both
reciprocal exchange and one-way entombment” (Stanyek and Piekut 2010, 34–35).

The Implications of Abundance

In parallel to practice-based considerations, we are led to consider aspects of the
wider, rhizomatic digital culture within which we exist (if not entirely “operate”). Like
others, we share a changing set of circumstances when creating with digital cloning
technologies and exchange. Although the world-of-closure tradition continues to
operate through music-as-product, the experience of musicking available to so many
now implies something apart from the professionalized—as empowered amateur, as
“produser” (Bruns 2009). Technology and the online experience offers to bring to
all a variable range or level of involvement where the roles of composer/performer/
listener/producer interact; ideas may be simultaneously true and untrue, virtual and
real. The traditional segmentation of the ways of thinking about sound and music is
now conflated with the notion that “a composer” may be in fact one who intentionally
relinquishes control in a world where technologies offer audiences to be collaborators.
Listening as a practice of hearing, inventing, imagining, knowing, and operating within
what Philip Auslander (Authors’ Blog) describes as “that virtual space which functions
as a stage for controlling music, its performances, and its performers, just as it also
functions as a platform in which control is diminished” (ibid.).
 Music in Perpetual Beta    261

We toyed with these ideas of musical crowdsourcing in the experimental phase #5

A Brief Encounter with Social Networking. However, given our emerging dilemmas and
conundrums about identity, control, and musical purpose, it became clear that this
was not a way we wished to proceed in the short run—there were quite enough inputs
between the two of us, and even when a controlled degree of interaction was added
from two musicians in #3 I Feel Like I’m Making a Record, this steered the project else-
where than intended. More centrally though, the process has assisted in better under-
standing how we might reflexively set boundaries to progress our work in the future.
Part of this may well include the idea of “remix” as crowdsourced, but we believe this
has very different implications from what has been explored here to date and would
consequently require thoughtful design as a specialized scenario, not the least of which
includes deeper sensitivities to a range of audiences and technologies we may wish to
engage.

Research on Praxis
Overall it would seem we have been usefully confronted with what Brian Eno once
described as a “change from an engineering paradigm, which is to say a design para-
digm, to a biological paradigm, which is an evolutionary one” (quoted in Toop 2004,
242). Our experiences of the Web 2.0 transition confirm this: pre-Internet commercial
practices fitted with the engineering paradigm as modernist approaches to compo-
sition and improvisation involving motivic linear development in realizing the con-
structs. This kind of thinking dominated twentieth-century modernism as form and
structure in composition, modality with chord scale relationships in improvisation.
The advent of electronic music and the free improvisation movement post-1945 saw the
biological paradigm ushered in with the chaotic/rhizomatic digital age.
Our well-worn neural pathways for making a record are located in the realm of the
“engineered,” while this project’s blind listening and improvised exchanges are more
akin to biological notions. Practices such as “Mail Art” (Ruud Janssen 2007), under-
taken by members of Fluxus since the 1960s, are a prophetic example of a biologi-
cal approach, while this philosophy is revisited in the more recent anti-art aesthetics
underpinning file sharing and the Free Culture and Free Music movements (McCarthy
2011). These overlapping, ongoing contexts operate simultaneously within particu-
lar time frames and phases. We find ourselves confronted by multidimensional time
and space-time propositions—phased, simultaneous, and compressed; now, then, and
future combined; polytemporal; delayed with anticipation—all measuring devices
bringing us ultimately to being “in the virtual now,” to living in concurrently phased
phenomenologies.
Both David Borgo (2010) and Jacques Attali (1985) have suggested a future where all
operators will be expected to be musical, yet where a number of orders of musicking
may coexist. In music, the sounds themselves are the first order of order. They are the
material substance of music, but as such they are subject to certain limitations imposed
262    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

by our physical realities; sounds can travel only so far before they are no longer heard,
and, as Walter Ong has suggested, “they exist only when they are going out of existence”
(quoted in Borgo 2010, 104)—and just as our work here is now committed to archive
and reflection (see Audiovisual Material). Clearly, we are led to consider our next
phase: if and how to begin afresh within a continuum that might endlessly evolve. Was
our methodology flawed? To “slow down” our interactions in order to better under-
stand our music making, we could only point to the lag/displacement within which we
were operating, suspended between two paradigms, one designed, one evolutionary.
Or is this in fact an ideal premise for clarifying exactly this dilemma and continue to
advance our praxis, that is, “the relationship between theory and application that keeps
both vivid, relevant and truthful” (Wilson 1994, 299)?

Coda

No new work of art comes into existence . . . without an organic link to what was
created earlier. But it is equally true that a healthy conservatism must be flexible
both in terms of creation and perception, remaining equally sensitive to the old and
to the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, with-
out which no future can ever be born. At the same time the artist must not forget
that creative freedom can be dangerous, for the fewer artistic limitations he imposes
on his own work, the less chance he has for artistic success. The loss of a responsible
organizing force weakens or even ruins the structure, the meaning and the ultimate
value of a work of art. (Solzhenitsyn 1995, 3)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s insightful thoughts remind us of ancient crafts and techniques

so appropriate to the world of music, embedded as they are in longstanding composi-
tional practices, yet which we might somehow forget in the postmodern world. Even
though creative expression-as-product may become disconnected from the “author,”
this should by no means detract from the work of art in an age of remediation. When
we return to the idea of “us” there is indeed a developed sense of ongoingness about
the work we have made together. As a result of this exploratory project, we believe that
a future resides in acknowledging our interdisciplinary prejudices as musicians while
continuously reconsidering our position as “listeners.”
We require boundaries—and even more so in a world of infinite/easy selection. The
organizing force will therefore become small tasks, explicit outcomes, and a finite selec-
tion of materials, again so reminiscent of our former lives, where commercial confines
drove the projects. We will indeed continue to make “records” as Internet works, as
a massaged and finessed series of produced materials as we best might accomplish.
Personally: valuable as representative work and milestones of endeavor are offered to
our audiences and peers, sometimes as proof of accomplishment but also as creative
pleasure in artistic communication. We will continue to perform and improvise, live
 Music in Perpetual Beta    263

and in concert where we ever seek to interrogate and reinvent our praxis. Like bands
of old, this will progress along familiar lines of identity or project concept. Whatever
the developments, what has changed is how we now understand contemporary asyn-
chronicity as an extension of musical practice. On this basis we will variously return
to “the brief,” minimalist compositional designs, improvising music to picture, the
one-call response approach that we found rewarding in two of our experiments here.
DAW-n is an ongoing provocation, a virtual partner, and our work continues without
closure.

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Theory and History of Literature,
Vol. 16), trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Auslander, Philip. 2013. “Music and Virtuality:  A  Virtual Book Chapter,” July 7 [Weblog]
https://musicvirtuality.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/music-and-virtuality-a-virtual-book-
chapter (accessed Aug. 28, 2013).
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In
Illuminations:  Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 217–252.
New York: Schocken.
Benkler, Yokai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and
Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Borgo, David. 2010. “Musicking on the Shores of Multiplicity and Complexity.” Parallax
13(4): 92–107.
———. 2006. Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age. New York: Continuum.
Bruns, Axel. 2009. “From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-led Content Creation.”
In Proceedings of Transforming Audiences, Sept. 3–4, London.
Chanan, Michael. 1994. Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian
Chant to Postmodernism. London: Verso.
The Comprovisers. 2012. Recordings and video from October 17 concert at Queensland
Conservatorium, Brisbane, Australia, http://www29.griffith.edu.au/comprovisers (accessed
Jan. 20, 2014).
Home Studio Producer. 2012. “Making Music in the Cloud,” http://www.homestudioproducer.
com/websites/making-music-in-the-cloud (accessed June 3, 2013).
Laske, Otto. 1999. Navigating New Musical Horizons: Contributions to the Study of Music and
Dance, ed. Jerry N. Tabor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. “The Trouble with Actor-Network Theory.” Soziale Welt 47: 369–381.
McCarthy, Alison. 2011. “The Future of Free Music Culture.” Hypebot.com, http://www.hype-
bot.com/hypebot/2011/02/free-culture.html (accessed Mar. 3, 2013).
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. London: Routledge.
Nine Inch Nails Remixes. 2013. Originally developed by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails,
http://www.ninremixes.com (accessed Nov. 24, 2013).
Ohm Studio. 2012. A Real-Time Collaborative DAW (hosted on local PC, stored in the cloud),
http://www.ohmstudio.com (accessed June 2, 2013).
264    Paul Draper and Frank Millward

Renaud, Alain, Alexander Carot, and Pedro Rebelo. 2007. “Networked Music Performance: State
of the Art.” In Proceedings of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) 30th Conference on
Intelligent Audio Environments, Mar. 15–17, Saariselkä, Finland.
Reynolds, Roger. 2005. Mind Models: New Forms of Musical Experience. New York: Routledge.
Ruud Janssen, B. (2007). “Short Statements About Mail-Art.” Breda, Netherlands: Tam, http://
www.iuoma.org/folder_mail_art_6_fluxus_and_mail-art.pdf (accessed Aug. 15, 2013).
Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking:  The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. 1995. “The Relentless Cult of Novelty, or How to Wreck the
Century:  Rethinking Soviet Studies.” In Beyond Soviet Studies, ed. Daniel Orlovsky,
289–304. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past:  Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Théberge, Paul. 2012. “The End of the World as We Know It: The Changing Role of the Studio
in the Age of the Internet.” In The Art of Record Production, ed. Simon Frith and Simon
Zagorski-Thomas, 77–90. Surrey: Ashgate.
Toop, David. 2004. Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Wilson, Brent. G. 1994. “The Postmodern Paradigm.” In Instructional Development
Paradigms, ed. Charles R. Dills and Alexander J. Romiszowski, 297–309. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Educational Technology.

Audiovisual Material
The following excerpts are available on Companion Website.

#1:  Setting the Stage

14.1.1a Beast in Swamp
14.1.1b Swamp Thing
14.1.2a Mind the Gap
14.1.2b Mind the Gap (again)
14.1.3a Not Much Changes the Beat
14.1.3b The Beat

#2:  Improvisation Exchanges

14.2.1a Nice to Be Home (solo)
14.2.1b Nice to Be Home (underscore)
14.2.1c Nice to Be Home (a remix)
14.2.2a CageN
14.2.2b Son of CageN
14.2.2c Son of the Son of CageN
 Music in Perpetual Beta    265

#3:  I Feel Like I’m Making a Record!

14.3.1 Pulse Two
14.3.2 Pulse Two (remix)
14.3.3 Go Fish (Pulse Two remix-remix)

#4: No Mix
14.4.1 e Strano (question)
14.4.2 e Strano (answer)
14.4.3 e Strano (conversation)

#5:  A Brief Encounter with Social Networking

14.5.1 Dub 4
14.5.2 Dub 5

#6:  On Live Performance

14.6.1 Il Polpo (bed)
14.6.2 Il Polpo 2
14.6.3 Il Polpo 3
14.6.4 Il Polpo (live)
 chapter 15

J ustin Bieber Fe at u ri ng
Slipk not
Consumption as Mode of Production

Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

A musical mashup typically consists of two recognizable recordings that are synchro-
nized such that the vocal(s) of one track is or are combined with an instrumental
version of the other without significant edits.1 The ontological presence of a mashup
band is thus only to be found in the virtual domain; –that is, the artists in question
have never actually performed together. The virtual music collaborations enabled by
mashup producers invite us to encounter the musical result in ways that are very dif-
ferent from those we apply to nonvirtual music collaborations, and, as scholars, we are
therefore compelled to analyze the music differently as well. Moreover, mashup music
encourages us to rethink what musical authorship, creativity, and musicality mean to us
today. Because mashups often consist of nothing but macro-samples, and often simply
of two full-length samples that have hardly been edited at all, mashup producers have
been criticized for lacking talent and creativity; for example, McLeod writes: “Despite
my appreciation of them, I do not mean to idealize mash-ups because, as a form of
creativity, they are quite limited and limiting” (2005, 86). This perspective might also
help to explain why scholars usually approach the musical mashup from a sociological
or juridical orientation with a focus on its extramusical features, and, in turn, why ade-
quate attention has not been devoted to the aesthetics of mashup music in and of itself.2
I will begin this chapter by arguing that the proliferation of mashup music cannot
be seen in isolation from the development of a virtual music environment consist-
ing of virtual studios and virtual distribution platforms. After this contextualization
of mashup music, I will briefly discuss the music’s aesthetic in terms of the principles
underlying the music and its effects on listeners. These principles and effects will then
be considered further through my analysis of the recent mashup “Psychosocial Baby,”
produced by Steven Nguyen (aka Isosine), which combines Slipknot’s “Psychosocial”
with Justin Bieber’s “Baby.” Through this analysis, I will explore how this mashup might
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    267

generate a unique musical experience, emphasizing that part of the meaning of mash-
ups lies in their intertextual play and the matrix of significations inscribed within them.
I will then seek to assimilate the author figure in an alternative way that speaks to the
contemporary state of artistic reproduction. This chapter argues that although the dis-
tinction between consumer and producer seems to blur within this new virtual music
environment that is characterized by the aforementioned musical ecosystem, produc-
tion has not been reduced to consumption. Instead, consumption must be studied as an
important aspect of production.

Virtual Bands
in a Virtual Environment

Musicians have quoted existing music for centuries in the guises of rewriting,
re-performing, and––following the development of recording technology—copying
musical sequences into new works. The digital sampler, which was introduced in the
1980s, facilitated the technique of copying and reworking musical sound sequences
from existing recordings. Hip-hop pioneers soon embraced the sampler’s ability to
facilitate their already established practice of extracting sound sequences from existing
recordings via two turntables, which in turn guaranteed the sampler’s influence on the
genre; during the late 1980s, hip-hop recordings were characterized by sonic collages of
quotations from other music recordings. However, music-sampling activity markedly
decreased during the 1990s, when copyright holders started to (1) require higher fees for
their music when sampled, (2) bring more cases of copyright infringement into court,
and (3) insist on stricter punishments for transgressions. It soon became economically
unviable to sample other recordings legitimately, so most producers instead started
to recreate the samples in question by hiring musicians to simply mimic or quote the
sequence (this required royalties to go to the songwriters but not to the copyright hold-
ers), or they obscured the samples almost beyond recognition.
In contrast to the dominant trend of the 1990s, a second wave of sample-based music
emerged at the start of the twenty-first century. This “new wave” of sample-based music
is the result of several factors, the most prominent of which is the irreversible ero-
sion of music gatekeeping, which has long served to block the reuse of unauthorized
material. This erosion has followed on the expansion of the Internet and its new dis-
tribution platforms, including peer-to-peer (P2P) networks3 and other social network-
ing services, all of which made it much easier to share and distribute musical files. In
this new virtual environment, the sheer quantity of user-generated activity makes it
impossible for rights holders to control the distribution of their copyrighted material.
Instead of being forced to hide the use of samples by sampling only small bits or other-
wise obscuring the samples until they are practically unrecognizable, this new wave of
sample-based music is instead characterized by the frequent use of quite recognizable
268   Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

macro-samples—that is, samples of significant (and legally actionable) length.4 This

chapter focuses upon macro-sampling’s emblematic musical form, the mashup.
It was producers like Richard X (Girls on Top), Mark Vidler (Go Home Productions),
and Roy Kerr (the Freelance Hellraiser) from the UK, as well as Soulwax (2 Many DJs)
from Belgium, who ensured that mashups became a pop phenomenon at the turn of
the twenty-first century.5 If the mashup scene was initially mostly British, it soon went
global, thanks to web forums such as GYBO (Get Your Bootleg On)6 and underground
clubs devoted to mashup music.7 The mashup scene generated a lot of media atten-
tion, including reviews by major news publications such as Newsweek and the New York
Times, partly because of the tendency of mashup producers to use copyrighted material
without clearance (Shiga 2007). In the mid-2000s, in fact, several mashup producers
and distribution networks received cease-and-desist orders from various music copy-
right holders. However, such attempts to create a gatekeeping mechanism for music in
cyberspace inevitably fails, and as a consequence, the development of virtual distribu-
tion platforms and archives has given bootleg music a means of survival beyond the
various copyright jurisdictions. In fact, the cease-and-desist requirements that have
saddled particular mashup projects, such as the famous The Grey Album (2004) by
Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton),8 seem to have contributed more to the success of
mashup music than to the curtailing of its production and circulation.
The proliferation of mashup music must also be seen to be partly the result of the
increasing accessibility of user-friendly virtual music studios in the guise of cheap (or
free) DAW (digital audio workstation) programs and the increasing affordability of
powerful computer hardware. As mentioned, a mashup often implies a production
in which two recognizable recordings (or full-length samples) are synchronized in
such a way that the vocal of one works with an instrumental version of another, with-
out significant structural edits to either party. Modern DAW programs simplify the
technical aspects of creating a mashup; one can match the keys and tempi of differ-
ent tracks in almost no time at all, for example, using the software’s auto-detection
methods. Moreover, in contrast to analog speed alteration, tempo and pitch can be
digitally manipulated independently of one another, allowing the speed-altered sounds
to retain their original pitch levels or the pitch-altered sounds to maintain their original
tempo. Digital speed and pitch changes also diverge from analog operations in terms of
being able to preserve sound quality and therefore produce a realistic result. In terms of
separating the vocal tracks of a sample from the instrumental tracks, there are several
methods (such as using an EQ filter or phase inversion), but often one can locate a cap-
pella and instrumental versions of most anything on the Internet and go from there.
Such virtual studios began to encourage those who once thought of themselves as
strictly music consumers to become music producers as well. In the act of mashing two
musical tracks, the “masher” goes from being a consumer of these tracks to becoming
the producer of the mashup. Along the way, interestingly, the originators of the mashed
sources go from being the producers of their own individual music to becoming “con-
sumers” of this (now shared) altered version of their music. We are, in other words, wit-
nessing a blurring of the boundary between producer and consumer on several levels.
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    269

By relying on macro-samples, these contemporary forms of music recycling, even

more so than 1980s sampling, challenge traditional notions of authorship, creativity,
and musicianship, and mashup producers are thus often considered to be consumers
who are playing with music for fun rather than competent producers who are creating
something viable and new. One of the reasons for this might be that the musical value
criteria in play here, as well as in the discourse on popular music more generally, are
dominated by the ideology of the Western art music tradition, which is closely linked
to an author figure who is understood to be an original, virtuous, and individual genius
who creates something from scratch through sheer (even visionary) talent and manual
dexterity. If one tries to understand mashup music through this author-based lens, it
will be rashly reduced to uncreative copying, outright stealing, plagiarism, and conse-
quently copyright infringement. I believe, however, as Michel Foucault (1991 [1969])
and Roland Barthes (1977) argued in the late 1960s and mid-1970s, that the figure of
the author—and, in effect, how we understand concepts such as creativity, originality,
and musicianship—is historically conditioned and discursively defined. If the figure of
the author is a construct, then the content that we invest in it is also prone to alteration.
As Derek B. Scott points out, a new art world needs a new rationale and new stan-
dards of criticism and judgment “or its activities will not be considered art” (2008, 93).
Although mashup music does not introduce us to a wholly new art world—the idea of
collage has been manifest in music since at least the fifteenth century—the aesthetics of
mashups have not yet been properly addressed in a scholarly context (contrary to other
forms of sample-based music and to collage forms within other fields of art). The study
of mashup music makes explicit the current need to rethink and redefine the tradi-
tional notions of authorship, creativity, and musicianship; otherwise, the discourse will
continue to suggest that the music of mashup artists is, as Paul Théberge puts it, “not
only derivative but parasitic in character” (2009, 149).
Although it is true that “virtually any consumer can now play the role of producer
thanks to digital music technology,” as Michael Serazio writes (2008, 82), the pro-
duction of successful mash-ups in fact demands particular skills, although these
might be different from what we traditionally view as “musical” talents. As argued
in Brøvig-Hanssen and Harkins (2012), A+B mashups, that is, mashups consisting of
virtual collaborations between two artists and their performances, are often based on
two key concepts:  musical congruity and contextual incongruity. Mashups are often
intended to violate the conventions of otherwise established categories, such as high
and low, serious and playful, black and white, mainstream and underground, or rock
and pop. For example, mashup producers Mark Vidler and Jeremy Johnson both state
that they always try to juxtapose samples from very different musical styles (Preve
2006). And Salon journalist Roberta Cruger argues, “The more disparate the genre-
blending is, the better; the best mash-ups blend punk with funk or Top 40 with heavy
metal, boosting the tension between slick and raw” (2003). The fact that mashup
bands exist only virtually is made obvious not just by the recognizability of the indi-
vidual tracks incorporated but also by the unlikelihood that the mashed artists would
ever perform these mashups as such.
270   Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

If mashups are to be understood as more than a one-liner or act of genre-blending

bravado, however, they should also function on a musical level, establishing a musical
dialogue between the mashed tracks. If, for instance, the musical elements compete for
the listener’s attention, the aesthetic result might be the experience of hearing two col-
liding recordings rather than one coherent track. Shiga quotes one contributor to the
mashup website GYBO who points out that talent within a mashup setting is “the capac-
ity to recognize shared properties between different songs, or the capacity to reorganize
the musical and aural relations of recordings so that they sound like they are compo-
nents of the same song” (2007, 103; my emphasis). Put simply, the art in the mashup
lies often in its juxtaposition of samples to produce a coherent piece of music that at
the same time generates a feeling of incongruity. It is often the experiential doubling
of the music as simultaneously congruent (sonically, it sounds like a band performing
together) and incongruent (it parodically subverts socially constructed conceptions of
identities) that produces the richness in meaning and paradoxical effects of successful
mashups.
In what follows, I will analyze a relatively recent mashup, called “Psychosocial Baby,”
with an emphasis on both the music’s underlying principles in terms of its contextual
incongruity and musical congruity and on how this music is experienced by listeners.
I will try to demonstrate that the act of combining already existing music can be under-
stood as innovative and creative if the repeated material is selected and combined such
that it manages to put into motion a play of various meanings and associations, thus
making us experience the repetition as something old but new.

The Virtual Collaboration

between Bieber and Slipknot

Steven Nguyen, who goes by the pseudonym Isosine, released an enormously influ-
ential mashup in June 2011, as part of his bootleg album Mashup Manifesto, which he
titled “Psychosocial Baby.” As the title implies, this mashup consists of the vocal tracks
from the 2008 single “Psychosocial” (All Hope Is Gone, Roadrunner Records) by the
heavy (nu)metal band Slipknot and the instrumental tracks from the 2010 smash hit
“Baby” (My World 2.0, Island, RBMG) by the Canadian teenage-pop phenomenon
Justin Bieber. The video that features “Psychosocial Baby” has today achieved more
than fifteen million views on the audiovisual Internet platform YouTube. Since the
primary distribution channel for “Psychosocial Baby” is YouTube, my analysis of the
music of this mashup cannot be separated from the video that features it; the music and
the video were made, and, moreover, are usually experienced, as a unified piece, and
they must therefore be analyzed as such.
When mashing Slipknot’s “Psychosocial” with Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” Isosine slowed
the former slightly while raising the pitch by two semitones to make it fit with the
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    271

harmonies and tempo of the latter. The instrumentation of “Psychosocial” is filtered

out, so that only Corey Taylor’s voice can be heard (or Isosine downloaded it as an a
cappella version in the first place). “Baby” is not altered at all, it appears, except that
Bieber’s voice has been filtered out of most of the track. Structurally speaking, Isosine
has done little else to produce this mashup; both the vocal sample of “Psychosocial”
and the instrumental sample of Bieber’s “Baby” appear in their entirety. Yet through
this analysis I will try to demonstrate that the act of selecting and extracting samples, of
inhabiting and appropriating them, of decontextualizing and recontextualizing them,
is also a perfectly legitimate mode of artistic production and creation that involves both
a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation.
As mentioned, the mashup concept often seeks to exploit a contextual incongruity
between the mashed tracks in a way that associates them despite their divergence. I will
start this analysis by discussing the contextual incongruity between Slipknot and Justin
Bieber before I move on to a discussion of the musical congruity and dialogue that
exist between the mashed sources. These two perspectives inform both the aesthetic
principles lying behind the production of this mashup in particular and several other
A+B mashups more generally, and the experiential effects that these principles (and
their sonic result) generate.
Because of our general tendency to conceptualize music as a spatiotemporally coher-
ent performance produced by co-present musicians, the manifestly virtual band of
Slipknot featuring Bieber comes across, first of all, as very funny, because these per-
formers present themselves and are presented by the media (and, most important,
are usually experienced) as vastly different artists.9 Slipknot is a nu-metal band that
claims to be inspired by bands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Slayer, and Primus.
Justin Bieber, on the other hand, is a teenage pop phenomenon who has expressed his
admiration for the music of Destiny’s Child, Boyz II Men, Usher, and Michael Jackson
(Arnopp 2011, Falsani 2011). In “Psychosocial Baby,” metal collides with teen pop, but
more than that, the personas of the members of Slipknot (in particular) collide with the
persona of Justin Bieber (in particular).
In an age when most controversial and mischievous concert-stage behaviors have
become formulaic at best, Slipknot still manages to shock and offend some portion
of their listeners and spectators. This is, of course, partly due to the band members’
embrace of primal stunts in the Ozzy Osbourne tradition, such as urinating, mastur-
bating, and playing with dead animals onstage, diving from high balconies, physically
abusing themselves, throwing and shooting things at the audience, and wrecking expen-
sive equipment.10 But what is most attention grabbing is how they present themselves
as epitomizing a musical “wolfpack”11 that is out of control. The band consists of no
fewer than eight (originally nine)12 intense and violent stock characters, each of whom
wears an individually customized horror mask and coveralls marked with a number
from zero to eight. Slipknot’s music and lyrics express a dark hatred toward the world in
general, which is also reflected in their theatrical music videos of doomsday scenarios.
While Slipknot’s way of handling the world’s injustices, perceived or other-
wise, might be best described by their lyrics to the track “Surfacing” (Slipknot, 1999,
272   Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

Roadrunner/Attic/I Am)—“Fuck it all, fuck this world, fuck everything that you stand
for”—Justin Bieber has (or at least used to have) a decidedly more constructive and
politically correct approach. At the time when “Baby” was released, he usually pre-
sented himself as a polite, affectionate, and humble celebrity who occasionally hugged
reporters and fans, gave away concert tickets, and donated money to dozens of char-
ity organizations and projects. Notwithstanding his young age (he was born in 1994),
he claimed to take his responsibility as a role model for millions of teens and tweens
around the world very seriously: “It’s really easy to do something good, whether it’s
helping an old lady across the street or, you know, just doing something small for your
city, helping out picking up garbage—whatever you can do. Little things make such a
difference” (quoted in Falsani 2011, 177).13
The members of Slipknot also take their responsibility as role models very seri-
ously, but they are ciphers for a very different (sub)cultural group. For their fans, the
most important thing is that Slipknot does not sell out but continues to represent “the
others”—those who are not comfortable with society’s conventions and do not fit in
there. Their adoption of horror masks is, according to Slipknot’s main drummer, Joey
Jordison (no. 1), an attempt to confront society’s interest in the calculatedly alluring or
“perfect” (quoted in Arnopp 2011, 44). Similarly, Slipknot’s lead vocalist, Corey Taylor
(no. 8), explains the coverall numbers as a symbol for how far people take commer-
cialism:  “[We’re] basically saying:  ‘Hey, we’re a product!’ ” (quoted in Arnopp 2011,
80)  Justin Bieber’s pretty face and fashionable style sense directly validate all of the
entertainment industry’s standards that Slipknot criticizes. The cover of a 2011 issue of
the magazine Vanity Fair depicted Bieber with red lipstick kiss marks all over his face,
and that same year he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone under the headline “Super
Boy” (Falsani 2011, 115), which speaks to Bieber’s embrace of his mainstream appeal and
sweeping popularity.
Slipknot and Bieber present themselves, and are presented by the media, as opposing
stereotypes—Slipknot as the aggressive and repellent and rebellious metal band, and
Bieber as the mainstream, commercially and politically correct pop phenomenon—but
the big picture is, of course, more complex for both recording artists. This is, for exam-
ple, obvious from the fact that Bieber’s innocent teenager image, which once seemed
virtually bulletproof and as much the culmination of the system as its product, is
now starting to show cracks. Though the media, and Bieber himself, long presented
his artistic persona as humble and politically correct, as described above, the media-
constructed narrative has, during the last couple of years, realigned and now presents
a rather more rebellious Bieber than was the case when his hit “Baby” was released.
Similarly, Slipknot’s rebellious image has also been questioned; to some metal fans, the
members of Slipknot have already “sold out” by embracing nu-metal’s fusion of other
genres, such as hip-hop and pop (nu-metal is a subgenre of heavy metal and is usually
described as a gentler version of its “older brother”). Moreover, Slipknot’s attempt to
defeat the whole pop-cultural concept of image results in a conspicuous image in its
own right, and, instead of being experienced as aggressive and frightening, it might also
be considered almost cowardly to be as confrontational as they are while hidden behind
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    273

a mask. Nevertheless, it is the listener’s oversimplified assumptions about and stigma-

tization of genres and individual musicians that fuel mashup artists and their pointed
play with such stereotypical contrasts, to the delight (and edification) of mashup fans.
The stereotypical differences between the presented personas of the Slipknot mem-
bers and Bieber are reflected in the lyrics, the music, and the video of the mashup.
The introduction of “Psychosocial Baby” is taken from Bieber’s “Baby”: Bieber, who is
softly singing “a-o-a-o-a-o-a” over a riff of delayed keyboard chords played in a thin,
clavichord-inspired 1990 sound, is pictured in a bowling hall together with friends,
flirting with a girl. So far there is no hint that this will be a mashup. But just as Bieber’s
soft, prepubescent voice is to enter with the first verse of the track, we instead hear the
guttural shouting of Slipknot’s Corey Taylor. The music has not changed, so Bieber’s
vocal line might still play on in the back of our heads, with its simple, cheerful, triad-
based melody, and love-confessing lyrics. Taylor supplants this straightforward nar-
rative of teenage love with an aggressive and monotone chant about something much
darker.
In Slipknot’s “Psychosocial,” Taylor’s lyrics are supported by a deep bass, two down-
tuned high-gain electric guitars playing a space-occupying percussive riff, and a steady
and powerful drumbeat supplied by the band’s main drummer and two percussion-
ists. The mashup abandons this aggressive and forceful music for the naïve and easily
digestible teen pop music of Justin Bieber. The first verse of “Baby” consists of nothing
but the keyboard riff from the introduction (mentioned above) plus drums. In con-
trast to the massive drum sound of Slipknot’s “Psychosocial,” the drums of “Baby”—a
compressed kick drum and a house-inspired dry and loud clap-snare (as well as some
instances of a snare drum roll)—are thin and sound synthesized. The Slipknot sound
buttresses Taylor’s dark message; the Bieber sound emasculates Taylor and makes him
seem ironically displaced.
Taylor’s vocal performance is kept at its original length, for the most part.14 In the
fourth verse, Taylor’s third line, “Now there’s only emptiness… .” is replaced with
Bieber’s “I’m goin’ down, down, down, down,” before they perform a virtual mashup
duet: Taylor sings “I think we’re done, I’m not the only one” while Bieber sings “And
I just can’t believe my first love won’t be around.” At this moment, then, Isosine tracks
the Slipknot lyrics atop Bieber such that the mashup becomes a discourse on innocent
teenage love, from multiple perspectives, including that of nu-metal. The link promptly
becomes farcical, when Bieber’s featured rapper Ludacris enters the mashup with his
own meek, laidback reminiscence of young love, which ends with the phrase: “She had
me going crazy, oh I was star-struck / She woke me up daily, don’t need no Starbucks.”
Although it is difficult to grasp the meaning of Slipknot’s lyrics to “Psychosocial” (some
have suggested that the track is about the Iraq war, others that it is about social decay
or religious and antireligious extremity; see Lovell 2009), it is clearly not about teenage
heartache, and Corey Taylor would never start singing about Starbucks. Yet here he is,
the mashup implies, and Starbucks just went by.
When Taylor’s vocal is introduced, the clips from “Baby” are replaced by clips from
Slipknot’s “Psychosocial” video, which, in contrast to the music by Bieber, reflects the
274   Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

dark message of the lyrics. Slipknot is shown performing their music while surrounded
by burning flames, with a white wooden building in the background. Given the tropes
of the metal genre, this scene might evoke the burning of churches (though the white
building does not have a steeple and the flames are well in front of it), confirming
our stereotypical notions about metal. The flames might also evoke a straightforward
doomsday scenario, in which Slipknot is headed for hell to face eternal punishment;
band member Joey Jordison wears a crown of thorns here, as did Christ when he was
crucified, which appears to support this association with the day of the Last Judgment,
when, according to the Creed, Christ will judge the living and the dead. Moreover, in the
middle of the video, there appears a nine-pointed star (a “nonagram”) of flare torches,
which, according to Slipknot, symbolizes the unity of the band’s original members,15
but it might also evoke a pentagram, supporting the stereotype of the metal genre in
general as sinful and satanic. Whether these anti-Christian allegories are intended as
such or not, they set up yet another contrast to Bieber’s more innocent video (and also
to the persona of Bieber, who calls himself a conservative Christian and often ends his
concerts by saying “God bless you” or “God loves you”; Falsani 2011, 131).
Despite the cultural, ideological, and music-stylistic incongruity of these two tracks,
the tracks manage to mingle into a coherent musical amalgam. Through its musical
congruity, which foregrounds unexpected similarities, the mashup seems to suggest
that these presumably incompatible tracks are not as different as we thought but may
actually have something in common. The verse, in which Taylor performs in a mono-
tone, is obviously easier to line up with Bieber’s music than the chorus, because it does
not require tonal synchronization between the melody and the chord progression
(although structural elements such as tempo, time signature, rhythmic subdivisions,
and breaks must be aligned regardless). In the chorus, Taylor ceases his guttural shout-
ing and instead sings a rather memorable melody, which is, by the standards of some
metal loyalists, already a traitorous move, even in the context of Slipknot’s instrumenta-
tion. In the context of Isosine’s mashup, needless to say, it becomes downright embar-
rassing within a metal context, as Taylor’s catchy melody soars above the quantified and
predictable pop music of Justin Bieber. Notwithstanding their very different stylistic
musical language, the tracks are made to share the same pitch material; the mashup
thus functions harmonically as well as rhythmically.
The harmonic outline of the chorus of “Baby” is Eb-Cm-Ab-Bb (I-VI-IV-V), a for-
mula used in multiple pop songs. What makes the melody of “Psychosocial” and the
chords of “Baby” fit so well harmonically is that the music of “Psychosocial,” which
is pitched up from G-minor to C-minor, appears in the relative minor key to “Baby,”
meaning the two tracks then share the same scale. Taylor’s originally minor-key mel-
ody becomes a major-key melody in the mashup, because the chords supporting the
melody are replaced (a fifth in the original Slipknot melody becomes a major third in
the mashup version and the minor third becomes the tonic center). This new tonality,
particularly when rendered by the rich, trancelike synthesizer strings of “Baby” as they
arpeggiate the tonic chord in quarter notes, lightens up Taylor’s melody while subvert-
ing his lyrical message.
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    275

The musical congruity between the tracks thus seems at once to emphasize their
contextual incongruity and call into question the stereotypes associated with them.
Mashup music demonstrates that the construction of identity is both founded on and
strengthened by an antagonist or “other”; the mashup of incongruent samples empha-
sizes the stereotypes inherent to both, because their differences are highlighted by their
immediate juxtaposition.16 As Gerhard Falk points out, then, the construction of iden-
tity is related to our tendency to stigmatize: “All societies will always stigmatize some
conditions and some behaviors because doing so provides for group solidarity by delin-
eating ‘outsiders’ from ‘insiders’ ” (2001, 13). Given the accompanying musical congru-
ity, however, the mashup also makes us question those stereotypes; “Psychosocial Baby”
might even suggest to some listeners that Slipknot and Justin Bieber are not so different
as they had assumed. One reason for this is that mashups, in their very superimposi-
tion of samples, reveal previously unnoticed aspects of the music. “Psychosocial Baby”
manages both to preserve its samples’ differences and undermine them in favor of a
newly coherent whole. If we expect Justin Bieber and Slipknot to have little in com-
mon, the mashup presents a successful virtual collaboration between them both despite
and because of the very distinct matrices of associations that are integrated in the
mashup, and attendant social conventions are thus challenged as well as confirmed. By
emphasizing both the expected differences and the unexpected similarities between the
mashed sources, the mashup does not necessarily satirize one or the other but instead
criticizes or pokes fun at the stigmatization of both by (in the case of “Psychosocial
Baby”) combining opposite ends of the music spectrum.
I have here tried to demonstrate how mashups might be understood as comment-
ing on the apparent social stigmas in music culture; others have interpreted mashups
as satirizing the music or artist(s) of one of the mashed sources while favoring the
other. Along these lines, several Slipknot fans have expressed their profound distaste
for “Psychosocial Baby,” perhaps because they interpret it as suggesting that Slipknot is
not an authentic metal band, or that they, with “Psychosocial,” have sold out. Slipknot
vocalist Corey Taylor (2008), by contrast, salutes it:

Ah, “Psychosocial Baby,” that is fucking hilarious! . . . I love it when anybody takes
the piss out of me because you . . . you take yourself too seriously and that’s when
you get knocked out, if you don’t laugh at yourself. I thought it was great. I was like,
“This is fucking beautiful!” The way it was put together. . . . There are so many kids
that are pissed off about it that it makes me laugh. You know, this is fucking amaz-
ing. You either get it or you don’t.17

Mashups have also been subsumed into larger social or cultural critiques. For instance,
some critics, particularly in the United States, have interpreted mashups that combine
black and white artists (such as Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album or Evolution Control
Committee’s The Whipped Cream Mixes) as implicit critiques of racial essentialism and
the segregated marketing of the music and media industries.18 In line with this, some
have also suggested that such mashups contribute to bridging the gulf between racial
276   Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

categories and support musical hybridism. Mashups have also been cast as transcend-
ing the high-low dichotomy of the cultural popular music hierarchy or as bridging
these social chasms.19 Whatever the cultural readings of this music, all of this meaning
making happens in the listener’s constant oscillation between the new and the original
contexts of the sampled material. The creative and innovative aspect of mashup music
lies in its very capacity to put into motion such an oscillation, to create an experien-
tial tension between texts and contexts, between the virtual and the nonvirtual, and
between the overtly articulated and the covertly implied.

Consumption as Mode of Production

In 1969, Foucault predicted that we will reach a point where the figure of the author
will no longer be important at all: “I think that, as our society changes, at the very
moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear”
(1991, 119). American scholar David Gunkel (2011) believes that this moment has come
and argues that mashup music “provides a persuasive illustration and functional exam-
ple of an alternative configuration of artistic creativity after the passing of the figure of
the author” (16). One of the reasons for this, he continues, is that the mashup producer
functions more as a scripteur than an author, in the sense that his or her task involves
mixing and remixing “scripts”––that is, existing recordings––instead of creating some-
thing from nothing. Contrary to Gunkel, I find that, although the mashup producer
does indeed function as a scripteur or curator, the mashups themselves indicate that
even within this “configuration of artistic creativity,” the author remains a central and
functional figure—if we rethink the traditional notions of authorship, creativity, and
musicianship with which we are working.
In order to grasp mashup aesthetics, it is not enough to point to the traditional music-
analytical parameters of lyrics, melody, harmony, and rhythm (by, e.g., examining the
melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic complexity of the music in order to legitimize its aes-
thetic value). We must turn to an alternative source: the study of these samples’ play
of internal and external relationships and their particular modes of functioning anew.
As literary theorist Linda Hutcheon points out in her work on parody and adaptations,
these forms of cultural recycling demonstrate a use of repetition that is interesting not
for its similarity but for its difference—in these removed contexts, the repeated material
is at once the same, and yet different (2006, 166). The samples used in “Psychosocial
Baby” have been changed not in the sense that the “texts” are altered but in the sense
that the contexts are switched out, banged together, at once engaged and abandoned.
Mashups consisting of nothing but copied full-length samples are thus not necessarily
parasitic in character. They can also be understood as revisions, reworkings, appropria-
tions, and reevaluations of the past. Nicolas Bourriaud expresses the existential quan-
dary of the contemporary artist in any medium in a way that sheds light on the mashup
producer as well: “The artistic question is no longer: ‘what can we make that is new?’
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    277

but ‘how can we make do with what we have?’ In other words, how can we produce
singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that
constitutes our daily life?” (2005, 8) In contrast to the notion of the “autonomous work,”
part of the aesthetic of the mashup lies in its acknowledgment and indeed embrace of
the intertextual play that converges existing meanings in order to form a new one.
This latter observation directs us to another demonstration of the author’s central-
ity to mashup music: the fact that so much of the mashup’s meaning derives from
the listener’s understanding of it as a mashup—a calculated collision of recogniz-
able and disparate sources, and thus as something that exists only within the virtual
domain.20 As such, mashups are in fact fundamentally based on mashup fans’ rec-
ognition of their samples’ authors, here understood as “artist brands.” This is why
mashup producers choose samples from popular or classic recordings and generally
edit them only subtly, to make it easier for listeners to recognize them. Mashup pro-
ducers seem to assume that listeners are well acquainted with a wide range of musical
styles and genres, but they generally avoid esotericism. There will always be listen-
ers who feel excluded regardless, but mashup producers generally trade obscurity for
listeners’ accessibility to the material, in order to enhance the appeal of their work
and broaden their audience base. Although the use of contemporary sources might
limit the longevity of the mashup (unless the musical sources manages to survive the
passage of time), it nevertheless “offers the possibility of greater consumer participa-
tion,” as Serazio states (2008, 85; emphasis in the original). Julia Kristeva’s objection
to the notion of the autonomous work, as well as the search for meaning as something
inherent in the text,21 might be interpreted as the “death of the author”22; nevertheless,
the listener’s constant negotiation with references to outside texts in mashups must
instead be understood as an intertextual play in which the authors of the samples are
constantly acknowledged and recognized. In a number of ways, then, mashups do not
prove the passing of the author but instead supply a functional point of departure for
rethinking and redefining what authorship might be.

Conclusion

Borrowing Hutcheon’s descriptions of various forms of media adaptations (the media

incarnations or remediation), we might characterize mashups as conducting an “ongo-
ing dialogue with the past” that “creates the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest: more
than one text is experienced—and knowingly so” (2006, 116). When we listen to mash-
ups, we experience an oscillation between the new context of the sampled music and
the samples’ original contexts, and it is this ambiguity or double meaning of such het-
erogeneous halves forming a compelling whole that supplies the exciting friction and
irony within the mashup aesthetic. Like Hutcheon’s descriptions of adaptations and
irony, the mashup is “intensely context- and discourse-dependent” (2000, xiv); the
mashup meaning operates in the space between the virtual and the nonvirtual, a space
278   Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

in which the virtual depends on the nonvirtual (the recognition of sources) in order to
generate meaning.
Mashups such as “Psychosocial Baby” contest the traditional notions of musical cre-
ativity, originality, and authorship in the sense that the mashup artist acts as a “cura-
tor” of already existing music. I have, however, argued that even in mashup music, the
author has not ceased to function; the culture of the new virtual music environment
caters for the author figure even as it challenges it. The production of mashups is not
a mode of consumption; instead, consumption has become a more explicit mode of
production. Bourriaud sees artistic mastery in our contemporary environment (in
which music recycling, or what he calls “postproduction”—a new production of an
existing recording—is the dominant art form) as a “matter of seizing all the codes
of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and
making them function” (2005, 8). The art of mashup music lies not in the creation of
something entirely new or original in the traditional sense. Like other recycled art
forms, the art and “newness” of mashup music derives from its very collection and
combination of something preexisting, in a way that makes it function anew. As such,
mashup music gives prerecorded music, previously assumed to be the final product,
an afterlife. As Serazio puts it, “A song, once thought to be a completed project upon
delivery to the consumer, is now forever unfinished—putty in the hands of a potential
Acid Pro23 alchemist” (2008, 84).
If the ubiquity of digital recycling in popular music means, as Andrew Goodwin
suggested in 1988,24 that pop might eventually eat itself, mashups pointedly avoid that
fate by reinventing the past, finding the new in the old, and announcing it with both
gusto and irony.

Notes
1. I am very grateful to Anne Danielsen, Hedda Høgåsen-Hallesby, Nils Nadeau, and Sheila
Whiteley for their insightful comments on this chapter. I would also like to thank Paul
Harkins for inspiring discussions about mashup music.
2. For a brief review of the scholarly discourse that has been constructed around mashup
music, see Brøvig-Hanssen and Harkins (2012).
3. The P2P network consists of nodes without a server-based central infrastructure; it
allows direct communication between personal computers. P2P networks entered
the music economy when the online service Napster adapted it for the purpose of
music file sharing in 1999. Although Napster lasted for only two years, similar music-
centered P2P services have followed and continue to expand in capacity (see Wikström
2009, 149).
4. It was Paul Harkins who first used the term macro-samples to describe mashup music, in
his 2010 article. He distinguishes between “microsamples” and “macrosamples,” tracing
the former term to Curtis Roads and the latter to plunderphonics pioneer John Oswald
(see Harkins 2010, 180–184).
5. Girls on Top received particular attention with “We Don’t Give a Damn About Our
Friends” (Tubeway Army vs. Adina Howard) in 2000, 2 Many DJs with “Smells Like
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    279

Teen Booty” (Nirvana vs. Destiny’s Child) and the Freelance Hellraiser with “A Stroke
of Genius” (the Strokes vs. Christina Aguilera) in 2001, and Go Home Productions with
“Ray of Gob” (Madonna vs. the Sex Pistols) in 2003.
6. The mashup website GYBO has been one of the most popular forums for mashup pro-
ducers and fans, all of whom can vote for the “Bootleg of the Year,” post mashup reviews,
links, and events, and discuss production techniques as well as legal issues (see www.
gybo5.com). Other mashup sites include www.mashstix.com, www.mashuptown.com
and www.mashupciti.com.
7. For a discussion on the development of mashup music, see Howard-Spink (2005) and
Shiga (2007, 94).
8. For a thorough examination of The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, and its relation to legal
issues, see Rambarran (2013).
9. Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant were among the first to explain humor by
pointing to incongruity or to the violation of our perceptual patterns, which results in
understanding something as odd or unusual. As Blaise Pascal once pointed out, “nothing
produces laughter more than a surprising disproportion between that which one expects
and that which one sees” (quoted in Morreall 1987, 130).
10. For a description of Slipknot’s behavior in several of their concerts, see Arnopp (2011).
11. The metaphor of a “wolfpack” is borrowed from Gene Simmons, the bassist of Kiss, in his
description of Slipknot as quoted in Arnopp (2011, 221).
12. The band’s bassist, Paul Gray (#2, The Pig), died May 24, 2010.
13. Considering Justin Bieber’s more recent behavior, this quote may come across as “yesterday’s
boy.” During 2013, Bieber was accused of repeatedly driving too fast in his Ferrari, drink-
ing, smoking marijuana, attacking photographers, drawing graffiti at unauthorized places,
and going to strip clubs and brothels. Though this “bad boy” behavior does not support his
claim to take responsibility for his position as a role model very seriously, several fans have
defended him, either in terms of claiming that these are nothing but false rumors, or in terms
of excusing and trivializing this recent behavior. Other “Beliebers” have expressed their dis-
appointment or even outrage at the situation, while other fans do not seem to really care.
14. There are two versions of the “Psychosocial” video, one of which excludes the “limits of
the Dead” lines of the album version. In the mashup, these lines are also missing.
15. See http://www.slipknot-metal.com/main.php?sk=nonagram (accessed Jan. 22, 2015).
16. The fact that the construction of meaning or identity depends on difference and thus is
relational has influentially occupied several poststructuralists, including Jacques Derrida,
who states, “Language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted ‘his-
torically’ as a weave of differences” (1982, 12).
17. Corey Taylor, freely transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPNBUSY2M-
Q (accessed Aug. 22, 2013).
18. See Taylor (2003).
19. See McLeod (2005, 84), and Brøvig-Hanssen and Harkins (2012, 100).
20. Of course, mashups can be appreciated even if the sources are not recognized, thanks to,
for example, the artistry or intricacy of the musical dialogue (and general congruence)
between the juxtaposed tracks. The point is that if the listener does not recognize the
sources, or is unaware that the music in question represents a juxtaposition of samples, it
will not be recognized as a mashup but instead as something else.
21. Kristeva (1980) developed her theories of intertextualité in her reworking of Ferdinand de
Saussure’s semiotics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism.
280   Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen

22. In his theoretical deconstruction of the author figure, Roland Barthes famously stated
that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (1977, 148).
23. ACID Pro is a DAW program by Sony Creative Software.
24. I am here referring to Goodwin’s article “Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Age of Digital
Reproduction,” first published in 1988 but reappearing in 1990 in Simon Frith and Andrew
Goodwin’s anthology On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (London: Routledge).

List of References
Books, Articles, and Websites
Arnopp, Jason. 2011. Slipknot: Inside the Sickness Behind the Masks. London: Ebury Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2005. Postproduction:  Culture as Screenplay:  How Art Reprograms the
World. New York: Lukas and Steinberg.
Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Paul Harkins. 2012. “Contextual Incongruity and Musical
Congruity: The Aesthetics and Humour in Mash-Ups.” Popular Music 31(1): 87–104.
Cruger, Roberta. 2003. “The Mash-Up Revolution.” Salon, Aug. 9, http://www.salon.
com/2003/08/09/mashups_cruger (accessed Jan. 22, 2015).
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Falk, Gerhard. 2001. Stigma: How We Treat Outsiders. New York: Prometheus Books.
Falsani, Cathleen. 2011. Belieber! Faith, Fame, and the Heart of Justin Bieber. Brentwood,
TN: Worthy.
Foucault, Michel. 1991 [1969]. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader: An Introduction
to Foucault’s Thoughts, ed. Paul Rabinow, 101–120. London: Penguin Books.
Goodwin, Andrew. 1990. “Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Age of Digital Reproduction.”
In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin,
258–273. London: Routledge.
Gunkel, David J. 2011. “What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking? Authorship, Authority, and the
Mashup.” Popular Music and Society 35(1): 71–91.
Harkins, Paul. 2010. “Microsampling: From Akufen’s Microhouse to Todd Edwards and the
Sound of UK Garage.” In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Anne
Danielsen, 177–194. Surrey: Ashgate.
Howard-Spink, Sam. 2005. “Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash-Up of
Music and Politics.” First Monday, July 4, http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/
ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1460/1375 (accessed Jan. 22, 2015).
Hutcheon, Linda. 2000. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
———. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language:  A  Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Lovell, Dominic. 2009. “A Semiotic Analysis of Slipknot’s ‘Psychosocial.’ ” Online column,
Aug. 1, http://blog.domlovell.com/2009/08/01/a-semiotic-analysis-of-slipknots-psychosocial/
(accessed Nov. 22, 2012) [defunct].
 Justin Bieber Featuring Slipknot    281

McLeod, Kembrew. 2005. “Confessions of an Intellectual (Property): Danger Mouse, Mickey

Mouse, Sonny Bono, and My Long and Winding Path as a Copyright Activist-Academic.”
Popular Music and Society 28(1): 79–93.
Morreall, John. 1987. “Traditional Theories of Laughter and Humor.” In The Philosophy of
Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreall, 9–126. New York: State University of New York Press.
Preve, Francis. 2006. “Mash It Up:  It’s Caught On in a Flash, and the Hottest Mash-Up
Producers in the World Are on Hand to Show You How to Do Your Own.” Keyboard
Magazine 32(1): 38–44.
Rambarran, Shara. 2013. “ ‘99 Problems’ But Danger Mouse Ain’t One: The Creative and Legal
Difficulties of Brian Burton, ‘Author’ of The Grey Album.” Popular Musicology Online 3.
Scott, Derek B. 2008. Sound of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in
London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Serazio, Michael. 2008. “The Apolitical Irony of Generation Mash-Up: A Cultural Case Study
in Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 31(1): 79–94.
Shiga, John. 2007. “Copy-and-Persist:  The Logic of Mash-Up Culture.” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 24(2): 93–114.
Taylor, Charles. 2003. “A Love Song to Bastard Pop.” Salon, Aug. 9, http://www.salon.
com/2003/08/09/mashups_taylor/ (accessed Jan. 22, 2015).
Théberge, Paul. 2009. “Technology, Creative Practice and Copyright.” In Music and Copyright,
ed. Simon Frith and Lee Marshall, 139–156. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Wikström, Patrik. 2009. The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Audiovisual Material
Bieber, Justin. 2010. “Baby,” My World 2.0. New York: Island. MP3.
Isosine. 2011. “Psychosocial Baby,” Mashup Manifesto. Bootleg album, http://isosine.band-
camp.com/album/mashup-manifesto (accessed Apr. 23, 2014).
Slipknot. 2008. “Psychosocial,” All Hope Is Gone. New York: Roadrunner Records. MP3.
 chapter 16

H uman Af t e r  A ll
Understanding Negotiations of Artistic Identity
through the Music of Daft Punk

Cora S. Palfy

Soon after they released their second album of electronic dance music (Discovery 1999),
the members of Daft Punk suffered a horrendous “accident in the studio” (Blashill
2001). Their human bodies nearly destroyed, and with fears of no longer being able to
make the music they loved, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo
“received reconstructive surgery” (Patterson 2007). Afterward, the artists’ features
retained no traces of humanity—skin a rubbery black, hands now geometric and fit-
ted with metal knuckles, and faces replaced by expressionless motorcycle helmets with
scrolling text and flashing lights. Though entirely fabricated, this dramatic narrative
certainly lends sparkle to Daft Punk’s image. The audience knows that the artists are
not being truthful: the robotic farce contributes to the fun of Daft Punk’s performances.
The artists perpetuate the “legend” as it were; they seldom break character and hardly
comment on the falsity of the tale. When asked to remove the costumes, Bangalter and
de Homem-Christo simply decline, insisting that they are robots.
Artists do not customarily change their public image so dramatically; as a general
rule, success with artistic identity hinges on consistency (Ahonen 2006). If, however,
an artistic persona must shift, the artist allows the old image to fade, making few ref-
erences to it, if any. This is reflected in Bangalter and de Homem-Christo’s insistence
on their robotic personae, the visual representation of the group. It is strange, then,
to note that Daft Punk’s music subverts their narrative; the music contains elements
that betray the artists’ original humanity. These two elements, music and visual rep-
resentation, co-construct Daft Punk’s identity through authorial mediation, or estab-
lishment of the author’s identity through secondary sources (Ahonen 2006). With
many celebrities, artists, and authors, establishing authorial mediators that are con-
sistent with each other is fundamental to conveying artistic identity. By contrast, Daft
Punk violates this norm by circulating mediators that are inconsistent, that contain
 Human After All   283

conflicting behavioral markers. This chapter will investigate two important aspects of
the artistic identity. In the first section,1 I will show that authorial mediation parallels
identity formation in daily life. There is a demonstrable psychological reality to an art-
ist whose identity is mediated only through secondhand information. The chapter’s
second section addresses the assumption of consistent mediation: most artists rely on
consistent behavioral information to establish their artistic identity. Daft Punk’s resis-
tance to establishing a coherent identity is fascinating because it challenges the com-
mon practice of authorial mediation for artistic identity. If consistency, then, is the key,
what might audiences make of artists like Daft Punk, who are incoherently mediated?

Doin’ It Right: How Is
an Authorial Voice Established?

Identity is a term used to describe, in the most basic sense, who someone is. This
includes understandings of personality, ideology, and an individual’s motivations.
In daily life, we gather information about other people’s identities through firsthand
experiences with friends, family, and colleagues. Each interaction with an individual
amends a constantly evolving representation of that person. Firsthand experiences
allow observers to form understandings of current and past behavior as well as form
predictions about future behavior for each individual. A musical artist, by contrast, is a
persona strategically shaped and preened by the recording industry; there is no oppor-
tunity for a genuine firsthand experience. Instead, mediated interaction, or an interac-
tion created by passing information through a secondary source, simulates firsthand
experience. Simon Frith comments, “Once rock and pop (or classical) performers are
embroiled in the sales process they cease to have unmediated access to their listeners
(even live performance is staged in terms of a sales narrative)” (1996, 62). Often, it is
through the public media that we receive most information about celebrities. Charles L.
Ponce de Leon states, “By virtue of their ability to make public figures visible and famil-
iar to millions of people who have never encountered them in the flesh, it is the news
media that literally create celebrity” (2002, 5).
As information builds over time, audiences form a detailed representation of a per-
former “through direct observation and interpretation of his appearance, his gestures
and voice, his conversation and conduct in a variety of situations” (Horton and Wohl
1956, 216). The conclusion that one knows the celebrity through such observation, how-
ever, is misleading. In contrast to intimate knowledge of a real person, a fan’s knowl-
edge and familiarity with a musical artist parallels familiarity with characters from
books. Further, the secondhand behavioral information is not neutral or unbiased2: it
is distinctly geared toward an audience’s enjoyment and continued consumption.
The star’s image is an illusion propagated by the production company and intended
as an advertisement for the artist’s signature musical product. Though fans receive
284   Cora S. Palfy

their information secondhand, often the artist’s persona proves so believable that the
impressions go unquestioned. It is through this artistic persona that a social interaction
between a listener and an artist can be simulated.

Brainwasher: Authorial Mediation
The emphasis on social experience between a listening subject and an artistic agent is
foundational to an engagement with popular music. Laura Ahonen writes: “The mak-
ing of musical works is linked with the authorial voice and personality of the artist. As a
result, the role of the media is to create a coherent image of the artist, so that the listener
finds the constructed image sufficiently appealing and believable” (2006, 164). Social
interaction between the two parties hinges on a process called “authorial mediation,”
wherein artistic agents adopt recognizable identities through layering of information
strategically released by production companies (ibid.). Mediators are the communica-
tive channels that relay information about the artist. Authorial mediators include media
coverage, such as interviews, artist statements, and articles. Compact discs, lyrics, live
performances, and merchandise as well as music videos also contribute to an authorial
voice. Other mediated elements that play a role in an artist’s construction are voice and
instrumentation. Frith comments, “In practice … we assign [recorded voices] bodies,
we imagine their physical production. And this is not just a matter of sex and gender,
but involves the other basic social attributes as well: age, race, ethnicity, class” (1996,
196). Piece by piece, the mediators coalesce to form complex, multimodal signifiers
that capture the behavior, personality, and ideology associable with an artistic identity.

Something About Us: The Formation of Impressions

Authorial mediation is integral for popular musical artists, who rely on their music
and image to become a consumable product, which rapidly conveys viewpoints and
beliefs. The artist as consumable product appeals to particular demographics that must
(literally and figuratively) buy into the artistic identity. Peter J. Martin observes that
constructions of specific genres and styles are contingent on the social group around
which they form (2006). Mediators change depending on the demographic; instrumen-
tation, singing style, and more specifically the conventions considered “performance”
shift as they suit the needs of a particular audience. This suggests that music and other
mediators not only fulfill an outwardly social role (Martin 2006, Frith 1996) but also
communicate more intimate, internal psychological traces to an informed audience.
Correlating psychological evidence shows that the elements of commodified popular
music, which contributes to an artistic identity, can be read as behavioral markers. The
observed traits feed into an overall mental representation of a celebrity just as they
would for any other person, forming what is referred to in psychology as an impression
(Asch 1946, Anderson 1977).3 The correspondence between impression formation in
 Human After All   285

real environments is problematized by the nature of authorial mediation: we get only

small chunks of information at a time, and all of it is secondhand. Is it appropriate to
assume that the process is the same?
Though mediators afford only small glimpses of an artist’s behavior and speech,
Gayle Stever argues that, despite a fan’s limited firsthand exposure to celebrities, enough
information is made available through various media outlets that accurate impression
formation is still attainable (2010). Impression formation functions best when behav-
ioral displays are consistent (Srull and Wyer 1989), and evaluations of personality have
been shown to be surprisingly accurate given regular exposure (McCrae and Costa
1987; Watson 1989; Funder 1995). This psychological evidence suggests that an audi-
ence can extract coherent details about the artist in order to envision his or her identity.
This task is relatively easy when mediators tell a consistent story about the artist. The
second issue I raised, that all information an audience member receives is hearsay, can
be productively addressed by studies in brand psychology. Brand psychology, which
neatly parallels authorial mediation if we consider the artist as a product, shows that
secondhand accounts do not hinder impression formation.

Technologic: Parallels Between Brand Psychology

and Authorial Mediation
The messages conveyed through authorial mediation are not without purpose: artists
are products. The record industry is selling unique fictional characters with whom the
audience can identify. Listeners are captured in an elaborate web of fiction designed to
hold their attention and guide their buying practices. Artists, therefore, are a type of
brand (Thomson 2006); they persuade an audience member to listen to and consume
a particular musical product as well as other music within similar genres. Each genre
connotes certain expectations for instrumentation, vocal timbre and range, tempo,
mode, and a number of other musical and social features.

Whatever decision is made generically . . . will have a determining influence on every-

thing that happens to the performer or record thereafter. . . . Once signed, once labeled,
musicians will thereafter be expected to act and play and look in certain ways; deci-
sions about recording sessions, promotional photos, record jackets, press interviews,
video styles, and so on, will all be taken with genre rules in mind. (Frith 1996, 76)

As mentioned, generic attributes contribute to the artistic voice directly. Studies have
shown that the musical elements associated with particular genres can communicate
specific personality traits (DeNora 2000; Martin and McCracken 2001; Rentfrow and
Gosling 2003, 2006; Hernandez, Russo, and Schneider 2009).4 Each artist’s unique
approach to genre norms5 relays an artistic persona and likewise appeals to different
people and communities. Thus, similar to pointed advertising campaigns, an artist-as-
product is molded and aimed at particular demographics.
286   Cora S. Palfy

The connection between an artist and a brand concept is important: both artist and
brand are virtual constructs, planted in the mind of an audience through mediated
information. Multiple studies have shown that television audiences abstract a personal-
ity for brands (Aaker and Biel 1993; Aaker 1997, 1999, 2005; Fournier 1998; Wee 2004).
It seems implausible that logos or products might have unique, observable behavioral
characteristics, but the actions and activities often performed by or associated with
products and their specific brands represent beliefs and personality, and they gener-
ate expectations for future actions for the brand (Stever 2010; Blackston 1993). Even
for brands completely removed from any human physical qualities, audiences generate
a virtual persona when given consistent information. It is no great leap, then, for an
audience to abstract an artistic agent from the embodied behaviors with which they are
presented. It is important to understand that there is a psychological, not just imagina-
tive, process occurring with artists: though the artistic agents are not real, are strictly
a construct, it is because of psychological processes an audience regularly uses that a
virtual author instead seems real, tangible, viable.

Veridis Quo: The Function of Virtual

Authorship

The “artistic agent” to which I have been referring is a paradox: although the impres-
sion formed of the artist is, psychologically, quite real and valid, the artistic agent is
also entirely fabricated (as discussed in the section “Brainwasher” above). In this sense,
the listener is actually engaging with a virtual author rather than a distinct and real
individual. This helps to better address the broader theme of this book, the virtual
in music: What does it mean for an artist to be virtual? Albert S. Bregman observes,
“Experiences of real sources and of virtual sources … are different not in terms of their
psychological properties, but in the reality of the things that they refer to in the world.
Real sources tell a true story; virtual sources are fictional” (1994, 460). I assert that,
though fictional, the virtual is experienced as real. Thus mediated music, performance,
and performers become “virtual” when an audience member is able to simulate an
experience of the artistic agent or event. The research reviewed in the previous sections
demonstrates that, despite being removed from the virtual author, the audience still
experiences and feels they can interact with the artist.
The concept of virtual authorship, or generation of a psychologically real authorial
voice from mediated materials, is not specific to popular music. Authorial mediation
also links closely with a concept originally discussed by Edward T. Cone. In his 1974
text The Composer’s Voice, Cone proposed that an omniscient, godlike “composer’s
voice” emerged from the combination of the lower-level elemental agents involved in
the musical utterance: “The composer remains in control, at least to the extent that it is
he who decides what the balance shall be and thus determines the nature of the complete
 Human After All   287

persona of the song” (44). Much like the varied mediators that convey behavioral mark-
ers for the artist, here too music communicates behavioral markers and intentions that
create a representation of a composer. Through the composer’s voice, a listener perceives
a guiding hand in that piece’s construction and understands the piece as an intentional
act. One can already see that the composer’s voice is closely related to the understand-
ing of the popular artist, whose output is assumed to be a personal utterance. Akin
to Cone’s “composer’s voice,” an ever-present virtual agent within popular song is the
artistic agent. This artistic agent is the virtual representation of the musical group, with
whom the audience is familiar through musical products and media releases. Much like
an omniscient composer, the combination of musical components, such as instrumental
mixes, playing styles, and lyrical nuances, is attributed to the artistic agent.
There are some obvious differences between the composer’s voice and the artistic
agent, first of which is the fact that the composer’s voice is mediated solely through the
music while an artistic agent is mediated through many channels. A further, subtler dis-
tinction should be made between the composer’s voice and the artistic agent. The com-
poser’s voice refers not to the specific composer of the work, but rather to an abstract
force manipulating the elements. This may correspond to an idea an individual listener
has about the composer of a work; however, the composer’s voice does not directly
contribute to that composer’s identity. In contrast, works within the popular canon are
directly attributed to a specific, well-publicized artistic agent. Frith stresses the illusory
reality of the virtual, particularized artistic agent for a listener: “The meaning of pop is
the meaning of pop stars, performances with bodies and personalities; central to the
pleasure of pop is pleasure in a voice, sound as a body, sound as person” (1996, 210).
The emphasis in popular music performance on live shows and artistic exhibition places
the artistic agent in a position of centrality even in lieu of an actual stage. An audience
is unduly aware of the artistic agent even when practicing solitary listening. Audiences
also feel that they have access to experiences and novel information about the identity
of artistic agents through each new song, interview, music video, or concert. There thus
exists a prominent illusion shaping an audience’s interaction with artistic agents; though
we know the artist only through secondhand information, as discussed in the previous
sections, the recording industry fosters very intimate, if distanced, interaction. These
conclusions all rely, however, on an overt assumption that the mediation constructing
the virtual artistic agent is consistent. It is mediators’ consistency that creates an illusion
of reality. What, then, of cases like Daft Punk, in which mediation is not consistent?

Harder Better Faster

Stronger: A Case Study of Daft Punk

Bangalter and de Homem-Christo met in early adolescence and took advantage of

popular dance genres in Paris. They established themselves spinning in what Andrew
288   Cora S. Palfy

Harrison deems “a small explosion of new and varied artists [that have] taken the
end-of-the-’70s swish and melodrama of Francophone acts like Cerrone and Patrick
Hernandez, and applied it to today’s techno and house” (1998, 87). In the early 1990s,
the duo played clubs in Paris’s Montmartre district. Pictures of Daft Punk from this era
often depict the two (human) artists unmasked, mixing samples freely in plainclothes.
In the late 1990s, the duo began experimenting with costumes, opting for new gear,
such as “Zorro masks, beer-bottle-thick goggles, or plastic gargoyle faces to conceal
their features” (ibid., 88) at each gig. However, almost as soon as Daft Punk acquired
international popularity, they began circulating the rumor that founds their now-
signature look.6 According to their accounts, they were involved in a studio accident
and were reconstructed with robotic bodies. When interviewed for Spin magazine in
2001, a very human Bangalter wryly commented, “We became robots after an acci-
dent we had in our studio…. We don’t wear helmets. Everything’s real!” (Blashill, 46)
The tale is further elaborated and embellished through Daft Punk’s other media
releases, notably documentaries and films such as Interstella 5555 (2003), an animated
musical collaboration with Kazuhisa Takenouchi that depicts the human protago-
nists being replaced by robotic doubles. Until the Discovery album was released in
2001, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo gave unmasked interviews, but it is common
knowledge among Daft Punk fans that the band no longer allows their faces to be
seen by the media (Grant 1997). In a 1998 interview, Bangalter commented, “We don’t
think there is a logical link between showing your physical face and making music”
(Harrison, 87).7 Daft Punk’s refusal to reveal their private identities not only main-
tains that privacy, but also allows the members measured control over an audience’s
ascription of identity.
It would seem that the modicum of control Daft Punk exerts over their artistic iden-
tity should circumvent any confusion about the artistic agents in question. Presumably,
more controlled, private construction of an identity should lead to a more coher-
ent representation of the band; by reinforcing the media’s image of Bangalter and de
Homem-Christo as robots, the identity should be coherent and easy to recognize.
However, this is not the case. Though the members want to be seen as robots, inter-
views with Daft Punk often refer to their humanity, the passion and emotion of their
music, and the conflict between their technological and human selves (Cornish 2013,
Tucker 2013). The disjunction between the robotic visual mediator and these press
releases and musical signifiers detracts from an easy ascription of artistic identity, and
further prompts investigations of Daft Punk’s intentions and identity. In a recent review
of Random Access Memories (2013), Ken Tucker comments:

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have come up with an

album that exposes the human side of their musical impulses. It’s the equivalent
of removing the helmet-masks the pair invariably wears in public performances.
Random Access Memories is a collection filled with music that suggests mad
romance, heartache and an embrace of the past that’s never merely nostalgic or
sentimental. (2013)
 Human After All   289

The conflation between robotic and human clearly disrupts any sense of coherent
mediation available to an audience; though fans are receiving consistent visuals, the
effectiveness of those images is frustrated through the other mediators. The members
confound any expectations audiences might generate by existing between the two avail-
able representations, robot and human. This boundary is especially noticeable within
their musical product; one can construct a fascinating narrative from CD titles alone.
From Human After All (2005) to Random Access Memories, there is a clear vacillation
between the two personae. Looking deeper into Daft Punk’s music demonstrates the
conflict between personae even further.

Human After All: Daft Punk’s Musical Mediator

Daft Punk’s music provides a key point of conflict in the mediation of their artistic
identity because of incorporating both human and robotic elements. The pieces ana-
lyzed will be taken from the Discovery and Human After All albums, as these were
released following the band’s “transformation” into robots.8 Daft Punk’s compositional
methods interweave the robotic and human, and create ambiguous, dynamic tension
between the artificial and the organic. The relationship and interplay between the two
elements infuses the music with greater meaning and value than either the robotic or
human artistic agent would on its own. The interplay between robotic and human ele-
ments prompts the listener to consider not only the larger relationship between tech-
nology and man, but also the artistic identity in question. There are two main elements
of Daft Punk’s music, the loops and the vocals, which cleanly represent the robotic and
the human, respectively. What is interesting about these two musical features is how
they are commingled, how the artists problematize identifying with either robot or
human personae.
An easy way to begin examining how the musical authorial mediator complicates
Daft Punk’s identity is by observing the immediate conflict between the visual autho-
rial mediator and the authorial mediator in Daft Punk’s CD titles. Though the vis-
ual authorial mediator is decidedly robotic, the titles of Daft Punk’s CDs often point
to an awareness of the bodies underneath the robot costumes, such as Alive (2007)
and Human After All (2005). More recently, the CD Random Access Memories (2013)
conflates the human brain with a computer hard drive. Daft Punk’s music also partici-
pates in a constant exchange of ideas that makes it difficult to categorize any trait as
“only human” or “only robotic.” It is this mixture of elements that creates Daft Punk’s
distinctive sound and also sets Daft Punk’s output apart from other electronic dance
music (EDM). I will begin by noting the robotic and human, and then will elaborate
the techniques through which Daft Punk creates ambiguity and, therefore, incoherent
authorial mediation.
The robotic side of Daft Punk’s persona is largely represented by the way in which
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo structure their loops. The loop structure found on
Human After All stands in direct opposition to standard loop techniques (Butler 2006),
290   Cora S. Palfy

and it is largely those dissimilarities that contribute to their robotic nature. In their
construction, the loops are quite mechanical: elements of time, such as meter, the use of
coglike interlocking rhythmic patterns, and a high degree of unchanging repetition are
prominent features. These elements mimic how robots precisely perform programmed
tasks. In contrast to the common practice of metrical ambiguity, Daft Punk simulates
mechanical precision in their music through use of overdetermined metrical struc-
tures within loops. An overdetermined metrical structure heavily reinforces metrical
accentuation, effectively eliminating any semblance of ambiguity. Every component
instrument within the loop reinforces a sense of meter through textural completion,
where rhythmic layers combine to create a seamless interchange between new sample
sounds. In so doing, each sample fills in a missing link within a pattern that confirms
the metrical structure (ibid.). Because each layer discretely fits within and reinforces
the meter, Daft Punk’s textural completion analogously mirrors an “assembly line” of
rhythmic production; each layered loop plays a specific part in constructing a tight
groove. The listener experiences no sense of metrical ambiguity whatsoever, and hears
a sonic representation of Daft Punk’s robotic personae. Figure 16.1, taken from the main
groove of “Steam Machine,” demonstrates how the instrumental and rhythmic layers of
overdetermined samples tightly interlock. As can be noted in the figure, all pulses level
are represented. “Steam Machine” presents a great example of how every instrument in
the texture can reinforce the metrical hierarchy. At the beat level, the bass drum pounds
quarter notes, and is subdivided by the synthesizer’s eighth-note patterning. The synth
line is, in turn, subdivided by an interlocking pattern of sixteenth notes between the
hi-hat and snare.
The features outlined in Figure 16.1 are also present in loops Daft Punk samples
from funk or disco tunes. These completed loops are texturally complete; they are
metrically unambiguous by compositional design. Metrical clarity can also be attrib-
uted to the listening audience’s familiarity with the sample in play. In Figure 16.2, Daft
Punk’s groove in “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” (sampled from Edwin Birdsong’s
“Cola Bottle Baby”) immediately establishes a confirmed metrical structure. In both
Figure 16.1 and Figure  16.2, the loop is unambiguously metrical, constituting an
interlocking texture, and is generally repeated throughout the entire song. Though
less thoroughly subdivided, the bass drum’s four-quarter patterning is embellished
through the layering of the quarter rhythms in the cymbals and claps. Metrical sub-
division to the eighth-note level is added by the synthesizer’s harmonic chunks, and
given more clarity by the running eighth notes in the bass guitar’s timbrally distorted
melodic line. These factors thus project “robotic” personae through their continuity
and presence.
In distinct contrast to the robotic, Daft Punk’s music also contains elements fraught
with dynamism, error, and the innately human. Daft Punk differs from many other
artists within the EDM genre specifically by incorporating extensively texted vocals
into their tracks. The lyrical element of Daft Punk’s output is an integral part of their
stylistic transition from house music into pop and techno for Discovery, and its inclu-
sion represents a distinctly human persona in relation to Daft Punk’s robotic loops.
 Human After All   291

Figure 16.1  The groove from “Steam Machine,” which represents textural completion to the
sixteenth-note level. (Note that the only rhythmic layer not represented fully is the half-note
layer. It could be argued that the interaction between the voice and the synthesizer’s half-note
attacks in the second measure are seen as a form of half-note representation.)

What is interesting about the inclusion of long texts within the lyrics is that they draw
attention to an embodied speaker, a sentient being with a voice who is responsible for
the articulation of those words.
It is with these two musical features, loop and lyrics, that clarity within the musi-
cal mediator ends. Almost as soon as we are able to identify “unambiguously” human
or robotic aspects in Daft Punk, they are problematized through confounding ref-
erences and musical features corresponding to the alternate persona. For instance,
“Technologic” provides a good example of extensive lyrics. It is dominated by a com-
piled, technological list that runs throughout the song:  “Buy it, use it, break it, fix
it… .” Though inclusion of words and a speaker draws attention to a human element,
the lyrics of “Technologic” explicitly reference technology. Further, the extensive
word list itself creates an additional (robotic) loop within the song. Another example
that negotiates between the robotic and human is “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,”
which includes words from the opening monologue of The Six Million Dollar Man.
The vocals draw attention to the fact that there is a human agent present, but the lyr-
ics reference a television program about a man reconstructed with mechanical parts.
292   Cora S. Palfy

Figure  16.2  The sample from “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” immediately establishes an
unambiguous 4/4 meter.

Thus, the human quality available through the texted, spoken lyrics is conflated with
the robotic nature of Daft Punk’s looping techniques, creating a conflicted musical
authorial mediator.
There are many other ways in which Daft Punk creates a dialogue between the human
and robotic. Daft Punk introduces technological presence within the texted vocal line
through robotic timbre. Certainly the vocoded timbre contributes to the robot voice,
but the artists also constantly incorporate vocal gymnastics very much outside of
human capacity. Specifically, the melodic line’s exploitation of extreme range and agile
movement draws attention to prominent auto-tuning. Figure 16.3, taken from “Human
After All,” illustrates precisely this. At 3’40”, the text repeats “Human, human, human
after all” in a seemingly endless loop. After every third repetition, the melody jumps
an octave, climbing into an ever-higher stratum that is impossible for most vocalists to
reproduce. The relationship of the lyrics and the melodic line thus participates in an
amusing dialogue: the text demands to be human while the melody transcends human
ability. Again we see the conflict, because even while the lyrics demand recognition as
human, the performance of those lyrics diametrically opposes human ability, squelch-
ing our inclinations to hear it as “human after all.”
 Human After All   293

Figure 16.3  The outrageous range in which the vocal line demands to be seen as “Human.”

Figure  16.4 Hocket between the robotic and human elements in “Better, Faster, Harder,
Stronger.”

One can also note subtler dialogues occurring between the robotic and human
musical features. In certain songs, the elements interact through hocketlike exchange
between parts. The techno-human hocket creates a literal dialogue between the
human and robotic. An example of the hocket technique occurs in “Harder, Better,
Faster, Stronger.” The original groove establishes an overdetermined metrical structure
(Fig. 16.2). The texture comprises the four-on-the-floor kick drum pattern and is
enriched by inclusion of a constant stream of eighth pulses found in the synthesizer’s
bass-line changes. The gaps in the synth line are reinforced by the hi-hat’s quarter-
note attacks. All of these layers interlock and confirm a 4/4 meter (we can return
here to the idea of mechanical precision and of a rhythmic assembly line). This loop
repeats until the entry of the vocoder’s texted line. At this point, the regularity of the
mechanically precise, overdetermined groove fragments and begins to participate in
complementary phrase interchanges with the new layer. The voice in phrase 1 speaks
on beats 1 and 3, but on 2 and 4 of the second (Figs. 16.4 and 16.5). In addition to
enlivening the discussion of robot-human interchange, this hocket also heightens the
294   Cora S. Palfy

Figure 16.5  Hocketlike exchange before the full groove is restored.

Figure 16.6  The rhythmic variation at 2’23”. The word stronger is omitted in the second mea-
sure, and the words better and us are clipped off at the end.

tension and dynamism between the lines and requires resolution. The fragmentation
of the patterns ultimately leads to the very satisfying amalgamation of the two fuller
patterns at 1’38”.
The hocket interchanges just described contribute a form of variation structure
to the loops they amend, but Daft Punk creates variation through other means as
well. “Glitch” is often used in Daft Punk’s music to convey mechanical failure and
is another means by which variations on the grooves are introduced. The genre
originated in music created from the crackles, pops, hisses, buzzes, and general
melee of sounds produced by technological equipment. According to Rob Young,
“Characterized by colossal shifts in dynamics, tone and frequency, this is an urban
environmental music—the cybernetics of everyday life—that reflects … an object …
vulnerable to breakage” (2002, 47). Figure 16.1 provides an initial instance of glitch
in “Steam Machine.” At 1’45” of the track, the groove begins to incorporate white
noise into the synthesizer loop (indicated by the x note heads). Glitch is also incor-
porated to create rhythmic variations within Daft Punk’s mechanized grooves.
For example, at the introduction at 1’38” of the unfragmented groove, the words
to “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” are set in a string of constant eighth notes.
Figures 16.6 and 16.7 are taken from sections located at 2’23” and 2’49”, respectively,
where the vocal line skips and breaks off. A listener gets the sense that these lines are
the product of a record skipping: text is left out and rests are interpolated into the
 Human After All   295

Figure 16.7  An example of glitch taken from 2’49”.

lyrical line. Additionally, the longest attack length remains an eighth note (the final
note of the first measure in Fig. 16.6 could be reinterpreted as an eighth followed by
a sixteenth rest).
Why would Daft Punk, purportedly robots, exploit errors and failure within their
technological stage presence? I argue that the inclusion of these “mechanical glitches”
problematizes reception of the seen robots on stage, as it would appear they are ­“failing”
to perform their jobs correctly. This is another form of dialogue, now between the
musical and visual mediators: each communicates a distinctly different persona, mud-
dling a coherent artistic agent.
As has just been shown in Figures 16.4–16.7, a product of the interplay between
human and robotic elements is the resulting tension, which requires resolution.
Commonly, looping and underdetermined meter are the musical elements that imbue
EDM with structural moments of expectation, tension, and release. This is because
looping and metrical ambiguity allow a DJ to respond to and play with an engaged,
dancing audience. The compositional choice to forgo loop layering and underdeter-
mined metricality in favor of immediately established, metrical grooves necessitates
a different method of climactic build within each song. Daft Punk’s music intensifies
tension through fragmentation and later completion, which creates a unique climactic
drama distinct from common practice.
As has already been noted within the lyrics of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” Daft
Punk incorporates references to popular culture to create tension between personae.
Within CDs, references between songs can also function in much the same way. In
these instances, Daft Punk establishes a motive specifically related to a song associated
with either the robot or the human. For example, this kind of exchange occurs between
“Technologic” and “Emotion.” The two voices exclaiming, “Yeah!” from “Technologic”
(Fig. 16.8) are specifically associated with the robotic personae that dominate the
track:  the song maintains its looping structure without glitching, takes advantage of
extreme ranges to problematize hearing the voices as distinctly human, and uses over-
determined rhythm through tightly interwoven rhythmic layers. The following track,
“Emotion,” includes the “Yeah!” exclamations as well, encouraging a closer look at how
the human and the robotic interact (Fig. 16.9).
“Emotion” provides a point of interest on Human After All because it has many
features that are “human.” Beyond the obvious suggestion from the title, “Emotion”
is the only metrically underdetermined song and is one of the few examples of com-
mon practice EDM layering on the CD. The synthesizer’s rhythm is asymmetrically
portioned in 3 + 5 + 4 + 4, which remains unclear until the introduction of a kick
drum loop at 2’17”. To add to this metrical instability, the voice’s text feels extremely
296   Cora S. Palfy

Figure 16.8  The pattern of outer Voice 1 and Voice 3 from “Technologic.”

imprecise because the loop is slightly early on every entry. Figure 16.9 illustrates the
precise moment when the 4/4 meter is finally confirmed by the entry of a four-on-
the-floor kick-drum rhythm, which is introduced at the same time as the techno-
logical “Yeah!” motives. “Technologic” is an extremely robotic song; it provides only
minimal exchange between the two personae. The intersong exchange complicates
the human-centric qualities of “Emotion.” The interaction of these songs provides a
perfect example of confusion within the musical authorial mediator.
As can also be noted in the previous discussion of intersong reference, human and
robotic conflation also occurs between the title of the song and its musical material.
As has already been shown in Figure 16.6, there are often disparities between what the
music refers to and the title’s evocations. A perfect example of this is the song “Make
Love” (Fig. 16.10). The title immediately implies sexual intercourse, an act specific to
the human personae. Musically, however, the song is the most mechanical on the album
Human After All. The groove shown in the figure repeats, unchanged, throughout the
entirety of the nearly five-minute song. The only new layer added is a vocoded voice
softly echoing the title. The inherent contradiction between the title and its musical
features draws attention to the interplay of robotic and human elements, but might
also imply the fact that many people may consider sex a mechanical act. Another inter-
pretation that could be drawn is that perhaps without a distinctly human element, sex
becomes mechanical and unemotional.
A final example of music confounding the title of a track is found in “Steam
Machine.” The title of the track indicates a focus on the technological entity, perhaps
a steam engine. However, it is of interest to note that this is the only track on the two
albums, Discovery and Human After All, that samples an unmodified human voice.9 As
can be seen in Figure 16.1, a looped human voice whispers the title over the rhythmic
loops beneath it. The voice sonically signifies the actual steam issued from an exhal-
ing mouth and, in doing so, inverts our original expectations that the song might be
referring only to the technological. By inverting a listener’s expectations and creating
interchange between musical features and their authorial personae, Daft Punk creates
 Human After All   297

Figure 16.9  The invasion of the “Technologic” motives into “Emotion.”

a musical environment that challenges an audience to explore the ramifications of the

conflict. Just as the interaction of the elements creates musical tension within the songs
themselves, it also requires resolution from listeners; they must investigate and decide
how to reconcile the opposing elements of the authorial voice.
298   Cora S. Palfy

Figure 16.10  The unchanging groove from “Make Love.”

Short Circuit: What Happens When

Authorial Mediation Is
Not Consistent?

We have now seen the many ways in which the mediators of Daft Punk do not align.
As discussed earlier, it is coherent streams of information that allow an observer to
quickly and easily construct a solid representation of an individual. Further, authorially
mediated, consistent streams of secondhand information contribute to a virtual artistic
agent and a corresponding artistic identity. When behavioral information and person-
ality traits are incoherent, the process is stymied:  “The primary goal in forming an
impression of a person is to extract a coherent evaluative representation. If the concepts
exemplified by the behaviors differ … such a concept may be difficult to construct”
(Srull and Wyer 1989, 61). So what are we to do with Daft Punk? Their mediation is
muddled, confusing; is Daft Punk human or robotic? Interviews, visuals, music, and
concerts do not confirm either identity through consistent behavioral markers. Studies
in behavioral sciences have shown three reactions applicable to both real-world and
virtual instances of this conundrum.
One way listeners might respond is by abandoning the artist whose behaviors are
incoherent. Behavioral inconsistency makes it difficult to predict future actions or iden-
tify with an individual. In daily life, an observer may believe that a person with incon-
sistent behaviors is not of sound mind; in essence, inconsistencies are akin to beacons
that signal something is wrong. Distance, then, is the general solution; it is common
to avoid others whose behavior is erratic or unpredictable. The distance implemented
in a firsthand situation analogously translates into negative reception for the artistic
agent. When it becomes difficult to fit new behaviors with previous representations
of an artist, reception suffers because it is more difficult to view the artistic agent as
a believable character with understandable actions.10 Additionally, incoherence might
 Human After All   299

also negatively affect an audience’s judgment of authenticity. Frith notes that mediated
elements participate in a type of intimate performance structure, wherein a relation-
ship between the artist and audience members is simulated (1996, 91). The intimacy
therein contributes to judgments of authenticity.11 Consistency, then, could convey a
more authentic (or trustworthy) artist, who confides in the audience his or her true
persona.

The star voice (and, indeed, the star body) thus acts as a mark of both subjectivity
and objectivity, freedom and constraint, control and lack of control. And technology,
electrical recording, has exaggerated this effect by making the vocal performance
more intimate, more self-revealing, and more technologically determined. The
authenticity or “sincerity” of the voice becomes the recurring pop question: does
she really mean it? (210)

When inconsistent mediators are presented, an audience has more reason to ask that
final question, and, incidentally, more opportunity to reject the artistic agent as authen-
tic. This first option may be the case for some fans: Daft Punk’s incoherent mediation
certainly might prompt audience members to reconsider buying the product or their
ascriptions of authenticity. However, articles about the band report that since their
transformation, Daft Punk’s reception has skyrocketed (Indrisek 2009, Powers 2013).
People are curious about the hidden human faces and seem excited by the robot cos-
tumes (Grant 1997). It is fruitful, therefore, to address the second and third strategies
for incoherence.
A second way an audience might respond to incoherent behavioral displays is by
disregarding one or more of those behaviors. Funder and Colvin (1991) demonstrated
that observers are likely to respond in this manner if they have already established
a coherent identity for an individual through consistent behavioral markers. This is
most likely when behavioral markers seem sudden and are not repeated. This response
cleanly translates into artistic identity:  if a comprehensible identity has been estab-
lished through consistent authorial mediation, unusual behaviors are a mere blip on
a radar, easily dismissed. An audience may think of certain actions, responses, or
events as anomalous behavior, or behavior that does not jibe with previously consistent
mediation. Jennifer Aaker et al. observe that “based on principles of accessibility, much
of the research has shown that if a trait related to the information at hand is acces-
sible, incoming ambiguous information is likely to be interpreted in terms of that trait”
(2005, 458–459). Instead of reevaluating the artistic agent’s entire identity, the observer
instead views the behaviors as a product of momentary lapses in judgment, situational
requirements, or errors. This means that the audience would select for consistent medi-
ators, ensuring coherence by privileging one set of behavioral markers. Again, though
this may be an option for some fans, it does not seem to be the overriding reaction to
Daft Punk. Although some fans may be interested in choosing either the robotic or the
human persona as a dominant source of artistic identity, Daft Punk’s released state-
ments and musical material problematize privileging one persona or another. Many
300   Cora S. Palfy

statements by either Bangalter or de Homem-Christo suggest that they want to prompt

the audience to contemplate the relationship between their two personae rather than
select one or the other as dominant. For example, in a 2013 interview, Bangalter spoke
at length about the evolution of Daft Punk’s music:

It’s maybe something we felt, which is we are two robots trying to become human.
So it meets halfway; it has this kind of a cyborg and droid quality, but it seems that
it’s a story that has some emotion with it. . . . But it’s always been for us about the
interaction between technology and humanity, and we couldn’t have done our proj-
ect, definitely, without technology. (Cornish)

Evident in this quote is the invocation of a narrative that reconciles the two personae,
that allows the diametrically opposed sides of Daft Punk to coexist in one artistic
identity. Reconciliation of behaviors, or justification of a repeated inconsistency into
a coherent framework, is the final strategy for dealing with incoherent mediation.
Behavioral psychologists Srull and Wyer observe:

Once an evaluative person concept has been formed, behaviors of the person that
are evaluatively inconsistent with this concept are thought about in relation to
other behaviors that have evaluative implications in an attempt to reconcile their
occurrence. This leads to the formation of associations among these behaviors.
(1989, 62)

In an interview about the Discovery album, Bangalter intimated how the artists view
the music as a mediation between their human and technological selves: “We want the
focus to be on the music,” Bangalter states. “If we have to create an image, it must be
an artificial image. That combination hides our physicality and also shows our view
of the star system. It is not a compromise” (Grant 1997). In this quote, Bangalter again
implies that Daft Punk’s incoherent mediation is purposeful and implies a symbolic or
narrative meaning. Work in psychology (Srull and Wyer 1989, Funder 1995, Aaker et al.
2005) as well as gesture and communication studies (Cassell, McNeill, and McCullough
1999; McNeill, Cassell, and McCullough 1994)  show that reconciliation is a primary
way in which inconsistent behaviors are often understood. Contradictory behaviors
are often considered symbolic; in gesture and speech literature, mismatch between ges-
ture and speech is often attributed to higher-level discourse, such as irony or humor.
Further, behaviors might also be reconciled through an overarching narrative that jus-
tifies repeating inconsistencies (Aaker et al. 2005). This seems to be the tack Daft Punk
is pursuing:  the quotes above implore audiences and fans to delve deeper into their
meaning, into why Daft Punk conflates the contradictory personae. Daft Punk is nei-
ther robotic nor human, but is rather a reconciliation of humanity and technology as
one artistic identity. Theirs is a story about technology’s relationship with mankind,
and the interaction of their mediators functions as a thoughtful commentary on that
relationship. Because it is the musical mediator that represents this commentary most
 Human After All   301

clearly, an audience may feel comfortable and confident in regarding the music as the
band’s primary identity. Though this is unusual—we often connect identity with visual
representations—it seems to correlate well with the quoted statements from Bangalter
and de Homem-Christo.

One More Time: Conclusion

What I have shown throughout this chapter is that artistic identity is a construction, and
that behavioral studies provide a good framework to evaluate the interactions between
listeners and authorially mediated identities. In constructing the artistic agent, the lis-
tener is given license to feel that he or she knows or experiences the artist in a virtually
simulated way. Because an audience member can feel involved with the artist virtu-
ally, the experience of listening and consuming the artist as product is, therefore, more
personal, more intimate. Though it is commonplace for coherent authorial mediators
to establish an artistic agent by consistently reinforcing behavioral markers, there are
examples where this practice is violated. Because fans must make conscious decisions
about how to resolve conflicting mediators, these mediators are particularly valuable
for forcing deeper engagement from audiences.
Although it is both interesting and illuminating to examine the construction of artis-
tic identity, the analyses and proposed resolution strategies given here implore us, as
listeners and analysts, to look at the broader implications therein. This chapter is pri-
marily concerned with how the authorial voice is established, but it is clear that artistic
identity affects and raises questions about several tropes common to the study of popu-
lar music. The most prominent theme noted in the section “Short Circuit” is reception;
the ease with which an audience identifies an artist influences how well that artist is
received. When an audience is unable to easily recognize or understand the actions of
a given artist, it challenges them to justify their continued enjoyment and consumption
of the product. If this task is difficult owing to incoherent mediation, reception can
dwindle. The interplay between audience and artistic agent also implies that artistic
identity affects and is affected by audience-artist interaction. Further, reception also
highlights the effects of mediation on judgments of authenticity. Finally, some readers
may have noticed that it was difficult, even within my merely demonstrative analyses,
to avoid narrative explanations of authorial mediators’ interactions. Clearly, authorial
mediation and the authorial voice can prompt hermeneutic analyses that push beyond
the interaction of music and lyrics. Considering authorial mediators as opportunities
for interpretation allows a broader narrative net to be cast. Reception, authenticity,
audience-artist interaction, and hermeneutics are only a few of the ways in which the
study of artistic identity can encourage meaningful interpretations and analyses of
popular music. By investigating the dynamic construction of an artistic identity, it is
my hope that this chapter will facilitate its further study.
302   Cora S. Palfy

Notes
1. Each section and subsection heading contains a title drawn from Daft Punk’s musical
releases. This section’s title, for example, is taken from the twelfth track of Random Access
Memories (2013).
2. I do not mean to suggest here that firsthand behavioral markers are always neutral or
unbiased. It is beyond the purview of this article to discuss persuasion tactics and inter-
action biases.
3. Early models of information acquisition about others are modeled by experimental and
cognitive psychologists, such as Tulving and Thompson (1973), John Anderson (1977),
and Blok et al. (2005).
4. The specific traits of genres and celebrities have been extensively discussed by multiple
scholars. For authors who infer or overtly study personality constructs and traits from
mediated material, see: Frith and McRobbie (1978); Walser (1993); Bradby (1993); Frith
(1996); Whiteley (1997); Clawson (1999); Zak (2001); Rentfrow and Gosling (2003, 2006);
Bannister (2006); Leonard (2007).
5. See also, Frith (1996, 76–90).
6. The shift can be also noted through the pictures, interviews, and live-recorded concerts
around 1999.
7. This same philosophy can be noted in other artists and bands such as the Gorillaz,
Deadmau5, Kraftwerk, Monarchy, Kiss, Insane Clown Posse, Slipknot, etc.
8. The arguments made could extend to Random Access Memories.
9. This is not the case on Random Access Memories, for which Daft Punk chose to record live
singers and instrumental samples.
10. The correlation of incoherent mediation and a drop in reception can most easily be seen
in child stars. Audiences grow to love child stars for their innocence and purity, and there
is a marked drop in reception after child stars reach maturity. This is because it is quite
difficult to reconcile the more sexualized behavior of an adult with an artistic agent previ-
ously associated with a childlike persona.
11. The argument could be made here that authenticity translates to a sense of suspended
disbelief. Authenticity might, therefore, mean that the artistic agent is believable enough
to convince a listener to buy into the fictional character as real.

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 chapter 17

Virtual Ba nd s
Recording Music under the Big Top

David Tough

The history of sound recording is approximately 135 years old, a brief moment in the
entire span of human history. The influence of macro-level changes in sound recording
technology in the recording studio has continuously had an effect on the creation pro-
cesses of the musical artist, engineer, and producer. Capturing individual performances
and approaching music recording as an asynchronous process is rooted in the earli-
est days of recording. As early as 1888, Thomas Edison began dividing his room into
partitions to increase sound isolation while recording with horns. In 1931, engineers at
MGM recorded “The Cuban Love Song” for a film of the same name, where Lawrence
Tibbett’s voice was superimposed on itself. Innovators such as Les Paul began experi-
menting with sound-on-sound recording techniques in commercial music with mono
disc cutters as early as the late 1930s. However, widespread use of sound-on-sound
recording came with introduction of the multitrack tape machine in the mid-1950s,
allowing engineers to record separate discrete “tracks” on the same tape. By the late
1950s two-track machines were common for rock recordings and Ampex introduced a
stock model of its half-inch three-track machine in 1960 (Wadhams, 1990). Multitrack
recording fueled the revolution in American popular music throughout the 1950s and
1960s. For the first time in history, all the steps of the traditional preproduction pro-
cess (music composition, lyrics, arrangements, rehearsal) did not have to be completed
before an artist entered the studio. Compositions could evolve and grow in the studio,
evidenced by albums such as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and Steely Dan’s Aja (1977). The old sound of blurred,
indistinct sonic sources now was replaced by clarity and separation of sound sources in
popular music (Swedien 2004). Relative balance values of separated instruments could
be altered during the mixdown process to affect a change in the emotional character
of the music (ibid.). Furthermore, artists no longer had to have the musical skills to
 Virtual Bands   307

Figure 17.1  Ryan States, producer, songwriter, mixer

perform a piece from beginning to end. Artists and bands could simply “punch in” if
they made mistakes during a performance, and musicians no longer had to perform in
one room together; they could record their individual parts, weeks or months apart.
Musicians backing artists such as Elvis Presley could perfect the instrumental track
before the singer sang a note. Self-contained artists such as Les Paul, Paul McCartney,
Stevie Wonder, and Prince could play every instrument on their albums thanks to the
overdubbing process. Multitrack recording provided the time needed by artists such as
Jimi Hendrix to expand their creativity and ideas in the studio. Two critical recordings
in popular music, both by Les Paul, that demonstrate the early overdubbing process are
“Lover” (1947) and “How High the Moon” (1951). “Lover” was one of many experiments
by Paul using a disc cutter system for overdubs. The recording features eight guitar
parts played in harmony, and special effects such as speeding up and slowing down the
guitar. “How High the Moon” was his first commercial hit, produced using his modi-
fied mono Ampex Model 200 with a sound-on-sound recording head. The recording
demonstrates Paul’s use of artificial effects such as reverb and tape delay. Both record-
ings feature multiple performances from Les Paul, or Les Paul and Mary Ford, to create
a larger recording.
The commercial success of these types of recordings signaled that the public was moving
toward a preference for asynchronous recordings over a live-recorded representation of an
artist in the studio. The 1991 Grammy winning song “Unforgettable,” is one of the utmost
examples of asynchronous recording. Using this technique, Natalie Cole was able to record
with her deceased father, Nat King Cole, furthering the trend of “creating a recording,”
308   David Tough

rather than only capturing an acoustic event. Until recently the equipment necessary to
produce professional-grade recordings was prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the
knowledge required to obtain good results was the province of a few highly specialized
technicians. The central process in the production of popular music, called multitrack
recording, was once possible only with the expensive, specialized equipment of the com-
mercial recording studio, but is now increasingly done on personal computers, even in
professional recording studios. In addition, digital audio workstations (DAWs) and musi-
cal instrument digital interface (MIDI) capabilities can create perfection in tempo, pitch,
and performance. All of these tools have greatly expanded the palatte of the independent
artist. Sobel (2007) said, “Today, with an investment of a few thousand dollars, it is possible
to make better sounding records than could be produced in a major studio 20 years ago
due to cheap digital memory, miniaturization and the increasingly globalized economy.”
Mobile recordings, which were rare in the early days of recordings, are now common-
place. Sobel observed that the audio engineer with even moderate technical ability can
now become an all-in-one producer, engineer, and composer.
With regard to the music production process itself, artists and engineers are able to
make less-frequent trips to the larger, expensive studios and instead opt to complete
an album between home and professional environments. For example, many engineers
choose to record instruments such as drums at a larger studio, overdub all other instru-
ments at home, and then return to the large studio to mix. Some producers see no need
to make any trips to the large studio; theoretically, someone can make an entire record
in a closet using a DAW-based system.

The newcomer in the industry can create an entire project at home alone in a home
studio environment and then take this basic information and load it into a larger
studio environment with live musicians to create the work heard on the radio, com-
puter, television, and in films. This individual is a life-long learner who continues
to experiment with new concepts, new technologies, and diverse musical genres.
(Kirk, 2004, 33)

With the development of recording on a personal computer (DAW) and the popularity
of websites such as YouTube and games such as Guitar Hero, the recording process has
slowly become “democratized,” allowing the consumer of audio to also be a producer
of entertainment. This phenomenon could be compared to the personal photography
revolution of the 1950s, when consumers purchased cheap personal cameras and sud-
denly fancied themselves as “photographers.”
The phenomenon of distribution is also central to this new paradigm of audio
recording and music production. In recent years, developments in digital technology
have radically altered distribution of popular music. In particular, digitization of music
files in the form of MP3s and the increase in file-sharing sites has brought attention to
the process of distribution of popular music over the Internet, raising many questions
about the future of the existing music industry. Yet, even though the impact of digital
technology on distribution of music has been widely written about, the role of digital
 Virtual Bands   309

technology in the process of producing popular music has received less attention, but it
must be understood if we are to adequately apprehend how new technology is altering
the landscape of musical production. An estimated one-third of the world’s population
is now online, a proportion that is sure to grow (ICT 2013).
This chapter focuses on Chicago-born musician/singer/songwriter Ryan States (see
Fig 17.1) and his journey to create his own personal music using all of the aforemen-
tioned modern techniques. What makes States’s process unique is that he completed
his entire CD “virtually” onboard a moving circus train. Cristen Conger (2012) stated,
“Virtual bands, also known as Internet bands, are bands in which the members do
not meet and make music face to face, but online.” States’s band was truly “virtual” in
nature. Since his studio was based in a train car, he had no physical means of conven-
ing more than one or two musicians. His recordings did not require that participants
be collocated or meet face-to-face, but rather simply that they be from a talent pool of
experts dispersed over a wide geographic area. His technique was also asynchronous in
nature; musicians could record on their own time and on their own terms. Furthermore,
States’s technique also preserved the anonymity of the participants. Recording a band
“virtually” means addressing issues associated with the imbalance of power or author-
ity and allows generation of creative and diverse ideas. If the musicians do not know the

Figure 17.2  Ryan States, Strange Town, album cover

310   David Tough

other players performing on the track, then each one may be more likely to compose
the purest part he or she can imagine. For example, in a typical face-to-face session, it is
often necessary to gain input from recording engineers, producers, and studio manag-
ers, who are sometimes caught in the political hierarchy of the music business. Using
a virtual band ensures that no individual defers to the opinions of one higher on the
“power totem pole” and gives the producer of the product the final say and control.
States’s recording “experiment” using these virtual bands culminated in his indepen-
dent CD released in 2010, entitled Strange Town (Fig. 17.2; 17.1 in Companion Website).

Background

Ryan States grew up in a musical family, the youngest of eleven children. He began
playing piano in church and never thought of music as a career, but rather “something
he always did.” He was in high school when he first used his DJ equipment to experi-
ment with overdubbing: “I had a simple DJ mixer and two standard cassette decks.
I would record one deck to the other, each time adding another vocal harmony. The
song pitch would gradually drift, take after take. And the early dubs would be more
degraded than the last ones. No going back and editing. No punching in and out.
Sometimes I drummed with Tupperware. But usually I did all the instruments in a
MIDI keyboard sequence.” In 1996, States upgraded to his “dream machine,” a digital
Roland eight-track with mix automation. States notes, “Of course now that looks weak
and primitive. In my own lifetime the recording process has changed dramatically.”
In his late teens, States attended the prestigious University of North Texas, taking
jazz classes and performing keyboards in local bands. While at North Texas, he saw a
flyer on the jazz department board that advertised for a fill-in keyboard player position
on a three-month run for Ringling Brothers’ traveling Blue Unit Circus. After his initial
run, States was asked by the bandleader to transition into the full-time position. States
likens playing keyboards for the circus to playing in a musical with a lot of cues based
on the timing of the show. States described the show as being “like a musical pumped
up on adrenaline” (all quoted passages from States are from the author’s May 15, 2013,
personal interview).
States, an openly gay musician, has been constantly traveling with Ringling since
2004. “I am a circus musician by trade. The circus life is quite different. I live on a train,
and perform with two-and four-legged performers. I’ve probably played ninety cities
in the U.S., and I recently spent five weeks performing in Mexico City and Monterrey,
Mexico, as well. We played the Madison Square Garden. Those types of shows are the
highlights and make the experience worth it. We have a nine-piece traveling band and
it’s really nice to work with professional musicians every day.” When describing the
musical environment of the circus, States said, “It’s like a film score providing musical
accompaniment to the performers on stage. You never know when the cue will be given
for the final style of each performer’s act,” he explains.
 Virtual Bands   311

Figure 17.3  States recording keyboards for Strange Town in his train room

States’s job with the circus keeps him on the road eleven months out of the year. This
would have posed a problem for musicians in the past, because until recently they had
to choose whether to remain in one location to pursue their own music career, or go
on the road for someone else to earn an income. Even though States is often in remote
locations and makes his home on a train, he has been able to make the new methods
of recording and virtual collaboration work in his favor. He candidly admits that his
album, Strange Town, would not have been possible without the Internet. “I just put out
something that major labels haven’t bothered to give us. And I did it on my Mac in a
train yard” (Fig. 17.3).

The Recording Process

States celebrated the idea that he could fill all the roles in his mobile studio: pro-
ducer, engineer, musician, and artist. “There was no red tape and I didn’t take orders
from anyone. I got to call the shots.” His eleven-track CD took two years to com-
plete. “I’m really happy with it,” he said. “It turned out to be simpler to collect tracks
and work from my computer on the train. I could track, and edit music all I wanted.
Creatively, it certainly doesn’t hurt to be in a workspace where each week I have a
completely different view outside my window. There’s no worry about stagnation.
With our work schedule of shows and rehearsals, time was the biggest challenge
for me.”
312   David Tough

Research and Pre-Production

Strange Town was the first time Ryan States had approached the process of recording
with a computer. Prior to the album, he had experienced recording only on a Roland
VS-880 digital eight-track. “I had never recorded to computer before. The only things
I used the computer for, prior to Strange Town, were lyric sheets, musical notation, and
MIDI sequencing. But no audio work. Basically I spent three years both making the
album and learning Logic while studying mixing.”
States initially conducted online research on the equipment he needed and also sup-
plemented his own knowledge of advanced audio engineering techniques by examin-
ing online forums, textbooks, and DVDs. “I took over 150 pages of notes while studying
things like Charles Dye’s Mix It Like a Record, The Project Studio Network podcast, and
The Art of the Remix. I  devoured the book Mix Masters:  Platinum Engineers Reveal
Their Secrets for Success. I  used websites such as www.thewombforums.com, www.
audioinstruction.com, www.gearslutz.com, and www.recordproduction.com as addi-
tional resources.”
During pre-production, States would sketch out the instrumentation of each song
in a Microsoft Word document. After instrumentation was chosen, States began to
contact players he had worked with in the past. He also searched for players online and
got recommendations for players from his peers in recording centers such as New York
and Nashville. “In terms of album personnel, by design I wanted to use both musician
friends as well as to network with new musicians because I live in such a bubble.” If
States could not find a particular player through recommendation, he would use popu-
lar recoding collaboration websites such as Studio Pros, RealSax.com, Esession, and
other sites connected with individual online musician personalities. States contacted
most musicians via email because his phone service on the traveling train was unreli-
able. He determined his own criteria for the musicians who made the cut for the CD.
Each musician hired had to (1) be a professional player with quality home recording
setups, (2) be savvy enough with technology to record themselves (or hire a competent
engineer within budget), and (3) have the capability to transfer the files online back to
States using sites such as wetransfer.com or yousendit.com. “I had to make the album
with musicians who have home studios, or at least know someone with a studio. If you
live on a train, online recording is priceless. I’m using lots of different drummers and
guitarists. I deliberately wanted to network with musicians through the collaborations
of this album. Using different musicians helps to diversify the sound. For example, each
drummer uses a different drum kit and microphones, and has a different room sound.”

Tracking
The virtual tracking process for Strange Town was lengthy. States would send a rough
mix of his keyboard and vocals, and a printed click to his chosen drummer. The files
 Virtual Bands   313

Figure 17.4  States’s wall cable organizer in his train room

were sent in broadcast wave format so that they were time-stamped and did not have
the timing inconsistencies that are possible with an MP3 transfer. The drummer then
recorded multitrack stems (kick drum, snare drum, toms, etc.) in another locale and
sent States the performance or multiple performances so he could choose the takes that
he felt fit each section of the song.
States made a composite of the best drum takes from each drummer. Sometimes
he did not receive drum files that fit the tonal quality of the song. In such instances,
he used drum triggers, replacing certain drums with sampled instruments from the
library on his computer.
Using the recorded drums as the foundation, States built other instruments on top
of the drum track. He said that the tracking process was time-consuming. “For each
314   David Tough

Figure 17.5  States recording bass guitar for Strange Town in his train room

remote musician I had to prepare a customized working mix—a reference track with
a ghost MIDI track for them to hear the gist of what I needed them to do. I would also
send another version for them to record along with. This version would be a WAV file.
I had timing problems with MP3 files, so I never used them as a guide track. I would
mute their MIDI part, bias the rhythmic elements in the mix, and reduce the vocal
levels so they only served as a reference, and were usually replaced. I later decided, out
of professional pride, that I would no longer create guide tracks unless the vocal per-
formances were finalized” (see Fig. 17.5).
States’s portion of the tracking process was solely completed in his private train room,
which measures a mere 13x7 feet. The room also accommodates his bed, television,
kitchen, and all personal effects. He recorded lead vocals, harmonies, bass guitar, and
keyboards live in his room in spite of the fact it lacked most of the desired characteristics
 Virtual Bands   315

of an ideal commercial recording studio. With parallel walls, States found that acoustic
foam was necessary to minimize noise. Train car noise, utility fans, toilets flushing,
water pressure, the nearby guest shower, and several other factors affected the record-
ing process. States had to time most performances recorded on the live microphone so
that he avoided these pitfalls. Some musicians were also recruited from the traveling
circus band, and States recorded them (e.g., horns) in his room as well.

You cannot sound-proof a train room. You can only address reflections. I have close
parallel walls. I glued Auralex acoustical foam in strategic locations to eliminate the
short echo. I supplemented that by hanging towels on the walls from my various hat
and coat hooks. The A/C unit itself is underneath my train room. I feel the vibration
each time it starts and stops. I have a full-sized refrigerator, just two feet from my
microphone. There isn’t enough room to properly set up a keyboard. Instead, I laid
the synth across my bed with one foot tucked in and the other on the floor with the
sustain pedal. This of course limits which side I can set the keyboard [on]. I would
have preferred to set it to my right but then I’d be forced to pedal with my left foot,
which did not work well.

Interestingly, States rerecorded the bass guitar parts before the final mix process:

I rerecorded the bass part so that I could meld all the performances together to cre-
ate the illusion that this music was not a patchwork of musicians who never played
these songs together, and may not have met one another. The bass performance
was the last chance to get the guitar and drum phrasing to sound cohesive, and to
lock into the drum fills that I would have the opportunity to hear and familiarize
myself with in advance. I recorded the bass with the lyric/chord chart in front of
me. I never comped my bass parts. I tended to record one or two song sections at
a time because I could easily memorize all the decisions on how to play it without
jotting down the precise note choices for the whole song. I would rehearse each
section, deciding exactly how I would play it in a way that served the arrangement
and followed dynamics. I was trying to create the most invisible and tasteful perfor-
mance. When mixing, I used plugins to emulate mic’d amp tones and room reverb
that were not present when recording bass through a DI [direct injection box].

States’s vocals were tracked on a condenser microphone in his train room (see Fig. 17.6).
He used specific equalization and noise gates to help minimize train noise. He even
performed vocals while the train was moving! States said that that he had to be realistic
about what could be done: “No pristine ballads were attempted. Additionally, I had to
keep constant momentum from the rhythm section to cover any ambient noises that
might be present from the microphone. You cannot sound proof a train room. Instead,
I  simply worked to create some diffusion. The Auralex foam tiles were strategically
placed to reduce reverberations. I also had clothes and towels hung to counteract the
parallel walls. While recording horns, I bribed my train neighbors with beer (the only
circus currency) and told them we were recording. Horns are surprisingly loud even in
a structure with no insulation, parked in an active train yard.”
316   David Tough

Figure 17.6  States’s vocal setup for Strange Town in his train room

The Musicians
With each musician charging anywhere from $75 to $250 to record each song, the cost
of the album added up. The musicians weren’t paid on the basis of how much they were
worth, but most who participated were happy for the work. “Some even donated their
time,” he said.
The primary guitarist on Strange Town was Cameron Morgan, a college friend from
the University of North Texas. Morgan played electric and acoustic guitars on the
album. Additional guitar work was performed by Scott Myers, Kevin Breuner, Jonathan
Blazer, Pat McGrath, and Steve Goodie. Each guitarist had his own arsenal of stringed
instruments. Hiring different players virtually also helped to speed up the recording
process since States was not depending on one musician to record all eleven songs.
“You can spread the work around,” he said. “It’s fun selecting which drummer will be
playing with a particular sax player or bassist.”
Seven of the musicians on Strange Town, not counting States, were musicians from
the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus band. Also Peter Bufano, a circus
composer/musician and former Ringling clown, produced the string recording session
at the Berklee College of Music and sent the files back to States. Deon Estus, best-
known as the bass player of Wham! and as George Michaels’s bassist on his solo proj-
ects, played bass on two songs. States said, “Sometimes you get lucky and get a rock star
in the mix!”
 Virtual Bands   317

States played electric bass on all the remaining songs. Half of the wind parts,
sax, and brass were recorded in his train room, creating a chorus of horns that
was recorded one at a time. The rest of the horns were recorded remotely in other
musicians’ studios. States explained that trumpet, saxophone, and trombone are
extremely loud on a train car. “It fills the whole space. We didn’t work too late and
I tried to only record one musician per day to keep my neighbors from getting frus-
trated with me. The greater problem was actually the noise coming from my neigh-
bors interrupting takes.”
Guitars on all but one song were recorded remotely, usually with live amps that
States could not support in his environment. Guitars on the song “Never Forget
(9/11/02),” were recorded using a DI box, and all guitar effects were selected after the
sessions.
States offered several good pieces of advice in recording virtual musicians:

Don’t hire musicians based on your belief or hope that they can play the kind of
music that you want. Make sure you’ve already heard examples of them playing
the specific instrument in the very style that you need. If it begins to look like they
can’t deliver, either musically or the studio isn’t up to snuff, bail out. Don’t try to
force something, it’ll only waste time and make people feel bad. The test that I used
is this: never give a musician more than two rounds of notes for revisions of the
performance. If it’s not there, it’ll never get there. So look somewhere else. On two
separate occasions I hired great musicians but decided I’d never agree to allow them
to record in the same studio. It sounded bad. There were technical problems or
significant mic problems on their end. Do not try to convince anyone to be a part
of your project. They will only drag their feet at every step of the process. Stick to
highly motivated professionals who can meet deadlines.
You can put players who know each other on the same song, or you can mix it
up. My aim was to ask musicians to do things that I know they would achieve with
success. Virtual recording can go wrong in many ways but I’m learning how to avoid
the pitfalls. Currently, I’m collaborating with a guitarist in New Orleans. We were on
the phone talking through the song, section by section. He emailed me two to four
rough ideas per section. I’d select my favorite and then he’d record a perfect, final
take of the riff, strumming, or melodic line.”

Only half of the musicians States recruited for the project were available and inter-
ested. He found musicians were hungry to work, even on a low-budget project. At least
one potential collaborator rejected the project because States was recording “out” gay
songs. “I felt that it was important that all collaborators understood from the begin-
ning what kind of content I was doing. I didn’t want someone to have bad feelings
about it after the fact. I made sure that all collaborators received a demo with the vocal
and a lyric sheet, even though I was the only vocalist on the album. Overall I felt over-
whelming support from the musicians and engineers and was told that this was a good
time for an album like this to be made—that it was relevant.”
318   David Tough

Mixing
Once all the tracks were recorded and compiled, States would tediously edit each
instrumental or vocal performance on headphones in his train room until he had the
product he desired.
States said about the mixing process: “My plan at the outset was not to use any mix
engineers on Strange Town, but to do it all myself. It would be a learning exercise and
I could spend my budget on my studio gear, and musicians, rather than engineers. Of
course, I would have loved to hire engineers but expected to do that on future projects
instead.”
States said he was persuaded by a friend to use an outside mix engineer and not to
wait. “I hired Chuck Zwicky, a very talented mixer in Manhattan. Since I had intended
to mix everything myself I was sometimes sloppy in my sessions. The tracks were not
clean and vocal performances were not perfect. I figured I’d fix everything myself. But
when you send all of your raw tracks out you need to make sure the performances
stand up on their own, not counting on them to know exactly which words to ‘duck’.
I  resolved on all future projects to create clean tracks with stronger performances
regardless of whether or not I intended at the time to mix them myself.”
In order to prepare his mixes for Internet transfer to the mixing professional, States
followed several steps listed below. As he could not be present during the mixing ses-
sion, he wanted to leave no ambiguity in the communication process.
States created a folder for each song in which he put all his consolidated audio files.
He chose 44.1 kHz, twenty-four-bit files to preserve maximum bandwidth and dynamic
range of the original tracking session. Before consolidating audio files (rendering every
track as mono.wav files from 0’00” time point) he made sure that all his edits and
punch-ins were crossfaded, without audible pops or clicks. All files were also labeled
clearly and simply (i.e., kick in, or piano L and piano R). Individual audio files were sent
without any automation and plug-in data, as most mixers preferred to complete those
steps themselves. He also included a rough mix of the song, mix notes for the song,
other commercially released tracks as reference, and a typed track list in a Word docu-
ment so the engineer could verify that every track was accounted for. Each folder was
then zipped up and sent to the respective mix engineer via wetransfer.com or yousen-
dit.com, depending on the mix engineer’s preference. States received a first draft mix
from the engineer within one or two weeks.
Typically, States communicated via email during the draft process until the mix was
completed. Additionally, he transferred mix drafts as high-quality WAV files to music,
producer, and engineer colleagues for an external set of ears and outside feedback.
Comments from these individuals helped him refine his notes for the mix engineer.
The mix engineer would then deliver a final mix in 44.1, 16 format for mastering.
When mixing ten of the songs, States found that some things were no different than
they would be in a proper studio. “I used bookshelf monitors and two low-fi ‘real world’
sets of monitors. I have a variety of professional headphones. They all have designated
 Virtual Bands   319

fine-tuning tasks. One headset helps me avoid high-frequency overs. Another helps
me hear when the vocals need to be louder. The bookshelf speakers and my Ultrasone’s
help control low-mids and 1k overs. I have a ten-inch subwoofer under my bed, but
I find that I can tune to lows with my Beyerdynamic DT 770 headphones.”
States said that mixing on the train put obvious limits on what he could do. “I cer-
tainly can’t mix during a train run. For one thing, the motion and the rumble cover up
the entire low end. But while we are parked I can, surprisingly, play back the music as
loud as I need to because my neighbors in the other train rooms are usually listening
to their entertainment systems and aren’t disturbed by me. It helps that on one side
of my room is the shower, creating more distance and walls to my neighbors in that
direction.”
After the album was released States decided that in going through the process, he
had become a solid midlevel mix engineer himself. “Now I’d rather mix most of the
tunes myself and hire A-listers on select songs. Since then, I’ve done mixes for other
clients from my train room and I now have an online mixing service as a side business.”

Mastering
Once all the final mixes were completed, States was ready to master his project.

I left the final balancing to the mastering engineer, which should be done in another
room and by another engineer anyway, regardless of whether I’m mixing on a train
or not. I  found that long-distance collaboration with Zwicky and the mastering
engineer, Justin Bonnema, worked incredibly well. I prefer it to in-person, on-the-
clock sessions. It gives me time to let it wash over me, to contemplate any revisions
I want to ask for. It also provided a back-and-forth opportunity for me to revisit my
own mixes to make edits or adjustments based on the mastering engineer’s observa-
tions. It would not have been nearly as collaborative, or as good, if we mastered it in
one day, paying by the hour.

States said he was pressured to use an A-list mastering engineer and to be there in per-
son to get it done in one day.

I found an experienced New  York mastering engineer who mastered the album.
I  was very dissatisfied and discovered that he simply couldn’t follow my notes.
Perhaps it was me, being that this was my first record as a producer. We weren’t get-
ting anywhere, so I hired a midlevel mastering engineer in Nashville who was a life-
saver. He was highly collaborative, understood my notes. He was able to quickly get
what I wanted. First, he worked his magic on each of the songs, which we addressed
one by one. Then he paced the song timings and set the comparative song levels.
I asked for adjustments here and there. It sounded fantastic. He listened to me, and
at times brought me around to his way of thinking. He was always easy to get along
with. And I discovered that it was actually a better way of working than to do it in
320   David Tough

person. We didn’t have any time constraints. I was able to listen to work in my own
environment on speakers that I was familiar with. I got the result I wanted.

States added that the process went better than expected, but not without a few bumps
in the road, and a learning curve.

The Songs

States wanted Strange Town to be very personal and introspective. “It’s a throwback
to the eighties, where gay artists weren’t as out as I  would have wanted them to be.
I wanted to be a voice for ones that grew up in that time, and this is the music I would
have wanted to hear.”
The music of Strange Town, like any skilled form of expression, is a personal set
of songs. Some songs on the project harken back to a 1980s pop rock feel similar
to Jackson Browne or Julian Lennon. These compositions were completed by more
modern material that pointed to the styles of bands like Jellyfish and Ben Folds.
States said he is musically schizophrenic. “I eventually want to make every album
in a different musical genre. Strange Town is more classic rock and southern rock.
The album is basically about me feeling sorry for myself. That’s what the blues are,
right?”
Strange Town was also a way for States to reject the pressure he felt to write “happy,
feel-good music.”

I think the whole music industry was given that charge. After 9/11 sad songs were
pushed aside. I need to hear feel-good music just as much as the next person. I’ve
always looked to music for escapism but I think it’s equally therapeutic to address
the pain. Just allow yourself to feel the sadness for a little while. You can’t fight sor-
row by turning a blind eye to it. There’s a lot of disappointment and longing, but the
album also has hope and determination. Musically, Strange Town is sort of a reac-
tion to the circus, because everything we do is like ESPN music on adrenaline, it’s
just louder and faster. So I’m not at all surprised that Strange Town is what I did in
my off time, on nights and travels days, just real down-tempo material.

“How Do You Know (You’re in Love?)” was written about infatuation and getting to
know a new person for the first time. “I wanted something innocent, and happy and
upbeat, so it’s sort of a happy-go-lucky, gay love song.” The song was later remixed.
“I wrote the song ‘In the Game’ when I was staying in my sister’s basement in Utah.
I had finally moved to New York City, but I had to leave after a few months. ‘Under the
River’ still haunts me because it’s still true. When we perform on Long Island the circus
train travels under the Hudson, under Manhattan, through Penn Station and under the
East River. I’m literally looking at it from out my bedroom window.”
 Virtual Bands   321

Figure 17.7  States in the hallway of his train car

States says the song “Immigrant (Fish out of Water)” is true to its title. “I was having
a lot of trouble in Texas. I moved there with my parents when I was fifteen, but I wanted
to return to the north. And I also had a desire to go to New York City. People would
be giving me a hard time for the type for the music I liked.” “I’ll Give You (What You
Want)” is a classic case of a gay man getting hit on by someone straight or married.
States says he envisioned a person who is trapped in a situation, someone who is gay,
but doesn’t have a choice, or didn’t know he had a choice and got married and is living
a life that is a lie.
“Better (When You’re Older)” is an anthem for others in the gay community coming
out for the first time. “I guess I was writing it for me, but I was also thinking of other
people who were coming out. This was the year that I came out to myself. I intentionally
322   David Tough

wrote it in the key of C major. I wanted it to be something people could play easily if they
wanted. I wanted it to be a song to tell people that they’re not alone when coming out.”

Inspiration

Even though the entire recording process for Strange Town was completed virtually,
States’s inspiration for the album came from the truest parts of his being.

I take my lyric inspiration from whatever is eating away at me, things that induce a
mood or a feeling in me. That’s the first part. Then I try to take what’s on my mind
and distill it down to a small idea or thought. Lyric writing is a very short form, so
you try to express a feeling rather than detail all the complexities of what you’re
thinking. You could try to compose a lyric with a thousand words, but it wouldn’t
sound very musical.

States said he began writing songs as a teenager, putting the music down first and then
searching for words. “The words were just an imitation of someone else’s lyrics that
I probably didn’t understand anyway. I didn’t start dating men until I was in my mid-
twenties, which is probably why I didn’t understand what most singers were singing
about. I was very naïve when it came to relationships.” States said that for the past ten
years all of his songs have started with lyrics. However, he mentions a desire to return
to music first to explore the phrasing possibilities it allows.

I don’t think I have a choice whether or not to write songs. I have to do it. It’s a way
to express myself. It’s kind of like when you write in a journal, it’s a way I capture
things that happen in my life. I also think that it’s communal, I’m always thinking of
the listener when writing. And I remember growing up on music. My older brothers
had a DJ company in Chicago and I remember it being a very social experience. It’s
something people can share, and it’s part of our everyday life.

The Audience

Ryan States is now recognized as an activist in the gay community. Many of his songs
are for other LGBTQs who are struggling with the same things he struggled with before
coming out. Most musicians who have revealed their sexual orientation rarely sing
overtly out songs.

It is rare to find a song in mainstream music that focuses on gay relationships. I find
it frustrating as a consumer. Sometimes gay music is really ambiguous or just a mir-
ror image of straight music. But it shouldn’t just be straight music with the pronouns
 Virtual Bands   323

Figure 17.8  States at mix console

flipped. Our community has unique stories to tell that haven’t been heard yet. And
if a gay artist likes nasty ‘do me, girl’ music, then sing ‘do me, boy.’ No need to feed a
double standard. If they don’t play it at the club or on the radio, who cares?

States’s courageous attitude has gained him a devoted Internet following. He thinks the
future of music is niche marketing, not in the big universal hit song with watered-down
lyrics. “I’m not going to castrate my music to try and fit in. Half of the songs on Strange
Town have out material in them.” With Strange Town, States wanted to tell his stories
the same way straight people do. “It’s about my life, not about being gay. On the record
I didn’t hide my gayness, or highlight it.”
States decided to remix the song “How Do You Know (You’re in Love?)” (see Fig. 17.9)
to reach a more current gay audience. “My remixer, Mike Ator, actually found me.
I  received an email out of the blue from a gay singer/songwriter from Houston. He
offered to remix my song. I’m guessing he learned of my music through JD Doyle’s
Houston radio program, QMH. I offered to pay him as I wanted control, to be able to
give notes and impose a deadline. That email process was very collaborative. I  gave
musical and mix-related notes. In fact, he sent me the stems and I tweaked the mix a
bit further. But the remix is ultimately his baby. I was really impressed with the vocal
harmonizer he used by singing himself. Not many remixers have the musical chops to
meld such harmonic material with the track. He only used my vocals and the sax intro
and solo. The rest of the parts were new.”
States enjoyed being able to produce the remix from long distance without wear-
ing any of the musical hats of arranger or performer. Although he met Ator virtually,
they’ve developed a friendship.
324   David Tough

Figure 17.9  Ryan States cover for the Mike Ator Club Remix of “How Do You Know (You’re
in Love?)”

The Future

The next step for Ryan States is to tour live, performing the music from Strange
Town on stages around the country. He said that the logistics behind booking shows
while touring with the circus is daunting. Although his album was recorded with
an amalgamation of musicians selected from across the country via the Internet,
he plans to gather individual musicians in each city to support his act. He plans to
create charts in two instrumentations, depending on the availability of members
of the circus band and local players. He will prepare and rehearse with them over
email and video chat in order to prepare them for the show. Once he arrives in the
city on the circus tour, he can also rehearse briefly with the musicians before play-
ing the show in that particular city. “I’ve not yet performed in front of an audience
I could see. I look forward to getting something bigger together. I am preparing for
it.” He has had airplay in Dallas, Houston, and Hartford, Connecticut. He has also
performed songs on live radio. “I’ve wanted to be a recording artist my whole life
but I’ve only recently considered performing my original music on stage, thanks to
 Virtual Bands   325

some prodding from Houston-based radio producer JD Doyle. I don’t look or act
like a front man. Plus, I didn’t know if my synth-based songs would translate to the
rock stage. But after performing a set with circus musicians at a big birthday bash
for our head porter, I  realized that the songs really do stand up, even with fewer
instruments.”
States is also currently producing his music video virtually from his train car. “Of
course my music video is still a work in progress. I’ve had some setbacks with Final
Cut Pro. I unwittingly purchased what would be the last version of the Suite. Then they
came out with a cheaper, more user-friendly version, based on the iMovie interface.
The video will come out long after the music was released, but that’s just part of being
indie and wearing so many hats.”
When asked about recording another CD like Strange Town, States said he’s got a
backlog of material and about three albums’ worth to touch up. “I also have material for
a new album as well. I’m really wanting to get into that. I feel like I’m trying to make up
for lost time now that I have better equipment. I want to put all that out, but I’m doing
about ten shows a week with the circus.”

Conclusions

The growth of the speed of the Internet and personal computing power continues
to point toward more unique ways in which artists are collaborating with each other
anonymously and by asynchronous means. Entire albums are now being recorded by
exchanging files across the Web. These trends of artist empowerment will only grow
in the future. As a result, independent musicians and producers, once at the periphery
of the music industry, are now able to produce recordings that rival those produced by
commercial studios, leading to what producer Steve Albini has called “the triumph of
the amateurs” (Karr 2002).
Ryan States is on the forefront of that trend. He said he learned a lot of lessons
about recording virtually along the way. He is also stimulated by his work with the
circus. He has all of life’s necessities: a place to live (albeit on wheels), a good musical
gig, and time for his own work. He even has his traveling circus family. “I’ll be here
for a while, at least another year. It’s nice to have steady work and just show up,” he
said. “I don’t really like a lot of attention, but as for my music, it is a new challenge
to be pushed up to the front. I’ve always been a sideman, but I know now I can do
whatever I want to do.”
Would States undertake another project like this again? “Absolutely. I don’t want
it to take three years, and it might require that I  play more of the instruments in
the future. So, maybe less musicians in the future, and a little smaller of a project,
productionwise; but definitely.” In the meantime, he has plenty to keep him busy at
the circus.
326   David Tough

References
CD baby DIY Musician podcast. Remote Collaboration. Episode 78. http://cdbabypodcast.
com/ (accessed July 3, 2013).
Conger, Cristen. 2012. What Is a Virtual Band? http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/virtual-
band.htm (accessed June 29, 2013).
ICT 2013 Facts and Figures, http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/
ICTFactsFigures2013.pdf (accessed July 2, 2013).
Karr, Rick. 2002. TechnoPop: The Secret History of Technology and Pop Music. http://www.npr.
org/programs/morning/features/2002/Technopop (accessed May 2, 2013).
Kirk, J. 2004. “Necessary Factors for the Creation of a Master’s Degree in Commercial Music.”
Ph.D.  diss., University of Memphis (Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Reference No.
20040001),https://umwa.memphis.edu/etd//index.php/view/home/4 (accessed May 15, 2013).
Lopez, Rich. 2011. “Travelin’ Man.” The Dallas Voice, http://www.dallasvoice.com/travelin%
E2%80%99-man-1083777.html (accessed May 15, 2013).
Sobel, R. 2007. “Music Schools:  Are We Incubating Excellence?” Music and Entertainment
Educators Association Journal 7(1): 177–186.
Swedien, Bruce. 2004. Make Mine Music. Norway: MIA Musikk.
Wadhams, Wayne. 1990. Sound Advice: The Musician’s Guide to the Recording Studio, 1st ed.
New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.

Further Reading
Moorefield, Virgil. 2005. The Producer as Composer:  Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Piekut, Benjamin, and Stanyek, Jason. 2010. “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane.”
TDR: The Drama Review 54(1):14–38.
 PA RT   F I V E

C OM M U N I T I E S
A N D T H E   WOR L D
W I DE   W E B

Fans’ identification with online communities who can participate, interact, and influ-
ence music in the virtual world of the Internet has often led to an all-encompassing
interpretation of social equality, but as Shzr Ee Tan observes, is this, at heart, “an
Internet-engendered false sense of democracy?”1 Her Chapter  18, “ ‘Uploading’ to
Carnegie Hall: The First YouTube Symphony Orchestra,” interrogates the implications
of Google’s championing of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra,2 where “an emerg-
ing picture of utopian teamwork … camouflages larger, uneven political concerns.”
Responding to a worldwide audition call on a dedicated channel, musicians around the
globe were encouraged to bid for a place in the orchestra. Some three thousand entries
were short-listed to two hundred by a panel of YouTube-appointed music professionals,
with the final selection being made by YouTube account holders. The finalists were then
flown to New York (at Google’s expense) for three days of intensive rehearsal under the
baton of Michael Tilson-Thomas. “Here was, in theory, an orchestra built by anyone
and everyone with an Internet connection who cared to participate” (Chapter 18). But
as Carr earlier observed, “In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a
few reap the rewards” (cited in ibid.). Tan presents a penetrative and fascinating account
of YouTube’s privileged position as a prime video-sharing site, not least its aspirations
to court the Chinese-speaking world by deploying high-profile China-born artists such
as Tan Dun (who was commissioned to compose the Internet Symphony Eroica for the
328    Part Five: Communities and the World Wide Web

orchestra’s inaugural concert), and internationally acclaimed pianists Lang Lang and
Wang Yuja. Yet “throughout most of the orchestra’s active period of existence, YouTube
in its entirety—alongside social network Facebook—came to be banned in China …
[and] the YSO’s crusade in China became a casualty of international politics” (ibid.).
Issues of social stratification are also explored, including how the orchestra “unwit-
tingly ended up acting largely in the interests of an ultimately select and elite group
despite trying to promote classical music as an international and universal language”
(ibid.). As Tan’s personal interactions with orchestra participants in New York reveal,
there are doubts as to whether the orchestra’s three days of intense offline socialization
could consolidate or remake existing notions of an online community. Not least, ques-
tions are raised as to whether, in making alliances with particular musical institutions
and artists, “Google was running a branding agenda that harnessed the social mobility
of classical performers” (ibid.), in so doing upgrading “YouTube’s profile within the
information technology market as a serious portal and cultural broker” (ibid.), “pres-
tigious” as well as “universal” (ibid.)—a cynical observation that is nevertheless an
important consideration in the Internet’s increasingly capitalist ventures.
How despatialized audiences, communities, and networks are assembled is also
addressed in Samantha Bennett’s discussion of “The Listener as Remixer: Mix Stems
in Online Fan Community and Competition Contexts.” This time the focus is on art-
ists who release stems of component song parts for mixing by their fan communities,
thus providing them with a means of interacting with their fellow community mem-
bers by promoting participation in the once-professional domain of the producer and
studio. Issues concerning what she describes as the ongoing “democratization” of not
only technology but recording and production skill sets and workplaces are extended
to include the artist’s assumption of technology ownership and the varying degrees of
technological literacy and ability among members of their fan community. Bennett’s
focus on the technological aspects of mix stems, including problems surrounding
audible nuances, and the distinctions between multitrack and master recordings, is
followed by an analysis of four contrasting case studies where compilation of mix
stems is contextualized by reference to the online community to which each example
was released: William Orbitt’s “Orbitmixer,” an eight-track interactive mixing console
interface; Radiohead’s “Nude” remix, a joint project with Apple’s iTunes music retailer
and Garageband DAW; the U.S. rap artist Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown”; and Nine
Inch Nails’ lead single, “The Hand That Feeds,” “one of the earliest examples whereby
a commercial recording artist has voluntarily released the multitrack elements of a
single to the public” (Chapter 19). As Bennett acknowledges, all of the case studies
elicit “multiple lines of inquiry pertaining to authorship, production, dissemination,
democratization, and reception” (ibid.), and her conclusions highlight how distinct
communities have evolved around remixing practice, as well as how these assume a
combination of both technological ownership (the tools to create a remix) on the part
of the artist, and processual ability (remixing skill sets) on the part of the listener. But
as her case studies reveal, “The listener is held at arms’ length and the ‘participatory
 Part Five: Communities and the World Wide Web    329

nature’ of their involvement with the remix is limited … technology may have been
‘democratized,’ but remixing skill sets have not, or at least not to the extent that a fan
could be trusted with contributing to an official remix release” (ibid.).
Is it the case, then, that communities tend to evolve from belonging to a generic
music technology? If so, how important is it to differentiate between the profes-
sional and the amateur, the physical/real and the virtual? Bennett’s investigation
into the relationship between global communities, technology, and creativity also
comes to the fore in Benjamin O’Brien’s discussion of laptop ensembles. “Sample
Sharing: Virtual Laptop Ensemble Communities” opens with a discussion of Roger
Dannenberg’s debut composition, FLO: Federation of Laptop Orchestras (2012), at the
First Symposium on Laptop Ensembles and Orchestras (SLEO): “The work featured
coordination between seven university-based laptop orchestras around the globe,
from Stanford University (US) to the University of Huddersfield (UK) … the pre-
miere was not just a simulcast of ensembles performing in parallel across 5,000-plus
miles:  each laptop musician virtually received and transmitted various combina-
tions of audio, video, and control-message data over a shared network. To accom-
modate and optimize the transmission of these data collections over vast distances,
Dannenberg and his university colleagues and students designed an innovative layer-
ing of multiple networks” (Chapter 20).
The SLEO provides the stimulus for O’Brien’s chapter, and as he observes, “In
addition to constantly monitoring the influx of data, each musician must come to
terms with the ‘displaced’ sound … emanating from any nearby computer as well as
the sonic reduction of virtual ensembles through the venue’s speaker-system … this
sound rests in a gap between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ realities” (ibid.). O’Brien’s discus-
sion of virtual music scene networks is contextualized by a brief history of the Hub
and “how individual and ensemble-driven artistic interest evolved as a result of inno-
vative computer technologies,” which he interprets “as a mutualistic feedback loop
where a community inspires its members, whose work encourages others to continue
advancing new music and technologies” (ibid.). Academy-based laptop ensembles
and orchestras are also discussed, as well as the concept of the laptop as a “folk”
instrument, and the recently created genre “algorave,” a music scene subset where
“musicians generate dance music on their laptops in real-time via algorithms that
allow them to freely adapt to the venue’s atmosphere or environment” (ibid.). O’Brien
also examines the complex philosophical and technical issues in the virtual realm of
performance, where “context reveals the structural qualities of elements in an envi-
ronment and situates the embodiment of performance—real or virtual” (ibid.). As
he observes in relation to laptop ensembles performing live, “One may argue that
the audience’s question of ‘who’s doing what?’ is a welcome ambiguity compared to a
completely virtual performance, where the trace rendered is only a product of phan-
tom processes” (ibid.). Laptop ensembles have also adopted Second Life conventions,
forging musical relationships within virtual geographies (ibid.), and a “relatively new
330    Part Five: Communities and the World Wide Web

live coding method for sharing SuperCollider codelets is” now “available to Twitter
users in the form of ‘sc-tweets’ ” (ibid.). As he explains, though this approach to live
coding attracts novices, “It is the charm of composing efficient, sonically interesting,
140 character codelets that appeals to the more advanced SuperCollider users” (ibid.).
O’Brien makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of network ensem-
bles, and although often technical in its detail, his philosophical discussion provides
a thoughtful insight into the connectivity between the local, translocal, and virtual
levels of the music scene. He also raises an important conceptual point:  “If one is
to hear music being created in a virtual place, then it must be heard at some real
locality … Thus, virtual music rests somewhere between symbolic and imagined
realities” (ibid.). It is a thought that is pertinent to David Pattie’s discussion, “Stone
Tapes: Ghost Box, Nostalgia, and Postwar Britain,” which opens with a reminiscence
of “The Geography,” the fourth track on Belbury Poly’s fourth album, The Belbury
Tales (2012). As he comments, it is “unsettling. We’re not in the familiar, safe, cozy
spaces of the English countryside; we seem to be elsewhere” (Chapter 21). “The track
and the album are the work of Jim Jupp, who records mainly under the name Belbury
Poly … the self-styled vicar of Belbury” who, together with Julian House, founded
the small independent label Ghost Box in 2004. As Pattie observes, the art work
and other ancillary parts of the label’s output resemble “a curiously jumbled lumber
room, filled with the refuse of British postwar society, mixed with images and ideas
drawn from a particular strain of (mostly) British horror and science fiction” that
“run around and against each other unpredictably” (ibid.).
Pattie’s analysis offers both insight and a critical evaluation of hauntology, a term
that was borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the
Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994), but that shed most of its politi-
cal associations when it migrated into popular music. Instead, it came “to describe a
type of recording that was haunted—or that existed in an indeterminate relation to
the past; it bore the spectral imprint of previous styles and technologies, mixed with
techniques and approaches available only to the contemporary musician” (ibid.). As
Simon Reynolds (2006) explained, in Ghost Box “the homeland of postwar Britain
becomes unheimlich; texts, images, and meanings that are part of an agreed memory
reemerge, in a jumbled, uncanny, unsettling virtual version of themselves” (ibid.).
They invoke “a musical style and a cultural memory of a time when the folk tradi-
tions were both nostalgically evocative and frightening, and when cultural concerns
over the past were inextricably bound up with persistent, cultural worries over the
technologies of the future” (ibid.). Yet, as Pattie observes, the virtual Britain identified
in Ghost Box recordings gets close to the cultural atmosphere of postwar Britain, so
an apparent fantasy version gets pretty close to the truth of the time.
“What makes Ghost Box (as a label, and as a virtual version of a vanished time)
both artistically and intellectually effective,” Pattie writes, “is that it manages to
simultaneously evoke and undermine the comforting nostalgia which we might
 Part Five: Communities and the World Wide Web    331

feel for a vanished time … one that was already haunted by the ghostly image of
its own apparently inevitable demise” (ibid.). Its music and its framing “combined
a nostalgia for a future that never came to pass, with a vision of a strange, alterna-
tive Britain, constituted from the reordered refuse of the postwar period,” and, as
such, “its nostalgia isn’t for a lost country, but for a country that was never quite
there” (ibid.). Not least, Ghost Box is about “the weirdness of Britain in general,
especially during our imagined all-at-once time frame of roughly 1958 to 1978”
(Jupp interview, cited in ibid.). As Pattie concludes, “The Britain in which I grew
up becomes a stranger, ghostlier place; a virtual, reconfigured, haunted collage or
palimpsest” (ibid.).
Adam Trainer, in Chapter 22, agrees: “Our relationship with memory and the rep-
resentation of our individual and collective pasts have changed. The personal and
affective are undeniably tethered to our negotiation of culture through increasingly
mediated experiences, which now occur predominantly in the digital realm” (ibid.).
“From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory”
situates the stylistic approach shaping hypnagogic pop within the cultural experi-
ence from which its young artists operate. More specifically, their childhood and
adolescent years stretched across the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their created sounds
use a nostalgic and unstable remembrance of that era, channeled through popular
cultural references:  “revenant forms freed from their historical context” (Keenan,
cited in ibid.). Trainer’s analysis of Daniel Lopatin’s video for “angel” (2009) pro-
vides a thoughtful example of hypnagogic pop’s format for cultural reappropriation
and its “investment in the personal affectivity of popular culture”: “a form of mne-
monically encoded cultural shorthand” (ibid.). Subsequent video experiments and a
mixtape of similar aural experiments released under the alias Chuck Person preface
“ecco jams,” a play on the interpretive functionality of texts:  “the furniture music
of the postconsumerist landscape” (ibid.). “In this reappropriation of the cultural
detritus of a media-saturated capitalist social order, hypnagogic pop and its con-
nected movements dislocate their source material from textual cynicism or irony,
instead accessing the affective moment of engagement” (ibid.). Trainer then turns
to James Ferraro, whose Far Side Virtual (2011) “summons a digital utopia built
from the detritus of the early-twenty-first-century consumer experience” (ibid.), or
as Ferraro commented, “ringtone music meant to be experienced on the poststruc-
turalist medium, the smartphone” (Gibb, cited in ibid.). Attention then moves to
“chillwave,” which “occupies a space somewhere between electronic pop, psychede-
lia and easy listening styles from the 1970s and 1980s” (ibid.); “vaporwave,” which
“took its musical cues from the shiny, synthesized digital vistas produced in the early
1990s” (ibid.), “depoliticiz[ing] its source material by presenting global capitalism
as an unobtainable aesthetic instead of an ideological hurdle” (ibid.); and “distroid,”
a fusion of “bass-heavy thumps and synthesizer reveries of dance music with the
mechanized, quasi-industrial soundscapes of dystopian digital nightmares” (ibid.).
332    Part Five: Communities and the World Wide Web

As Trainer concludes, “The post-Internet age has produced an aesthetic of musical

understanding that cuts across not only popular music but also other media, result-
ing in an approach to art (and music) born out of the glut of information that assaults
contemporary subjectivity (ibid.).3
The extent to which the post-Internet age has changed how identities are inscribed,
enacted, and managed through networks and in front of multiple audiences, and
how this is reflected in the representational choices made by bands, is increasingly a
matter of concern. As Danijela Bogdanovic reveals, “Politics of style, commonly tied
to commercial goals” (Chapter 23), “guided the visual representational choices” of
the five bands observed in her ethnographic study “Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social
Networking, and Masculinity.” Her research provides an important insight into “the
practices of ‘doing music’ and ‘doing gender’ … of social networking communities”
and whether these signify “a challenge to stereotypical representations and enact-
ments of gender, prominent in real-life musical spaces” (ibid.). Situating “virtual
music spaces and practices … as an extension of the real-life spaces and practices,”
as “enmeshed, interlinked, and interreliant,” “the convergence of the participants’
experiences, social spheres, and practices” (ibid.), she reveals “some of the signif-
icant themes that emerged from my work on gender and music in offline music
spaces and communities … [These include] observable (gendered) practices that
actively or inadvertently exclude women from music spaces, the regulatory power
of hegemonic masculinity within the setting of the band, homosocial practices that
reinforce the sense of belonging to a group and feelings of bandhood, and the signifi-
cance of musical enculturation in the forging of gender/masculinity through a series
of music-related practices” (ibid.). While acknowledging the demise of MySpace
as the number one social networking site, Bogdanovic maintains that its architec-
tural legacy (“profiles, friends lists, tools for public communication, and streamed
updates”) and “the dynamics created by both visible and invisible (imagined) audi-
ences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of the public and private domains [cit-
ing boyd] remain a pertinent terrain for the arguments about self-presentation and
social connection in the digital age” (Chapter 23). As Bogdanovic discovered, “There
was a striking and noticeable lack of female presence in images used to represent
and contextualize the bands, within their virtual photo albums and their top friends”
(ibid.), although she was added to the latter “to aid credibility” or “due to the way
I looked” (ibid.). Outside of the context of band identity, her inclusion was based
on rapport and real-life knowledge, suggesting that “the performance of gender/
masculinity and music group member identities are determined and governed by
different behavioral norms … extending beyond a simple display of connections,
to where they become strategic and political” (boyd, cited in ibid.). To be included
on a band profile, the female fan needed to display both physical attractiveness and
entertainment value. In contrast, male fans commented on technical aspects of a
band’s performance.
 Part Five: Communities and the World Wide Web    333

As Bogdanovic’s research reveals, “Music-related interaction on SNSs includ-

ing MySpace can be understood as gendered in the sense that different behavioral
modes are adopted by men and women, reflecting the different roles played by
men and women within wider cultural domains. Though undeniably there were
and are female bands and performers with profiles on SNSs, women, on the whole,
tended to be visible or invisible fans and invisible girlfriends and friends of a band”
(ibid.). Hence, “If we accept that identity is verified and inscribed through visu-
ally represented connections, then who is included within the network becomes
a significant determinant of self-identification of bands” (ibid.). It is also evident
that “in 2013 social networking is characterized by cross-platform interaction,
where one’s Facebook profile features links to videos on YouTube or sound files
on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, where Twitter updates are synced with Facebook
status updates and so forth, creating a further challenge of managing representa-
tion in front of several audiences and across several platforms” (ibid.). Thus, even
though “the shift in status from digital objects to that of digital subjects had a
potential to disrupt the dominant representations of gender marked by hegemonic
masculinity, homosocial practices, and assignment of gender-specific spectatorial
roles and positions, the artists scrutinized and discussed in my study tended to
translate offline dynamics onto online platforms. This was achieved by employing
strategies such as active exclusion of women from online band spaces and visual
reinforcement of bandhood ties through choices made in managing the groups’
visual capital, as well as through textual and musical coding of gender” (ibid.). As
Bogdanovic concludes, this is an area that merits further research, not least as “an
approach that incorporates theorizing about the importance of spectatorial gaze
in the co-creation of musical and gendered meanings, by artists and audiences”
(ibid.).

Notes
1. Anahid Kassabian, Research Training Roadshow on Studying Popular Music, pers.
comm., Jan. 17, 2007.
2. Google had acquired YouTube in 2006.
3. The editors would like to thank Danny Bright (AHRC researcher, University of Sussex)
for his thoughtful reading of Pattie and Trainer’s chapters.

References
Books, Articles, and Websites
boyd, danah. 2008. “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality and Networked Publics.”
Ph.D. diss., University California, Berkeley.
334    Part Five: Communities and the World Wide Web

Dannenberg, Roger. 2012. “Laptop Orchestra Communication Using Publish-Subscribe and

Peer-to-Peer Strategies.” In Proceedings of the First Symposium on Laptop Ensembles and
Orchestras: 88–93.
Derrida, J. 1994 Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International. London: Routledge.
Reynolds, S. 2006, November. “Society of the Spectral.” The Wire 273: 26–33.
Whiteley, Sheila. 2015. “Sexploitation and Constructions of Femininity in Contemporary
She-Pop.” Pop-Frauen den Gegenwart:  Körper - Stimme - Image. Vermarktungsstrategien
zwischen Selbstinszenierung und Fremdbestimmung, ed. Christa Brustle. Bielefeld:
Transcript- Verlag.
 chapter 18

“U pl oadi ng ”
to Carneg i e  Ha l l
The First YouTube Symphony Orchestra

Shzr Ee Tan

In April 2009, ninety-six strangers from around the world came together to play at
New York’s Carnegie Hall in the name of a virtual experiment. YouTube, the event orga-
nizer, disclosed that the performers had met in the flesh for only three days, after being
selected to form an ensemble by even more strangers—some two million Internet users
across the globe. The event attracted reportage from the international press, including
CNN, the BBC, Scandinavian television, Korean broadcasters, and the Straits Times in
Singapore. In the ensuing media frenzy, one press officer claimed that Carnegie Hall
“had never hosted as many as 20 television cameras.”1 Tan Dun, the composer com-
missioned to write a piece for the orchestra’s inaugural concert, described the venture
as a “modern arranged marriage, with matchmakers YouTube and Google.”2 A  new
community—of the orchestra, and around the orchestra—was born.
This chapter tracks the virtual beginnings of the ensemble from 2008 to its eventual
embodiment in real time and space. It examines YouTube’s aspiration to create a new
utopian musical playing field engineered through the global, participatory, and democ-
ratizing reach of Internet technologies. It critiques the commercial hype and techno-
logical determinism riding the vogue enthusiasm concerning new media, and explores
the convergence of new and old paradigms witnessed through changing physicalities
and communities in performances over the Internet. These new modes of musicking
and cultural brokering, coinciding with an agenda-laden promotion of YouTube itself,
employ a strategy in which Western classical music acts as mythologically symbolic of
“prestigious” as well as “universal.”
336   Shzr Ee Tan

Fetishizing the Internet
as “New” and “Cool”

The idea of assembling an orchestra through voting on YouTube was mooted by Tim
Lee, a young Google employee from London. Now based in the United States, Lee
was a classical music enthusiast who idealistically hoped to enhance the accessibility
of his “favorite genre’s” otherwise elite profile, riding on the back of YouTube’s “huge
reach with the masses.”3 Backed by his employer Google (which acquired YouTube
in 2006), Lee proposed his idea to classical music practitioners in late 2008. He
encountered positive response, piquing interest from institutions in the arts, finan-
cial, and administrative spheres. Carnegie Hall, the London Symphony Orchestra,
composer Tan Dun, violinist Gil Shaham, and pianist Lang Lang came onboard
immediately, either as musical collaborators or endorsers. Performers from the
Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Sydney
Symphony Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic also formed a judging panel for
the first stage of this experiment. Some judges eventually went on to coach and play
in the orchestra. Outside of the arts circle, the venture gained a major sponsor in the
Korean makeup company Laneige. The group offered its spokesperson, TV soap star
Song Hae Gyo, as a mascot.
From its inception, Google envisioned the project taking off with velocity by nature
of its virtual and technological potential, and the Internet-encouraged ethos of tempo-
ral currency. Collaborators bent their schedules: conductor Michael Tilson Thomas,
Tan Dun, and the London Symphony Orchestra gave the project priority timetabling
in their diaries, which were usually queued up years in advance. On December 1, 2008,
YouTube released a worldwide audition call on a dedicated channel in a video fronted
by Tan and young, attractive classical musicians.4 Musicians across the globe were
encouraged to bid for a place by recording themselves on video and uploading it to
the same site by January 28, 2009. They were asked to use downloadable PDF scores
(including part of Tan’s new Internet Symphony No. 1: Eroica) and play alongside down-
loadable tempo-guidance videos. Some three thousand entries from seventy territories
around the world were then filtered to a shortlist of two hundred by a panel of music
professionals. General YouTube account holders could then vote for their favorites.
On the portal, they made contact with the candidates in cyberspace, clicking through
interactive features, forums, and commentary menus. Voting closed in February, and
the successful finalists were named in March. Instrumental parts for a full program
were sent out to successful candidates, who were told to practice at home in advance of
a flight (at Google’s expense) to New York for three days of rehearsal. On April 18, 2009,
the orchestra was ready to play.
The frenzy with which the project was set in motion was consonant with Google’s
larger, self-conscious fetishization of all things web-mediated as “new,” “novel,” and—for
want of a shinier buzzword—“cool.” Google’s partners shared the same sentiment.
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    337

At the orchestra’s inaugural concert, Tilson Thomas updated a famous phrase, quip-
ping: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Upload, upload, upload.”
Select classical music acts worked closely with Google to generate hype around the
venture. The audition video, for example, was a fast-paced ninety-second clip collaging
split-second snippets of classical musicians both recognizable and unknown. Although
glossy and professionally produced, it paid tribute to amateur genres of remixed home
and commercial videos (known as “mashups”) just then emerging on YouTube. As
media theorist Trebor Scholz might comment, the venture celebrated “the new new-
ness of technologies” (2008). Classical musicians who had aligned themselves with the
virtual experiment relished shedding an earlier, conservative image; they were now
full-fledged members of Web 2.0, as digitally plugged into new media as their counter-
parts in the pop world.
To be sure, for many performers involved, this coming together functioned more as
a makeover exercise than a fundamental shift in mode of musicking, even as musicians
around the world were becoming increasingly web-savvy, joining social networks as a
simple necessity to keep up to date with technology and life. And yet, underscoring the
campaign’s shiny re-projection of the classical music world in terms of “new newness”
was the larger issue of technological determinism. This, in turn, reflected Google’s stra-
tegic framing of the Internet as a vehicle for attaining a new kind of egalitarian utopia
achieved through participatory culture.

False Virtual Democracies

The underlying subtext could be seen in how project managers advocated an ethos
of “transparent democracy” in creating an orchestra, whose “truly global” nature was
marketed as enabled through the supposedly mass and nondiscriminatory reach of the
Internet. YouTube advertised that orchestral positions were open to all—professionals
or amateurs. Applicants were addressed as the proverbial “everyman” and could hail
from any territory, and be of any gender and age. Although judges moderated the initial
list, other stages of the selection process involved YouTube viewers directly or indi-
rectly as performers, voters, and spectators. Any member of the public could watch
any audition clip and follow its protagonist’s progress, tracking views and votes. Any
YouTube user could comment on the performances of individual musicians and engage
with them in public or private. Here was, in theory, an orchestra built by anyone with
an Internet connection who cared to participate.
The utopian dream of a limitless and publicly networked community echoes what
Jeff Howe (2006) describes as a decentralized, technologically determined, and “crowd-
sourced” culture. He refers to the widespread reach of new media as creating unprec-
edented access to the latent talents of “everyday people.” Consonant with Howe are Don
Tapscott and Anthony Williams, who assert that consumers have also become “pro-
sumers … (engaged in) co-creating goods and services” (2006, 2). Lawrence Lessig,
338   Shzr Ee Tan

contributing to the same discussion, writes (2008) of collaboratively engineered public

action, roused through open calls over the Internet and summoned in the name of
community spirit. In its public attempt to build a democratically assembled musician
community, the YouTube Symphony (henceforth YSO) exemplified all of these theo-
ries. As an open partnership between corporate and noncorporate sectors, it is also
what Lessig has described as a “hybrid economy” project, maximizing the potentially
leveled playing fields of new media communities (2008, 177).
This emerging picture of utopian teamwork, however, camouflages uneven politi-
cal concerns. In spite of its idealistic beginnings, fundamental economic asymme-
tries still govern the orchestra’s hybrid economy. At the heart of this lies what Anahid
Kassabian describes as an Internet-engendered “false sense of democracy,” all too easily
subscribed to in the world of virtual musicking.5 Scholz has also warned of how the
kaleidoscopic conversational diversity found in the vistas of Web 2.0 is still “strictly
filtered … for applicability to the market” (2008). This is true of the YouTube case in
parallel games played by commercial bodies (such as established record companies and
sponsors) who have taken advantage of their equal, and often more than equal, access
to free platforms to generate artificial demand for their own products. In the words of
Nicholas Carr, “in the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap
the rewards” (2008, 247). In effect, the Internet’s very nondiscriminatory reach has lent
itself to commercial manipulations and capitalist practices. The YSO can thus be reas-
sessed, not least for its ultimate origin in and financial backing from Google, a major
player in the media world itself. The supposed democratic “free” space of YouTube,
otherwise a selling point in the project, must therefore also be understood as suscep-
tible to manipulation by Google and its collaborators for a specific agenda. Jean Burgess
and Joshua Green put it this way:

The questions that confront us now are about what comes next: whether or not the
future of participatory culture can accommodate increasing diversity and breadth
of participation, and the extent to which such issues can be made to matter to cor-
porate futures. More specifically, how might the future of YouTube as commercial
enterprise actually be bound up with the politics of participatory culture? (2010, 103)

Consequently, one can reconsider whether YouTube actually enjoys a reach as demo-
cratic or as global as its owners hope. Indeed, the fabled twenty hours of video footage
uploaded every minute, every day, are not always accessible anytime or anywhere.6
Never mind YouTube as a specific platform: asymmetries of media and wealth distri-
bution around the world demonstrate that large tracts of sub-Saharan Africa barely
maintain an Internet penetration rate of 15.6  percent (compared to North America’s
78.6 percent).7 Where Internet usage might have soared into quadruple-digit growth
figures over the last ten years in certain developing economies, the legal and logistical
availability of YouTube across other territories is also worth examining.
In China, for example, YouTube’s prime position has been undermined by state
censorship and deliberately encouraged competition from local (and more culturally
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    339

attuned) platforms such as the Chinese-language-based Youku.com and Tudou.com.

This is ironic, given that one of the orchestra’s aims was the active courting of Sinophone
worlds and their potential share of a population familiar with classical music. In pursuit
of this market, Google deployed high-profile Chinese artists such as Tan Dun, Lang
Lang, and Yuja Wang as mascots. It also hired a public relations officer from Hong
Kong. In addition, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra was engaged to perform an alter-
native arrangement of Tan’s new symphony, aimed at YouTube viewers who were fans
of Chinese orchestral music.
However, throughout most of the orchestra’s existence, YouTube in its
entirety—alongside social network Facebook—came to be banned in China. These
sanctions were (and continue to be) imposed on “foreign” websites, identified as are-
nas for potential galvanization of political sentiment. The measures were initially
introduced in 2009, owing to state fears of contemporaneous uprisings in Tibet and
Tiananmen anniversary-related protests on the Internet. They remain in place today,
ostensibly to further protectionist media policies. Thus the YSO’s crusade in China
became a casualty of international politics.
Such paradoxes of the ultimately unequal playing field of the Internet were not the
only factors undermining the orchestra’s idealistic and utopian aspirations. From the
perspective of Pierre Bourdieu (1984) on social stratification of taste and construc-
tion of cultural capital, a consideration lies in how and where classical music pro-
moted here was still practiced as a class-bound genre within its microcosm of an
Internet-incarnated symphonic ensemble. Although the eventual orchestra boasted a
multicultural membership of ninety-six representatives from more than thirty coun-
tries, 85 percent of these musicians were selected from or schooled in North America
and Europe. YouTube reported members of the orchestra as including schoolteach-
ers, bankers, and one would-be truck driver (who eventually became a professional
performer). However, this did not also mean that its musicians were less than highly
trained. They hailed from positions of already high social mobility within the first
world. From this author’s observations of rehearsals in New York, as well as interviews
with musicians, plus perusal of web videos, the impression created was of primarily
English-fluent ensemble members hailing from relatively privileged and educated
backgrounds. One could argue further it was this type of background that, in the first
place, had afforded individuals time and money to pursue a sustained—and largely
private—education in classical music.
Whether such class-delineated biases in YSO’s demographics are reflections of a
particular Internet-savvy subcommunity within any virtual classical world remains
a moot point. One might argue that far from being a monolithic entity, the classical
music world is a collection of many local and international scenes. It merges different
networks of subcommunities, populated not only by performers ranging from rank-
and-file professionals to freelancers and amateurs, but also by educators, producers,
administrators, sound engineers, impresarios, philanthropists, avid record collectors,
and, often, anxious parents. However, a consequent issue lies in how the orchestra
unwittingly ended up acting largely in the interests of an ultimately select and elite
340   Shzr Ee Tan

group despite trying to promote classical music as an international and universal lan-
guage, one that transcended ethnicity and class in service of a participatory society
rendered egalitarian by technology.
YouTube did showcase some diversity in the cultural backgrounds of individual
orchestra members. On its website and concert program, ninety-six performers were
individually named alongside their nationalities. The inaugural concert also wove in
videos of the lives of selected players—a professional Japanese percussionist, a cellist
poker player, a physicist who played the double bass. However, the separate identities
of these musicians, framed within the project’s utopian rhetoric on YouTube’s standard-
ized platforms, were milked for symbolic difference, serving more as tokenistic proof of
a global community. In video portraits, musicians were presented as “everyday” if only
for having yet to enter the classical big league commanded by the likes of endorsers
Lang Lang and Tilson Thomas.
The YSO’s engineered image of the nascent classical musician—an unknown tal-
ent finding momentary recognition through taking part in a prestigious institution
by dint of democracy—is not unprecedented in youth orchestras. Equal-opportunity
ensembles such as the New World Symphony, the Asian Youth Orchestra, the UBS
Verbier Orchestra, and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra already exist. Rachel Beckles
Willson (2009), for example, has reflected on the political and representational fac-
ets of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s Jewish-Arab musical collaborations. She
exposes the “range of competing utopias that sustain” as well as destabilize director
Daniel Barenboim’s promotion of a singular utopian notion rooted in cultural exchange
within a conflict zone:  there is no single utopia but multiple utopias, where politics
determine which (or whose) utopia is adopted for normative representation. Working
out her arguments as an extension of Richard Dyer’s writings on musical utopias, she
reads such utopias as self-serving expressions, “alternatives to capitalism which will be
provided by capitalism” (2002, 27).
Similarly, the YSO functions as a politically and economically entangled construc-
tion, mired in the same challenges plaguing Barenboim’s outfit. One can argue here
that YouTube has channeled the “Benetton Effect,” a term informally used to describe
how cultural diversity is nominally celebrated through the consumption of the exact
same item around the world (whether white t-shirt, “world music,” or Tchaikovsky
via the Internet). Ultimately, only one brand of Western classical music has been
promoted via the deceptively neutral “blank slate” of a “global” symphony orches-
tra. At the same time, decisions have been made on the basis of organizers’ imag-
inings of world-class standards and global practices that do not necessarily speak
for the larger diversity of music cultures—Western classical or otherwise—around
the world.
One can also conjecture that the hopes and dreams of members of the YSO in the
aftermath of their three-day high in New York, on return to their “everyday” lives, will
necessarily differ. YouTube’s democratizing experiment did not extend to guarantee-
ing equal experiences or expectations on completion of the concert. Many participants
claimed to have had the positive “experience of a lifetime.”8 Others expressed doubts
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    341

over the longer-term future of this “three-night-stand.”9 Professional harpist Regina

Ederveen, for example, spoke of how the stint gave her existing freelance career in
Holland a boost. She wondered how life after the experiment would be different for
individual musicians:

It’s a holiday romance. It’s done something for my CV. I don’t think the experience
was the same for everybody, or will be after we leave. I don’t know what will happen
after this. Are we going to disband? What do we take away from it collectively? We
did share some music. But I was a harpist; I spent a lot of time waiting for others. Do
we really know each other after three days of being together? Do we keep the new
friends? Do we come back next year?10

Cultural Difference
and Cultural Jamming

The political and economic undercurrents reveal themselves through such analysis of
YSO’s larger ethos, but it is also useful to examine the project as an Internet campaign.
Here, virtual responses to the initial audition call are worth scrutiny.
Unsurprisingly, musicians leveraged features of the web to pitch themselves in ways
that would have been different from offline presentations. Because of the time limit of
YouTube’s hosting requirements (ten minutes per video in 2009), applicants molded
their musical individualities into notional slots of equal-opportunity showcasing. On
YouTube, clips from successful applicants were reformatted into a grid of thumbnails
featuring ninety-six windows, each emblazoned with the applicant’s national flag,
somewhat reminiscent of a beauty pageant.
Responding to YouTube’s encouragement of “any kind of wacky, creative way of
presenting oneself,”11 Japanese pianist Eiko Sudoh converted a piccolo part for the toy
piano. Her supplementary delivery of Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca,” packaged within
the strategic uniqueness of her instrument’s size in relation to her own small frame,
was a visually stunning performance that convinced viewers to advocate creation of an
extra part just for her.12 In Japan, Sudoh is better known as a nontoy pianist, special-
izing in contemporary repertoire.
Other contestants emphasized cultural difference, donning eye-catching costumes
or playing unusual instruments. Marimba player Maki Takafuji garnered viewer statis-
tics of more than seventy thousand after playing the instrument dressed in a kimono,
her hair impeccably coiffed.13 Her clip drew more than 150 comments, many of which
mentioned her “beautiful kimono” or her “cute” Japanese accent. Fewer praised her
mallet technique and musicality, otherwise palpable in her body language.14 On her
admission to the orchestra, a Japanese TV crew made a short film about her life and
her unorthodox choice of audition clothing.15 At the inaugural concert, she returned
to wearing black. Since her YSO debut, she has developed a larger Internet presence
342   Shzr Ee Tan

on Japanese sites as well as on YouTube, where she is shown playing the marimba with
various ensembles.
From Europe, professional musician and audio engineer Darius Klisys of Lithuania
set aside his clarinet for the lesser-known birbyne, playing a rearrangement of Mozart’s
clarinet concerto.16 In interviews, Klisys related that he played in a traditional music
group that also allowed him to conduct research on the instrument, a reeded aero-
phone of Lithuanian origin already modified in the nineteenth century after the
clarinet. Klisys emphasized his longer and more systematic dedication to the clarinet,
explaining that he had chosen the birbyne as an audition instrument for strategic rea-
sons, made in the hopes of increasing his chances. He spoke of bringing the instrument
into Baroque ensembles on the back of his YouTube exposure, exploring its distinctive
sonorities. Bringing DIY CDs to New York, Klisys distributed them among newfound
friends and members of the press.17
Such displays of cultural insignia, superficially masking the delivery of works within
the Western canon, were not the only types of novel presentation styles. In tribute to
video tutorials that YouTube had come to be famed for, American violinist Ben Chan
recorded himself giving lessons.18 Broadcasting his sessions on his own preexisting
YouTube channel, he provided phrase-by-phrase analyses of violin technique and
interpretive approaches for different audition pieces. In an early attempt, Chan gave a
preamble to his playing, noting

How I’m going to play this [Tan Dun’s] piece . . . I’d like the players to be the very
best that they possibly can. I do realize that the logic also means that if I’m sharing
how I play it, I may have a lesser chance to get into the orchestra because everybody
else is going to be playing as well as I do because they are learning the same tech-
nique . . . at the same time I’m gonna keep practicing and do my darnedest to get
into this orchestra.19

Chan also invited fellow YouTubers to upload their own videos in response to his
efforts and, communicating via YouTube’s comments page, asked for mutual feedback.
Chan became a minor YouTube star, attracting as much accolade for his fuzzy sweaters
and teddy bear prop as for his technique. In the words of Kiri Miller, he was creating
a new “community of practice … gradually transforming the face-to-face, body-to-
body transmission contexts that have always played a crucial role in music pedagogy”
(2012, 17). Exchanges between Chan and his fans continue to be found on his personal
YouTube channel, which has gone on to collect more than three hundred thousand
views on individual videos and more than 2.8 million hits.20 Some of these predate the
YSO. Speaking to this author in New York, the software engineer expressed surprise at
being the “focus of so much attention,” maintaining that he had already been broad-
casting tutorials for two years.21 Chan has since launched a music e-learning site, riding
on the success of his YouTube channel.
In addition to musicians genuinely interested in auditioning for an orchestral post,
a small number of YouTubers responded to the project’s fanfare, creating remixes that
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    343

recall Lessig’s ideas on “cultural jamming.” As Lessig reasons, the meaning of such
remixes “comes not from the content of what they say; it comes from the reference,
which is expressible only if it is the original that gets used … and it is this ‘cultural
reference’ … that ‘has emotional meaning to people’ ” (2008, 74–75). The first YouTube
audition video that kickstarted the project functioned not only as a call for performers;
it was also a symbolic musical marker, a meme to be riffed on in evolving guises.
Interestingly, Internet users who had remixed the audition call tended less to be clas-
sical musicians coveting an orchestral seat but rather members of a more tangential
group. For example, a budding music producer uploaded a pop music arrangement of
Tan’s symphony as well as a synthesized version of the same theme, expanding its origi-
nal classical context into cross-genre territory. In Hong Kong, a proud parent uploaded
a video of his toddler humming Tan’s melody while playing with a stuffed toy in the
back of a car. The clip, which could have been relegated to the web wastelands of mawk-
ish home videos, was actively “favorited” by YouTube’s web team.
Apart from applicants and fans, high-profile artists also jumped onto the YouTube
bandwagon. Shortly after Ben Chan’s tutorials were released, the London Symphony
Orchestra created an entire series of public Internet masterclasses. Unlike Chan’s home
videos, which reflected the prevailing, rough-cut “do-it-yourself ethic” of YouTube
tutorials, LSO’s sessions, featuring in-house players, were filmed professionally in high-
definition. In total, it uploaded more than twenty clips.22

Performance Codes

The multifarious presentation of musicality brings on the separate question of how tal-
ent and creativity is processed, consumed, and judged on YouTube’s virtual platforms.
One emerging issue concerns how the aesthetics of short-term performance apprecia-
tion are altered through Internet mediation.
My review of hundreds of YouTube clips yielded several observations. A hypermedi-
ated culture of instant gratification prevails: one can click through many hyperlinks as
fast as they appear. The video format, which previously required dedicated real-time
viewing (as opposed to skimming a book), was now flexible. YouTube viewers today, for
example, make frequent use of the timeline cursor, a technological improvement over
DVD and VCR fast-forward buttons. Video fatigue, in combination with multitabbed
browsing, encourages users to click on a video, tire of watching it after thirty seconds,
and then leave it playing in the background while accessing other soundless, text-only
links, or embarking on another physical activity altogether, away from the computer.
The result is often an audio-only experience marred by low-resolution sound, appreci-
ated in a multitasked context. This emerging manner of performance consumption
recalls what Richard Schechner terms the “selective inattention of an integral audi-
ence,” practiced for example in the ebb and flow of crowds at an overnight performance
of wayang kulit or a commercial roadshow (2002, 211). Meanwhile, the optimization of
344   Shzr Ee Tan

YouTube’s search engine technology for a growing collection of recorded performances

has led to its functioning less as a video archive than an informal jukebox, connecting
the itinerant laptop user to music on demand via cheap speakers.
With the YSO, time-elastic and multiplatformed options presented new socio-spatial
frameworks for interaction. Rather than prioritizing the absolute attention required of
traditional audiences in concert halls, virtual mediation here transcended the limits of
physical geography, if also blurring private-public divides. Viewers could watch per-
formances from their bedroom, or office cubicle, or a café. They could be engaged in
concurrent activities while taking in footage, chatting with friends about the material
being watched, shooting off emails in separate windows, or reading comments about
other performances on the same site.
As for the issue of low-resolution, the orchestral world—quite apart from YouTube’s
experiment—appears to have been keeping up with technological shifts. At the orches-
tra’s launch in New York, the head of LSO Live, Chaz Jenkins, pointed out that video
judging for real auditions had already been incorporated into standard practice, main-
taining that with training it was possible to judge musical competence over the web.23
Many active classical performers showcase their own interactive sites featuring embed-
ded YouTube or Vimeo videos. These are in turn often incorporated as hyperlinks into
curriculum vitae and job application email packs.
Indeed, a wide range of loosely networked classical virtual communities have also
begun to mushroom on YouTube itself. Some of these have grown out of fan clubs or
resource groups that collate footage of contemporary and historic performances; others
are tenuously connected through sprawling networks of hyperlinks in video-response
comments and recommendations. Yet other communities are active on dedicated chan-
nels or fan pages featuring recordings of old and new work, web conversations, virtual
tutorials, news, or short films about classical music performance. Beyond YouTube and
Vimeo, free radio sites and pay-per-view arenas such as ClassicalTV.com have emerged,
even as artists and ensembles have signed onto and begun using music download and
streaming services such as iTunes and Spotify. Elsewhere, personal and institutional
classical music blogs have sprung up across cities, tapping into translocal networks. As
Marc van Bree (2009a, 2009b) points out, orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony,
the New  York Philharmonic, and the Berlin Philharmonic have started embracing
social media and web interfaces to promote their own music and news, including vod-
casts, digital concert halls, Facebook, SoundCloud, and Twitter.

Virtual Space-time: Temporal
Disjunctures and Context Collapse

Given the array of media options already found within the diverse worlds of classi-
cal music, one might wonder how the YSO could offer anything new. An answer lies
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    345

in the manipulation of linear time-space relationships. Several months before the

physical launch of the orchestra, YouTube announced that it intended to release a final
“mashup,” which would stitch together excerpts from audition clips.
This was effected through releasing rehearsal “play-along” clips that had been pro-
vided for time-keeping different instrumental sections. Featuring close-ups of Tan Dun
conducting soundlessly into thin air, these videos were targeted at imaginary—that
is, time- and space-dislocated—auditioning musicians. In immersive experiences that
recall Miller on role play in gaming (2012), these performers shared the virtual stage
with Tan, watching a clip while simultaneously playing into its silence and recording
their own instrumental responses to cues. Tan made several parallel deliveries of the
same piece for numerous instrumental groups, including percussion, strings, winds,
and full orchestra.24 Deliberately muted, the videos worked to rhythmically ground
each audition clip, such that all entries conformed to the same speed required for
coherence in the final mashup.
Media anthropologist Michael Wesch’s writings on context collapse can be used to
theorize the generative experiences of these time-disjunctured videos. He describes
(2008) the phenomenon as

an infinite number of contexts [collapsing] upon one another into that single
moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any
moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer
must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a black hole
sucking all of time and space—virtually all possible contexts—in upon itself.25

Questions can be asked of YouTube’s reengineering of relationships: How might one

experience Tan’s silent conducting and imagined music, delivered in linear and non-
linear terms? Would the locating of this performance lie in PDF scores on YouTube?
Or were they to be found in model recordings of the work performed by the LSO
and featured as reference material? Could parallel performances of this “work” also
be found in Tan’s imagination, given that he was allegedly conducting into muted
nothingness—even if in actual probability miming a previous recording of the same
music? How might each of these imagined mute versions of the “work” incorporate
the time- and space-removed performances of auditioning musicians? Would a true
manifestation of this performance become actualized only through its abstracted, vir-
tual embodiment somewhere or everywhere in the mysterious caches of cyberspace?
Where exactly was the YSO located?

Online and Offline Communities

What are the ramifications for YSO’s potential audiences, real and virtual? An issue
lies in how, over the Internet, the orchestra functions as a temporally and spatially
346   Shzr Ee Tan

disjunctured entity: Tan Dun conducts different versions of his symphony (for separate
instrumental sections) to unseen audiences at the other end of a silent camera, even as
three thousand musicians “rehearse” with him several times, virtually, in thousands of
time-spaces, before recording and uploading themselves onto the Internet according
to his cues. From then on, millions of other viewers in their bedrooms or office desks
can access the resulting presentations, sharing in stages of musicking across staggered
timelines and physical geographies.
Consideration of de-spatialized audiences underlines how web communities and
networks are often quickly assembled and disassembled according to search engine
keywords, algorithms, backlinks, hyperlinks, embedded information, crowdsource
potential and, finally, pure chance. Sherry Turkle writes on the seduction of “tak-
ing things at interface value” on the Internet, where computer “programs are treated
as social actors” even as they are superficially constructed, replaceable, and perme-
able (1995, 102–103). She explores the paradigm of building multiple and fragmented
“aspects of the self ” through “cycling through many selves” over the Internet’s myriad
and changing interfaces (177–181).
Turkle suggests that within the world of YouTube’s intersecting portals lie communi-
ties within communities, communities intersecting with other communities, and com-
munities multitasking with tangential relationships and chained degrees of separation.
A  single click on one of Ben Chan’s links, for example, leads to a scrolling view of
comments representing a specific, ad-hoc community of viewers. These viewers are
connected in having shared the same experience of taking part in the YouTube audi-
tion, or having watched Chan. Members of this community critique each other’s tech-
nique, laud each other’s dress sense, share audition experiences, and offer views on
other violinists and performance tips. But this is not the only reference chain in the net-
work: subsequent clicks will yield newer video channels, posts, and links bringing into
view further networks and tangents, even as the unfolding sites might cross-reference
Chan again.26 Still further clicks on the “related videos” tab (featured in the manner of
“recommended” items in user-heavy sites like Amazon or Last.fm bounce viewers on
to even more tenuously related interactions.
Whether such instant-assembly search results or loose amalgamations of YouTube
comments might constitute “communities” in any useful sense is debatable. Writing
on the subject, Howard Rheingold posits that “when people carry on public discus-
sions long enough, with sufficient human feeling,” “webs of personal relationships”
are formed (1994, 5). While notions of Internet community in new media-savvy
societies continue to change, it is useful to recall René Lysloff and Leslie Gay on
integrated “technocultures,” where online transactions and social interactions can
no longer be treated as separate from, or parallel to, offline existence (2003). Instead,
they are extensions and prosthetic functions of real, physical life. Thus the YouTube
project must also be considered in terms of its material realizations. The orchestra’s
inaugural offline concert in April 2009—preceded by three days of rehearsals at the
Juilliard School—was a crucial aspect of its offline embodiment. In fact, YouTube
had heralded this physical transformation as the triumph of the entire Internet
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    347

exercise. The apogee was the orchestra’s debut in the prestigious, bricks-and-mortar
venue of Carnegie Hall.

Encounters in New York

One might wonder how three days of intense offline socialization could remake online
community. In New York, organizers housed their wards in the Juilliard area, giving
musicians several hours to introduce themselves to each other before moving them
into practice rooms. Tilson Thomas had drawn up a tight schedule of full and sec-
tional rehearsals. In between these, Google personnel organized press interviews. The
result was three days of a musical boot camp that left little time for informal gather-
ings. Musicians had to make the most of lunch and tea breaks to get to know each
other beyond perfunctory hellos. In the evenings, performers went out for dinner
before returning for yet more rehearsals. Later still, there were some jam sessions
in New York’s bars and nightclubs. Open interactions held as part of press events at
Carnegie Hall also turned out to be useful opportunities for musicians to leave their
rehearsal environment and mingle with each other and the press.
Over these short and intense bouts, friendships (plus a few romances) formed
quickly. Often, Internet representations of individual players themselves became the
starting points of conversations and the foci of relationships. Clarinetist Ana Ramirez,
a professional orchestral musician in Costa Rica, described the surreal nature of meet-
ing her colleagues in the flesh:

It’s like, “I saw you on YouTube and you showed me your house and now we’re play-
ing together and we’re friends!” You get exposed to a surprising amount of their
lives on the Internet, then you see these people later in the flesh. You learn new
things, expect some things, get inspired, get to know the person on an additional
level. And then, get filmed again doing this together, making music together, and it
goes back to TV, to the Internet.27

As content on and off YouTube’s orchestral site shows, these newly established rela-
tionships have subsequently been reintegrated into the virtual sphere, entering blogs
and captured in yet more smartphone-recorded video sequences. Many of them are
mirrored on interfaces beyond YouTube such as Facebook, Vimeo, and Twitter, often
in remixed forms cross-referencing physical and virtual interactions. Such demonstra-
tions include, for example, observations by musicians delighting in self-referencing,
physically watching themselves on YouTube while being recorded for YouTube.
One moment can be found in how David France, a violinist from Bermuda, uploaded
a video of two newfound friends from Europe surfing the web during a rehearsal
break at the Juilliard School. In the clip, the friends consciously click a mouse, scroll-
ing through YouTube’s orchestra website, all in the name of locating a clip of France
348   Shzr Ee Tan

the videographer himself among thirty-one other violinists. Amused, France engages
his subjects directly in conversation, bringing the documenter’s self-oriented stand-
point into the act of video representation. His friends tease:  “It’s David France! It’s
you! It’s you! How is it possible?” All three continue the inside-joke knowing that
France will eventually upload the clip back onto YouTube. In mimetic reflux, such
YouTube-within-YouTube videos, created for further distribution, mediated consump-
tion, and response, bring the virtual-real-virtual experience into an infinite, technocul-
tural cycle where the physical reality of the Self versus Other is no longer separate from
the virtual reality of the Self and Other.28
Further blurrings can be found in orchestra-related vlogs, or video diaries, created
by young musicians. Partly made as somewhat mawkish, self-documentary projects,
these serve as information updates for targeted communities of friends, family, and
fans. Such presentations recall Aymar Christian’s description of intimate video diaries
created by (largely) teenage Internet users as consciously groomed and stylized repre-
sentations of “the authentic self ” (2009). San Francisco-based violinist Alice Lizard, a
teenager at the time of the YSO’s inauguration, is a case in point. Thesping from her
bedroom about the “cool” experience of being asked by YouTube to be part of an offi-
cial “vlog squad,” she tells the world, weeks before the joining the orchestra:

I will be able to record interviews with some of the musicians, give you guys a
behind the scenes peek, and give you my own impressions of the event . . . you guys
should stay tuned, this is definitely a first step of its kind, a very unique classical
music experience and I’m thrilled to be part of it. They say that music is a universal
language . . . people are traveling from all parts of the world to collaborate with each
other and participate in this event, and people of all kinds will be coming together
make beautiful music.

Lizard signs off brandishing a pack of gourmet popcorn chips, touting its “crispy and
crunchy, sweet and salty” qualities. At Carnegie Hall, she produces more broadcasts,
weaving in recordings of an impromptu performance by the Juilliard Quartet. She also
interviews fellow players on their “cool” experiences of joining the ensemble, editing in
footage of dinnertime socialization before saying goodbye, mourning that she was too
young to join the group for an open mike event in a club. The collective picture that
emerges of Lizard’s persona is that of a tech-savvy young musician. Wholeheartedly
embracing the YouTube ethos of digital, global, and musical connectivity, she networks
into and expands the campaign via her own vlog activities, which integrate intimate,
yet physically dislocated, worlds.29
A final comment on subnetworks can be made in relation to online versus offline
analyses. General observations in New York showed that physical cliques within the
YSO still stratified along patterns commonly found in orchestral subgroups: biases ran
along instrumental, language, ethnic, and geographical divides.30 During breaks, wind
players tended to socialize separately from string players and percussionists, while
Europeans, Asians, Hispanic, and American collegiate crowds branched off into ethnic
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    349

subgroups. Physical proximity played a part: string players spoke to their standmates

and continued their talk over lunch. Shared musical language, cultural backgrounds,
and each performer’s relative openness to collaboration also facilitated the making of
new relationships where virtual networking proved less successful: over the rare jam
sessions, instrumentalists from Latin America, for example, gravitated toward one
another to improvise on Afro-Cuban and tango hits, even as jazz- and Balkan-trained
musicians slipped in and out of the same conversations.

Classical Music and Prestige

If the discussion has so far privileged how musical collaborators of YouTube have
appropriated the virtual world for their own strategic purposes, it is also useful to con-
template reverse motivations for the partnership: in making alliances with the London
Symphony Orchestra, Tan Dun, and Tilson Thomas, Google was running a branding
agenda that harnessed the social mobility of classical performers. In 2009, Google exec-
utive Ed Sanders heralded the venture as proof that “YouTube can be useful and impor-
tant to the classical music community—we are not just about DIY video tutorials.”31
Sanders’s words hint at how the campaign was an exercise in rebranding YouTube for
prestige, undertaken for the same reasons that lay behind its hosting of the U.S. presi-
dential debates earlier in 2008. In associating with well-known players of the classical
music world, Google hoped to boost YouTube’s profile within the information tech-
nology market as a serious portal and cultural broker. Indeed, if generic expansion of
its already-substantial reach was an aim, the company might have done better with a
community-building exercise involving a basketball team or a pop idol contest. That
the final assembly of the physical orchestra was located in the metropolis of New York
is also significant, as was the choice of Carnegie Hall, with symbolic resonances very
different from, say, a cloud-computing atrium in Silicon Valley, or an auditorium in
Mumbai. Google was demonstrating that YouTube had finally “made it to Carnegie
Hall,” even as Carnegie Hall had also “made it to YouTube.”

Live Performance, Mashups,

and Rehearsal Breaks

In view of Google’s larger agenda, it is worthwhile to examine the YSO through a more
traditional measure of success: reception of its inaugural concert. What kind of music
could it make? While YouTube has gone on to support a second and different incarna-
tion of the orchestra in Sydney in 2011, its commitment to the project—echoing virtual
trends around the world—remains one of harnessing moments of instant impact and
350   Shzr Ee Tan

riding on their immediate currency. This significantly influenced the dynamics of per-
formance and programming.
The Carnegie concert was sold out and met with a standing ovation. Internationally
acclaimed violinist Gil Shaham, soprano Measha Brueggergosman, and composer
Mason Bates were guest artists. YouTube endorsers Lang Lang and Yo-Yo Ma were
absent, but sent congratulatory messages through—aptly—Internet video. A  variety
bill was formed of short pieces, deviating from Carnegie Hall’s usual offering of a full
symphonic work. This is in itself worth critiquing in terms of representational poli-
tics within the construction of canons in classical music repertoire: What did YouTube
want to say on behalf of classical music in the Internet age? Who did YouTube want to
speak to, and what were its audience’s inclinations?
Programming was kaleidoscopic, showcasing every section of the orchestra and the
diversity of five centuries of composition in Western music history. Works were decon-
textualized, chosen for their bite-sized lengths and adaptability for eventual uploading
onto YouTube as separate items. The lineup included the Finale from Tchaikovsky’s
Symphony No. 5, Allegro Giocoso from Brahms’s Symphony No. 4; an excerpt from
Dvorak’s Serenade in D minor; Canzon Septimi Toni No. 2 by Gabrieli; a preview
of a new Mason Bates work called Warehouse Medicines, and Tan Dun’s Internet
Symphony:  Eroica; Scherzo from Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2; music from Lou
Harrison’s Canticle No. 3; the Finale from Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5; and John
Cage’s Aria. In between orchestral demonstrations, unaccompanied solo pieces by
guest performing pianists and a cellist were also inserted.
The delivery of this compilation presented some problems of aesthetic commensu-
rability in ensemble work. At times, musicians struggled to keep up with the changing
stylistic, rhythmic, and aural landscapes, sacrificing detail and a blended orchestral
“sound.” Gauging by applause, the high point of the evening was Mason Bates’s new
work, which resonated with the wider philosophy of the experiment’s technological
aspirations. In contrast, Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony, one of the pillars of the cam-
paign, proved less successful because of its episodic nature and clichéd quoting from
Beethoven.
On traditional media, news reporters were supportive of the project, while specialist
critics remained cautious. A casual survey of reviews in the United States and Europe
revealed reception ranging from lukewarm to terse. The Guardian judged the perfor-
mance “mediocre” and smacking of gimmickry,32 while the New York Times highlighted
its “frustrating” qualities.33 Critics took issue with Tilson Thomas’s program, which had
left performers “too little time to prepare too much music.”34
For all the pomp, circumstance, or disappointment of the live event, the debut did not
mark the end of the YSO. Following the ensemble’s origination in virtual community,
the bonus item of an officially produced global mashup video was presented, for which
Tan Dun’s video clips had earlier been created.35 The bona fide “mashup” content of
this video remained another matter, however: how much crowdsourced content could
truly be distilled from an institutionally facilitated audition mechanism? Did this video
say more about Google’s prominence in the landscape of emerging media empires than
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    351

about the galvanizing power of “netizens”? Certainly, a Google-orchestrated remix

did not reflect the sort of paradigm shift toward the empowerment of user-turned-
borrower-turned-creator that Aram Sinnreich has described in his observations of
“configurable culture” (2010).
Here, the mashup was a multiwindowed presentation overlaid with a number of aural
tracks. Editors from YouTube had spliced it together from selections within a larger
stock of three thousand clips. And yet this slick lineup was perhaps also a performative
coup too successful for the project’s own purposes, a meticulously engineered culling of
rehearsal videos featuring self-consciously synched scripts in standardized tempi, keys,
and performance genre. If anything, it appeared contrived in comparison to the mal-
leable live performance, or indeed other examples of culture-jammed videos created on
the back of the “rough-cut” amateur aesthetics popularized by YouTube itself.
YouTube statistics shed some light on this understanding. Over the Internet, the final
mashup has attracted about 1.4 million views to date, in comparison with slightly lower
figures for the orchestra’s premiere concert. Drop-down menus show that viewers do
not necessarily come from geographies as diverse as Google might have hoped: these
were largely teenagers based in North America, followed by Europe, certain parts of
South America, and Australia. Although audience-capture figures for the project hint
at the developing presence of diverse classical music communities on the Internet,
the numbers pale in comparison with some of the Internet’s biggest viral video hits.36
Beyond the inherent asymmetries of socioeconomic access to classical music around
the world, individual videos’ relatively lackluster performances in East Asia—home to
large populations of Internet users also exposed to classical music education—peak
further for YouTube’s incomplete dominance in the global media market.
On the one hand, the YSO has received praise—among its elite, Internet-made
community of “ordinary” web-users-turned YouTube stars. The experiment has been
praised by the Internet community at large for its innovation and aspirational aims. On
the other hand, it has also been described as a media stunt. Google’s ideas here in any
case have been borrowed from successful preexisting projects: viewer-voting contests
from American Idol, multicultural youth orchestras from the New World Symphony,
and reality television.
Such reservations can be understood against the larger social implications of the
orchestra’s actual reach on the Web:  Might its comparatively small online presence
reflect classical music’s residually specialist or elitist strands? This chapter has dis-
sected the projection of utopian democracy through appropriation of the Internet as
an egalitarian mechanism engendering participatory culture. It has also examined the
acquiring of prestige through Google’s associations with Western art music, and media
leverage of the social mobility of a certain type of classical performer. In examining the
collapse of time-space relationships through Internet musicking and deliberate decon-
textualizing of linear performance frameworks, the chapter has also exposed disjunc-
tures emerging in remediations of classical music performance.
A final point can be made: perhaps the YSO should be understood less as an indict-
ment of a particular classical scene’s Internet-enabled assertion of cultural universalism
352   Shzr Ee Tan

than as an example of how generic musicking over the Internet—classical, “Western,”

pop, or otherwise—has already become such an established part of twenty-first-century
life that it has lost its novelty value. To paraphrase postdigital scholar Maurice Benayoun
(2008), Internet technology has become so ubiquitous that creativity, even through its
express harnessing of technology, must now be defined separately and exclusively from
its very reliance on technology.37
YouTube has become so successful that its parent company brand continues to
cast a shadow over in-house projects. The YSO, in intertwined and symbiotic ways,
has become both a success as well as a failure on the very basis of Google’s victorious
ascendancy—an ascendancy that has left the platform matchless and indispensable (for
now) even as it has come to be taken for granted in everyday life.

Notes
1. Interview, Joanna Lee, Apr. 17, 2010, London.
2. Interview, Tan Dun, Apr. 14, 2009, New York.
3. Interview, Tim Lee, Apr. 14, 2009, New York.
4. http://www.youtube.com/user/symphony#p/u/88/-T_SryRAXuw (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
5. Anahid Kassabian, Research Training Roadshow on Studying Popular Music, London,
pers. comm., Jan. 17, 2007.
6. “Zoinks! 20 Hours of Video Uploaded Every Minute!” http://youtube-global.blogspot.
com/2009/05/zoinks-20-hours-of-video-uploaded-every_20.html (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
7. http://www.Internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
8. Interview with Ko Sugiyama, Apr. 14, 2009, New  York. Sugiyama’s enthusiastic senti-
ments were also echoed by YouTube orchestra members Ana Ramirez, Manuel Zogbi
Ramos, Ben Chan, and Rainice Lai.
9. Interview with Regina Ederveen, Apr. 14, 2009, New York.
10. Ibid.
11. Interview with Joanna Lee, a public relations manager for the East Asian arm of the YSO’s
outreach campaign, Dec. 10, 2008.
12. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9F566D4FD02D0BA7 (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxqZk9nEdds (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
14. http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=TxqZk9nEdds (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
15. Takafuji related in a video interview that her choice of the kimono was prompted by her
young daughter, who had encouraged her to showcase her distinctive national dress to an
international audience.
16. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNeSSgvReOI (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
17. Interview, Darius Klisys, Apr. 13, 2009, New York.
18. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f6n1HMHI6g&feature=channel (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
19. Ibid.
20. http://www.youtube.com/user/BenChanViolin (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
21. Interview, Ben Chan, Apr. 13, 2009, New York.
22. http://www.youtube.com/user/symphony#p/u/68/VXG5j82FW1s (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
23. Interview, Chaz Jenkins, Apr. 14, 2009, New York.
24. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym3VFuxdFHA (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
 “Uploading” to Carnegie Hall    353

25. http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=183 (accessed Aug. 11, 2011).

26. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f6n1HMHI6g (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
27. Interview, Ana Ramirez, Apr. 14, 2009, New York.
28. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgvZfvG2kDM (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
29. http://www.youtube.com/user/alicelizard#p/u/35/zSs1_3vCmAo (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
30. http://www.youtube.com/user/symphony#p/c/B8B08228E249AB61/1/yr7gUCVgkJI
(accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
31. Interview, Apr. 14, 2009, New York.
32. Tom Service, “My Verdict on the YouTube Symphony Orchestra? Mediocre and Pointless,”
Guardian Blog, Apr. 17, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/tomserviceblog/2009/
apr/17/orchestra-youtube (last accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
33. Anthony Tommasini, “YouTube Orchestra Melds Music Live and Online,” New  York
Times, Apr. 16, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/arts/music/17symphony.html
(last accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
34. Ann Midgette, “YouTube’s Un-harmonic Convergence,” The Washington Post, Apr. 16,
2009, http://www.youtube.com/user/symphony#p/c/B8B08228E249AB61/1/yr7gUCVg-
kJI (accessed Sep. 1, 2013).
35. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC4FAyg64OI (accessed Aug. 11, 2012).
36. This is the case of what has come to be memed as the “Numa Numa Guy” video, a home-
made clip of a New Jersey resident lip-synching to a Moldovan pop song, understood to be
the world’s first viral video. Released in 2005, this video first entered the Internet via an early
video-sharing site, Newsground, and received more than two million views within two weeks.
37. Benayoun (2008).

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 chapter 19

The Listener as Re mi x e r
Mix Stems in Online Fan Community
and Competition Contexts

Samantha Bennett

Listen. Change the tempo. Add new loops. Chop up the vocals. Turn me
into a woman.
—Trent Reznor (2005)

This chapter focuses on the recent practice of online remixing. Dedicated remixing
websites such as the remix competition host Indaba Music1 and the authorized sample
set distributor ccMixter2 serve diverse online music production communities with a
broad scope of remixing opportunities. Communities engaging with such sites have
been acknowledged in wider academic scholarship. However, there are many instances
of commercial recording artists releasing component song parts to their own fan com-
munities outside the parameters of remix host websites. Since 2005, artists includ-
ing Nine Inch Nails (referred to from here on as NIN), Kanye West, Radiohead, and
William Orbit have engaged their own fan communities with “stem” releases of com-
ponent song parts for remixing. This chapter seeks to answer a number of questions
raised by such practice: How do commercial recording artists prepare and disseminate
stem releases? In what contexts are stem mixes released? What are the technological
and processual implications? How do fan communities engage with stem remixing?
What is the difference between a “real” and a “virtual” remixer?
Existing studies of virtual music lean slightly toward compositional, instrument,
performance, and ensemble practice. Schober states, “Virtual reality allows us to imag-
ine new forms of copresence that have the potential to enhance creativity in rehearsal
and in performance” (2006, 85). In a consideration of virtual musical instrument aes-
thetics, Dobrian justifies the focus on virtual instrument performance in suggesting,
“Much of our appreciation of music is in its performance” (2003, 1). This angle also fea-
tures in extensive works by Cope (2001) and Duckworth (2005). Cope suggests virtual
356   Samantha Bennett

music “represents a broad category of machine-created composition” (2001, 3)  and

Duckworth refers to both the process of “making music in thin air” and virtual music
as being “online interactive music” (2005, xi). In terms of reception, much research
has been undertaken in the educational field; Dillon focuses on ethnomusicological
methodologies for “creating meaningful and engaging environments for music learn-
ing that enable interactive engagement with real and virtual musical worlds” (2009, 2).
There is, however, unexplored territory in the space(s) between virtual composition,
performance, and reception. Recording, mixing, mastering, and dissemination are
essential points of focus if we are to understand the relationship between composition
and consumption. Duckworth pointed out, “Virtual Music is a new art form, within a
new medium, producing a new type of interactive artistic experience, with the ability
to draw in and engage its listeners in the creative process” (2003, 254). This definition
is useful when considering the virtual in terms of music production, and specifically
audience engagement in virtual remixing practice.
Accounts of intertextual practices in popular music often relate to sampling. Key
studies, including Goodwin’s seminal chapter “Sample and Hold” (1990), Beadle’s Will
Pop Eat Itself? (1993), and Katz’s Capturing Sound (2004), all document the sociological,
legal, and musicological connotations of sampling practice. Scholarly work surround-
ing specific recording and production techniques and roles is scarce (Warner 2003
and Moore 2001) although research disseminated via the Art of Record Production3
forum has made significant headway in recent times. However, the specific practice
of remixing and the role of the remixer are often overlooked in sound recording and
music technology discourse. It is generally believed that remixing practice proliferated
through the 1980s; the remix as intertext is grounded in the advent of the twelve-inch
single as well as wider DJ culture. Zak describes a remix as being “a mix created sub-
sequent to a track’s original mix and exhibiting some degree of difference from the
original” (2001, 223).
A more contemporary viewpoint by Eduardo Navas is offered in his chapter in the
book Mashup Cultures, as he states, “A music remix in general is a reinterpretation
of a pre-existing song, meaning that the ‘aura’ of the original will be dominant in the
remixed version” (2010, 159). Navas’s extensive work identifies three distinct remix
“types” as “extended” (longer versions of existing songs), “selective” (adding or sub-
tracting material from an existing song), and “reflexive,” all of which challenges the
“aura” of the original and claims autonomy (159). Navas’s diagram in Regressive and
Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture (2010) illustrates the (inter)relationship of
extended, selective and reflexive remixing, wider film, fashion, and video arts, as well
as software and social media. However, it is not clear where mix stem remixing practice
might fit into this model, as “virtual remixing” is relevant to all three “types.” Parallels
can, however, be drawn between “mashup” remixing and stem remixing. In both cases,
the remixed intertexts are a product of accessible, easily distributed, and manipulable
digital music files and the sophisticated editing tools available in modern-day DAWs.
However, as Sinnreich (2010), Sheiga (2007), and Grobelny (2008) have established, the
mashup is recognizable as an unauthorized mix of two or more texts. In many cases,
 The Listener as Remixer    357

including the oft-referenced Grey Album by Danger Mouse (2004),4 the mashup is a
superimposition of one text on another; vocal phrases from one song are often superim-
posed on an instrumental phrase from another. Mashups are, therefore, quite different
from stem remixes, in that most mix stem sets are released via artists’ official channels
or are registered on a legitimate remix competition hosting site. In the majority of cases,
terms and conditions pertaining to copyright ownership accompany the mix stems, so
the remixer is not infringing copyright law by engaging in the stem remixing process.
Hugill suggests the role of the mixer is “central” to the entire production process; as
he points out, “Traditionally, there are three main phases in the production of recorded
music: recording, overdubbing and mix down. The mixer is central to all three” (2008,
53). Although this is certainly appropriate to the home and studio, artist and producer
conflations that Hugill deals with, the individual roles of mixer or remixer are not fully
theorized. In Plugged In, however, Paul Théberge quite accurately described the remixer
as being a “specialist” (2001). Mark Cunningham identified the remixer as being inex-
tricably linked to DJs, as he pointed out: “In no small way, new technology has aided
the rise of DJ-producers … among these remix producers are Paul Oakenfold and ex-
Housemartin Norman Cook” (1998, 346).
Remix producers such as the ones Cunningham mentions were—and still
are—employed for that very specialization: to undertake the remix. As Phil Harding,
mix and remix engineer for the 1980s production trio Stock, Aitken and Waterman,
specifies in From the Factory Floor, “A remixer uses audio mixing to compose an alter-
native master recording of a song, adding or subtracting elements, or simply changing
the equalization, dynamics, pitch … or almost any other aspect of the musical compo-
nents” (2009, 107).
Zak, Cunningham, Théberge, and Harding all refer to the role of the remixer in
the professional audio domain(s), but what about remixing practice in the amateur
realm and in online community contexts? Recent studies by Jarvenpaa and Lang (2011)
and Michielse (2013) deal with online community remixing. Jarvenpaa and Lang have
examined content production, community purpose, and boundaries via the autono-
mous ccMixter and the firm-sponsored remix.nin.com. In identifying issues of iden-
tity, competence, and control among both communities, they suggest participation
and content generation in the niche, fan-centered remix.nin.com supports the goal of
“producing new content (brand enhancement) and fostering fan participation (rela-
tionship enhancement)” (2011, 451). In Musical Chameleons, Michielse studies remix-
ing practice(s) among the online Indaba Music community. Indaba hosts exclusive,
commercial remix competitions, whereby time frames, rules, and prizes are explicitly
set out in each case. Michielse studied remix practices among the open discussion
threads and via personal interviews. Summarizing by saying that participants pos-
sess both fluency, “the ability to respond to, and produce ideas for, a wide variety of
musical source materials, quickly and easily,” and flexibility, “the ability to understand,
and adapt these approaches to … the original song” (2013), the study cites adapt-
ability to differing sets of musical circumstances as central to the remixing process.
Such studies illuminate important interrelationship(s) between remixing, community,
358   Samantha Bennett

and audience participation. Lacasse (2000) identified the intertextual nature of stem
remixing. However, a gap exists between Lacasse’s 1990s examples and the recent work
of Jarvenpaa and Lang (2011) and Michielse (2013). The aim of this chapter is to go
some way in bridging that gap; matters of reception, community, and participation are
important, but so too are the technological and processual factors, which have until
now received scant attention. The process of stem remixing and the role of the remixer
are both dependent on access to, and interaction with, the editing tools of DAWs. In
order to create their individual, intertextual commentary, the remixer must possess
a fundamental DAW operational skill set. This chapter highlights the technological
aspects of mix stems: What exactly are mix stems, and how do they differ from multi-
track and master recordings? And what production nuances are audible within them?
The chapter goes on to focus on four case study examples representing sets of official
mix stem releases.

Mix Stems

A traditional music production process involves three key stages:  recording or pro-
gramming sound sources, mixing the recorded sources into a cohesive mono or ste-
reo recording, and mastering the mono-stereo mix into a final representation. In
recent times, stems have served as an alternate means of submitting a finished mix to
a mastering engineer, thus increasing the options available to the mastering engineer
to “shape” the final recording. Bob Katz suggests:  “Consider a live recording with a
very heavy high-hat and ride cymbal… . I asked for a vocal and instrumental stem,
then processed the instrumental stem with a high frequency compressor, which left the
vocal untouched” (2007, 210).
Katz’ example illustrates how working with mix stems allows a mastering engineer
access back into the multitrack recordings. Stems, therefore, work as a useful “halfway
house” between the final stages of the multitrack mix and the final mono or stereo mix.
At this stage, it is important to distinguish mix stems from their original, multi-
track origins. Unlike a full mono or stereo master recording, a mix stem is a subgroup,
compiled from individual instrumental or vocal recordings derived from the original
multitrack recordings.
In Figure 19.1, a multitrack recording containing eight tracks is assimilated into one
mono or stereo master recording. The figure illuminates a “bounce” or “mix down,”
whereby individual tracks are processed into a final mix ready for mastering.
In Figure 19.2, stems are depicted as the aforementioned “halfway house” between the
individual multitrack recordings and the final mono or stereo mix, illustrating a typical
example of four mix stem subgroups created from an original eight-track recording.
Izhaki explains common stem organizations thus: “It is becoming increasingly com-
mon to submit mixes in stems… . Common stems are vocals, rhythm, leads and of
 The Listener as Remixer    359

Track 1

Track 2

Track 3

Track 4
Mono/Stereo Master
Track 5

Track 6

Track 7

Track 8

Figure 19.1  Eight individual tracks of a multitrack recording bounced into a master.

Track 1
Stem 1
Track 2

Track 3
Stem 2
Track 4

Mono/Stereo Master

Track 5
Stem 3
Track 6

Track 7
Stem 4
Track 8

Figure  19.2  Eight individual tracks of a multitrack recording bounced into four mix stems,
then processed again into a master.

course the residue mix, which consists of everything but what is already included in
the other stems” (2007, 56).
Both Katz and Izhaki’s explanations posit mix stem processing firmly in the profes-
sional audio domain, that being the exclusive territory of experienced recordists, spe-
cialist technologies and skill sets, and acoustically treated workplace. Yet mix stems are
not simply convenient tools for mastering engineers to fine-tune the inconsistencies
of a multitrack recording. Stems have become a viable commodity in their own right,
perfect little digital audio soundbites for the virtual world.
360   Samantha Bennett

The public availability of mix stems as “stand-alone” formats is a relatively recent

phenomenon; most releases can be dated within the last eight years and the majority
are packaged as digital audio files, as opposed to physical formats. However, this is not
to say the practice is particularly original. Lacasse identified an early example where
the listener was encouraged to “remix” a track:

I have in mind the CD-ROMs Xplora 1 and Eve by Peter Gabriel, which allow the
listener to “remix” (and edit) for himself or herself particular songs (in the case of
Xplora 1, the song is our familiar Digging in the Dirt). Of course, the CD-ROMs do
not allow the listener a totally free hand. This kind of interaction (of which Gabriel’s
attempt constitutes, I  believe, just the timid beginning) undoubtedly places the
question of artistic “authorship” in a new perspective. (2000, 50)

Lacasse was right in his prediction. Although the CD-ROM was perhaps not the user-
friendliest format in which to distribute mix stems, the proliferation of such practice
is undoubtedly due to the ease with which files can be distributed online and targeted
toward specific demographics and artist fan bases. In suggesting the listener does not
have a “free hand,” Lacasse alludes to the listener’s restricted access to the original mul-
titrack recording. Taylor further identified the remix possibilities among online com-
munities in Strange Sounds, as he pointed out: “Yet, whereas in the past, only someone
with a studio could alter recorded music … with digitally recorded music and with
inexpensive software or even free Internet websites, it is now possible for music fans to
remake and remix somebody else’s music” (2001, 20).
Since Lacasse and Taylor’s observations, there have been many instances whereby
mix stems were commercially released either as individual, stand-alone files or as
complementary-to-their-parent “single” releases. In each of the case studies given here,
the compilation of mix stems is contextualized in the online community to which the
example was released.

William Orbit: The “Orbitmixer”

In January 2009, recordist William Orbit uploaded an eight-track interactive mixing

console interface to his blog at williamorbit.com, entitled “The Orbitmixer.” Orbit’s
website is designed in “blog” format and is frequented by a community of fans who are
given the opportunity to post messages and questions and engage with the recordist
on subjects related to his musical output. Though Orbit’s responses are sporadic, he
regularly engages his fan base with interactive features. In addition to the Orbitmixer,
Orbit also embedded what he labels “Billy Buttons” into his blog posts:  short audio
clips extracted from perceivably random, individual multitrack recordings of his art-
ists’ mixing and production repertoire.
 The Listener as Remixer    361

Orbit’s longtime online media collaborator Richard Shea designed the Orbitmixer
software, basing it on a common mixing console interface. Each of the Orbitmixer’s
eight channels contains a panning indicator, a panning control, a solo and mute but-
ton, a volume indicator, and a channel fader. The main panel contains a track indicator
window; mute, stop, pause, and play buttons; and a master fader. Additionally, there is a
“toggle” button, allowing the user to move between a default “user” preset and two fur-
ther presets. The interface, in a brushed chrome effect with Orbit’s signature depicted
under the main interface panel, was titled “Orbitmixer—8 Channel Multitrack Player.”
Downloadable for Apple Macintosh OS and PC Windows, the Orbitmixer came com-
plete with a set of instructions on how to download, install, and use it with a guide to
its functionality and features. The Orbitmixer was designed in Adobe’s Flash software
and as such operates only in Flash Player. At 39.7 MB, the Orbitmixer contains fully
embedded, compressed audio files. Its eight-channel stems derive from “Pure Shores,”
the 1999 single5 by UK pop group All Saints (see Fig. 19.3).6
Once downloaded, users can solo or mute channels, apply panning, and/or adjust the
volume of individual stem channels. However, there is no option to “bounce” or mix
down the stems into a master file; the Orbitmixer is a playback interface only, allowing
the user limited mix-processing functionality. Furthermore, there is no means of add-
ing dynamics or time-based effects processing to the stem channels.
The Orbitmixer’s channel stems are presented with all the original dynamics and
time-based effects processing intact; that is, they are not the raw instrument and vocal
recordings. Additionally, each channel stem contains more than one instrument record-
ing. The Backing Vocals stem, for example, is a compilation of at least four individual,
harmonizing vocal tracks. Interestingly, Preset 1 on the main interface panel presents
the stems slightly off their default position, with Guitar 1 and Guitar 2 panned hard
left and right, respectively, and the Vocals stem muted. Here, the Backing Vocals stem
is exposed and the extent of multitracking and processing clearly audible. By contrast,
Preset 2 presents muted Drums, Vocals, and Backing Vocals stems, giving prominence
to the Juno, Keyboards, Guitar 1, and Guitar 2.

Channel number Mix Stem

1 Drums
2 Bass
3 Juno1
4 Keyboards
5 Guitars 1
6 Guitars 2
7 Vocals
8 Backing Vocals

1The Roland Juno 106 synthesiser.

Figure 19.3  The organization of mix stems in William Orbit’s “Orbitmixer.”
362   Samantha Bennett

An example of mix stems made available to an online community, the Orbitmixer

interface was developed by William Orbit voluntarily and at no charge to the user. The
stems are, however, available only within the interface and are not downloadable as
separate files.

Radiohead: “Nude”

On March 31, 2008, British rock band Radiohead released “Nude,” the second single
taken from their 2007 album In Rainbows. To coincide with the single release, Radiohead
launched a “Nude” remix event via a dedicated remix, but now defunct, website, www.
radioheadremix.com. The event was a joint project with Apple’s iTunes music retailer and
Garageband DAW.7 Five mix stems forming the single “Nude” were made available as
individual, single purchases from Apple’s iTunes store on April 1—one day following the
full single release. Furthermore, all mix stems were available in uncompressed AIFF file
format. Radiohead’s remix event ended on May 1, when votes were counted and the final
ten most popular remixes were displayed on Radiohead’s remix website (see Fig. 19.4).
The site featured separate areas: “Upload your remix,” “Information,” and “Get your
widget.” On the information page, clear instructions were given to remixers, promot-
ing the use of Garageband, despite mix stem compatibility with most DAWs. Remixers
were encouraged to use the stems to remix “in any way” they liked, to include the addi-
tion of new musical elements, instruments, and phrases. Once the remix was complete,
users could then upload their remix to the website.8
The original single “Nude” is a composite of multitracked instrument recordings, as
opposed to a full, live, group performance. This is ascertainable not simply from the
stem separation of instruments, but also because of the lack of overspill from other
instruments within each mix stem. Such production aesthetics are audible at particular
points in time throughout the stems. In the Guitar stem, for example, the drum “click
track” is audible from 0’10”.
The Guitar stem is summed from at least two separate guitar tracks. An acoustic
guitar, panned center-left, appears at 1’00”, joined at 1’12” by an electric guitar panned
hard right and placed significantly higher in the stem mix than the acoustic guitar. The

Stem Number Mix Stem

1 Drum stem
2 Bass stem
3 Guitar stem
4 Vocal stem
5 Strings, Effects Etc stem

Figure 19.4 Mix stem numbering for Radiohead’s “Nude.”

 The Listener as Remixer    363

electric guitar is, however, positioned differently in the stem than in the original single
mix, where it is placed hard left. Such production nuances suggest that the “Nude”
mix stems were not simply bounced from the original multitrack recordings; further
production work has been carried out at the stem stage. The individual mix stems rep-
resent the instruments differently from their arrangement in the original single release.
A key feature of the “Nude” mix stems is that they are presented with all audio,
to include silent phrases, intact. This is particularly noticeable on the Guitar stem,
whereby the guitars do not enter until 1’00”, but the guide drums are clearly audible.
Breathing and fidgeting sounds are also heard throughout the first minute of “silence,”
as the guitarists Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood wait to record. This suggests
a performance-based approach to recording on the part of recordist Nigel Godrich;
time has been taken, quite possibly to allow improvisation, in the lead-up to recording
the guitar sections, as opposed to simply dropping the guitar players in a few seconds
before their phrase. Conversely, the Bass stem is silent until 0’38”, suggesting that it has
been recorded with a DI9 as opposed to being “mic’d up” via an amplifier.
Listeners were given a limited time frame to complete their remix and upload it.
Additionally, they were asked to vote for their favorite remix; the most popular remixes
would be displayed in a chart. Despite the similarity to a competition, no prize was
offered to the “winning” remix, that being the remix with the most votes.

Kanye West: “Love Lockdown”

On September 18, 2008, the U.S.  rap artist Kanye West released the single “Love
Lockdown,” the first to be taken from his fourth studio recorded album, 808s and
Heartbreak. The album title invokes the technology used to create it, in that the Roland
TR-808 Rhythm Composer was the central instrument. On September 25, one week fol-
lowing the single release, West posted an item to his blog at Kanyeuniversecity.com (now
defunct), entitled “Love Lockdown Stems!!!” With no introductory text, instruction, or
description, listeners were simply directed to another website, acapellas4all.com. On
arrival, they could download each of six individual mix stems derived from the original
single “Love Lockdown.” The stems were not made available as an official release from
West’s label, Roc-a-Fella; nor were they available via an online retailer. Furthermore, the
stems did not form part of a competition or other online community event. If users were
to create a remix of “Love Lockdown,” there was no apparent community space avail-
able for the dissemination of such remixes. Subsequently, the availability of West’s mix
stems generated much discussion within online audio and music technology fora, such
as Gearslutz10 and on P2P file sharing websites such as BitTorrent (see Fig. 19.5).11
“Love Lockdown,” a contemporary, minimalist R&B song, comprises few instrument
performances. Notable for its programmed synthesis and prominent application of pitch-
shifting processor AutoTune to the vocal performances, “Love Lockdown” is an example
of technology-centric, commercial song production. All mix stems were presented with
364   Samantha Bennett

Stem Number Mix Stem

1 LoveLockdownFINALSTEMSynth.wav
2 LoveLockdownFINALSTEM808.wav
3 LoveLockdownFINALSTEMPiano.wav
4 LoveLockdownFINALSTEMBvoxFX.wav
5 LoveLockdownFINALSTEMVocals.wav
6 LoveLockdownFINALSTEMDrums.wav

Figure 19.5 Mix stem numbering in Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown.”

their audible sections and silences in tact. Made up of two synthesizers, the Synth stem
appears to be the only instance of a composite stem featuring more than one track from
the original multitrack recording. This is evident as the two synthesizers that are present
feature contrasting timbres and tonalities. Each of the six mix stems is 4’33” in length. The
Synth stem is silent until 3’36”, and with no audible noise until that point, this indicates it
was recorded via a DI. Conversely, the 808 stem features noise and hum throughout; no
attempt has been made to apply a noise gate or other DAW editing program, such as “strip
silence.” Although many software plug-in emulators of the TR-808 machine exist,12 the
original hardware instrument has been implemented on “Love Lockdown.” This is evident
by the centrality of the machine to the overall album concept and the audible machine
noise present, consistent with a technological precursor from the early 1980s. The Piano
stem appears to have been edited from two parts; a section from 0’00” until 0’04” features
a two-note phrase, which is likely to have been used to test the piano input level. At 0’04”,
a clear edit is audible with low-level noise apparent until 0’39” up to the piano enters. The
presence of noise suggests an original recording of an acoustic piano was made, as opposed
to a piano phrase programmed on a synthesizer. The Bvox FX and Vocal stems are pre-
sented with all dynamics, time, and pitch shifting effects processing intact. Indeed, the
Bvox FX stem features West’s vocal processed beyond recognition. The original words are
barely audible and a distorted, heavily pitch-shifted version of the original performance is
the result of extensive effects processing. This does, however, contrast with the main Vocal
stem, which features compression as well as a combination of a lengthy room reverb and
delay. The resulting vocal delays have been panned alternately left and right to create a
ping-pong effect, common in contemporary popular music production. Furthermore, the
prominent use of pitch-shifting processor AutoTune is evident and has been applied in
varying amounts to different vocal phrases.

Nine Inch Nails: “The Hand That Feeds”

Taken from their 2005 album With Teeth, NIN’s “The Hand That Feeds” was released as
the album’s lead single on April 18, 2005. Three days prior to the single release, a mes-
sage was posted to the band’s official website, nin.com,13 that read:
 The Listener as Remixer    365

“Attention Macintosh Users: Trent [Reznor] has prepared a file you might find inter-
esting. System Requirements:  G4 or better, 512MB RAM (1GB+ Recommended),
Garageband 2.0 or greater. Click to download [70MB]”14 (Nine Inch Nails 2005)

Embedded within the file were sixty-four original multitrack elements of “The Hand
That Feeds” along with a Readme file containing a letter from NIN’s lead singer, song-
writer, and producer, Trent Reznor. Reznor’s letter set out his reasoning for making his
multitrack recording available to NIN’s online community, featuring justifications such
as “it dawned on me that the [music production] technology now exists and is already
in the hands of some of you” (Nine Inch Nails 2005) and instructions such as:

Listen. Change the tempo. Add new loops. Chop up the vocals. Turn me into a
woman. Replay the guitar. Anything you’d like. (Nine Inch Nails 2005)

Reznor went on to suggest that giving his multitrack recording away was an “experiment.”
“The Hand That Feeds” is one of the earliest examples whereby a commercial recording
artist has voluntarily released the multitrack elements of a single to the public. On first lis-
ten, it appeared the multitrack elements had been released, as opposed to stems. However,
on closer listening, one finds this is not quite the case. For example, each of the first two
“ambient loop” stems consists of two distinct sounds: a distorted crackle and a windlike
ambience. Additionally, the backing vocal stems (numbers 7 through 10)  each consist
of at least three separate vocal tracks. Furthermore, each element varies significantly in
length; “The Hand That Feeds” is 3’36” long, yet the multitrack elements range between
0’24” (stem 53) and 0’2” seconds (stems 13 through 16). So, the sixty-four stems listed in
Figure 19.6 do not accurately represent the channels of the original multitrack recording.
The absence of silences and the precision editing present in each stem ensure the listener
is presented with audio clips that are simple to copy, paste, duplicate, and sequence within
a DAW editor. Another point worth noting pertains to the vocal stems. Stem 53 begins
“dry” and with minimal processing, aside from compression. A  lengthy delay is then
“wound in” at 0’11” to create long repeats. Stems 62 and 63 have been treated with a short-
room reverb and short delay, adding depth to the recording. Stems 32 through 35 are
variations on the same “pay-off ” line. Aside from compression, these vocal stems contain
little processing, except on the word bite, which has been treated with a bold plate reverb
and delay effect for emphasis. Such varied and sophisticated effects processing has been
deliberately kept intact, yet in encouraging listeners to “turn me into a woman” (Nine
Inch Nails 2005) Reznor directed them toward further manipulation of the vocal stems.

Discussion

Each of the aforementioned case studies elicits multiple lines of inquiry pertaining to
music authorship, production, dissemination, democratization, and reception, some
366   Samantha Bennett

Stem Number Track Name Stem Number Track Name

1 THTF ambient loop.aif 33 THTF end2 lead vox.aif

2 THTF ambient loop 2.aif 34 THTF end3 lead vox.aif
3 THTF bass ch 1.aif 35 THTF end4 lead vox.aif
4 THTF bass END loop.aif 36 THTF end5 lead vox.aif
5 THTF bass verse loop 1.aif 37 THTF end6 lead vox.aif
6 THTF breath lead vox.aif 38 THTF filtered intro.aif
7 THTF BV 1.aif 39 THTF GTR ch riff 1.aif
8 THTF BV 2.aif 40 THTF GTR CH riff 2.aif
9 THTF BV 3.aif 41 THTF gtr riff 1.aif
10 THTF BV 4.aif 42 THTF gtr riff 2.aif
11 THTF ch1 vox.aif 43 THTF GTR riff 3.aif
12 THTF CH2 lead vox.aif 44 THTF hat loop 1.aif
13 THTF coco loop 1.aif 45 THTF hat loop 2.aif
14 THTF coco loop 2.aif 46 THTF hat loop 4.aif
15 THTF coco loop 3.aif 47 THTF hat loop end 1.aif
16 THTF coco puff loop 1.aif 48 THTF hat loop end 2.aif
17 THTF DDL mid perc 2.aif 49 THTF hat loop fill.aif
18 THTF DDL mid perc 3.aif 50 THTF hat loop tail.aif
19 THTF drum fill 2.aif 51 THTF intro.aif
20 THTF drum loop 1.aif 52 THTF mid DDL perc 1.aif
21 THTF drum loop 2.aif 53 THTF MID lead vox.aif
22 THTF drum loop 4.aif 54 THTF mod synth riff.aif
23 THTF drum loop 5.aif 55 THTF perc loop 1.aif
24 THTF drum loop 6.aif 56 THTF synth riff 1.aif
25 THTF drum loop 7.aif 57 THTF synth riff 2.aif
26 THTF drum loop 8.aif 58 THTF synth riff 3.aif
27 THTF drum MID 1.aif 59 THTF synth-perc 1.aif
28 THTF drum MID 2.aif 60 THTF tom pattern 1.aif
29 THTF drum MID 3.aif 61 THTF tom pattern 2.aif
30 THTF end drum loop.aif 62 THTF V1 lead vox.aif
31 THTF end synth riff.aif 63 THTF V2 lead vox.aif
32 THTF end1 lead vox.aif 64 THTF Virus seq.aif

Figure 19.6 Stem organization in Nine Inch Nails’ “The Hand That Feeds.”

of which I  will acknowledge in part and some I  will explore in more depth. There
are technological and processual issues; the prospect of listeners—fans—as remixers
potentially enables an audience to take on a professional, skilled role as a participant
in a once-concealed production process. Additionally, the construct of “listener as
remixer” raises questions surrounding musical artifacts. Via recorded artifact and live
performance, audiences listen to songs as often-complete entities, cohesive and “fin-
ished” representations of the instrument or voice combinations as intended by artist
and recordist. In accessing mix stems, audiences are given a rare opportunity to (re)
appropriate an artist’s original sound recording. This presents a unique, insider’s view
of the inner workings of a multitrack, usually reserved for occasional documentary
 The Listener as Remixer    367

viewing, as in the Classic Albums series. Furthermore, the time-limited dissemination

of mix stems via digital files, as well as the temporary nature of media player versions,
implicates a transient mix stem remixing opportunity.
In all case study examples, distinct communities have evolved around remixing
practice, which is particularly noticeable in the NIN example. In some instances, the
community is “inward looking,” in that it is born out of the artist’s existing fan base.
In others, a community of “outward looking” enthusiasts belonging to generic music
technology fora are attracted to the remixing opportunities presented by artists.
The availability of mix stems raises further questions surrounding intellectual
property and copyright. In an industry where the postrecording dissemination pro-
cess is almost entirely digitized, challenges are presented in terms of copyright
management—particularly where the copyright authors and owners encourage adap-
tations of the original sound recordings. O’Brien and Fitzgerald (2006) and Cochran
(2010) have discussed this issue in the contexts of sample clearance and mashup
remixes, but the implications surrounding stem remix releases remain understudied.

Technological Issues

Although the mix stems have been made available through fan communities, web-
sites, and online retailers, the technology required to remix them has not. In all
examples, the artist presumes a combination of both technological ownership (the
tools to create a remix) and processual ability (remixing skill sets) on the part of
the listener; Radiohead and NIN presumed ownership of Garageband and William
Orbit presumed ownership of Flash Player. However, ownership of technologies
alone is by no means indicative of a listener’s ability to construct a remix. It could be
argued that assumption of technology ownership is fair, from the (real or perceived)
democratization of technology, as presented in existing studies by Durant (1990),
Théberge (1997), and Bennett (2009, 2012). Audio recording and editing software
such as Apple’s Garageband is included as standard on Mac hardware and has been
since 2004, which contributes to increased availability. Paul Théberge (1997) recog-
nized how music communities embrace technologies and the tech-utopian ideology
they represent:

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the more idealistic discourses from computer cul-
ture have also manifested themselves within the musical community . . . the utopian
belief in the essentially democratic, participatory nature of technologically medi-
ated forms of communication. (131)

Yet in all examples, the listener is held at arms’ length and the “participatory nature”
of their involvement with the remix is limited. As Lacasse pointed out in the Peter
Gabriel example, the listener is certainly not given a “free hand”; the opportunity to
368   Samantha Bennett

remix is presented only following completion of the professional single and album
recording sessions. Therefore, the listeners have no impact on how the final, official
release will sound; nor are they invited to attend any of the official recording ses-
sions. Furthermore, a listener does not partake in any official remix release. This
points toward an understanding on the part of the artist: technology may have been
“democratized” but remixing skill sets have not, or at least not to the extent that a fan
could be trusted with contributing to an official remix release.
A further issue relates to performance exposure. After a multitrack recording is
complete, a key task of the mix engineer is to assimilate the individual recordings
and “mask performance mistakes” (Montecchio and Cont 2011, 627). In all exam-
ples, the instrument and vocal performances are never presented in “raw” form;
all dynamics and time-based processing remain intact. However, performance ele-
ments concealed in the single releases are subject to exposure in the mix stems. The
fidgeting and shuffling audible on the “Nude” guitar stem as well as the piano note
improvisation at the start of the “Love Lockdown” piano stem are both inaudible
on the original single releases and are “masked” by the presence of other instru-
ments. Additionally, there are performance nuances among some of the vocal per-
formances: the “vocals” stem in the Orbitmixer is a composite edit of single, lead
verse lines and a group vocal chorus performance. Though the verse performances
appear to be a single performance (multiple swallows and breaths are audible in
between lines) the chorus makes up a group performance; a single, guide backing
track is clearly audible, suggesting this was a group vocal recording, as opposed
to a composite of individual multitrack recordings. “The Hand That Feeds” and
“Love Lockdown” contain contrasting vocal stems: the extent of the effects process-
ing in “Love Lockdown” ensures the original “raw” performance is fully concealed,
whereas the absence of time-based processing and de-essing on stems 32 through
37 of “The Hand That Feeds,” coupled with the lack of “sung” melody, gives the
impression of an entirely raw vocal recording. Although there is no evidence of
performance “mistakes” among the stems, many performance nuances and insights
into the recording processes are illuminated.
Another factor for consideration pertains to format permanence. The absence
of physical release in all the case studies suggests a temporary nature surrounding
stem remixing; the stem releases are designed for interaction over short periods of
time. The stems for Radiohead’s “Nude” are still available for purchase as individual
tracks from iTunes, despite the closure of the remix event in May 2008. Though the
Orbitmixer remains available for download, the interface was designed for version 7
of Adobe’s Flash Player and will not open in later versions of the software. The blog
post containing links to West’s “Love Lockdown” stems has since been archived and
the links to “Acapellas4All” are no longer active. In 2007, links to “The Hand That
Feeds” stems were moved to remix.nin.com, where NIN community remixing activ-
ity continues. In the latter case, NIN remix fans have long since moved on from “The
Hand That Feeds”; current remix activity is centered on Reznor’s score compositions
to The Social Network.
 The Listener as Remixer    369

Online Communities and Engagement

In Dance Music: Culture and the Politics of Sound, Gilbert and Pearson state:

A new species of digital auteur exists, who is able to compose and produce music on
a single computer. . . . This does not necessarily comprise a new digital onanism: col-
lective composition, collaboration and performance is still allowed. Moreover,
working with samples, or enfolding your own repeated performances within those
of others creates a type of community of production. (1999, 118)

Such niche communities of production are evidently formed around remixing practice,
particularly via Indaba Music and ccMixter. However, when considering single art-
ist mix stem releases, online community engagement varies significantly. Gilbert and
Pearson refer to collective performance and collaboration among digital auteurs, and
there is certainly evidence of such group activity among ccMixter, as Jarvenpaa and
Lang established. However, collaborative producer/user activity, or what Axel Bruns
termed “produsage” (2008, 2–3), is not so prevalent among listeners engaging with
single artist mix stem releases; listeners tend to remix alone.
Orbit’s blog post containing the “Pure Shores” Orbitmixer received just five com-
ments from fans, ranging from a simple “thanks” to compliments on the production
(“I admire your work very much”). The apparently minimal engagement with the
“Pure Shores” Orbitmixer has much to do with the mode of dissemination. Had the
Orbitmixer been released to the All Saints fan community, a different level of engage-
ment might have transpired. However, this was not Orbit’s first venture into mix stem
releases. All songs from Orbit’s 2006 album Hello Waveforms, as well as various other
single releases, were made available to download in the Orbitmixer format from Orbit’s
website.15 A later Orbitmixer release of “Purdy,” from the 2009 album My Oracle Lives
Uptown, was made available in a June 2009 blog post16, along with two downloadable
folders: one containing a “full multitrack” featuring all twenty-four channels of “Purdy”
in uncompressed AIFF format and another containing an eight-channel stem version.
Despite the availability of “Pure Shores” and others in Orbitmixer format, there is little
evidence of fan engagement with the interface. Conversely, significant fan community
engagement is evident with the “Nude” and “The Hand That Feeds” stems. Radiohead’s
dedicated remix site provides a clear point of focus for the listener, and in outlining
a time frame and explicit terms and conditions, they give the listener set parameters
in which to produce their remix. The remix event was promoted widely in the music
and technology press, with prominent coverage in Wired, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone;
2,252 remixes (Radiohead 2008) were uploaded to Radiohead’s website in a one-month
time frame, suggesting a significant level of online fan community engagement. On
further analysis, fan remixes appeared across various social media and online com-
munity websites, including MySpace, Facebook, SoundCloud, and Vimeo. Despite the
official release of individual stems for purchase through iTunes (ensuring the listener
370   Samantha Bennett

pays for five stems at 79p/$1.29 each) the event was easily disseminated through social
media via the downloadable “widget,” a promotional tool allowing the user to embed
the remix within a social media platform. Listeners were also asked to vote for their
favorite mixes, prompting an evolving top-ten listed on the remix site’s main page.
A  key strategy on the part of the artist—engaging listeners in both production and
judging capacities—gave the illusion of a competition.
In presenting the files as raw clips instead of full length stems, NIN has expected
more from the listener in terms of their remix ability. On downloading, more interac-
tion with DAW features is necessary in order to create a remix—copying and pasting,
moving, duplicating, and editing—whereas the Radiohead and West examples simply
require the listener to line up the stems in audio tracks and move faders as a minimum.
“The Hand That Feeds” garnered a much broader appeal among general music technol-
ogy fora, such as Gearslutz, Apple’s LogicPro, and Mac forums. “The Hand That Feeds”
stems were released prior to NIN’s dedicated remix website. Subsequently, between
2005 and 2007, listeners used a number of social media platforms to disseminate their
work. Though Reznor stated he was interested to see “what the results are” (Nine Inch
Nails 2005), listeners could not post their remixes to nin.com. However, many listen-
ers posted links in the comments section of the original blog post, directing members
of the fan community elsewhere. With no time frame or limit attached to “The Hand
That Feeds,” a steady stream of remixes appeared via YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud,
Bandcamp, MySpace, and Facebook throughout 2005 and 2006. The demand for more
of Reznor’s multitrack recordings was high, leading NIN to set up a dedicated fan remix
site (remix.nin.com) in 2007, coinciding with the release of their later album Y34R
Z3R0. West’s “Love Lockdown” stems were similarly promoted through online blogs
and magazines. In the absence of a competition or specific online community remix
site, listeners posted links to their completed “Love Lockdown” remixes in the com-
ments section of Kanye West’s original blog post. The remixes appeared across mul-
tiple social networking, media, and file sharing websites, primarily MySpace, YouTube,
and zShare. Unlike the “Nude” example, it is not known precisely how many listeners
engaged with “The Hand That Feeds” or “Love Lockdown,” although the stem releases
have clearly been disseminated beyond the artists’ fan communities.
The “digital auteur” that Gilbert and Pearson refer to predates the laptop remixers
described in this chapter. Today’s listener-as-remixer is part of a continuum of home
studio-based music technology enthusiasts engaging with the technological and proces-
sual aspects of music via budget equipment and basic techniques. However, it is important
to differentiate between the professional and the amateur, the real and the virtual remixer.

Remixing: A Virtual Reality?

In ensemble musical performance, or other forms of collaborative music making, a

clear demarcation exists between the physical and the virtual: performers are physically
 The Listener as Remixer    371

present, together in a “real” group, whereas they may appear together in a virtual perfor-
mance environment, such as via web or video link. Yet the lines are blurred between the
real and the virtual when considering the remixer. The mix stem examples considered
in this chapter are targeted toward desktop computer or laptop-based production; there
is no requirement for a professional recording workplace, and though further record-
ing is encouraged in some instances, it is not a prerequisite. Additionally, remixers—in
both amateur and professional domains—rarely work as part of a team on the remix
itself. In the professional domain, a remix engineer possesses specialist skills and pro-
vides a niche service. The need to concentrate for extended periods of time on the fine
nuances of audio remixing demands an otherwise quiet environment free of noise or
distraction, further isolating the remixer. In Modern Records, Maverick Methods, I dis-
cuss the issue of isolation with professional mix and remix engineer Chris Sheldon,
who lamented the decline of the professional recording studio. In personal communi-
cations with me (2009), he described working practices in the 1980s and 1990s as being
team-oriented, particularly during his time working at London’s Townhouse studios:

At the Townhouse, we’d all pile in around supper time and I’d be talking to people
like Stephen Street about what he’s doing, or another band. I loved that and I really
miss that and it won’t happen again. At one point, my wife and I were thinking about
moving out of town. But that would be even more isolating. No one ever comes
down here; well you have, but . . . not many people come down. I’m working with
Australian bands, they send me a wave file and boom, it’s done. I’ve never met any
of these people. There is something slightly sad about that.

Sheldon refers to an era in contemporary record production when individual profes-

sional recordists, including mix and remix engineers, were attached to a workplace,
studio, or record company. Notwithstanding the remixing process itself being a lone
role, in many instances a community surrounded the place of work and the recording
project. In an increasingly delocalized, fragmented, and freelance recording industry,
as described by Leyshon (2009), Homer (2009), Watson (2013), and Pras et al. (2013),
the remixer—like many recordists—regularly works alone. Théberge (2004) conflates
elite, semiprofessional, and home studios of amateur musicians, describing them as
a “non place,” thanks to the isolated practices and networking of individual record-
ists; such practice is exemplified in Sheldon’s description of file transfers overcoming
geographical challenges. The point is that there are few differences between the real
and the virtual in contemporary remixing practice. In both amateur and professional
instances, the remixer is isolated; operates a computer-based DAW; works in the digital
audio domain as opposed to working with physical, analogue tape; and, more often
than not, works alone. Professional remixing, as part of a wider recording and pro-
duction process, is private, concealed from public view (Williams, 2010) and, at best,
operating in what Eliot Bates (2012) described as a “back stage” area.
The differences between amateur and professional remixing practice become
apparent only when considering experiential and budgetary factors. From an artist’s
372   Samantha Bennett

perspective, the perception of amateur and professional remixing practice may differ
but the practice of remixing—the modus operandi—is identical in the contemporary
professional and amateur domains. Both amateur and professional remixing revolves
around creation of an intertext; both are simultaneously real and virtual.

Conclusion

The level of listener engagement in all mix stem case studies is somewhat superficial;
the listener is not transported to the original recording, mixing, or mastering process.
In all instances, stems are released with the original recording, mix, and mastering
processes (levels, compression, EQ, time-based effects processing) intact; the artist
exercises full control over what the listener hears, which are the definitive “takes” of
instrument and vocal recordings. Furthermore, the listener is not privy to the alter-
native takes deemed unworthy of the final mix. Although the level of engagement is
fairly shallow, there are varying degrees of expectation on the part of the artist. In the
William Orbit case study, the user is required to do nothing more than engage with
the mix interface. There is no apparent way of saving a remix and no requirement by
the artist for the listeners to “upload” finished versions. Lacasse mentioned the Peter
Gabriel examples “allowing” the listener to “remix,” that is, engage in the practice of
remixing. In the Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails examples, the listener can upload a
completed mix for online community reception. These examples illustrate not only
how the listener has engaged in the practice of remixing, but also how the listener
becomes remixer. Additionally, on downloading and interacting with the mix stems,
the listener finds the domain of recording engineers, mixers, and producers accessible.
However, the limited nature of participation results in a perceived, as opposed to real,
involvement in the recording workplace or process.
The understudied nature of this topic presents future lines of inquiry. There is much
room for further studies investigating legal aspects of popular music intertexts, par-
ticularly in the areas of online dissemination, IP management, and revenue collection.
Perhaps the largest area for future study lies in online ethnography and online commu-
nity participation analysis. This chapter has concentrated on filling a gap between virtual
creation and reception practices, although it recognizes the extensive potential for further
inquiry surrounding audience participation in online remixing contexts.

Notes
1. Indaba Music was founded in 2005. Its dedicated website, www.indabamusic.com,
launched in 2007.
2. ccMixter was founded in 2004. Website at www.ccmixter.com.
 The Listener as Remixer    373

3. The Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production (ASARP) holds an annual
conference. The fora also oversee the Journal on the Art of Record Production. Further
details are available at http://www.arpjournal.com.
4. For example, Gunderson (2004), McLeod (2005), and Rambarran (2013).
5. “Pure Shores” was released on Sept, 12, 1999, as a digital download. The single was released
again on Feb. 14, 2000, as a CD single.
6. Orbit co-wrote and produced the single, which featured on two albums: All Saints’ Saints
and Sinners (2000) as well as The Beach:  Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack
(2000).
7. DAW, digital audio workstation. Common DAWs are AVID’s Pro Tools, Apple’s Logic
and Garageband, and MOTU’s Performer.
8. A lengthy list of “terms and conditions” set out rules including ownership of rights by
Radiohead’s publishing company, Warner/Chappell Music, and their own record label,
Xurbia Xendless. Here, the user is termed “the entrant,” yet the terms and conditions of
remix entry stipulated the remixes were not part of a competition.
9. DI (direct injection): this is a common recording technique whereby an instrument is
sent directly to the microphone input on the mixing console, as opposed to being ampli-
fied with a microphone placed on the amplifier speaker. This is used to minimize noise
and distortion and is a particularly common technique in bass guitar studio recording
and live performance.
10. See http://www.gearslutz.com/board/rap-hip-hop-engineering-production/330621-kanye-
west-love-lockdown-stems-thread.html.
11. See http://www.bittorrent.com.
12. Such as the D-16 Group’s Audio Software Nepheton Drum Machine.
13. This website is now archived at www.nin.com/withteeth.
14. The page is now archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20050418234050/http://www.
nin.com/current/index.html.
15. Currently unavailable at http://www.williamorbit.com/site/media/orbitmixer.html.
16. Currently unavailable at http://www.williamorbit.com/purdy-orbitmixer/.

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Audiovisual Material
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———. 2009. My Oracle Lives Uptown. UK:  Kobalt Digital. 5060186920061. Compact
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bit.com/blog/?p=57 (accessed August 2013).
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 chapter 20

Sample Sha ri ng
Virtual Laptop Ensemble Communities

Benjamin O’Brien

On April 16, 2012, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Rodger Dannenberg debuted
his composition FLO: Federation of Laptop Orchestras (2012), at the First Symposium
on Laptop Ensembles and Orchestras (SLEO), hosted by Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge. The work featured coordination between seven university-based laptop
orchestras around the globe, from Stanford University to the University of Huddersfield
(UK).1 Note, for the purposes of this chapter, the term laptop orchestra (Trueman 2007),
or “laptop ensemble,” is a group of performers on more than one microprocessor-based
instrument. Each ensemble in FLO included laptop musicians implementing various
digital signal processing (DSP) and audio playback procedures, as well as a few tra-
ditional acoustic instrument performers. SLEO attendants in Baton Rouge witnessed
the host laptop orchestra perform with a real-time audiovisual projection of the glob-
ally disparate ensembles. However, the premiere was not just a simulcast of ensembles
performing in parallel across five-thousand-plus miles: each laptop musician virtually
received and transmitted various combinations of audio, video, and control-message
data over a shared network. To accommodate and optimize the transmission of these
data collections over vast distances, Dannenberg and his university colleagues and
students designed an innovative layering of multiple networks (Dannenberg, 2012).
Although existing Internet applications provided the platform for broadcasting audio
and visual data, the development of a robust network for transmitting control messages
was necessary for Dannenberg to remotely conduct the virtual laptop orchestras. In spite
of this consideration to direct the local and virtual ensembles, Dannenberg maintained
that there was a significant amount of self-determination among them, and owing to
latency issues concerning control-data transmission and audiovisual synchronization,
FLO realizations would vary depending on geographic location (Druckenbrod 2012).
With this performance in mind, several observations and subsequent questions emerge,
which serve as the basis for this chapter. Extrapolating from the FLO performance,
one can infer that laptop musicians are tasked with a multitude of responsibilities: to
378   Benjamin O’Brien

control and perform their respective laptop or other microprocessor-based instrument;

listen to fellow musicians at their current, physical location, as well as an audiovisual
composite of all the virtual ensembles; and receive performance instructions from a
virtual conductor. In addition to constantly monitoring the influx of data, each musi-
cian must come to terms with the “displaced” sound (Cascone 2002) emanating from
any nearby computer as well as the sonic reduction of virtual ensembles through the
venue’s speaker system: whether generated via DSP techniques on a microprocessor-
based instrument or mediated through a standard house speaker, this sound rests in a
gap between “real” and “imagined” realities. This seemingly intangible idea of sound
is further obfuscated by every musician’s acknowledgment that latency may very well
affect the reception and projection of any audio, visual, or control-message data over
the network.
Similar to this precarious notion of sound in the laptop ensemble practice is the con-
cept of the “network.” Defining the term is of particular interest to ensembles that wish
to virtually exchange or synchronize data among their members. In the composition
FLO, for example, the network is something very real, as its existence provides—and
its demise ceases—the transmission of artistic processes. But it is implemented “sym-
bolically,” abstracted in a programmatic language, and it is also believed to be some
structure imagined by laptop musicians. This former point is essential in designing a
network to potentially handle disconnection and packet loss.2 In this sense, the net-
work virtually functions both as the pathway for data exchange among laptop ensemble
members and as a participant itself.
From this point, one can induce that this understanding of the network is but a
microcosm—or fractal—of a much larger concept: the laptop ensemble music scene.
To be more precise, the music scene is a complex meta-network composed of several
interactive networks. A music scene is an emergent social entity, integrating creative
use of technologies, material cultures, and social codes. Despite an inability to system-
atically demarcate the specific properties of a music scene, varying degrees of partici-
pation, finance, time, and discourse are dedicated to this elusive, imagined idea. The
music scene network is a lattice structure of nodes, such that each node represents the
practitioners and supporters who adapt to their geographical location or social context.
Independent nodes and nodal structures in the network not only support the fitness
of the music scene, but also imprint their associations onto the network (Straw 1991).
Although physical distances between connected nodes in a particular music scene may
vary, these differences flavor the laptop ensemble experience:  drastic permutations
may distort principles common to the practice (Connell and Gibson 2003), but these
idiosyncrasies are coupled to the similar ideological experiences inherent to the laptop
ensemble medium.
With this in mind, sociologists Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (2004) par-
tition the notion of a music scene into three intersecting levels: local, translocal, and
virtual. These levels extend the interactions between nodes where, given their local-
ity, they contribute to the laptop ensemble community via different means. In addi-
tion, within the laptop ensemble music scene is a tripartite subset of value structures
 Sample Sharing   379

that aids the sustainability of each level: the specific belief system that establishes the
ensemble’s identity, the methodology that stems from the ensemble’s identity, and the
performance practice that evaluates the integrity of the ensemble’s belief system and
practice. The particular values attributed to each subset structure help define a laptop
ensemble’s presence, or role, in the local, translocal, and virtual levels of the music
scene. The subset structures influence each other depending on the particular music
scene level.
If the overall concept of a music scene network is a virtual entity, then this meta-
network as a whole helped design one of the first network computer ensembles: the
Hub. A  brief history of the group illustrates how the Hub’s community influenced
their network computer music developments, which led to modern laptop ensemble
practice. Emerging from the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s and 1980s, the Hub
and its earlier incarnation, the League of Automatic Music Composers, were inspired
by the concept of experimenting with microprocessors to make music (Brown and
Bischoff 2002). The then-emerging Silicon Valley fostered the founding kernels of
Apple Computer and Microsoft, as well as embracing an immense array of experi-
mental music practices including indeterminacy, electroacoustics, and minimalism.
The circulation of ideas and technologies contributed to the group’s ideology of com-
posing works dependent on each member’s computer programming knowledge and
musical tastes. Early on, compositions were a product of custom-made software and
hardware such that data communication between members’ instruments occurred by
directly soldering connections (Brown and Bischoff 2002). These first network com-
puter experiments opened the door for highly idiomatic forms of musical expression
(Gresham-Lancaster 1998). Yet this fragile network was prone to errors, and subse-
quently the ensemble synthesized a server-based system that allowed members to share
a common memory as well as virtually communicate. A combination of instrumen-
tal decay and technological advancement led the Hub to several paradigmatic shifts.
First, they used a MIDI-based system, which simplified network upkeep but absolved
the shared memory environment. Subsequently, they adopted Adrian Freed and Matt
Wright’s Open Sound Control (OSC)3 protocol, developed at the Center for New Music
and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley, to allow
members to transmit data over much larger distances, including some transatlantic
performances (Brown and Bischoff 2002). The Hub’s work demonstrates how indi-
vidual and ensemble-driven artistic interests evolved as a result of innovative com-
puter technologies. This development can be interpreted as a mutualistic feedback loop
where a community inspires its members, whose work encourages others to continue
advancing new music and technologies. This feedback occurs differently on each level
of the laptop ensemble music scene, as does an ensemble’s identity, method of imple-
mentation, and approach to performance.
An observation of the ideological and methodological practices that permeate the
local level of a laptop ensemble music scene yields a wide variety of perspectives.
Beginning with academy-based laptop ensembles and orchestras, it is typical that the
host university or college offers courses in computer-related research and performance
380   Benjamin O’Brien

to interested students. These courses unite students from the fields of computer sci-
ence and music—among many other disciplines—with varying degrees of expertise.
For example, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO) con-
tinues to design its open-source software toolkit Network Resources for Collaborative
Improvisation (NRCI) to encourage novice and advanced student programmers
and performers alike to participate in the laptop ensemble experience (Burns and
Surges 2008).
Developing different types of networking practices or building hemispherical speak-
ers4 to simulate acoustical properties for laptop-generated audio playback are a few
common projects explored in courses (Smallwood et al. 2008). End-of-term concerts
showcase these technological advancements, including works that feature iPads, Wii
Remotes, and other alternative controllers as an approach to humanize laptop musi-
cian processes.5 This “embodied” performance is significant to most laptop ensem-
bles:  dancelike gestures anthropomorphize developed technologies and (possibly)
inform audiences to better inquire about processes in play. The courses allow stu-
dents to not only expand their knowledge base in computer science, music compo-
sition and performance, and other transdisciplinary practices, but also reach out to
their surrounding community. The Virginia Tech Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork), for
example, develops their own PD-L2Ork code repository to tour and outreach to stu-
dents at local area K–12 schools (Bukvic et al. 2010). Recognition, awards, and grants
for academy-based laptop ensembles and orchestras is well documented, including
support from Apple for the Worldscape Laptop Orchestra (Harker et  al. 2008), and
a 2008 MacArthur Foundation grant to Princeton University’s Perry Cook and Dan
Trueman for founding the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). Support of this mag-
nitude paves the way for laptop ensembles to spread the word about their practice (and
their academic institution) through invitations to perform and workshop research at
translocal events. In addition, a noticeable trend in academy-based laptop ensembles
and orchestras is adoption of eclectic names with which to distinguish themselves, for
example, MiLO, PLOrk, HeLO (Huddersfield Experimental Laptop Orchestra), and
ODEO (Oregon Electronic Devices Orchestra, University of Oregon). Catchiness and
brevity in a name are important factors in getting one’s brand and message out to sur-
rounding communities, and this may be the appeal.
Of course, there are many alternative perspectives on the laptop ensemble prac-
tice. Regarding the laptop computer as a “folk” instrument (Rohrhuber et  al. 2007),
Powerbooks_Unplugged (PB_UP) cultivate many of the classic characteristics of a
traditional folk band: PB_UP members typically perform on unamplified laptops and
routinely change their lineup depending on member availability. PB_UP advocate a
stripped-down, completely textual interface system for performance, devoid of graphi-
cal user interfaces (GUIs), for the purpose of all members sharing a balanced perfor-
mance platform (Rohrhuber et al. 2007). PB_UP members communicate via chat and
share code snippets over wireless networks. Uninhibited by external devices commonly
used to supplement a laptop musician’s performative control or audio output, PB_UP
members are free to engage and interact with audiences during performance. PB_UP
 Sample Sharing   381

inscribe a unique role in the laptop ensemble music scene: while echoing the portability
and accessibility of the 1960s acoustic guitar, PB_UP also explore the limitless possibili-
ties inherent to the modern laptop, using all aspects of the machine through unique
software design for performative purposes.
Embracing the computer’s unmatched programmatic prowess, laptop performance
enthusiasts interested in dance music have recently created the genre algorave (Cheshire,
2013). Seeming to combine the terms algorithm and rave, this particular music scene
subset takes its definition from a more political place: the United Kingdom’s Criminal
Justice and Public Order Act 1994.6 A notable ideological distinction of algorave lap-
top musicians is a focus on composing music for people to dance. Algorave musicians
generate dance music on their laptops in real-time via algorithms that allow them to
freely adapt to the venue’s atmosphere or environment. This focus differs from princi-
pal laptop ensemble ideologies, which typically encourage innovation in audio, control,
and software development above all else. To be clear, the emphasis on dance, of course,
attracts dancers and dance-music enthusiasts, thus garnering a much wider audience
and subsequent support.
Although the preceding examples illustrate a few of the many directions laptop
ensembles pursue at the local level, translocal events such as SLEO are quite united
in their purpose and execution. Translocal events sponsor local and virtual commu-
nication between academic and nonacademic participants and supporters through
various conferences, symposiums, and festivals. These occasions provide a forum for
comparative discourse and invention, educating practitioners of the diverse styles and
tastes at other laptop ensemble localities. Performances, paper sessions, and workshops
highlight software developments, computer-networking improvements, composi-
tional uses of alternative controllers, and aesthetic evaluations of works. Given that the
recent surge in laptop ensemble popularity is the result of the widening intersection
between like-minded programmers, composers, and performers, and the accessibility
and mobility of technologies, the discourse surrounding the practice is immeasurable.
However, it is these translocal events that allow practitioners to take stock, document
milestones, and hypothesize on the direction the music scene is heading in. For exam-
ple, one evening concert at SLEO featured selected compositions from an international
call for works: the concert not only illustrated that other local ensembles could realize
the works, but also added the compositions to the laptop ensemble canon. Through
performance at translocal events, compositions for laptop ensembles are solidified as
being significant to the practice.
With the exception of SLEO, most translocal events, however, are not exclusively
related to the laptop ensemble practice. The shared disciplines of electroacoustic
and computer music typically result in laptop ensembles performing at longstanding
translocal events, such as national conferences from the Society for Electro-Acoustic
Music in the United States (SEAMUS), founded in 1984. However, newly estab-
lished translocal events feature laptop ensemble performances in relation to festival
themes. For example, the Network Music Festival7 is held annually at various ven-
ues in Birmingham, England, since 2012, and presents musical research centered on
382   Benjamin O’Brien

networking music. The event showcases a variety of works that express the topic of
networking from laptop ensemble performances to network art to free-improvisation
simulcasts. Similarly, the live.code.festival8 was held April 19–21, 2013, at the Karlsruhe
University of Music, Germany, and focused on the medium of “live coding,” a sub-
ject to be discussed shortly. It featured talks and featured laptop ensembles, real-time
electroacoustic musicians, and algorave artists. Thus, translocal events integrate laptop
ensemble practitioners with artists and researchers from other musical and technical
practices, enriching the medium.
The Internet, of course, allows laptop ensemble practitioners the finesse and ease of
virtually communicating with others about their practice. Thus the virtual level of the
laptop ensemble music scene is integral to the sustainability of the local and translo-
cal levels. Even if unable to participate in local laptop ensembles or attend translocal
events, fans can visit countless websites that advertise developments and recommen-
dations on technical configurations, aesthetic choices, and grants, among many other
opportunities. In addition, novice laptop ensemble enthusiasts can interact with well-
versed programmers on many software- and hardware-related email lists and forums.
The Live Group Computer Performance (LiGroCoP)9 is one of many email lists that
feature discussions on all things relating to real-time computer performance, including
calls for works, journal entries, and general technical inquiries. Additionally, the online
presence of laptop ensemble musicians exists on social media sites such as Facebook,
Twitter, and SoundCloud. Information on the topics of programming, composition,
and performance is certainly abundant.
Virtual communication among laptop ensemble practitioners is fairly accessi-
ble and affects the local and translocal levels of the music scene, but performance
in the virtual realm is a much more complex philosophical and technical issue.
Context reveals the structural qualities of elements in an environment and situ-
ates the embodiment of performance, real or virtual. When laptop ensembles per-
form at a real locality—for example, a performance hall—audiences see the human
performers, though they may not completely comprehend the mechanics of their
performance. There may be clues, such as waving a Wii Remote left-to-right to con-
trol audio panning, but rarely is the symbolic software written to implement said
musical process on display and understood by audiences. This problem of human
performance mediated through electronic instruments is well documented, and
a solution is not easy (Ostertag 2002). Thus one may wonder:  Is there anything
gained—in terms of expression—by seeing a laptop ensemble perform in the flesh?
Comparatively, the tradition of acousmatic music has long suffered from the per-
formance tradition of multiple speakers standing on a bare stage in the dark. In
defense of laptop ensemble performances, the computer is at least a type of instru-
ment that an audience can acknowledge is responsible for sonic generation—even
if they do not understand the specifics of those processes. One may argue that the
audience’s question of “Who’s doing what?” is a welcome ambiguity compared to
a completely virtual performance, where the trace rendered is only a product of
phantom processes.
 Sample Sharing   383

In some cases, virtual laptop ensemble performers may be physically absent from
the place of performance, thus leaving the audience with additional questions. Does a
human body exist in this performance, and how integral is it to the composition? How
does the technology affect this human body? Is this performance occurring in real-
time? Finally, how can a virtual performer be identified without any sign warranting
his or her presence? In inverting this last question, one is reminded of Plato’s theory
of musica universalis, or “Harmony of Spheres,” which supposes celestial bodies are
capable of producing music thanks to their proportional relationships; following iden-
tification of performers—the planets—one may infer an inaudible “virtual music.” This
music may not be audible at the present time, but it may nevertheless exist. Additionally,
who is to say that it will not be heard in the future? Thus virtual music rests somewhere
between symbolic and imagined realities. Although this philosophical question is cer-
tainly posed to the virtual laptop ensemble practice, a simple truth remains: if one is
to hear music being created in a virtual place, then it must be heard at some real local-
ity. Virtual laptop ensembles must formulate concise ideologies in which to base their
technical practice before answering this question of how one listens to virtual music?
There are three main practices for virtual laptop ensembles: simulcast performances,
live coding, and network compositions. All three of these laptop ensemble identities
employ some form of networking but in varying ways, to make their virtual music
practice audible at some locality. Even though the idea of a telecast is not particularly
new given the age of the television, the concept of a simulcast is a viable arena for
virtual performers. Simulcast or “telematic” performances collapse the music of lap-
top ensembles and orchestras from at least two real places into a minimum of one
local space. This virtual connection allows ensembles to improvise or realize composi-
tions in real-time via transmitted audiovisual laptop ensemble re-presentations. Skype,
Google Hangouts, and similar online applications easily achieve this audiovisual trans-
mission. However, even if these laptop ensembles possess an audiovisual reduction of
the sound created and the place occupied by virtual musicians, simulcasts have limita-
tions: performers do not share a common space. This fact, of course, imposes a fixed
boundary between performers, which is somewhat ironic considering the purpose of
the simulcast is to unite laptop ensembles and orchestras over great distances.
An alternative approach to simulcast performances is the local broadcast of congre-
gating laptop musicians in a mutual but completely virtual place. Formed in March
2007, the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM)10 uses the Second Life online environ-
ment to connect performers from three continents with the goal of investigating and
highlighting new audiovisual compositions that challenge long-celebrated traditional
music norms (see Trevor Harvey’s Chapter 10). AOM members adopt the Second Life
conventions much like any musician on their instrument, and collaborate with each
other in a manner similar to the traditional orchestra paradigm—where the notable
difference between the two is the space for interaction. The physicality of a common
place is not likely possible nor required, but the congregation of AOM members does
occur in the virtual realm: each ensemble member navigates his or her own custom-
made, personal avatar through virtual environments, real or imagined. Despite the
384   Benjamin O’Brien

existence of these places as being purely phantasmal, social markers akin to collective
realities exist, and thus musical relationships are forged at these virtual geographies.
These projected audiovisual interactions are documented at local or translocal perfor-
mances by attending participants and audiences.
Stemming from this idea of laptop ensembles “meeting” in a shared virtual space
is the practice of live coding. Live coding techniques and interests vary depending on
the musician, but in short it can be described as real-time programmatic scripting to
produce music (Collins et  al. 2003). Similar to free improvisation or indeterminate
music, the “liveness” of creating computer music in real time is considered dangerous
for a number of reasons: risk is always involved when executing code that has not been
debugged; preparatory code must be available in case of scripting errors; undesired
sounds may be presented sequentially or in tandem with preferred sounds; and there
is the real, physical strain of typing and staring at an LCD screen during performance
(Collins et al. 2003). Live coding is unlike composition as composers have the luxury
of organizing sound outside of time. However, with these dangers and inconveniences
come many benefits, foremost being sound production malleability. This flexibility
stems from the live coding practitioner’s preference for abstract, textual interfaces, as
opposed to cumbersome GUIs. Code is typically executed in terminal windows that
can be shared via any digital networking scheme; however, some ensembles prefer to
synchronize available “codelets” so all performers may access in real time. Common
networking protocols such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission
Control Protocol (TCP) are used for transmitting data for network computer perfor-
mance; the specifics of these processes will be discussed shortly. For example, the lap-
top trio Slub uses a TCP/IP-based networking system to coordinate code written in Perl
and REALbasic (Collins et al. 2003), while Julian Rohrhuber’s Just-in-Time Library, or
“jitlib,” written for the open-source audio programming software SuperCollider11, uses
a UDP/IP system and allows multiple users to simultaneously access code (Rohrhuber
and de Campo 2011). Once code is accessible to virtual laptop ensemble performers,
they are free to execute and produce sound on their own computers.
A relatively new live-coding method for sharing SuperCollider codelets is available
to Twitter users in the form of “sc-tweets.” These 140 character tweets are completely
self-contained and written in the SuperCollider language syntax, such that sound is
produced when executed in SuperCollider. This approach to live coding certainly
attracts novice SuperCollider programmers, who quickly learn how to produce sound
and adapt code. However, it is the charm of composing efficient, sonically interesting,
140 character codelets that appeals to more-advanced SuperCollider users.
Of course the creative advantages afforded to the succinctness of sc-tweets
is immense. For example, in 2009 The Wire published an album of twenty-two
sc-tweet pieces online, which showcased the sonic diversity available to 140 characters
executed in SuperCollider.12 This album introduced some Wire readers to the sound
palette available to the audio programming language. The more curious readers were
free to download the open source software, copy and paste title tracks, and then exe-
cute the code, all from the comfort of their personal computer. Another documented
 Sample Sharing   385

work that uses sc-tweets is Andre Bartetzki’s installation A Show Case for SC Tweets
(2010). Briefly, SC Tweets collects sc-tweets sent to a specific Twitter user and soni-
fies them at some performance venue. The work has been realized several times at
translocal events, including the SuperCollider Symposium 201013 in Berlin and the
2012 International Workshop for Computer Music and Audio Technology14 in Taipei,
Taiwan. The intrigue of the work rests in its variability: depending on the number of
online SuperCollider-Twitter users, the timing of sc-tweets, the design of the sc-tweet,
and the efficiency of the network determine the realization. Finally, there is a Tumblr
page http://sctweets.tumblr.com/ that acts as a repository for sc-tweets, inviting novice
and advanced SuperCollider users to revel in sound and design encapsulated in 140
characters.
By now it is clear that networking for virtual laptop ensembles is not just an issue of
style, but also methodology: how musicians choose to employ networking schemes is
dependent on their ideology. Additional factors such as particular operating systems,
the locations of performers, and online securities also determine networking proce-
dures. Virtual laptop ensembles preferably employ UDP to transfer data to multiple
users as opposed to TCP, which has a higher overhead because of constant data stream-
ing. UDP, on the other hand, is message-oriented and quite adaptable—qualities that
are excellent for transmitting musical gesture data. Recalling the OSC protocol from
earlier, this open-source dynamic framework uses UDP and is also message-oriented.
OSC provides communication between group members on local networks and the
Internet, and is available to many audio-programming languages such as SuperCollider,
Max/MSP,15 and Pure Data.16 The Hub, PLOrk, PB_UP, and many other laptop ensem-
bles use OSC messaging for their network compositions. Some ensembles make use of
OSCgroups,17 developed by Ross Bencina, as it is a routing scheme for coordinating
OSC messages. Among its many features, OSCgroups allows users to easily join or leave
communal virtual spaces for the purposes of performing network compositions.
In addition to OSC messaging, there are other research programs interested in com-
puter network music. The SoundWIRE Research Group (Cáceres and Chafe 2009) at
Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)
developed the system JackTrip.18 Whereas OSC deals only with sending control message
data, JackTrip is capable of transmitting high-quality audio over the Internet via UDP.
Depending on the audio application, JackTrip may be modified to lower latency and
lessen packets lost (Cáceres and Chafe 2009). JackTrip allowed the Stanford University
and Queen’s University of Belfast laptop orchestras to collaborate for several concerts
between 2005 through 2007 (Lopez-Lezcano and Wilkerson 2007).
However, since UDP does not require mutual consent, or handshake, dialogs between
users, the flexibility of this feature constitutes unreliability, as there is no method of
confirming whether data are delivered or ordered. Depending on the complexity of
a composition, this can produce some major pitfalls, including remote messages not
being sent to allow members to join or leave a group, or to begin or end a sound. Thus
there is significant research devoted to finding solutions to these previously discussed
problems of disconnection and packet loss. Nevertheless, the key reality in network
386   Benjamin O’Brien

music is that latency, bandwidth, and synchronization always affect virtual commu-
nication, and virtual laptop ensembles must address these concerns in their composi-
tional research.
Although some laptop ensembles choose to compose around the problem of net-
work latency, others integrate this potential hazard by composing with it in mind. Since
users cannot predict network latency, one can think of it as an intermittent and inter-
ruptive, or disruptive, force in the process of virtual communication. In cybernetics
this entity is defined as “noise” (Ashby 1970). If network latency can be expressed as
noise, then latency can be represented via stochastic processes (Shannon 1948). Noise
created by network latency tests the technical strength and integrity of the compo-
sitional structures within the system. By testing the fitness of a system, noise creates
new meaning in and outside the system (Bateson 1967). If virtual laptop ensembles do
not adequately prepare for latency, then artistic endeavors may be compromised. Thus
some ensembles choose to design compositional structures that feature randomness to
encapsulate the chaos created by network latency. Some laptop ensembles do their best
to avoid noise in their networking procedures; those who welcome it may yield new
products and perspectives relative to their designated systems.
The international laptop quartet Glitch Lich is an ensemble that embraces the unpre-
dictability of network music. Glitch Lich has members located on three continents19
and routinely performs in four time zones. Early compositions forced Glitch Lich to
prepare for the worst-case scenarios of packet loss, dropouts, or disconnections; how-
ever, now they collaborate on a self-developed network designed to share data and syn-
chronize visuals. Glitch Lich compositions reflect this previous caution by embodying
these problems in using and creating chaotic data structures. For example, in Glitch
Lich member Chad McKinney’s work Yig, The Father of Serpents (2012), Stochastic
Unit Generators (UGens) written in SuperCollider are defined in various modular
synthesizers that combine with input data generated by virtual performers (McKinney
and Collins 2012). This interaction between synthesizer and virtual performers creates
complex feedback structures such that the sonic product diverges at each locality. Even
though input values drive parameters for data generation in each synthesizer object,
the inherent chaos of all the synthesizer makes it impossible to have a singular rep-
resentation of the work. The particular chaining sequence and configuration of each
performer’s choice in synthesizer, degree of synthesizer modulation, and position of
the synthesizer can dramatically effect the realization of the composition. These real-
izations are heard at local terminal points, such that audiences observe the geographi-
cally local performers collaborate with unseen Glitch Lich performers, whose presence
is only virtually known. However, these phantom performers are manifest by visuals
projecting the shared virtual environment, which include a cursor named after each
member and a chat window Glitch Lich uses in performance for matters concerning
conducting and updating. Thus Glitch Lich members collaborate at a compositional
point of tangency, but their individual experiences of a work run parallel to one another.
Understanding the importance of crafting a sound networking technique,
Glitch Lich members Chad McKinney and Curtis McKinney resolved networking
 Sample Sharing   387

problems by creating OSCthulhu20, a flexible system of abstracted SyncObjects and

SyncArgs (McKinney and McKinney 2012). Early Glitch Lich works used OSC mes-
saging, but as previously discussed, the vast distances between performers proved
problematic. Modeled after the networking techniques found in online multiplayer
games (McKinney and McKinney 2012), the name OSCthulhu references OSC and
H. P. Lovecraft’s mythical monster “Cthulhu.” The near-instant synchronization of
dynamic audio and visuals through this client-server architecture stems from how
OSCthulhu represents data: SyncObjects contain varying amounts of modifiable pro-
grammatic value types, called SyncArgs. Glitch Lich’s OSCthulhu shares the status of
all virtually known performative objects—for example, a synthesizer—and constructs
a mirrored image of the object on each member’s computer (McKinney and McKinney
2012). This differs from the networking techniques employed by ensembles such as
the Hub and PLOrk, where messages are sent to all participants to influence behav-
ior, and subsequently, are independently outputted from each computer. Thus, Glitch
Lich’s networking scheme is designed in terms of shared variable objects as opposed
to sequential messaging. OSCthulhu provides a perfect environment for experimenta-
tion and compositional formation with many technical and compositional benefits.
Performers are able to chat in real time via the OSCthulhu chat window, but even so
Glitch Lich members tend to rely on their musical intuitions to guide the performance.
This flexibility with communicating data is possible thanks to the network design.
Rather than using a networking protocol for the sole purpose of transmitting musical
ideas and materials, the network system itself communicates the ideas inherent to the
composition.
Two main themes emerge from this research on virtual laptop ensemble commu-
nities. The first thread traces the complex integration of all levels within the laptop
ensemble music scene. Although this chapter isolated and observed each level of the
music scene independently, it is clear that the stages do not exist in a vacuum; nor are
they unrelated. On the contrary, the connectivity between the local, translocal, and
virtual levels of the music scene functions much like feedback in a system, as processes
in the music scene network influence nodes that subsequently reinforce said opera-
tions. Similar to the Hub’s developmental process, this feedback supports the health
and infrastructure of the music scene, as evident in international universities collabo-
rating to realize compositions like FLO, or sharing networking research such as OSC
or JackTrip at translocal conferences. However, this feedback is only as significant as
one’s understanding of the transmission of messages sent and received among nodes
in the network; it is necessary that laptop ensemble participants be knowledgeable on
the fundamental concepts of networking and philosophical issues concerning virtual
performance for the music scene network to build on its knowledge base.
The second point addresses issues regarding how virtual music is performed and
consumed in the laptop ensemble music scene, and how to speculate on its direction.
Ensembles such as AOM and Glitch Lich compose music in a completely virtual space,
a shared place that exists only in the digital realm and is accessible at many real locali-
ties. As a result of their research—among many others—the concept of “place” must
388   Benjamin O’Brien

be revisited and redefined to reflect this artificial, digital space: whereas a real place
changes with time and environmental restraints, the digital place is static, dependent
on its occupants and their processes. However, the music composed in this shared
place by these ensembles can be enjoyed only at a real but always different locality,
where difference is determined by an individual’s location. In addition, the issues sur-
rounding networking and the temporal nature of music necessitate a truth:  no two
people can hear the same virtual music. Yet, given this example of needing to redefine
place, a question arises:  At what point will the paradigm of understanding virtual
music shift?
In searching for an answer, one recalls the origin of PLOrk was to breathe fresh life
into the archaic institution of an orchestra by virtue of the “newness” of laptop com-
puters (Truman 2007). If one chooses to re-present the longstanding tradition of an
orchestra through the vessel of multiple laptops, then given digital assistance, logic
leads to a reinvigoration of the concept of performance. As human communication
becomes increasingly digitized, it is inevitable that markets concentrating on virtual
performance will exist and (most likely) thrive. As observed in this chapter, virtual
laptop ensembles have the opportunity to not only realize music in real time, but also
simultaneously offer performances that depend on an audience’s locality. Thus music
fans who wish to experience multiple perspectives of one virtual entity will need to
become increasingly digitized, requiring avatars. Subsequently, one wonders whether
the continued development of assistance technology will ultimately render the human
body into a virtual shell.
In closing, if audiences evolved to understand the principal acoustic properties of a
pianist striking a piano key, as well as the basic computation possibilities of the micro-
processor, then it should be clear that humans are capable of adapting to accelerating
technological developments. The laptop ensemble music scene reflects this evolution
in its inherent choice and interest to produce music through a machine of limitless
potential. The aesthetic curiosities coupled with the technical developments of virtual
laptop ensemble communities encourage philosophical discourse and technological
advancement in and around the field of music.

Notes
1. The participating laptop orchestras are from Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA;
University of Colorado, Boulder; Texas A&M University, College Station; Louisiana State
University, Baton Rouge; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, PA; Queen’s University
of Belfast, Northern Ireland; and University of Huddersfield, England.
2. Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data sent from one network endpoint fail
to arrive at their intended destination.
3. Adrian Freed and Matt Wright developed Open Sound Control (OSC) at the Center for
New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), University of California, Berkeley. For
more information on OSC, visit http://opensoundcontrol.org/ (accessed July 24, 2013).
 Sample Sharing   389

4. This point addresses our earlier concern for “displaced sound” as the purpose of
the hemispherical speakers is to localize the sound of each performer in the lap-
top ensemble. An additional goal of these hemispherical speakers is to embody
sonic phenomena inherent to acoustic instruments in spite of the computer’s
nonresonant body.
5. There are countless laptop ensembles and orchestras that use alternative control-
lers, including the commercial iPad, Wii Remote, and Xbox Kinect products. These
wireless products easily interface with laptops and give laptop ensemble performers
a greater range for performative expression. For more information on some laptop
ensembles that use alternative controllers, see Bukvic et  al. (2010) and Booth and
Gurevich (2012).
6. The website http://algorave.com/ (accessed July 24, 2013) links the definition of Algorave
from the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 c.  33, Part V, 63 1b:  “ ‘music’
includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succes-
sion of repetitive beats.” For more information on the genre and its artists, visit http://
algorave.com/.
7. For more information on the Network Music Festival, visit http://networkmusicfestival.
org/ (accessed July 24, 2013).
8. For more information on the live.code.festival, visit http://imwi.hfm.eu/livecode/ (accessed
July 24, 2013).
9. For more information on the Live Group for Computer Performance (LiGroCop), visit
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ligrocop (accessed July 24, 2013).
10. For more information on Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, visit http://avatarorchestra.
blogspot.com (accessed July 24, 2013).
11. For more information on SuperCollider, visit http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/learn-
ing/ (accessed July 24, 2013).
12. For more information on the album, visit http://thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/
supercollider-140.1 (accessed July 24, 2013).
13. For more information on the SuperCollider Symposium 2010, visit http://supercol-
lider2010.de/ (accessed July 24, 2013).
14. For more information on the International Workshop on Computer Music and Audio
Technology (WOCMAT) 2012, visit http://web.it.nctu.edu.tw/~eamusic/wocmat2012/
index.html (accessed July 24, 2013).
15. For more information on Max/MSP, visit http://cycling74.com/ (accessed July 24, 2013).
16. For more information on Pure Data (PD), visit http://puredata.info/ (accessed July
24, 2013).
17. For more information on OSCgroups, visit http://www.rossbencina.com/code/oscgroups
(accessed July 24, 2013).
18. For more information on JackTrip, visit https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/soundwire/
software/jacktrip/ (accessed July 24, 2013).
19. As of August 1, 2013, Glitch Lich has members located in Shanghai, China (Cole
Ingraham); Sussex, England (Chad McKinney); Brooklyn, NY (Curtis McKinney); and
Gainesville, FL (Benjamin O’Brien). For more information on Glitch Lich, visit http://
glitchlich.com (accessed July 24, 2013).

20. For more information on OSCthulhu, visit https://github.com/CurtisMcKinney/
OSCthulhu (accessed July 24, 2013).
390   Benjamin O’Brien

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 chapter 21

Stone  Ta pe s
Ghost Box, Nostalgia, and Postwar Britain

David Pattie

Remember Tomorrow

It seems to me that the past is always happening now. In the present we

are always memory. (Trish Keenan, Broadcast, Belbury Poly album, The
Belbury Tales, 2012)

It starts with the sound of crackling—the kind of sonic interference that used to be
airbrushed out of the recording process but that is now left in, as proof of a sample’s age
and authenticity. Then the music begins; a low, swelling analog hum, and a rising, ten-
tative, five-note phrase, on what sounds like a muffled, badly recorded flute (or the syn-
thesized approximation of a flute). And before the voice speaks, I know what it is going
to say; and I’m so confident of this that I find myself mouthing the words, even though
I  can’t match the authoritative, meditative timbre of the speaker. The track includes
only the first four words—“The geography of peace”—but in my mind, as the music
plays, the rest of the speech plays out, and with the words, the images the words con-
jure; and with those images, the memory of my younger self, watching those images,
and listening to that voice. The track is “The Geography,” the fourth track on Belbury
Poly’s fourth album, The Belbury Tales (2012). It samples a 1970s public information
film about the recently opened Cleveland Way, one of the first of the national trails, a
network of paths taking ramblers across unspoiled stretches of the English countryside.
The film, like so much of the visual detritus of the 1970s, can be found online. Watching
it now is a curious experience: the images are degraded, the soundtrack distorted, but
oddly this feels entirely appropriate. The clear, sharp colors of the 1970s have faded, and
the film is indistinct, like a dream, or a memory.
It might sound as though my response to the track is as unreflectingly nostalgic as
the comments posted underneath the original video on YouTube:
 Stone Tapes   393

Open a door and let me walk inside this film—safe from lager louts, punch-ups on
buses and tubes, mobile phones and er . . . laptops and the Internet!! . . . I remem-
ber these public information films very well . . . they were always on TV on as [sic]
Sunday when I was growing up in the 1970s. Thank you SO much for this lovely bit
of nostalgia! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bcxwcO2ncI)

And perhaps, if the track had used the video in its entirety, I would have felt the same
sense of warm familiarity; but it does not. A woman begins to sing, and the melody
sounds as though it comes from an old folk song, but the words are indistinct; only the
repeated phrase “they sang so sweet” is clearly discernible. A man’s voice sets up a coun-
ter melody, but here too, the words he sings can’t be made out, and the rhythm of both
melodies does not sit easily, either harmonically or rhythmically, with the rest of the
music. The original public information film tells us that the Cleveland Way is alive with
history. It lays that history out for us—Vikings, witches, castles, the Scots fighting the
English—with the comforting assurance that all these conflicts are past, that the land is
peaceful, and that all the ghosts have been laid to rest. “The Geography” is rather more
unsettling. We’re not in the familiar, safe, cozy spaces of the English countryside; we
seem to be elsewhere.

The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone with a dull red
glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the
great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of
the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between
the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure
white, began to rise from the hills. . . . (Machen, n.d.)

This description of an apparently idyllic Welsh valley (from Arthur Machen’s 1890
novel) is both tranquil and quietly frightening; the land seems at peace, but the dull
red sun casts no shadow, and a pure white mist is rising, masking the contours of the
landscape. Even before the first horrific event (a surgeon slices into a young girl’s
brain, in an operation designed to link the physical and spiritual worlds), the world of
the novel is rendered uncanny. This is a place where ghosts might walk; a place where
the eerie and the ethereal blend into one. If a well-meaning government body made
a public information film about Machen’s valley, “The Geography” would be on the
soundtrack.
The track and the album are the work of Jim Jupp, who records mainly under the
name Belbury Poly; The Belbury Tales was released by the small independent label
Ghost Box, which was founded by Jupp and Julian House in 2004. The music released
on the label conforms to an overall aesthetic, which is carefully maintained by Ghost
Box’s founders, extending to the artwork for each release (designed by House, who also
records for Ghost Box as the Focus Group) and to other, ancillary parts of the label’s
output—short films, mock channel idents, a booklet (called Ritual and Education), the
rather endearingly low-tech Ghost Box website (with reviews and information pecked
out in typewriter font); periodic podcasts uploaded to Mixcloud (and hosted by Jupp,
394   David Pattie

as the self-styled vicar of Belbury), and so on. The overall impression is of a curiously
jumbled lumber room, filled with the refuse of British postwar society, mixed with
images and ideas drawn from a particular strain of (mostly) British horror and science
fiction. The list of influences that Jupp, House, and other artists linked to the label (Jon
Brooks, who records for Ghost Box as the Advisory Circle, in particular) have iden-
tified in various interviews since the label’s inception is extensive. Among others, it
includes the horror fiction of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and
H. P. Lovecraft; the visionary fiction of John Cowper Powys and C. S. Lewis (whose
novel That Hideous Strength is set in the fictional English town of Belbury); 1970s
children’s television (in particular, oddly disconcerting serials like The Changes, The
Owl Service, Sky, and Children of the Stones); public information films; Nigel Kneale,
the author of the Quatermass serials. There are other, seminal examples of TV sci-
ence fiction and horror (an adaptation of 1984: The Year of the Sex Olympics: The Stone
Tape: the six-part anthology Beasts); the music of Boards of Canada and Broadcast;
the kind of library and incidental music used by TV channels in the sixties and seven-
ties (Basil Kirchin’s work, for example); early, experimental electronic music (the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop, and especially the music of Delia Derbyshire, is a key touch-
stone); English folk music; psychedelia; and the light, whimsical progressive rock styles
that came out of the Canterbury scene in the late sixties.
These various influences are not blended together into a seamless whole; they run
around and against each other unpredictably. The Focus Group creates collages of
samples drawn from a variety of sources, all running together (“With the audio col-
lages I try to achieve the sensation that there is a real acoustic space that all the sounds
exist in, even if it sounds slightly unreal,” as Julian House puts it (Reynolds 2011, 343).
However, the label’s underlying aesthetic is strong enough to bind all of these dispa-
rate elements together. For someone like myself, who grew up in the 1970s, the effect
of the music—in fact, the effect of the integrated aesthetic that Ghost Box creates—is
simultaneously immediate and evanescent:  I  know the samples and the references,
either directly or by association, but their configuration is unexpected, uncanny, and
unidentifiably odd. It does feel like moving from the security of the Cleveland Way to
the uncertain territory of “The Geography,” and, as this is a journey into a past version
of Britain (which is also my past), an immersion in the world of the label is both com-
forting and disorienting. The Britain in which I grew up becomes a stranger, ghostlier
place; a virtual, reconfigured, haunted collage or palimpsest.
Simon Reynolds, along with Mark Fisher, the first music critic to latch on to Ghost
Box, used the critical term hauntology to describe the intention and the effects of the
label’s music, and the output of other musicians (Moon Wiring Club, Mordant Music,
the Caretaker, and a number of others) working in the same general field. He borrowed
the term from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International (1994):

Ghost Box’s “memory work” isn’t exactly therapeutic, though, a salve for homesick-
ness (the root meaning of nostalgia). Their music is too disorienting for that kind of
 Stone Tapes   395

simple comfort. What is returned to you (assuming, perhaps, that you’re British and
grew up in the 1960s and 1970s) is a sense of this country as a stranger, more fantas-
tical place than you had ever realized: Homeland becomes unheimlich. (Reynolds,
“Spirit of Preservation,” 1995)

Derrida’s original term was, as Reynolds admitted “a tad clunky” (Reynolds 2006, 28),
not least because it carried with it a wider argument about the position of Marxism in a
post–Cold War world (Derrida’s work, among other things, was a very effective polemic
against the idea that the collapse of communism signaled the unalloyed triumph of lib-
eral capitalism, and therefore, according to the American academic Francis Fukuyama,
the end of history). When the term migrated into popular music, it shed most of its
political associations, coming to describe a type of recording that was haunted, or that
existed in an indeterminate relation to the past; it bore the spectral imprint of previous
styles and technologies, mixed with techniques and approaches available only to the
contemporary musician.
As with all critical terms, hauntology is simultaneously illuminating and restric-
tive: it does identify key aspects of the label’s music (its atemporality, its evocation of
the half-heard and the half-remembered) but at the same time it misrepresents the
label somewhat. It suggests that the relation between the music the label produces
and the culture from which it derives is between an unstable, uncanny music and
a fixed, knowable past. As Reynolds puts it above, the homeland of postwar Britain
becomes unheimlich; texts, images, and meanings that are part of an agreed mem-
ory reemerge, in a jumbled, uncanny, unsettling virtual version of themselves. It is
this, for commentators, that saves the label from the charge of nostalgia; as Sexton
has noted, those who first wrote about Ghost Box were profoundly suspicious of the
negative or reactionary connotations of the term. Mark Fisher, for example, argued
that the label’s music constituted a careful investigation of the process of nostalgia,
rather than a directly nostalgic evocation of the recent past. Simon Reynolds saw
the label’s releases as a response to popular music’s growing obsession with its own
history; against pop culture’s retromania, Ghost Box created music that combined a
nostalgia for a future that never came to pass, with a vision of a strange, alternative
Britain, constituted from the reordered refuse of the postwar period (“More than a
Proust-like quest to recover ‘lost time,’ the Ghost Box project is really an attempt to
turn the past into a foreign country,” Reynolds 2006, 33). More recent commentators
face the charge that Ghost Box’s work is an exercise in the postmodern pastiching of
nostalgia rather more directly:

Ghost Box, for example, offers a form of heritage and nostalgia that is very much
associated with alternative values (particularly paganism, psychogeography and
public education) and packages its releases carefully in order to construct “psychic
heterotopias.” And if not all of the music that Ghost Box releases can be termed
pastiche, some of it—selected output from the Advisory Circle and Belbury Poly in
particular—certainly can. Yet this is a mode of pastiche that can be largely differen-
tiated from other forms through its ransacking of generally obscure sources. It is,
396   David Pattie

therefore, not so much the absence of pastiche and nostalgia that typifies the label
and its general critical acclaim, but rather the displacing of these concepts through
strategies of selectivity and framing. (Sexton 2012, 21)

In both types of reading, the label essentially undertakes the same cultural task; it cre-
ates a virtual version of a past Britain, which manages to escape the lure of the simply
nostalgic because its nostalgia isn’t for a lost country, but for a country that was never
quite there.

A Field Guide to Belbury

Look for this sign to show you’re on the right track . . . (Belbury Poly, “The
Geography”)

The locus of this virtual version of postwar Britain is the town of Belbury, a town that
has, it seems, proved very vulnerable to the impact of the twentieth century. According
to the Field Guide to British Towns and Villages, helpfully printed on the back of the
CD booklet of The Owl’s Map (Belbury Poly’s second album), Belbury is located in
border country; it used to have a medieval town center, which was badly damaged by
“an opportune air-raid in 1940.” Now, it is an odd hybrid of the ancient and the new: the
“quaint Manor Hall” and the “reputedly haunted Baroque Folly” coexisting with “some
notable modernist architecture including the Polytechnic College, Public Library and
the striking Community Fellowship Church.” In the surrounding area, there are, as the
Guide points out, features “of interest to the antiquarian”: an Iron Age fort on Belbury
Hill, and a Neolithic stone circle at Thornwood Ring. No wonder that “some feel that
Belbury is an uneasy mixture of ancient and modern” (Sleevenotes, Belbury Poly, The
Owl’s Map¸ Ghost Box 2006); this fictional town is a palimpsest—a clashing collage,
in which the history and the prehistory of Britain tangle together. In this, Ghost Box’s
Belbury is not that different from its previous fictional incarnation, in C.  S. Lewis’s
That Hideous Strength: in that novel, Belbury is the place where the forces of modernity
exert what for Lewis was a baleful influence on an older, more conservative England (in
Ghost Box’s version of the town, however, the past infects the present as much as the
present threatens the past).
This Belbury could find a place in Lewis’s fiction (although without Lewis’s innately
pessimistic conservatism). It would also be a suitable location for M. R. James (mixing
as it does the supernatural and the prosaic; see the story included in the CD booklet
for The Belbury Tales). It would also comfortably house Nigel Kneale. According to a
scientific report helpfully included in Pye Corner Audio’s Sleep Games, Kneale’s The
Stone Tape (which follows the attempts of a group of scientists to study and exploit the
echoes of past violence, trapped in the walls of the old mansion that they occupy) is
being replayed in Belbury—but this time it is in the town’s discos, and the traumatic
 Stone Tapes   397

echoes of the past are caught in concrete. However, we don’t need to look to fiction for
analogous examples; walking through Canterbury, for example, you also pass from the
medieval to the present, in the space of a footstep. As with Belbury, Canterbury was
bombed during the war—and it is still very easy to see, from the design of the buildings,
exactly where the bombs dropped, and how extensive the damage was. The bombing
of Canterbury also has its own fictional representation; the devastation of the ancient
town is the backdrop for the final scenes of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury
Tale (1944). The fictional town in which Jupp and House position their music, with its
“uneasy mixture of ancient and modern,” is not as unreal as it at first seems.
Belbury, it could be said, is a virtual representation, not of an entirely fictional ver-
sion of Britain, but of a Britain composed of real, traceable history (the impact of World
War II bombs and postwar redevelopment; the persistence of the past, jumbled together
in a confused mixture of architectural forms and styles) and of the type of narratives
that this history produced. In other words, the raw material that Jupp, House, Brooks,
and the other musicians draw on could be described as the cultural memory of postwar
Britain. As Astrid Eril points out in Memory in Culture (2011), this term has a long his-
tory, having been first coined in 1988 by Jan Assmann:

The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images and
rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize
and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most
part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and
particularity. (Assmann 1995, 128)

In other words, a cultural memory is one in which the ordering of past events has taken
on a stable narrative structure; this narrative structure becomes in its turn a crucial
part of the organization of current events. It provides the fixed point against which
more recent events can be judged and converted into narratives in their turn. Ghost
Box, in dealing with the period from the 1950s through to the end of the 1970s, has
chosen a period that has what seems to be a fixed place in the UK’s cultural memory
(partly because the period can be neatly bookended, from the aftermath of the end of
World War II through to the Winter of Discontent in 1978–79, and partly because, after
the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the country passed through another period
of radical transformation). Certainly, responses gathered by Mass Observation (which
has been compiling information about daily life in Britain from 1937 onward) would
seem to suggest that the period exists at some remove from the country in which we
now live.
When locating the postwar years within a longer historical trajectory, Mass Observers
of both genders tended to locate the 1950s in a continuum with the prewar period. As
one respondent put it, “What does strike me is that the period I grew up in—say mid-
fifties to mid-seventies—was in many ways far more similar to the period my par-
ents grew up in—the mid-twenties to mid-forties—than to the world today, another
30 years on” (Langhamer 2005, 362).
398   David Pattie

It is easier to construct a cultural memory around a period that seems to have

come to an end; the narrative has a conclusion, and the period itself can be treated as
a landlocked, self-contained, homogenous unit, whose meanings and importance are
self-evident.
The period covered by the Ghost Box mythos is the period in which (as cultural mem-
ory would have it) Britain moved from postwar austerity to relative material comfort,
one in which the idea that the state had a role in every aspect of social and economic life
was accepted by both main parties. It was a period in which Britain shed its empire, and
adjusted to a changed, diminished role in the world; it was also a period in which indus-
trial militancy and other forms of social unrest bore witness to the complexity of that
adjustment. A difficult time, in many ways, but one whose parameters are at least fixed.
A surface reading (one that fits with the prevailing notion that hauntology is a useful
term) might suggest that Ghost Box’s music, and its general aesthetic, acts as a creative
reimagining of this fixed, stable narrative: that, as Sexton points out, it creates a heteroto-
pia from the details of this narrative, blended with other, apparently discordant cultural
elements, to create the rich mixture of the influences discussed earlier.

Victor Burgin has already adopted Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia in terms of
a more psychic form of space, which is how Ghost Box’s aesthetic universe seems
to exist: it is a universe that is hinted at through music, text, and visuals, but which
doesn’t really exist “out there” in an objective sense. (2012, 8)

As I have noted above, this would be a reading in line with the general direction of
hauntological analysis: there is a stable history, one we recognize and agree on, and a
hauntological reading builds an alternate, spectral version of a time that we think that
we know.
This, however, raises the question, How virtual is Belbury? It might be an unplanned,
mismatched mixture of cultural influences; its public and private spaces might be
marked both by quotidian reality and by the unstable, the uncanny, the dread-filled
and the spectral; it might seem on the surface to be as close as a record label could come
to providing a soundtrack for the unheimlich; and yet, it could be said that in doing so
it manages to identify, and generate music that catches precisely the sense that postwar
Britain had become an uncanny, unheimlich place. Jupp, discussing the origins of the
album The Belbury Tales, points out that there is more to the label than the recreation
of a ghostly, mythical, virtual Albion:

I hope that we’ve created a world which is as much to do with the weirdness of
Britain in general, especially during our imagined all-at-once time frame of roughly
1958 to 1978. I often get asked about ghosts and the occult in interviews but the ghost
in Ghost Box is more to do with faulty memory and TV screen after-images.1

What this quote captures is the sense of a country that is both solid and uncertain, an
odd admixture of the settled and the strange. What is more, rather than (in Sexton’s
 Stone Tapes   399

words) “ransacking obscure sources,” the label creates a spectral version of the UK from
those elements of popular culture that would have been inescapable at the time; as I will
go on to argue, the idea of Britain as haunted, as fragile, and as fundamentally trou-
bled was an inescapable part of the cultural landscape of the period. Albums like the
Belbury Tales and Other Channels are linked thematically to the popular cultural texts
of the postwar period. But those texts in turn create a cultural memory of a country
profoundly uneasy with itself—with the weight of its past, with its role in the present,
and the threat posed by an uncertain future. As the next section will argue, the ghosts
evoked by Ghost Box were already there, in the cultural narrative of this time.

Mind How You Go

The Belbury Tales (Belbury Poly, 2011)

I don’t remember now, what possessed me to pull off the A  road and slip along
the winding lanes towards Belbury. I  only know it was almost dusk, and I  had
escaped from my conference without so much as wetting my whistle. (Young, “The
Journeyman’s Tale,” 2012)

Rob Young’s “The Journeyman’s Tale,” a short exercise in synthetic folk-horror printed
in the CD booklet accompanying Belbury Poly’s 2011 album The Belbury Tales, starts
in time-honored horror fiction style, as an ordinary man takes the road less trav-
eled and finds himself in a world that initially seems welcoming but soon reveals its
true, uncanny nature. In The Wicker Man, a police sergeant travels to an ordinary-
seeming Scottish island and finds himself the centerpiece of a pagan sacrificial rite; in
M. R. James’s A View from a Hill, an uncanny, eerie landscape is superimposed on the
placid English countryside. In these texts, the past intrudes on the present, dragging
the protagonists back to a crueler, more violent version of British society; also, we are
given the strong impression that this crueler world is closer to the truth of human
existence than the polite world of the present. In “The Journeyman’s Tale,” however, the
protagonist’s journey from the heimlich to the unheimlich isn’t simply a journey from
the present to the past. He goes into the local pub (The Bury Bell, revealed in the album
artwork as a featureless, new brutalist brick and concrete box) and orders a plough-
man’s lunch. A stranger (one of the band playing in the pub that night) tells him:

“It’s not just food, man. It’s like a gateway, it’s a line you can follow. . . .” He was shout-
ing in my ear over the music’s roar and the horse brasses rattled over the hearth.
I have only fleeting, disjointed memories of what followed. I saw my long-haired
friend raising the microphone stand over his head, a crush of bodies around my
table and the brush of a leopardskin skirt; two charming young ladies pulling me
somewhat unsteadily to my feet, the dial on the telly-box whirling, moving pictures
reflected in each squared fact of my ale-glass, sunrise winking through standing
400   David Pattie

stones, pylons striding across a meadow, fellows in jerkins mounted on horseback,

hard-hatted types aligning theodolites, a chapel glimpsed through trees. . . . (ibid.)

Rather than traveling into the pagan past, the journeyman of the story’s title has
stumbled into the world of David Gladwell’s Requiem for a Village, in which film
the past and the present slide smoothly into each other, the shots of blacksmiths
shoeing a horse juxtaposed with images of the concrete paving slabs of a seventies
shopping plaza.
Gladwell’s film, released in 1975, is a threnody for the old rhythms of village life,
disappearing under the ubiquitous concrete and tarmac of 1970s redevelopment. It
is very much a film of its time; as historians of the period (Andy Beckett, Dominic
Sandbrook) note, the 1970s saw an upsurge in concern about modernization, and
its deleterious effect on the natural world and on older, long-established British
traditions. During the decade, the first political organizations devoted to environ-
mental politics formed. The environment also cropped up as an object of anxiety
in both high and popular culture—in Philip Larkin’s poem “Going, Going”2 and
in TV series such as Doomwatch (BBC 1970–1972), which staged a series of weekly
battles between enlightened scientists and ecologically destructive businessmen or
bureaucrats.
In “Inferno,” a 1970 Doctor Who serial, scientific interference nearly triggers the
destruction of Earth. However, this concern ran in parallel with other cultural anxiet-
ies, in which the past (and especially the rural past) was itself the threat. In the opening
moments of Blood on Satan’s Claw (Tigon 1971), a ploughman unearths a skull whose
eyes are still intact; in Nigel Kneale’s “Baby” (part of the six-part anthology series
Beasts, ATV, 1976), mummified remains are discovered when a young couple decide
to renovate their old house; in “The Exorcism” (part of the BBC’s Dead of Night horror
anthology series, 1972), a smugly comfortable middle-class dinner party is disrupted
by the ghostly presence of a family of poor farm workers, who starved to death in the
same cottage; in “A Warning to the Curious” (1972, one of the BBC’s very successful
Christmas ghost stories, adapted from an M. R. James short story), an amateur archae-
ologist is pursued by the ghost of an East Anglian laborer, whose pledge to protect the
last remaining crown of Anglo-Saxon England extends beyond death. In some texts of
the period, however, threats from the past and the future collide. In Kneale’s The Stone
Tape (BBC, 1972), a team of scientists use modern technology to uncover an apparently
unending sequence of past torment; in Children of the Stones (HTV, 1977), the power of
a supernova, exploding in the distant past, is harnessed by an astrophysicist, who keeps
his activities on track with an atomic clock, hidden in the cellar of his Elizabethan
manor house. The central premise of the BBC series Survivors (1975–1978) was that
a plague wiped out most of mankind; the effect of this sudden, sharp reduction in
the world’s population is to catapult those who survived it back into an unimaginably
primitive past, in which the skills required for even the most basic sustenance have to
be laboriously relearned.
 Stone Tapes   401

Asked about the ideas that fed into the creation of The Belbury Tales, Jupp replied:

As odd as it sounds, this idea of the ploughman’s lunch was kicking round at the
back of my head for most of the time. Not cool or rock-and-roll, and dangerously
in Clarkson/Wakeman territory perhaps, but it occurred to me that it perfectly cap-
tures the very British relationship with the past:  at once fascination, fantasy and
reinvention.3

In the album’s sleevenotes, two differing accounts of the ploughman’s lunch are given.
One is from Ian McEwan’s screenplay for Richard Eyre’s The Ploughman’s Lunch, which
claims that it is an ersatz tradition, invented to give a sheen of natural purity to a basic,
cheap meal. The other is from a late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century country
diary, which describes taking lunch “in the manner of ploughmen, on bread, cheese
and ale” (sleevenotes, The Belbury Tales, Ghost Box 2012). The Ploughman’s Lunch
is both an invented tradition and a historical practice, a cultural memory compris-
ing historical truth and ex post facto reshaping. As noted above, a number of postwar
popular cultural texts made what was in effect a Ploughman’s Lunch of Britain’s rural
past; the various ritual elements of The Wicker Man (British Lion, 1973) are drawn from
rural folklore, and the Avebury circle (with additional, prop stones) is at the center of
Children of the Stones. The Belbury Tales, in its turn, takes this cultural memory and
reimagines it from the perspective of the twenty-first century. The tropes and styles of
seventies rural horror—the ominous chords, pounding rhythms, the grimly jaunty jigs
and reels, the eerily melodic children’s singing, the exaggeratedly rustic voices of the
locals, and the plummy voice of the incomer (juxtaposed on the track “Unforgotten
Town”)—are brought together in a virtual version of a seventies British folk–horror
movie soundtrack.
However, such soundtracks were themselves exercises in cultural memory, a virtual
recreation of the idea of an authentic folk heritage (an idea that was itself a culturally
determined invention; see Young’s Electric Eden, 2010). The soundtrack of The Wicker
Man might seem closer to “real” folk, but for all its nods to the then-current folk rock
genre, it is as much of a Ploughman’s Lunch as The Belbury Tales, a virtual recreation of
a half-real, half-imagined musical tradition. The Belbury Tales, in its music and pack-
aging, is both an addition to that tradition, and a playful interrogation of it. “Green
Grass Grows,” for example, contains a vocal sample (a young girl singing), but rather
than the kind of eldritch faux-folk backing one might expect, the sample is backed by
oddly jaunty electronica; a track aiming at the kind of unheimlich effect common to
horror films is called, unsurprisingly, “Unheimlich.” Throughout, the album follows
the Ghost Box ethos, described by Jupp as “a world where weird cosmic and occult
fictions play out against a background of post war modernism” (2010)4; it sounds as
though the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop had been tasked with scoring Witchfinder
General (Tigon 1968). In this, though, it manages to invoke a musical style and a cul-
tural memory of a time when the folk traditions were both nostalgically evocative and
402   David Pattie

frightening, and when cultural concerns over the past were inextricably bound up
with persistent, cultural worries over the technologies of the future.

Other Channels
(The Advisory Circle, 2008)

The television picture is a man-made ghost. (T. C.  Lethbridge, quoted in Other
Channels CD booklet)

Normally, one might expect the presenter of a popular TV show to spend the last few
minutes of the Christmas edition wishing his or her faithful viewers the compliments
of the season. On the December 27, 1976, however, Hughie Green chose to end the sea-
sonal broadcast of his talent show Opportunity Knocks with a stump speech:

We British—Scots, Welsh, English, Irish—who in the past earned respect through-

out the world, have one more loan to come, one more transfusion for the nation
that twice—twice nearly bled to death for freedom. A nation that Churchill offered
only blood and toil, tears and sweat. Have we really lost what he once inspired in
us—the dignity of work, the urge to salvage honour, the will to win? . . . Friends, let
us take—yes, take, not borrow—this year of 1977. Let it be our year. To lift up our
heads and resolve that this time next year, we can say: we did it! And it cost nothing
but determination, hard work, freedom from strikes, better management, and from
all of us: guts! Lest without these virtues, we lose our freedom for ever. (quoted in
Moran 2010, 173)

And, as the orchestral backing to the speech swelled to a crescendo, he launched into
a stirringly patriotic anthem, called “Stand Up and Be Counted.” This rather bizarre
interjection into a normally cheap and cheerful program didn’t go down well with
Green’s superiors at Thames Television; it broke the terms of a 1955 act of Parliament,
which required political matters to be dealt with impartially by program makers. As
Jeremy Isaacs, then Thames’s director of programs, later wrote, Green’s “mixture of
patriotism and propaganda … was excruciating and inappropriate” (quoted in Moran,
2010, 174); but it was not entirely out of place. For one thing, Green tended to empha-
size his right-wing patriotic credentials when the opportunity arose; for another, by the
time Green’s exhortation was broadcast, it seemed as though the country was moving
into the end stages of a political, social, and economic crisis that had been brewing for
quite a while.
By the 1970s, television was the dominant leisure-time occupation for most of the
population of the country. In 1976, the government’s General Household Survey found
that women watched TV for an average of twenty hours every week; for men the total
was lower (though not by much) at seventeen hours. As Helen Wheatley has pointed
 Stone Tapes   403

out, the very ubiquity of television during the period has acted to blur our memories
of the viewing experience; certain iconic moments and programs might stand out, but
they do so against a half-remembered palimpsest of texts and images. As these pro-
grammes come to light once more (via YouTube and other video streaming sites), their
reception has become a long, unfolding exercise in the excavation of a shared cultural
memory:

A cursory trawl through message boards will reveal long strands of chat about
where an image, song or character might be located within the history of British
television programmes, with discussion particularly focusing on drama watched in
childhood; subsequent discussion often turns to how the (now adult) viewer can
re-view this half-remembered text. We might, therefore, see the history of children’s
television being commonly experienced as uncanny in light of Freud’s assertion that
“the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of
old and long familiar. (2012, 384)

Wheatley is right that the concept of the uncanny can be extended beyond the texts
themselves, to the process through which they are rediscovered and reviewed. What
it misses, though, is the wider context indicated by (among other things) the Hughie
Green example cited above. A  children’s TV program like The Changes (which, like
Survivors later in the decade, pitched modern Britain back into a pre-technological
past) has to be seen in the context of a medium that, at the time, could not but help
reflect a wider sense of social and economic anxiety; it was the manifestation not of a
stable country at ease with itself, but of a nation displaying all the signs of pervasive
cultural neurosis. This manifested itself in an obsession with the idea that Britain was
in inexorable decline:

It filled doomy books aimed at the general reader. It became a melodramatic sta-
ple for newspapers, magazines and television programmes. It darkened the work
of artists, novelists, dramatists, film-makers and pop-musicians. It soured foreign
commentary on Britain. It spoke ominously to audiences beyond its traditional con-
stituencies of the elderly, the conservative and the instinctively pessimistic. And it
shifted in tone: from the anxious to the apocalyptic. (Beckett 2009, 177)

Even though in some ways life had improved (Britons were more prosperous than
they had ever been, and economic growth remained respectably high for much of the
1960s and 1970s), the country seemed both mired in decline and increasingly polarized
between right and left. Unsurprisingly, as Hughie Greene’s impassioned monologue
demonstrated, this generalized sense of social tension could not but erupt through the
bland surface of light entertainment programing from time to time.
Over the past few years, a small cult has grown up around one of the most visible
manifestations of this tension, the public information films produced by the Central
Office of Information between the end of World War II and the end of the twentieth
century. Their general tone and style (an odd, unsettling mix of the comforting and the
404   David Pattie

frightening) has been identified by Jon Brooks (who records for Ghost Box under the
name the Advisory Circle) as a key influence on his work:

The way Public Information Films were shot is very appealing. Quite a lot of them
were shot through a child’s eyes and, to me, represent the way I viewed my environ-
ment back then. My Gran’s garden, for example, was very large by any standard,
and it’s where I spent a lot of my childhood; looking at the sun poking through the
trees, feeling warm and secure. There were also nettles around the edges, bits of
broken glass amongst the rockery and the ponds—two large ones—were deep and
definitely potential hazards.5

This description not only captures a clear memory of the experience of growing up
at a time when some of the most disturbing PIFs would appear between programs on
both the BBC and ITV; it also sums up the atmosphere of the Advisory Circle’s second
album, Other Channels. The Belbury Tales mimics the soundtrack to a late sixties, early
seventies folk-horror movie: Other Channels mimics the experience of watching TV
in the 1970s, or more correctly, being at home with the TV on (the tracks with vocal
samples, for example, have the blurred semicoherence of a TV soundtrack playing in
another room). However, although Other Channels might place its listeners in a living
room somewhere in the early 1970s, listlessly watching daytime TV (Pebble Mill at One,
say, or Crown Court), the liner notes take us directly into the kind of suburban dystopia
imagined by J.  G. Ballard (or more directly, the world described in Pamela Zolene’s
seminal short story “The Heat Death of the Universe”):

She is the black box, the ruined city, the empty plane stretching out into the horizon.
Her face pressed up against the window, looking in. The ghost in the weed garden.
We can see her from a long way off. We will warn you of what’s coming. Move the
body to another room in the house. You should receive radio instructions on what
to do next. If no instructions have been given within five days, you should tempo-
rarily bury the body as soon as it is safe to go out, and mark the spot. (Hollings,
“Other Channels”)

These liner notes place a frame around the music, but they don’t define it exactly.
Rather, they provide a context from the association of narratives and images. In this
case, a scenario that sounds uncannily like the plot of “A Woman Sobbing” (an episode
of the short-lived BBC horror anthology series Dead of Night, first broadcast in 1972,
in which Anna Massey played a housewife falling prey to the ghosts inside her appar-
ently comfortable, safe home) blends with the alarmingly pragmatic instructions in
“Protect and Survive” (a series of public information booklets and films made in the
1970s, designed to reassure the British populace that, in the event of a nuclear war, the
authorities would know exactly what to do).
As with The Belbury Tales, the music in Other Channels does not aim to replicate the
sequence of music cues and themes in any one period of British TV history; rather, it
assembles a series of tracks that capture both the experience of viewing and the wider
 Stone Tapes   405

context in which viewers and program makers alike operated. The album is bookended
(as many Ghost Box releases are) by callsigns, the equivalent of TV channel identifica-
tion (the first of these is called, tellingly, “The TV Trap”). From there, the sequence
alternates between the vaguely unsettling (“Swinscoe Episode 1  & 2,” in which snip-
pets of blurred dialogue are set against a muted, discordant ambient backing, as in
“Civil Defence Is Common Sense,” which sounds like the theme of a documentary on
surviving a nuclear attack; mock PIFs about the coastguard, and the dangers of frozen
ponds), the narcotically calming (“Mogadon Coffee Morning”; “Sundial”; “Fire, Damp
and Air”), and the unsettling (“Keep Warm, Keep Well”; “Eyes Which Are Swelling”).
The overall effect of the album is both calming and disturbing, as though the surface
tranquility of the music is at once beguiling and misleading, a thin cover for the ten-
sions and disturbances that periodically break through to the surface of the album. The
Belbury Tales captures the tensions running beneath particular popular cultural texts
of the 1960s and 70s; Other Channels manages to capture not the fine detail of TV pro-
gramming, but rather the experience of viewing, in a world that seemed on the point of
fracturing and dissolving into chaos.

“Civil Defence Is Common Sense”

There is a tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorpo-

rates nostalgia. It can be called “off-modern.” The adverb “off ” confuses our sense of
direction. It makes us explore side shadows and back alleys, rather than the straight
road of progress; it allows us to take a detour from the deterministic narratives of
history. (Boym 2007, 8)

At Easter, in 2012, I pay a visit to a place whose existence was, until recently, secret: a
bomb-proof bunker in Fife, which would have been used as a seat of regional govern-
ment in the event of a nuclear war. Buried deep underground, the bunker is a blend of
the recently antique and the almost familiar. The bunks in the dormitories could have
come from a 1950s film about World War II, while the technology on display—the
tracking devices, the communications equipment—would have been thought state-of-
the-art in the 1970s. Two screening rooms have been set up side by side. One shows
Peter Watkins’s harrowing 1965 film The War Game, in which the aftereffects of an
air-burst nuclear strike on Kent are shown in unsparing detail; the other shows the
various PIFs made by the government to prepare the population for a nuclear attack,
including the full “Protect and Survive” sequence. I watch the cycle through; the com-
bination of simple, almost childish animation, and the deep, stern, commanding tone
of the commentary paradoxically make the content more, rather than less, frighten-
ing, even if I  didn’t know the likely outcome of a nuclear strike. The truth must be
terrible, to require such reassurance. I’m reminded of a moment from David Rudkin’s
1973 play Penda’s Fen (broadcast by the BBC, and directed by Alan Clarke). The play,
406   David Pattie

a dreamlike coming-of-age saga set in the borderlands between England and Wales,
contains a character called John Arne, a playwright who, like Rudkin himself, espouses
a mystic, pastoral version of Socialism, rooted in the hidden, unauthorized history of
the land. Arne participates in an informal, local version of Question Time,6 in the vil-
lage hall. Asked by another panel member to moderate his views, and to provide a more
balanced perspective, he replies:

Perspective I give you. . . . Not far from here is an expanse of country. You all know
it well. . . . Poets have hymned the spirit of this landscape; our greatest composer has
enshrined it. Farmland and pasture now, an ancient fen; the earth beneath your feet
feels solid there. It is not. Somewhere there the land is hollow. Somewhere beneath
is being constructed something we are not supposed to know. Top secret. We locals
are not supposed to know it’s even there. . . . What is it, hidden beneath this shell
of lovely earth? Some hideous angel of technocratic death—an alternative city, for
government from beneath. . . . (Rudkin, Penda’s Fen, 1974)

A command bunker, in other words, just like the one in Scotland; with the same odd
disjunction: the technology supposed to sustain state power in an unimaginable future,
beneath the beautiful, solid, familiar soil of Elgar country, or the East Neuk of Fife.
The experience of listening to “The Geography” might suggest that Fisher’s and
Reynolds’s discussion of hauntology is correct, that hauntological compositions build an
unheimlich, virtual version of a stable, agreed past out of whatever bits of cultural flotsam
they can find. Arguably, though, this is not how Ghost Box as a label tends to operate.
Rather than reconfiguring the past, the artists on the label create a virtual soundtrack of
postwar Britain, which, arguably, manages to evoke the strange cultural atmosphere of
the period (described, memorably, by the historian Peter Hennessey (2007, 7) as one of
“easement tinged with anxiety.” The cumulative effect of the label’s output is to place us
firmly back in a world where even the most tranquil landscape (the immemorial England
of Penda’s Fen, or the farmlands of Fife) could already be unheimlich; where indications of
decay, fragmentation, and tension could be found everywhere—in horror films and chil-
dren’s TV, in novels and advertising breaks. The music and its framing (in a virtual location
created from the cultural memory of postwar Britain) is an exercise not in hauntological
evocation, but in nostalgic dissidence, a term coined by Svetlana Boym in 2001:

In the end, the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic
dissidence … Instead of recreation of the lost home, reflective nostalgia can foster a
creative self. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn
out to be another Potemkin village with no exit. (Boym 2001, 354)

A dissident nostalgia is one that operates, as Boym puts it, on “the border zone between
longing and reflection” (ibid., 354), acknowledging the pull of cherished memories and
also the need to hold those memories up to critical investigation. It could be said that
one of the unintended consequences of the term hauntology is that too much weight is
placed on the act of remembering, rather than on the thing remembered. What makes
Ghost Box (as a label, and as a virtual version of a vanished time) both artistically and
 Stone Tapes   407

intellectually effective is that it manages to simultaneously evoke and undermine

the comforting nostalgia that we might feel for a vanished time. It does so, however,
not by bending the detritus of the past into new shapes and forms, but by exploring
and evoking what Boym calls above the “off-modern”—the side roads and hidden
tracks of postwar popular culture. The label’s output invokes two virtual Britains, one
based on our memory of the period (and on the sense of nostalgia that unsurprisingly
accompanies those memories), and one based on the processes through which post-
war Britain imagined itself. Rather than hauntology, Ghost Box’s work is an exercise in
cultural memory; rather than a virtual recreation of a fixed past, it evokes a past that
was unfixed—one that was already haunted by the ghostly image of its own apparently
inevitable demise.

Notes
1. Jupp interview, FACT magazine, Feb. 1, 2012.
2. Collected in High Windows (London: Faber, 1974).
3. Jupp interview, FACT, Feb. 1, 2012.
4. Interview with James Jupp, Cardboard Cutout Sundown, Dec. 20, 2010, http://jameshood-
illustration.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/interview-with-jim-jupp.html.
5. Brooks, interview, The Quietus, Apr. 26, 2010.
6. Question Time is a popular BBC-produced political chat show.

References
Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Memory.” New German Critique
65: 125–133.
Beckett, Andy. 2009. When the Lights Went Out:  What Really Happened to Britain in the
Seventies. London: Faber.
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
———. 2007, Summer. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9(2): 7–18.
Brooks, Jon. 2010. Interview, The Quietus, Apr. 26, http://thequietus.com/articles/04153-the-
advisory-circle-mind-how-you-go-ghost-box.
Eril, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. London: Palgrave.
Hennessy, Peter. 2007. Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s. London: Penguin.
Hollings, Ken. 2008. “Other Channels.” Other Channels. The Advisory Circle. Ghost Box.
Langhamer, Claire. 2005. “The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain.” Journal of Contemporary
History 40(2): 341–362.
Jupp, Jim. 2012. Interview. FACT magazine, Feb. 1, http://www.factmag.com/2012/02/01/
belbury-poly-on-ploughmans-lunches-prog-rock-and-avoiding-clarksonwakeman-
territory/.
Machen, Arthur. n.d. The Great God Pan, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/389/389-h/389-h.htm.
Moran, Joe. 2010, Autumn. “Stand Up and Be Counted: Hughie Greene, the 1970s and Popular
Memory.” History Workshop Journal 70.
Reynolds, Simon. 2005. “Spirit of Preservation” Frieze 94 (October), https://www.frieze.com/
issue/article/spirit_of_preservation/.
408   David Pattie

———. 2006, November. “Society of the Spectral.” The Wire.

———. 2011. Retromania. London: Faber.
Rudkin, David. 1974. Penda’s Fen, BBC.
Sexton, Jamie. 2012. “Weird Britain in Exile: Ghost Box, Hauntology, and Alternative Heritage,”
Popular Music and Society 35(4): 561–584.
Wheatley Helen. 2012. “Uncanny Children, Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms:  Children’s
Gothic Television in the 1970s and 80s.” Visual Culture in Britain 13(3): 383–397.
Young, Rob. 2010. Electric Eden. London: Faber.
———. 2012. “The Journeyman’s Tale.” The Belbury Tales. Ghost Box.
 chapter 22

From Hy pnag o g ia
to Dist roi d
Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory

Adam Trainer

Our relationship with memory and the representation of our individual and collective
pasts have changed. The personal and affective are undeniably tethered to our negotia-
tion of culture through increasingly mediated experiences, which now occur predomi-
nantly in the digital realm. As the first decade of the new millennium came to a close,
it became apparent that the age of digital information was approaching a new era. The
Web 2.0 phenomenon (O’Reilly 2007), which had previously offered new possibilities
for the access of information and openness of digital communication, was thoroughly
entrenched in everyday social practices.
Through the exponential growth of online media channels a new form of cultural
democracy was achieved whereby new forms became shaped online through the con-
vergence of established texts.1 Informed by this new era of cultural and informational
oversaturation, a number of musical trends emerged that drew on concepts of nos-
talgia, formed by both collective popular memory and the personal histories of their
creators. Driven by technology but steeped in a desire to revisit the past, these styles
celebrated personal attachments to past forms while pushing the sources of that nos-
talgia into less-recognizable musical performances. These styles, variously referred to
as hypnagogic pop, chillwave, vaporwave, and distroid, not only facilitated a renegotia-
tion of the relationship between the artist, technology, and creative temporality; they
also used this renegotiation to blur the lines between creative sincerity and irony. In
this sense the virtual is used not only in reference to the recreation of the everyday via
technology, but also through memory, dreams and psychic subjectivity.
In August 2009, David Keenan’s article “Childhood’s End” in The Wire coined the
term hypnagogic pop and grouped several artists as proponents of its sound. The article
focused on the work of artists working in a wide-ranging form of post-noise psychede-
lia, including Spencer Clark and James Ferraro as the Skaters, as well as Pocahaunted
410   Adam Trainer

and Emeralds. Other artists have since been included in the genre, among them
Oneohtrix Point Never, Matrix Metals, Ducktails, and Sun Araw.
Describing hypnagogic pop as a genre is problematic, because instead of comprising
a consistent style with recognizable structural bridges between artists, the term—like
Keenan’s article—groups disparate artists who share a musical approach but whose
resultant music is wide-ranging in form. Although Ferraro and Clark created distorted,
often structureless, noise as the Skaters, Ferraro’s early solo material ranged from
repetitive guitar pop filtered heavily through analog noise to warm ambient drones.
As Pocahaunted, Amanda Brown and Bethany Cosentino created tribalistic drone
music that featured heavy use of delay and feedback, and after Cosentino’s departure
worked toward dub-influenced songforms. Working as Emeralds, Mark McGuire,
John Elliot, and Steve Hauschildt made music deeply indebted to both Kosmische
musik (Cope and Drechsler 1996) and ambient music, which was considerably more
high-fidelity than the music of other proponents of the style. Moreover, rather than
emerging from a specific geographical location as an aesthetic shared by artists in a
traditional music community, the artists mentioned by Keenan emerged from disparate
locations: Emeralds from Cleveland, Lopatin from Brooklyn, and others from various
locations in California. Although Reynolds (2011) has linked the aesthetic to the cul-
tural and geographical landscape of Southern California, the style arguably emerged in
a number of locations simultaneously. Keenan’s assertions may have located a shared
aesthetic or approach being pursued by a number of artists, but application of the term
hypnagogia emerged externally. Amanda Brown comments that even though she can
see the merits in Keenan’s assertions, for her “it was a hard article to read, because of
the ideas put forward by Keenan at the time along with the term ‘hypnagogic.’ I don’t
necessarily know if that’s my relationship to music, or how I come to it. It’s not like
I was offended, but I don’t have that relationship.”2 Almost all of the music branded as
hypnagogic pop is indebted stylistically to various traditions of experimentalism such
as noise, drone, repetition, and improvisation, but the resulting music is disparate and
varied in its own sonic and stylistic elements. Instead, what shapes hypnagogic pop is
the cultural experience from which its artists operate.
To Keenan, the sounds created by these artists is influenced as much by the mem-
ory of music, and arguably a personalized misremembering of it, as it is by specific
musical traditions or a unified approach to sound creation or musical form. Keenan
asserts that these artists, all in their twenties at the time of publication, and whose
childhood and adolescent years stretched across the late 1980s and early 1990s, use
a subconscious remembrance of that era, channeled through popular cultural refer-
ences from the time. To Keenan the aesthetics of hypnagogic pop draw from “revenant
forms freed from their historical context.” Using the music of James Ferraro, he cites
“slimers from Ghostbusters, straight-to-video surf movies, TV dinners, old episodes
of Beverly Hills 90210” (2009, 26). These artists seemingly activate nostalgia for an era
in their lives that can’t be summoned clearly or concretely, an era that was refracted
through a specific popular cultural lens but, given their average age, was also filtered
through the unstable perspective of childhood remembrance and nostalgia. For James
 From Hypnagogia to Distroid    411

Ferraro, the music he made with J. C. Peavey as Lamborghini Crystal was an attempt
at “approximating the headspace of the moment just before you go to sleep as a child,
while somewhere in the distance the sounds of pop and disco come muffled through
the wall and infiltrate your subconscious” (Keenan 2009, 26). Peter McKellar defines
hypnagogic imagery as “imagery of any sense modality, frequently of almost hallucina-
tory character, which is experienced in the drowsy state preceding deep sleep” (1995,
33). A dream state creates a lived world within which an individual can move, behave,
and react, and within which he or she may recognize environments, situations, or
individuals; hypnagogic imagery is akin to a static figurative or representational image
that unfolds without narrative.
It makes sense that such heavily encoded music has emerged in an era when informa-
tion is in surplus, and when as subjects of an information-rich cultural moment we have
access to any and all facets of global and historical culture, and when relative cultural
gratification and reunion with long-lost personal memories is only a few mouse clicks
away. It is as a music of remembrance that hypnagogic pop parallels both Derrida’s con-
cept of “hauntology” (1994), and the musical genre named after it, as described by Mark
Fisher (2010), Jamie Sexton (2012), and in this volume David Pattie (Chapter 21). Just
as hauntology focuses on retro-futurism and a rupturing of time—where the past and
future converge in odd or dreamlike combinations—hypnagogic pop sources its aes-
thetic oddness from personal psychic interference. Hypnagogic pop is therefore a form
of nostalgia as music, painting nostalgia as inherently individualistic and affective.
The most apt bridge between the concept of hypnagogia and the artists and musical
tendencies identified by Keenan would appear to be the hallucinatory nature of hypna-
gogic imagery, as well as its ability to trace psychic experience beyond consciousness to
a state that is subjective and individually specific. Hypnagogic pop draws from the col-
lective consciousness of late 1980s’ and early 1990s’ popular culture, tracing nostalgia
for an era that holds personal importance to the artists through various experimental
sonic tangents.
Hypnagogic pop accesses psychedelia through an exaggeration of sound, often com-
bining analog tape hiss and muffled, muddied recording techniques with overly bom-
bastic representations of the most synthetic elements of 1980s and 1990s sonic and
visual culture. Distorted renderings of television commercial muzak are played out
using notably dated and kitsch synthesizer sounds, guitars that are overdriven into dis-
tortion or drenched in flange and reverb effects while lumpen drum machines offer up
dislocated rhythms. Often making use of simple looping techniques (either via digital
means or through use of analog tape loops), hypnagogic pop employs repetition not
only as an aesthetic practice, but as a way of summoning—apropos Derrida (1994)—
ghosts of past eras. Without the simplicity of automated digital playback, repetition
in the age of analog required a process of physically rewinding and reusing the tape
used to record an image or sound, which inherently degrades its quality. Hypnagogic
pop revels in this degradation, decay, and noise, using warped tape sounds and the
abundant hiss of low-quality audiocassette home recordings as signifiers of its cul-
tural and technological origins. In many instances even the arrangements mimic this
412   Adam Trainer

fragmentation, as in segment jumping midsection without any musical or structural

cue, aping the effect of cassette overdubbing.
This sonic renegotiation of a temporally specific aesthetic is best represented by
examples that encompass the visual as well as the aural. Daniel Lopatin, best known for
his work under the moniker Oneohtrix Point Never, created a series of YouTube videos
as Sunsetcorp, collected on the Memory Vague DVD-R. Much of its source material
was lifted straight from the Web from low-bit-rate digital files, replete with pixel trails,
or as digital versions of old, degraded analog video footage. Often the images depicted
were magnified portions of larger images, and many were color-treated with bright-
ness and contrast-enhanced to create a form of digital noise steeped in an aesthetic of
obsolescent technology.
Lopatin’s video for “angel” (2009) exemplifies hypnagogic pop’s format for cultural
appropriation. A single section of Fleetwood Mac’s “Only Over You” is first jumbled
and then played through in a decelerated loop, with phaser effect added over specific
phrases. This is accompanied by footage from an advertisement for early VCR tech-
nology, vector graphics of an early home computer, a woman using an early handheld
video camera in front of a golden ocean sunset, and a young Japanese woman holding
a portable cassette player. It has been asserted in the YouTube comments for the video
that the final images are of 1980s Japanese pop star Okada Yukiko, who took her own
life in 1986. As the lyrics “Angel please don’t go, I miss you when you go, Please stay”
(1983) are looped toward the end of the clip, the woman turns towards the camera
before smiling, and raises her hand to wave.
Lopatin himself was not able to verify that the woman in the video was in fact
Yukiko, and he had not intended for that meaning when he created the video, but
he sees merit in the assertion regardless of its factual accuracy:  “The sentiment
itself—that particular comment—has become an animated idea, it’s actually become
material, and then feeds back into that piece and becomes another layer of material-
ity within that piece—and that’s totally how they’re supposed to function” (Lopatin,
phone interview, Perth, Mar. 9, 2013). This reappropriation of existing texts acti-
vates hypnagogic pop’s investment in the personal affectivity of popular culture.
By including only an excerpt from each song, Lopatin’s videos tap into sampling
culture (Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, 2008), and the use of short, looped clips
references animated GIFs. In this instance, sampling is being employed to access
the segmented portions of popular culture that we use as a form of mnemonically
encoded cultural shorthand. This process engages both nostalgia as a personalized
impression of culture and collective memory, as detailed by Assmann and Czaplicka
(1995), and Lipsitz (2001); this sees meaning as being made through the collective
experience of texts. By using overly emotive commercial musical texts from a spe-
cific era (such as Fleetwood Mac3) Lopatin’s work points to a complex engagement
with irony. A  nostalgic attachment is being displayed toward these texts, but also
a reframing and displacement that forms an implicit commentary that might be
construed as ironic but can equally be viewed as a reclamation of and reflection on
personal experience and memory.
 From Hypnagogia to Distroid    413

To a specific cultural cohort, whose childhood years were played out against the
rampant corporate saturation of the late 1980s and early 1990s, music such as that used
by Lopatin represents the paradox of much corporatized popular culture: luridly sen-
timental, creatively hollow and vapid, yet aesthetically alluring. This ubiquitous chart
music from a period when corporate culture had converged significantly with popular
music represents not only the grasp that capitalism had on culture at that time, but also
the superficiality and resulting creative impoverishment of much popular culture from
that period.
However, in an era where we now have unprecedented access to cultural texts through
a host of online applications, a fluid form of cultural exchange and creative practice
has emerged. This virtual recall of culture enables interconnectivity between corporate
culture and underground or avant-garde cultural forms, and the confluence of texts
from various points on the spectrum of cultural production, which can now be merged
to create entirely new hybrid texts. Facilitating this process has been a network of new
cultural practices that have emerged online. Mashup culture (Navas 2010)  and folk-
sonomy (Suster 2006) are some of the cultural practices that have emerged from and
contributed to the shaping of what Gene McHugh labeled post-Internet culture (2011).
Drawing on Lev Manovich’s work on postmedia aesthetics (2001), McHugh presents
the Internet as the platform for a cultural economy where information is available to be
mined and reused in ways that recontextualize (or decontextualize) its original mean-
ing, creating a form of digital DIY that Karen Archey refers to as “technology-based
conceptualism” (2010). In this new economy the distinctions between grassroots cul-
ture and corporately funded mainstream culture are blurred, and a new relationship
has been fashioned between artists, audiences, and cultural currency. In the liner notes
for his Memory Vague DVD-R, Lopatin comments: “Embedded in collective memory
are unique instances of the personal. No commercial work is outside of the reach of
artistic reclamation. Likewise no artistic project is outside the reach of commercial
implications” (2009). In this new cultural economy, individuals have the access to
information and the tools to shape their own texts, which occupy a state outside of
traditional precepts of cultural currency.
Fueled by nostalgia, Lopatin’s video experiments and a mixtape of similar aural
experiments released under the alias Chuck Person were labeled as “eccojams,” in part
because of the reverb placed on the recordings as well as the repetition, or echoing, of
singular phrases. But this is also a play on the concept of eco jamming, which is eco-
logical because it recycles culture, and also economical because it picks a single concept
from its source material, which is obtained for free, and jams on it. A reference to the
1980s punk band the Minutemen’s claim “we jam econo,” as chronicled by Azerrad
(2001), may also be discerned here. Musically, eccojams also reference both the preva-
lent echo of dub music (Veal 2007), and what Patel and Calloway (2007) identify as
screw music (also known as “chopped and screwed”), which slows the tempo of a track
and repeats phrases to emphasize particular lyrics. The use of the term ecco also refer-
ences both Sega’s 1992 console game Ecco the Dolphin, from which Lopatin borrows
imagery for the release’s cover, and Umberto Eco’s work on “guerrilla semiotics” (1986),
414   Adam Trainer

which informs much of the thinking on culture jamming and its attempt to “turn cor-
porate power against itself by co-opting, hacking, mocking and re-contextualizing
meanings” (Peretti 2001). For Lopatin, eccojams are a play on the interpretive func-
tionality of texts.

It’s a kind of a play on Satie’s furniture music. . . . What I’m trying to do with those
eccojams is make a contemporary type of furniture music, where it’s either the most
benign thing that is going on or it takes on an evocative nature, and it becomes part
of the room itself and it affects the things that are going on in it. (2013)

Much of the source material for Lopatin’s eccojams is commercial pop music, which
through its ubiquity has become the furniture music of the postconsumerist landscape.
Commercial pop is, through its use in public spaces, functional as a form of aural wall-
paper. By replicating the eternal pop moment, and prolonging it via looping and other
forms of digital processing, eccojams create a form of self-reflexive aural wallpaper.
However, as an affective and subjective expression of personal memory, hypnagogic
pop undercuts the political subtext of culture jamming by accessing the emotionally
resonant moment. This might be considered an attempt to remove the sociopolitical
and ideological implications from a media text by accessing a personalized version of it,
or an attempt to tap into a pre-political interpretation and decontextualized enjoyment
through the lens of childhood remembrance. Simon Reynolds refers to Lopatin’s cultural
excavations as “ecstatic regression” (2011). In this state, use of a text with low cultural
currency no longer becomes an ironic act, but one informed by affective subjectivity.
Lopatin comments that “it’s a good exercise in a world where essentially you’re force-fed
things that you don’t want, to try to find some sort of happiness in those things” (2013).
In this reappropriation of the cultural detritus of a media-saturated capitalist social
order, hypnagogic pop and its connected movements dislocate their source material
from textual cynicism or irony, instead accessing the affective moment of engagement.
Vanessa Friedman’s assertion of “the real tectonic shift of the noughties: the final death
knell of the sartorial age of irony, and the dawn of the age of sincerity” (2008) rings true
for this music, and its sincerity is accessed through the personal and affective. Lopatin’s
eccojams are like aural light prisms, refracting kaleidoscopic meaning through the use
of a single phrase to create a form of self-reflexive psychedelia—a trip into the mind
through memory. This is the hypnagogia of a postinformation age, inherently post-
ironic in nature. It is this awareness and acceptance of our corporatized entertainment
landscape, a reaction against the knee-jerk rejection of corporatism that has character-
ized so many DIY underground musical movements, that sets post-ironic music apart.
Technology not only plays a role in the dissemination of and engagement with the
culture from which hypnagogic pop has emerged; it is also one of its primary the-
matic and aesthetic concerns. In digital culture, the analog is transferred and trans-
formed, and the period mined by hypnagogic pop artists resonates with this transition.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, digital technology first permeated sociocultural dis-
course, and the transition from analog to digital revolutionized consumer and personal
 From Hypnagogia to Distroid    415

technologies. Reynolds points out that Lopatin’s work is concerned with “cultural mem-
ory and the buried utopianism within capitalist commodities, especially those related
to consumer technology in the computing and audio/video entertainment era” (2009).
Merging the imagery of outmoded technology with a digital DIY aesthetic cast through
the MSPaint and Photoshop model of amateur digital image fusion, hypnagogic pop
offers a complex engagement with cultural capital in the digital age and its constantly
shifting relationship with commercial art and artifacts.
The sonic and visual aesthetic used by artists operating within this approach evolved
over the course of several years, and with it a series of related but distinctive sounds
emerged alongside. The aesthetic favored by James Ferraro on his first releases with
Spencer Clark under the Skaters moniker was ingrained with digital and analog noise,
with a haphazard approach to both sonic and visual suture, whereby seemingly dis-
parate segments or ideas were overlapped randomly, offering the impression of an
improvised process of cut-and-paste. Ferraro’s aesthetic increasingly incorporated
rhythm and melody, moving via sidelong ambient soundscapes on Pixarni and Son
of Dracula (both 2009)  into washed out lo-fi pop jams on On Air (2009) and Night
Dolls with Hairspray (2010). Merging minimal fidelity with maximalist arrangements,
this music collaged simplistic, repetitive pop hooks and samples poorly recorded on
distorted instrumentation. Melding cheap synthesizers with gnarly overdriven guitar
solos, Ferraro offers an oversaturated sonic palette of cheesy pop reminiscent of early
video game soundtracks and 1980s Saturday morning cartoons. It is arguably here that
Keenan’s assertions of hypnagogic pop as conduit for childhood remembrance (2009)
and Reynolds’s labeling of the genre as a form of ecstatic regression (2011) ring truest.
But in 2011, a split seemingly took place in Ferraro’s music with the release of Far Side
Virtual, an album that transferred his musical and technological preoccupations from
the analog world into the digital.
Composed solely on virtual instruments in Apple’s entry-level audio software
suite GarageBand, and exercising a compositional maximalism that collages bright
MIDI-synths and virtual horns with recognizable aural signifiers of the digital age,
Far Side Virtual merges cascading melodies and staccato synthetic rhythms with the
start-up, log-in, and error tones synonymous with widespread personal computing.
Featuring text-to-speech excerpts from virtual waiters and service staff, the album
summons a digital utopia built from the detritus of the early-twenty-first-century con-
sumer experience. Ferraro commented that the sixteen tracks making up the album
were initially meant for release individually as ringtones, and labeled the music con-
tained on it as “ringtone music meant to be experienced on the poststructuralist
medium, the smartphone” (Gibb 2011). Many reactions to the album focused on its
structural and conceptual relationship to technology, with Wharton commenting that
the album “highlights developments in the ways that we consumers interact with our
technological limbs,” and asserting its celebration of “the advancement toward a post-
human dynamic” (2011). The sonic landscape from which Far Side Virtual operates
gives the impression of a digital world where capitalism and technology combine to
create the ultimate leisure experience.
416   Adam Trainer

The most marked departure from Ferraro’s previous output is the noticeable audio
fidelity enacted on the album, with none of the analog tape hiss or muddy arrange-
ments of his earlier work. Instead, Far Side Virtual presents clean sonic surfaces with
the high-frequency sheen often associated with digital sound. But its disembodied vir-
tual instruments, which sound almost too crisp and clear, form a barrier similar to
the tape hiss and compression of Ferraro’s early work, creating a meta-musical expe-
rience, a sound offering replication of emotion as opposed to true emotive musical-
ity, a haunted simulacrum of an experience mediated through technology. Although
Ferraro’s tools and aesthetic may have changed with Far Side Virtual, his modus ope-
randi remains intact. By using the egalitarian tools of composition available to the aver-
age consumer—first four-track recorders and cassettes, followed by entry-level audio
composition software—Ferraro’s music is informed by the materiality of the consumer
experience, seeking to comment on the technologically overdetermined cultural space
that haunts us as mediated subjects.
Hypnagogic pop is not the only musical genre to have emerged from this technologi-
cally enabled cultural fluidity. In July 2009 a blog entitled Hipster Runoff, written by an
individual identified only as Carles, posted an entry about an emerging genre of music
that was, as part of the post, labeled “chillwave” (2009). The artists discussed were
Washed Out, Neon Indian, and Memory Cassette (an early moniker of Dayve Hawk’s
Memory Tapes project), but subsequently Small Black and Toro Y Moi among others
were associated with the aesthetic. Sonically, chillwave occupies a space somewhere
between electronic pop, psychedelia, and easy listening styles from the 1970s and 1980s.
Clearly indebted to the history of electronic pop, and in particular reaching specifically
into the vintage electronics of the early 1980s, chillwave filters this approach through a
hybrid of cheesy hooks, synthesizer sounds verging on novelty, reverb-soaked vocals,
and echo-laden drum machines. The aesthetic legacy of consumerist-pop is rampant,
and when combined with more critically maligned and contextually unpopular or
unsophisticated influences, it creates a hybrid musical form that draws on pastiche
and play.
In describing the style, Carles’s authorial voice took on the self-aware subject posi-
tion of the contemporary postinformation era urbanite, and the blog used postmillennial
textspeak to comment: “Feel like chillwave is supposed to sound like something that was
playing in the background of ‘an old VHS cassette that u found in ur attic from the late
80s/early 90s’ ” (2009). The same description could be leveled at hypnagogic pop, and the
two have been used interchangeably.4 Chillwave is more indebted to the retro/revisionist
fetishization of the 1980s and 1990s as removed from the postnoise underground, in more
widely spread and commercially viable popular music. To this end the chillwave sound
may be the logical end to the 1980s-inspired musical leanings of the first decade of the
new millennium, taking revisionism to a new level of cultural fluidity through irony and
pastiche. Luvaas has discussed how electroclash expresses itself via “the confusions and
contradictions of life in a ‘media-saturated’ late-capitalist world economy” (2006, 168),
and links the genre to the notion of irony through its reliance on and expression through
a heavily mediated cultural landscape. Artists operating from this perspective
 From Hypnagogia to Distroid    417

use irony as a means of disavowing any ideological link with the appropriated mate-
rial. Irony, here, has become a distancing mechanism. It makes it possible to say one
thing and mean another. But irony has another function as well. It makes it OK to
have tastes seemingly out of sync with an anti-materialist, anti-corporate agenda.
It makes ambivalence acceptable, allows one to have their cake and eat it too—to
like commercial pop, arena rock, and MTV and still hate what they stand for. (169)

Although chillwave also uses a form of ironic distancing, its relationship to irony is less
politically antagonistic and more self-reflexively accepting. This is reflected not only in
the genre’s sound, but also in its relationship to its musical influences.
Many of the musical approaches referenced by chillwave as its stylistic touchstones
were, at the time of the genre’s emergence, considered outdated or passé by popular
taste, and in particular the tastes of those to whom chillwave chiefly appealed. The
spaciousness and insular synthetic ambience of what Dennis Hall refers to as new age
music (1994) was summoned via hazy reverb and chiming synthesizers, and the use of
steel-pan percussion and drum samples from hybridized ethnomusical traditions often
labeled as “world music” (James 1996) added a kind of postcolonial global rhythm to
the music. Instrumentally, the use of vintage synthesizers also mimicked the album-
oriented rock sound identified by Kronegold (2008), and the melodic and composi-
tional aspects of chillwave reflected a similar musical approach that has subsequently
been lampooned as “yacht rock” (Crumsho 2006). This particular aesthetic summons
an early 1980s leisure-class aesthetic, which chillwave celebrates, while also comment-
ing on it from an ironically distanced subject position. To twenty- and thirty-something
chillwave artists of the postmillennial era, yacht-rock artists like Christopher Cross,
Hall and Oates, Foreigner, and Toto represented a form of laid-back, easily digestible
pop music readily associated with their parents, and with their childhoods. Combined
with a visual aesthetic that marries analog video noise, Instagram filter effects, day-
glo, lens flares, and summery beach-oriented sea and sky imagery, chillwave offers a
postdigital reinterpretation of yacht rock’s leisure aesthetic for the digital age. Filtering
these concepts through fluid textuality creates a sound as informed by irony and popu-
lar memory as it is by the personalized memories of its proponents.
Alan Palomo’s Neon Indian project is one of the names most readily associated with
chillwave. Over the course of two albums released in 2009 and 2011, Palomo produced a
wonky electronic pop music featuring breezy vocals, burbling synth tones, and vintage
drum-machine beats. Tracks such as “Deadbeat Summer” and “Should Have Taken Acid
with You” from 2009’s Psychic Chasms touch on AOR soul and bubblegum pop emo-
tiveness. These tracks exemplify the use of pastiche not to revive long-dormant musical
styles, but to comment on them by tracing around their edges. Although not a carbon
copy of 1980s synth-pop, Neon Indian’s music is affectively hypernatural—comparable
to a form of arcane musical shorthand that references the saccharine emotiveness and
blandness of classic AM radio pop without fully committing to it. It is this distanced
abstraction that sets chillwave apart from its influences. Instead of caustic sarcasm,
this music embraces the saccharine and emotive, summoning an affective pop-melody
418   Adam Trainer

sugar rush because of—and not despite—its influences. Of the artists usually labeled
as belonging to chillwave, Palomo along with Chaz Bundick as Toro Y Moi and Ernest
Greene’s Washed Out project were among the few who were able to sustain careers after
the buzz of the label wore off, arguably because their songwriting surpassed the laconic
aloofness of which chillwave was often accused. This distanced emotional posturing
was one of the primary identifiers of the chillwave sound, and arguably one of the criti-
cisms leveled at it by detractors.
This detachment is emblematic of the seemingly ironic discursive approach tradi-
tionally favored by blog critics and other minions of the Internet age’s endless mine
of pop criticism. As music created and shaped by the lens of blogs, music forums, and
other forms of online comment, chillwave was subject to a backlash almost as soon as
it had been labeled and defined. Ric Leichtung commented that chillwave had “been
shoved down our throats over the past couple of years due to its ease of creation and
distribution … and a lot of it fucking sucks” (2011). Reynolds commented that “2010
wasn’t the Year of Chillwave so much as the Year of Chillwave Backlash” (2011). Carles
continued to comment on the movement in increasingly biting and ironically self-
aware blogposts that highlighted the fickleness of online music trends and consump-
tion, as well as drawing attention to the coverage or the movement in publications such
as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. As Sinfield points out, “the centre
takes what it wants, and under pressure will abuse and abandon the subcultures it has
plundered” (1993, 32), but in the instance of chillwave, as soon as the center began to
show interest, the subculture disappeared.
Even categorizing chillwave as a subculture is problematic, and to this end it is rel-
evant to note that the traditional relationship between music scenes and geographi-
cal specificity could not be applied to the moniker either. Palomo from Neon Indian
commented that whereas traditionally established music genres often emerged out
of particular cities and scenes, “now it’s just a blogger or some journalist that can find
three or four random bands around the country and tie together a few commonali-
ties between them and call it a genre” (Pirnia 2010). Instead of the self-generative
subcultural mythology arising out of the interaction between multiple artists in a
specific region that has traditionally underpinned music scenes, it was the asser-
tions of an outside influence that created the chillwave label. It may be this, as well
as the fact that the label was initially created as a joke, that contributed to the ensu-
ing backlash against both the term and the music that it was used to label. In less
than eighteen months, chillwave had emerged, bloomed into relative popularity, and
disappeared. As such, the primary criticism of the style was its limited sonic palette,
and the inability of its proponents to move beyond a particular aesthetic. This lim-
ited sonic palette can be attributed not only to the approach that chillwave artists
chose to adopt, but also to the tools used to create the music: DIY music software
and the personal computer. As such, chillwave presented a specific rendering of the
post-ironic recontextualization of past musical eras, but also channeled it through
the direct, amateur aesthetic of home recording techniques afforded through con-
sumer technology.
 From Hypnagogia to Distroid    419

Like hypnagogic pop, much of chillwave’s mystique lay in its ability to filter disparate
musical influences through an aesthetic that embraced the lo-fi sound that character-
izes amateur recording techniques afforded by consumer electronics. Chillwave was
described by Pareles as “recession-era music: low-budget and danceable” (2010), and
was identified by an anonymous blogger as “the product of a collapsing economy and
the instinct to escape it, and the effect the economy is having on the first generation
of kids to have it worse than their parents” (2011). That particular critique drew on the
“womblike” aspects of the music as a means toward shutting out the external world
through immersive auditory landscapes, but the music created via these technologies
was also engineered for the aural atmosphere of tinny iPod speakers, and a generation
of music listeners more likely to access music in the form of digitally compressed files
played through MP3 players and computer headphones than through a traditional ste-
reo or hi-fi system.
Chillwave may be informed by dance music—which often privileges low frequencies
for their bodily effects (Gilbert and Pearson 1999), but its own skewed approach to tradi-
tional dance music aesthetics often operates through its notable lack of bass—arguably
a result of the music having being produced on laptops via easily accessible software,
to be listened to on portable music devices. Chillwave (and by extension hypnago-
gic pop) may be the first music specifically made to be heard through the low-fidelity
digital compression of MP3. Chillwave recordings often have a muddiness to them that
is not necessarily compromised—and may even be enhanced—when paired with the
tinniness of computer speakers or iPod earbuds. In a manner redolent of the crackle
associated with vinyl and the hiss of analog tape, which carry with them a specific sonic
blueprint of their form, so does low-bit-rate MP3 audio conversion. Furthermore, Beer
(2008) suggests that the hardware on which chillwave is played has become the defin-
ing circumstance of audience engagement with this style of contemporary music.
Chillwave may have quickly become subject to the acerbic scrutiny of music blog-
gers and the increased churn of cultural relevance for which the post-Internet age is
arguably responsible. However, its engagement with music of the leisure class offered
a conceptual paradigm that, combined with hypnagogic pop’s postretro aesthetic ten-
dencies, would prove to have sustained relevance. Yet despite chillwave’s rapid progress
from novelty to obsolescence, other digitally based retro-hybrid genres have proven
even more ephemeral. In mid-2012 the term vaporwave began to emerge as a tag on
Last.fm clouds and among various blog posts to describe a music that, like hypnago-
gic pop, was concerned with representing the early 1990s and focused on a particular
aesthetic married to a passé utopianism rooted in the detritus of global capitalism.
Whereas hypnagogic pop’s aesthetic lies in the tenets of noise, vaporwave samples the
crystalline synthesizers of corporate videos, smooth early 1990s R&B and shopping
mall muzak. Where hypnagogic pop is often muddy and cluttered, vaporwave presents
sounds filtered through the bass-empty sheen of early digital instrumentation and syn-
thesized instrumentation. Much like chillwave’s sonic search for “chill vibes” (Carles
2009)  through the musics that came of age in the era of neoconservatism and eco-
nomic plenty, vaporwave presents an evolutionary step into the muzak of the dawning
420   Adam Trainer

of the digital era. In an image that emerged from the music blog Girls Blood enti-
tled “Vaporwave Essentials” (2013), both Far Side Virtual and Daniel Lopatin’s Chuck
Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 were presented as “Proto Vaporwave” releases alongside the
2010 album Holograms by an artist known as 骨架的, which translates from Japanese
as Skeleton. Many of the artists who emerged as part of the vaporwave movement oper-
ated under anonymity, uploading complete albums’ worth of material to MediaFire, or
via Bandcamp. Project names such as Macintosh Plus, PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises,
Internet Club, and Laserdisc Visions summon antiquated retro-futurist imagery of
post-globalization-era corporations peddling a digital dreamworld of wish fulfillment
through technology. It is worth noting that the term virtual is particularly well rep-
resented among vaporwave artist names and song titles, here representative not only
of the digital and online realm but also of a kind of ideological utopia free from the
tangible everyday.
It was reported by Adam Harper that vaporwave took its name from the sonic
vagueness perpetrated by its proponents. Will Burnett, who worked under the
moniker Internet Club, credits the aim of vaporwave artists as creating “fogged-out
environments—places where everything is obfuscated and uncertain” (2012). The label
is also similar to the term vaporware, which describes computing projects that, even
though advertised and promoted, are never in fact released (Haan 2003). Steeped in
antiquated techno-savvy chic, vaporwave took its musical cues from the shiny, synthe-
sized digital vistas produced in the early 1990s as stock music for corporate business
documentaries, infomercials, and product demonstrations—the kind of music made
less for enjoyment than for the regulation of mood. Much of the early material pro-
duced under the vaporwave premise sampled music of this kind, often processing it in a
manner similar to hypnagogic pop’s reimagining of the chopped and screwed aesthetic.
Later vaporwave releases worked toward a hyperreal rendering of this late-twentieth-
century leisure-class musical projection, presenting itself as leisure-oriented music in
the same way chillwave rerendered the yacht-rock aesthetic, but instead offering itself
as music for business-class hotel lobbies and day spas. Exemplifying the aesthetic is
the work of one anonymous producer, reportedly from Portland, who worked under a
range of monikers including Vektroid, Laserdisc Visions, and 情報デスクVIRTUAL,
which translates as Virtual Information Desk. Across a series of releases, this producer
amassed a body of work incorporating minimalist textural ambience, synthesized adult
contemporary, chopped and screwed R&B, and the kind of corporate muzak that has
come to define the vaporwave tag. Most emblematic of vaporwave’s status as postcapi-
talist leisure music was material that the same producer created as PrismCorp Virtual
Enterprises on a pair of albums entitled Clear Skies™ and Home™. These two albums in
particular presented an array of sounds so slickly digitized and plastic as to be consid-
ered almost unlistenably garish in their embrace of musical cliché. Tracks such as “Neo
Spa and Salon” and “Webscapes” from Home™ comprised slick computerized jazz and
salsa rhythms complemented by tinny, unrealistic MIDI horns and chiming electric
piano, while “Narayani Falls” and “Virtual Fruit Plaza” from Clear Skies™ presented
decidedly vapid and saccharine relaxation muzak featuring leaden electronic rhythms,
 From Hypnagogia to Distroid    421

synth pads, and chimes. The result was incidental music—music intended to be heard
only as a sonic backdrop to other ideas or texts—cast into the spotlight, with attention
paid to its vacuous sheen and insipidity.
The visual and text-based elements that complement the music complete the vapor-
wave aesthetic, as the vast majority of vaporwave releases were chiefly made available
for free online and never received any physical distribution. The text surrounding
these releases also gives off a distinctly retro-futurist corporate sensibility. This text
was included as part of the Vaporwave Essentials image:

Global capitalism is nearly there. At the end of the world there will be only liq-
uid advertisement and gaseous desire. Sublimated from our bodies our untethered
senses will endlessly ride escalators through pristine artificial environments. More
and less than human. Drugged-up and drugged down. Catalyzed. Consuming
and consumed by a relentlessly rich economy of sensory information. Valued by
the pixel.
The virtual plaza welcomes you. And you will welcome it too. (2013)

Entrenched in the divide between the personal and the public, the subjective and the
universal, and between the corporeal and the technological, vaporwave provides a
dreamlike engagement with futuristic utopia. The imagery adorning vaporwave album
artwork is fetishistic in its appropriation of digital home entertainment technology
and the imagery associated with it, depicting shiny CDs and laser discs, frames from
anime and early computer games, computer and television screens, all tricked out in
visually striking neon and pastel color schemes. Home™ and Clear Skies™ present high-
definition first-person depictions of virtual reality situations that could be lifted whole-
sale from a digital simulation of luxury leisure aesthetics. The music video for Internet
Club’s “Wave Temple” (2012) loops a series of 3D animations presenting fetishized
urban spaces from architectural and city planning simulations, depicting the interior
of shopping malls and dream homes, and external shots of skyscrapers, galleries, and
cityscapes. Here vaporwave—similarly to hypnagogic pop and chillwave—actively aes-
theticizes Giles Slade’s notion of the inevitability of obsolescence (2006). While hypna-
gogic pop and chillwave fetishize past eras; vaporwave offers nostalgia for a dream that
will always remain out of reach—the mythology of perfection and satisfaction through
the pursuit of capitalist aesthetics.
What sets vaporwave apart as an aesthetic system is the lack of direct comment
taking place in the music itself. By leaving its source material almost entirely intact,
or by replicating it closely, vaporwave presents a simulation of both the empty vacu-
ousness and the boundless promise of a postglobalized consumer landscape. Harper
has linked vaporwave to the concept of the “virtual plaza” (2012), and much of the
imagery surrounding the music takes this image to its logical conclusion by offer-
ing a utopia of consumer-oriented hypercapitalism and the consumerist drive toward
a landscape of luxury possessions and personal technology. Will Burnett comments
that “capitalistic society has generated a dehumanizing hyperreality by focusing on
422   Adam Trainer

infinite generation of ideals as shown through commodities” (Harper 2012). His work
as Internet Club indicates a strong anticonsumerist critique of these social conditions,
and he has linked his own work to Guy Debord’s notion of “commodity fetishism”
(1994). However, owing to the anonymity of many vaporwave artists it is impossible
to determine whether individual texts are similarly influenced. Instead it seems more
appropriate to view vaporwave not as an ironic or even post-ironic rendering of our
contemporary obsession with technology and luxury aesthetics, but as a confusion—a
retreat from the uncertainty faced by contemporary subjects into the dreamlike aes-
thetics and infinite promise of fantastical techno-futurism, the virtual as a haven from
the physical. Whether this retreat is a cynical critique or an accelerationist fantasy is
arguably up to the listener. Similar to the obfuscation and uncertainty that Burnett
discusses with reference to vaporwave’s aesthetic, there is also an uncertainty sur-
rounding what that aesthetic is meant to represent. It displays a shifting relationship
with the concept of irony, whereby simulation and dedication to an aesthetic principle
extend the possibilities for reuse and recreation. By transcending traditional subject
positioning in lieu of an affective rendering of experiential vagueness, vaporwave
depoliticizes its source material by presenting global capitalism as an unobtainable
aesthetic instead of an ideological hurdle.
Vaporwave too, experienced a limited shelf life. Unlike chillwave, which gained
exposure in the mainstream media, vaporwave had a far too aesthetically restrictive
and niche sound to extend beyond music blogs and MediaFire download links. It was
this aesthetic restriction that also saw the label and the music it tagged disappear just
as quickly as it emerged. Galil’s piece in the Chicago Reader in February 2013 declared
vaporwave not so much dead as abandoned, and pinpointed an online gig entitled
SPF420 2.0 as the moment in which this occurred, wherein audience members and
musicians ruminated via on-screen messaging about the next emerging genre. Anthony
Fantano’s video review of Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe (2012) was also cited as a piv-
otal moment in the demise of the tag. However, it retained some (albeit niche) presence
online, and its retro-tinged digital futurism remained a musical touchstone for artists
such as Lopatin and Luke Wyatt’s Torn Hawk project. As such, it may be more reward-
ing to view vaporwave less as a distinct genre and more as a movement, albeit a brief
one, in the development of a post-ironic creative aesthetic that extended the potential
and language of postmillennial digital music culture.
Running parallel to the development of labels such as hypnagogic pop, chillwave, and
vaporwave has been the emergence of the term microgenres in online music journal-
ism. Ruben Lopez Cano’s discussion of the term (2003) locates it halfway between the
concepts of a fixed work and that of a traditional genre, using the notion of variation
as the axis along which these concepts can be located. It makes sense for such a term to
have emerged out of the blogosphere, where countless individuals, message boards, and
social media discussions attempt to categorize a musical landscape in which traditional
structural and generic terms no longer apply. Microgenres encompass a more specific
sonic palette than traditional genres—as exemplified by backlashes against both chill-
wave and vaporwave, they are also highly reactive to outside influence—operating
 From Hypnagogia to Distroid    423

within niche communities online, and seemingly combusting or petering out at the
instance of exterior comment or wider attention.
As an addendum to his work on vaporwave, Harper also recognized an antitheti-
cal musical movement that cast itself in opposition to the technological utopianism of
vaporwave (2012). Dubbing this new strain of post-ironic digitalism “distroid,” Harper
identified the work of a number of artists, notably Fatima Al Qadiri, Gatekeeper, and
James Ferraro’s BEBETUNE$ and BODYGUARD projects as proponents of the style.
The label was chosen as a combination of the words disturbing, dystopian, android, and
steroid, but also as a reference to DIS Magazine, a satirical online fashion and art blog
that Harper identified as “the key focal point for the network of artists working in this
aesthetic” (2012). Although it never caught on in wider parlance, stylistically this form
nonetheless extends the possibilities of virtual microgenres. In opposition to vapor-
wave’s musical vapidity, distroid offers a form of high-octane body music, undeniably
high-definition and digital, birthed from dense clouds of digital start-up themes and
the sonic language of online warfare games. Taking its musical cues from modern R&B,
house, techno, and drum ’n’ bass, distroid fuses the bass-heavy thumps and synthesizer
reveries of dance music with the mechanized, quasi-industrial soundscapes of dysto-
pian digital nightmares.
Vaporwave is obsessed with an early 1990s retrofuturism; distroid depicts post-
millennial high-definition accelerationism, using the visual language of online war-
fare and CGI hyperreality, and exhibiting Reynolds’s notion of digital maximalism
(2011). Exemplifying this particular aesthetic is Tabor Robak’s music video for Fatima
Al Qadiri’s “Vatican Vibes” (2011), which combines the visual discourses of religion,
technology, and warfare in a sleek, high-definition digital animation of excess, as told
through the language of virtual reality simulators and first-person video games. Distroid
comprises dense soundscapes steeped in the sonic language of dystopia, summoning
the sounds of an android-dominated lived reality and fiery global warfare. Although
darker than vaporwave, distroid is just as tapped into the capitalist machinery of the
post-Internet digital experience. Both vaporwave and distroid summon the notion of
culture jamming as prank culture by “playfully appropriating commercial rhetoric both
by folding it over on itself and exaggerating its tropes” (Harold 2004, 189). Instead of
offering an oppositional critique of the cultural systems with which it engages, distroid
instead presents an unadulterated aestheticization of its primary concerns, which could
be considered to move beyond mere critique. In this way distroid can be seen to enact
Gregory Ulmer’s concept of postcriticism, which “functions with an ‘epistemology’ of
performance—knowing as making, producing, doing, acting” (1985, 94). It offers yet
another post-ironic rendering of a media-saturated contemporary experience, albeit
one steeped more in pointed nihilism. By way of the immediacy of its content and the
political directness of its aesthetic, distroid seeks to highlight the discursive structures
underlying contemporary digital subjectivity through an exaggerated palette of sonic
and visual affronts.
Post-ironic music as a conceptual tether is a product of an accelerated cultural cli-
mate, wherein information and the speed by which it is absorbed and reused have
424   Adam Trainer

become a new form of cultural currency. These cultural circumstances give rise to
a confused and complex set of relationships between artists, popular and personal
memory, technology, and intertextuality. The post-Internet age has produced an aes-
thetic of musical understanding that cuts across not only popular music but also other
media, resulting in an approach to art (and music) born out of the glut of information
that assaults contemporary subjectivity. By allowing personal and popular memory to
infiltrate their work, artists operating through the emerging aesthetic approaches dis-
cussed here have sought to renegotiate the cultural worth of specific musical modali-
ties. Moving past the cynicism of irony, musical post-irony is both a critique and a
celebration, an unapologetically confused rendering of subjective experience that fuses
the intertextuality of contemporary pastiche with personal and experiential affectiv-
ity. These forms move beyond traditional binaries of taste and currency, working per-
sonal and collective experience through a framework of functional and aesthetic value
that recontextualizes our relationship with the products of commercial populism and
capitalist-driven culture. Most importantly, such music reimagines the cultural land-
scape through a personalized lens—presenting subjectivity as a conduit for creative
engagement—using both historically embedded musical constructs and the tools of the
postinformation era to articulate the language of memory.

Notes
1. The best example of this convergence of established media is the proliferation of new
audio and video content where existing source material has been remediated to create
new texts. The proliferation of cheap consumer-oriented digital video, audio, and image
editing software has given rise to much of this content, which is distributed by user-
upload-driven sites such as YouTube for video and SoundCloud for audio.
2. Amanda Brown, phone interview, Perth, Mar. 13, 2013.
3. Lopatin also used Chris DeBurgh’s “Lady in Red” in the video “nobody here,” and Roger
Troutman’s “Emotions” in the video “END OF LIFE ENTERTAINMENT SCENARIO #1.”
4. Amanda Brown’s post-Pocahaunted work under the LA Vampires moniker can be viewed
as an intersection of the two styles.

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 chapter 23

Bands in Virtua l Spac e s ,

So cial Net worki ng ,
and M ascu l i ni t y

Danijela Bogdanovic

Halfway through the last decade, and after a significant time away from music,
I unexpectedly rediscovered a passion and enthusiasm for going to see bands and art-
ists perform live. This alteration of attitude and associated practices coincided with
the commencement of my Ph.D. studies, which from the vantage point of 2005 was
going to be dominated by desk-based, predominantly archival research of audiovisual
material, focusing on music and gender. Perhaps more importantly, it coincided with a
move from London to the Fylde Coast in North West England, and the desire to learn
about and connect with my new geographic locale, its communities, values, and cul-
tural expressions. Music and associated musical practices rapidly came to the fore, in
a manner that I had not previously experienced in London, where because of the city’s
size and an abundance of “culture” on offer, music had to compete for my attention
with an array of other forms of artistic expression, and where a clear sense of a music
“scene” associated with locality, and marked with a coherent, unifying sense of musical
practices, seemed obscure at best.
As well as frequenting many local gigs in the North West, I began to actively par-
ticipate in an online forum dedicated to the Glaswegian group Franz Ferdinand, post-
ing and replying to messages, exchanging band-related information, and discussing
popular music more generally. Although using some of the features of Web 2.0, such
as interactivity and content cocreation, the forum was dominated by text-based data.
It was moderated by an enthusiastic and technically proficient fan of the band, who
was later employed by the band’s management to run and maintain their website. This
employment was short-lived, thanks to a new form of music-related communication
and consumption lurking around the corner; the social networking site MySpace was
to be embraced by Franz Ferdinand, and numerous other established, lesser-known,
and unknown acts. The emergence and popularity of social networking sites more
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    429

generally, and those dedicated to music specifically, was to significantly alter the man-
ner in which I was to conduct my Ph.D. research. In addition, it had led to a transfor-
mation of my original plan for desk-based research to that of an ethnography, which
was to incorporate the study of virtual spaces frequented by the bands, in addition to
participant observation within traditional music locales such as rehearsal rooms and
live music venues. Recognizing the potential of the new virtual platforms as both sites/
fields and tools for research, I immersed myself in observation of a variety of music and
gender identity practices of five bands, at varying stages of their careers.
This chapter provides an ethnographically informed account of music and gender
practices in virtual music spaces, informed by the shift from textual to visual online
communities. It examines practices of “doing music” and “doing gender,” thus broad-
ening the ethnographic work I  conducted in offline music “locales” such as that of
a band—understood as a space for social and musical interaction as well as iden-
tity inscription, and a variety of live music venues where performers and audience
co-negotiate music, space, and identities. It opens with a discussion of the meaning
and remit of “virtual music” before proceeding to map out some of the key theo-
retical milestones in discourses of cyberspace. Finally, it engages with “the cultural
politics of the digital media” (E. Coleman 2010, 487)  by situating the discussion of
the bands I  studied closely in offline locales, within the gender and identity reali-
ties of social networking communities. The focus of the chapter is visual and textual
representations of gender identity by chosen bands, through questioning the degree
to which new opportunities for visual and musical inscription signify a challenge to
stereotypical representations and enactments of gender, prominent in real-life musi-
cal spaces. The middle sections of the chapter examine how the bands under scrutiny
have responded to the media convergence challenge, resulting in erosion of some of
the old media boundaries such as that between the producer and the consumer, and
how selfhood/bandhood and gender identities are negotiated in relation to multiple
audiences and conflicting agendas. The notions of bandhood, homosocial space, and
hegemonic masculinity are contextualized and examined against the background of
social networking. Coconstructing of music and gender identities by fans, as a part of
wider participatory culture practices, is also discussed, as is the enmeshment of online
and offline music worlds.

Defining Virtual Music

Guided by my interest in representational and cultural practices associated with music,

and the ways of knowing (epistemology) rather than an approach situated in ontology
of music, the virtual represents an additional locale where musical expression, rep-
resentation, and associated interaction take place. As such, virtual music spaces and
practices are understood and discussed as an extension of real-life spaces and prac-
tices, with the two enmeshed, interlinked, and interreliant. When situating her findings
430   Danijela Bogdanovic

on the basis of an autoethnographic study of the desire in the online game World of
Warcraft, Sundén (2012, 165) reflects on sources of knowledge and ways of knowing:

The discussion makes use of personal experiences—in particular an in-game as well

as out-of-game love affair—as potentially important sources of knowledge. Was it
her regardless of the game? Was it her through the game? Or was it the game “itself ”?

She concludes that “most likely it was all of these things combined” that have roused
the desire and led to a love affair (ibid., 169), suggesting a significant degree of
permeability between real and virtual spaces of interaction, or what Parks (2011,
120)  calls “mixed mode relationships,” that is, those existing in both online and
offline worlds.
This notion of permeability of practice and experience between real life and virtual
settings can be applied to our experience of music, which, similarly to sexual desire
and pleasure, relies on multisensory engagement. In an age where music is frequently
preceded by the adjective “digital,” and where those involved in its production and
consumption increasingly use Web 2.0 features and capabilities, all music could be
defined as virtual. The declining sales of physical formats and increasing sales of
digital formats, coupled with an alteration in how we consume music, could lead
us to believe that music as a form embedded in real-life, offline social practices, is
losing its significance. The arguments in this chapter emerge from a position that
sees the most complete appreciation of music occurring at the point where real-life
and virtual musical experiences collide, where contexts collapse, where audiences are
both visible and imagined, and where public and private become blurred (boyd 2011).
Furthermore:

The individual combines the affordance of both older and newer media to construct
a social sphere that lends autonomy and fluidity to the way in which sociality is
managed. (Papacharissi 2011, 306)

In other words, much debated “media convergence” thus does not simply denote the
convergence of technologies and media platforms, but also the convergence of the par-
ticipants’ experiences, social spheres, and practices.

From Cyberpunk to Networked Publics

and Music 2.0

Informed by postmodern approaches in understanding culture and identity, the

late 1980s and most of the 1990s were dominated by two strands in the debate
about “the status” and gendering of the body: an acknowledgment that the body is
losing its ontological prominence and retreating into the realm of discourse (the
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    431

notion of the “disappearing body”), and a more balanced approach calling for an
examination of inscription of gender, race, age, and sexuality on the disappearing,
postmodern body.
Further discussions examined a multiplicity of boundaries; our age was to become
an age in which the opposition between technology and nature continues to dissolve,
where boundaries between the artificial and the “natural,” the mind and the body, and
even male and female begin to blur. For most, such blurring of the boundaries provided
an opening, a possibility for more egalitarian and increasingly flexible spaces of human
existence and interaction. Haraway’s introduction (1991) and subsequent politicizing of
the concept of cyborg came to exemplify the possibilities of disruption of the dominant
binaries, including those of sex and gender (male-female, masculinity-femininity).
However, within the discourses of postmodern corporeality the question of gender
remained pertinent, with authors such as Balsamo arguing that gender boundaries
remain “vigilantly guarded” (1995, 217).
A more affirming argument put forward by Plant examined a longstanding rela-
tionship between women and technologies, where histories of women’s liberation and
technology are “woven together,” and where through an attempt to establish their own
networks women begin to represent a threat to patriarchal order (46). Whereas Balsamo
perceived the body as always marked by race and gender, Plant saw the cyberfuture as
belonging to women, with men having to resort to adjustments and modifications and
rethink their positions thanks to something inherent in “female style” that would make
it a foundation of cyberspace.
Others, notably Turkle (1996), Stone (1996), and Springer (1996), engaged with issues
of cyberspace, embodiment, and identity by examining virtual communities in rela-
tion to identity play. Although no suggestion is made that some of the philosophi-
cal underpinnings of cyberspace debates are out of date, it is important to note that
virtual environments facilitated by current digital technologies provide opportunities
for novel and diverse ways of engagement. More up-to-date accounts of online com-
munities have been given, among others by Hodkinson (2007), who expanded on his
work on subcultural communities by examining virtual subcultural communities (e.g.,
subcultural blogging among UK goths), engaging with issues of identity and individu-
alization within online environments.
Much of the recent writing on virtual platforms and activities examines social net-
working as interactive practice, and social networks as platforms that facilitate such
interaction. Recognizing the significance of social networks and social networking has
a long tradition in sociology, with some elements traceable as far back as the nineteenth
century and Durkheim’s notion of anomie as a form of social deregulation. In the lat-
ter half of the twentieth century, there appear to be two parallel theoretical approaches
focusing on the significance of social networks:  social resources theories and social
capital theories. Social resources theories focus on social network analysis and status
attainment, and originate in the seminal study of Granovetter (1973), which established
a positive correlation between interpersonal connections or “the strength of the weak
ties,” and attainment of more prestigious and higher-paid jobs. It has been taken up,
432   Danijela Bogdanovic

among others, by Lin (1982, 1999a, 1999b), who continued to examine the relationship
between the social resources and attained statuses.
The second and parallel tradition originates with Bourdieu’s social capital theory,
where social capital is defined as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources
which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized
relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition” (1985, 248, cited in Portes 1998, 3).
Bourdieu’s argument has been developed by J.  Coleman (1990) and Putnam (1995),
among others, with Coleman focusing on the co-relation between social inequality and
educational achievement, and Putnam examining the role of civic society and civic
community networks in quality of public life and performance of social institutions.
A number of authors have extended social resources theories and social capital theories
to social networking sites. In their writing about strong ties “that exist among close
friends and families, the kinds of ties that connect dense clusters” and weak ties, “the
kinds of ties that exist among people one knows in a specific setting,” Donath and boyd
suggest that there is a positive correlation between communication technology and
the number of weak ties that are formed and maintained (Donath and boyd 2004, 80).
This certainly has implications on how bands and artists use social networking sites
and the type of ties that are developed, with some opting for extensive, “promiscuous”
networks without discrimination on the basis of value or utility, while others tend to
evaluate contacts and add them on the basis of potential benefit they can bring.
In recent years, boyd’s work has continued to map out the development, utilization,
key characteristics, and sociocultural significance of social networking sites in the
United States (boyd 2007, 2008, 2011). She introduced a functional concept of “net-
worked publics,” defining them

as publics that are restructured by networked technologies . . . they are simultane-

ously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imag-
ined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology
and practice . . . they allow people to gather for social, cultural and civic purposes.
(2011, 39)

However, despite their potential to disrupt hierarchical and hegemonic relation-

ships, “networked publics appear to reproduce many of the biases that exist in other
publics—social inequalities, including social stratification around race, gender, sexual-
ity, and age” (ibid., 54).
One of the landmarks in writing about music in the digital age was the publication
of Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture (Ayers 2006). It situated itself in what
it defined as “a relatively underpublished area” (ibid., 2) of convergence of cyberculture
and musicology. The articles in the volume provide insights into a distinct rift between
the music industry, fans, and the artists, by examining legal challenges surrounding
music in a networked society, for example, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, prac-
tices employed by fans and artists within online environments, nongeographic dimen-
sions of online communities, and the notion of virtual scenes.
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    433

Much of the current writing on music focuses on its situatedness within Web 2.0
environments, referring to it as “music 2.0” (Young and Collins 2010), characterized by
“disintermediation” or the leveling out of the roles of the producer and the consumer.
Jenkins et al. (2006) discuss “participatory cultures” where the audience’s role extends
beyond mere consumption to co-production of music and musical meaning. Bruns
(2008) coins the term “produser” to describe the same phenomenon, while Gauntlett
(2011) introduces the phrase “making is connecting” to denote a transition from “sit-
back-and-be-told culture” to a “making-and-doing culture.” Wikström (2009) exam-
ines the characteristics of “music in the cloud” as well as the impact of the digital
term on the music industry more broadly, and Baym (2007) focuses on the role of the
Internet in empowerment of music fan communities. Hugill’s work (2008) examines
how technological innovations and overall digitization of music have had an impact on
the meanings and practices associated with musicianship.
In terms of the cultural politics of representation in online spaces in general, and the
representation of identity in online/virtual environments in particular, the past two
decades have brought about a noticeable shift from textual to visual online communi-
ties. Creatively used photographs and videos associated with template-driven personal
profiles still allow a degree of cyberplay with identity; however, they fasten the partici-
pants to the categories of gender, age, and ethnicity more readily.

MySpace

During a short trip to Edinburgh in Spring 2006, I picked up a copy of The List (“what’s
on guide”) and after some deliberation decided to visit the Jam House, a centrally located
music and entertainment venue, renowned for its unplugged and intimate experiences
of live music. On the bill that night were several local acts, none of which I was familiar
with. I recall several singer songwriters taking to the very large stage, each supported
by her or his own private audience consisting of friends and family. The standard of the
performances and the sound quality were high. The final act to perform was a group.
They delivered an impressive set of well-crafted songs with the elements of progressive
rock and pop. The two guitarists both sang, which provided visual and sonic variation.
Thanking the audience, the front man announced, “We are called X and if you wish to
hear us again check out our MySpace.” I did not catch the group’s name, but MySpace
sounded familiar, as I had heard a musician friend refer to it and had seen it printed
on fliers. I learned the group’s name from the sound engineer, located their MySpace
profile that same night, and shortly afterward created my own. Although I  did not
know it then, I was embarking on a three-year research journey through music, friend-
ship, lineup changes, record deals, fallouts, and regroupings. MySpace was a point of
departure for much of my research, allowing me to locate and connect with artists
I have liked for a long time, as well as facilitating discovery of new music. It existed as a
research locale and a social space, in addition to being a research tool.
434   Danijela Bogdanovic

Although MySpace was once the preferred online home of the majority of bands, it
has long lost its status as the number one social networking site (SNS), with numer-
ous failed attempts to redesign, revive, and relaunch it. It has been surpassed by
Facebook, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, Last FM, YouTube, Twitter, and other
online platforms. All SNSs have undergone numerous changes and updates since
my introduction to MySpace in 2006; however, detailed mapping of those changes is
not beneficial for the arguments presented here. Nonetheless, there are two impor-
tant points to note:  first, much of the original “architecture” of MySpace such as
profiles, friends lists, tools for public communication, and streamed updates (boyd
2011)  has remained and underpins social networking on other platforms; second,
the dynamics created by both visible and invisible (imagined) audiences, collapsed
contexts, and the blurring of the public and private domains (ibid., 49)  remain a
pertinent terrain for the arguments about self-presentation and social connection
in the digital age.
In her comprehensive survey of ethnographic work on digital media, E.  Gabriela
Coleman (2010) suggests that it encompasses three distinctive areas:

1. The cultural politics of digital media

2. The vernacular culture of digital media
3. The prosaics of digital media

The work I  undertook on musical and gender inscription and negotiation within
MySpace incorporates elements of all three areas, but because of its focus on the analy-
sis and interpretation of creation, recreation, reiteration, and attempts at challenging
the dominant musical and gender identity representations, it is most firmly situated
within the domain of the cultural politics of digital media.
Some of the significant themes that emerged from my work on gender and music
in offline music spaces and communities included observable (gendered) practices
that actively or inadvertently exclude women from music spaces, the regulatory power
of hegemonic masculinity within the setting of the band, homosocial practices that
reinforce the sense of belonging to a group and feelings of bandhood, and the signifi-
cance of musical enculturation in the forging of gender/masculinity through a series
of music-related practices. Drawing on the dichotomy in discourse of virtual spaces
that either appraises them as either an extension of the real, offline social and cultural
environments or places them within the utopian, cyberdream of a disembodied, age-
less, genderless, and race-free world, I  sought to observe and evaluate the degree to
which popular musicians were using or transgressing culturally available discourses
of gender/masculinity in the context of “writing themselves into being” within social
networks such as MySpace.
The presence of bands on MySpace and other SNSs can be viewed and studied as
an extension of music as an interactional event, where bands, fans, music promoters,
venue owners, and record labels come together. Although well-established acts have
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    435

had opportunities for such interactions outside the realm of SNSs, most up-and-coming
bands had to negotiate uncharted territory. The majority had to “write themselves into
being” and establish their online identities, through which potential audiences would
eventually access their music in real-life, offline settings, by coming to see them perform
live, for instance.
My analysis of strategies employed by bands to manage their online identities, as
well as facilitate realization of their goals, is based on close observation of the online
activity of five bands I  studied offline in parallel, employing participant observa-
tion and semistructured interviews. In addition to observing and noting relevant
aspects of the online activity of the bands, I took active part by commenting on their
music, lyrics, blogs, and band photographs. They reciprocated by leaving comments
on my profile. I have seen all of the bands perform live on more than one occasion
and have developed good rapport with various band members. Although my pres-
ence on MySpace was that of a visible researcher, my interventions in the form of
the comments posted about music or visuals remained at the level of a music lover,
never becoming overburdened with theoretical and methodological concerns inher-
ent in my work.

Images of Bandhood

When examining the inner workings of the band as one of the key sites for the
construction and contestations of masculinities in offline locales, I  have argued
that notions of bandhood and collectivity are relevant attributes in such processes.
Reinforced through extramusical practices such as “hanging out” or “the band’s
night out,” associated with the exclusion of women and nonband members, band-
hood acts as a glue for the collective identity. The band thus can be conceptualized
as a micro social group, a creative unit, or even the family, “the mother of all clichés”
(Weinstein 2004, 188).
Much of the pioneering writing on cyberspace encounters and interactions high-
lighted either an absence of a fixed identity or, where present, its textual represen-
tation (age, sex, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on, inscribed/communicated through
language), sometimes achieved through a playful form of “textual striptease” (Sundén
2012, 173). Conversely, current debates concerning construction of virtual identities
are informed by the possibilities of visual representation of embodied selves, where
the body is increasingly “on demand in virtual worlds,” and as such is “consistently
reintroduced, represented” (ibid., 166). The sections that follow map out and examine
how the notions of bandhood and homosociality have been visually articulated by
tools and features available to bands on MySpace, and the extent to which they con-
form to the existing stereotypes of representing gender more generally, and masculin-
ity specifically.
436   Danijela Bogdanovic

Profile Photographs, Top Friends,

and Comments

The key element in the architecture of all SNSs is the profile, with the profile pho-
tograph. boyd suggests that profiles are both a representation of an individual (or in
the case of my research the collective) and “the locus of interaction” (2011, 43), while
creation of the profile can be seen as an act of “writing oneself into being in a digi-
tal environment” (ibid., 43). As such, a vast majority of bands’ profile photographs on
MySpace tended to include all band members, commonly a close-up of their heads.
Also common was an “action” shot capturing the band in a live performance. An alter-
native was a professionally done, often rather contrived band photograph. Only one
out of five bands I observed was using an abstract image for their profile photograph.
On the whole, such a choice was quite rare, usually encountered with musicians who
are involved in “obscure” experimental, electronic music genres, and it corresponded to
drawing the attention to abstract qualities of the music itself, and in turn the insignifi-
cance of the body and associated image.
The profile photographs are selected from numerous albums that are available for
viewing and comments, and whereas some of the bands under scrutiny changed it
regularly, others kept the same profile image throughout the period of my observa-
tion. When asked about the reasons for keeping a single image as the profile photo-
graph for so long, the bands suggested that such a strategy was beneficial in creating a
recognizable “brand.” Additional photographs found in bands’ albums fell into several
categories: group or individual shots of the band in a studio during a recording session,
photographs of the band performing live, informal shots (band members “hanging
out” together without instruments), images of the band in a rehearsal space, gig post-
ers, logos abstracted from promotional material, record sleeve images, band-on-tour
photographs, and images of audiences captured by the band from the stage during the
live performance. Despite suggestions about the ongoing blurring of public and private
spheres within SNSs, there was a noticeable absence of images depicting any aspect of
private lives of band members: physical locations, family members, partners, friends,
pets, and so on, which are commonly included and visually depicted aspects of life
on many nonband profiles. This is in line with Mandelson and Papacharissi’s findings
(2011) based on research of college student Facebook photo galleries, where visual ref-
erences to family or home life were rare or absent.
The visual foregrounding of the group reinforces the notions of bandhood and col-
lectivity:  the band as a closed, tightly knit unit. Similarly, the absence of private-life
signifiers is associated with the etiquette of professionalism adopted by working (tour-
ing, gigging) bands. Although structured, the shots of bands practicing or relaxing
in rehearsal spaces provided a window into the private sphere of bands, previously
inaccessible to fans. Such practice seemed popular among well-established bands too,
who tended to include rough video clips, shot by the band members, usually during
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    437

the rehearsal, and depicting “exclusive,” previously unavailable footage. The strategy
of providing exclusive and yet selective access to private domains has often been used
to keep the fans interested during a time of low activity or downtime (song writing,
recording), when the fans are most likely to transfer their attention and loyalties to
another band.
Although I  suggest that the visual dynamics of bands’ profiles can be seen as an
extension of existing homosocial spaces (rehearsal rooms, privacy of backstage), their
role extends to catering for a series of twofold interactions, with fans and other partici-
pants involved in music making and promotion. Successful preservation of the balance
between the band as a professional work unit and maintenance of the friendliness and
degree of openness with their fans (both those whom they encounter in real-life set-
tings and those who exist only as fans in virtual worlds) presents a significant represen-
tational challenge for any band.
There was a striking and noticeable lack of female presence in images used to rep-
resent and contextualize the bands, within their virtual photo albums and their top
friends. Girlfriends and female partners, most of whom I learned had MySpace profiles
and were active participants on the platform, tended to be absent from top friends.
Instead, those were populated with profiles of record labels, radio DJs, other bands, gig
promoters, and venues. If women somehow made it into top friends, there seemed to be
rather visible tokenism associated with their “top” statuses. On occasions where I came
across scantily dressed female figures within the top friends of bands and proceeded
to explore their profiles, it became clear that those women were not actual friends but
rather looking for clientele for their webcam exploits. Including such profiles in their
top friends invited comments from actual friends, along the lines of “Oh, so you know
Monica intimately then?” leading to further innuendo and sexist jokes.
Three out of five bands I  studied included me, the visible female researcher, in
their top friends at various times over the period of two years. I did not feel a sense of
belonging there, among record labels, radio DJs, and other bands. When questioned
about reasons for my inclusion, the responses varied from “it is good to have some
real people there too” to “you look cool and sexy in your photograph.” Interestingly,
almost all individual band members from the bands under scrutiny included me in top
friends on their individual profiles, and proceeded to interact with me extensively. In
the context of a band’s online identity, together with many others I was “invisible” (not
included in top friends), or was added to aid credibility (the reference to having some
“real people”), or was there because of the way I looked. My inclusion in top friends and
communication with band members outside the context of band identity was based on
rapport we established, and real-life knowledge of each other. It could be suggested that
such practices indicate that the performance of gender/masculinity and music group
member identities are determined and governed by behavioral norms that vary with
online contexts, such as the band profile and an individual profile extending beyond a
simple display of connections, to where they become strategic and political (boyd 2011).
In their discussion of the New Model Army website, O’Reilly and Doherty (2006)
argue that the brand of the band is reinforced through the key components of the
438   Danijela Bogdanovic

official website (news archive, monthly newsletter, music samples, album cover art-
work, record and tour news, notice board, links to other websites selling band mer-
chandise, and so on). The official website is seen as a vehicle for promoting the band
as well as the space for the fans to communicate with each other. With SNSs’ added
functionality of fans “speaking” directly to the band, bandhood and the brand ought to
be even more closely guarded as there is a danger that the site may get swamped with
fans’ identities and unwanted posts (comments, images).
As I have suggested, the absence of women from the most prominent parts of band’s
profiles was striking, used to foreground the band’s collectivity and promote a sense
of professional distance. There was, however, one significant exception to this rule: a
dedicated female fan who engages with the band frequently by posting affirmative and
gratifying comments about their recordings, live performances, videos, or photographs.
As an active participant the female fan is seen as contributing to the overall image of the
band, her praise and approval positively contributing to the status of the band. Positive
comments from female fans often resulted in keeping a particular band photograph on
the profile for a very long time. This was the case with the Unstoppables, who kept a
photograph of the band on their site for two years, with these comments attached to it:

Comment 1:
ach your looking braw boys*ecchhem* its a very interesting photo you got here x
Comment 2:
What a goodlooking band you are x

And a selection of comments next to a photograph of a live performance:

Comment 1:
Truely Awesome. You Rocked my world woooooo!!!
Comment 2:
if u cud see the first row of the audience me n fishkniiiicks cud b seen! i should throw a
leaving party for her n u cud come play! woooo! ps. cya nxt saturday hehe x x x

These comments by female fans reflect two of the key “ingredients” that all mainstream
bands I  observed reported as valuable in their marketability:  physical attractiveness
and entertainment value. Similarly, a well-established and successful band with whom
I had a number of research-based offline and online encounters have kept a particular
band photograph on their site for more than two years, with these comments written
by female fans:

Comment 1:
Bloodyell John, have you brushed your hair!!! blimey . . . looking very dapper i must
say gentlemen . . .
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    439

Comment 2:
hey!who are these minty looking boys?rock on man!x
Comment 3:
love love love this pic!! x

Bands tended to get comments from other bands too, usually the ones they share a
stage with on a particular night or whom they know as a part of their gigging circuit.
On the whole, they were positive. However, it was very rare to find a comment about
the physical appearance of a musician written by a male fan or a fellow musician. On
the whole, male musicians and male fans commented on technical aspects of perfor-
mance (e.g., sound quality, level of instruments, quality of vocals), record sleeve art-
work, or the production value of new songs. For example:

Comment 1:
Awesome set ye played the other night!
Comment 2:
Hello. New songs are sounding lovely! Would love to hear them augmented in a full
band scenario! Get on it chief! I’ll play drums!
Comment 3:
Hey guys! The feedback from everyone who came last night was really good! Just wanted
to say thanks for your awesome performance! Your presence was much appreciated!

Comment 4:
just listened to that bbc session, was quality, last song was beautiful, hats off to you
guys, the harmonies were lush, take care x

Comment 5:
new songs are PURE class- have been enquiring about gigs will definitely get something
together this summer. really great songs and sound- it’s so refreshing to hear something
that isn’t the shite tuneless guff that’s popular at the moment. keep up the good work!

Music-related interaction on SNSs including MySpace can be understood as gen-

dered in the sense that different behavioral modes are adopted by men and women,
reflecting the roles played by men and women within wider cultural domains.
Though undeniably there were and are female bands and performers with profiles
on SNSs, women on the whole tended to be visible or invisible fans and invisible
girlfriends and friends of a band. Their interaction with bands predominantly con-
sisted of making remarks and comments about visual elements of bands’ output: vid-
eos, photographs, and visual presence in live performances. Men who frequented
MySpace profiles were likely to be other musicians, male friends or male fans, who
on the whole focused on music rather than visual representation of bands under
440   Danijela Bogdanovic

scrutiny. Their comments were likely to refer to the musical quality of recordings
and performances, or to contain invitations and suggestions for collaborations. And
while the male fans avoided commenting on a band’s image, they tended to fore-
ground their knowledge of a band’s musical output, outlining how many times they
have seen the band live or providing in-depth information on an obscure recording,
or lesser known previous incarnations of the band.
Collecting, of artifacts and knowledge as a masculine trait and a rite of passage (Straw
1997), becomes visual in virtual environments. If we accept that identity is verified and
inscribed through visually represented connections, then who is included within the
network becomes a significant determinant of self-identification of bands. The original
idea behind bands’ presence on MySpace was for bands to “collect” fans, who will help
increase the profile of the band, spread the buzz, attend their gigs, and download their
songs. For some bands, who is included in the “collection” is equal in importance to the
number of acquired “friends”; the band is only as worthy as the networks it is a part of
and the connections it has. The Unstoppables were typical in their choice of top friends,
with their top sixteen including two radio DJs (BBC and Scotland XFM) who played
the Unstoppables’ music on their radio shows, two fellow musicians whom they knew
personally, five bands with whom they had musical and geographic connections, one
well-known band and one established musician whom they supported live, an inde-
pendent record company, one group of music promoters, and one venue. The top six-
teen did not include any fans, females, or nonmusic connections. A private MySpace
correspondence with a Dublin-based musician I interacted with frequently confirmed
some of these patterns and strategies:

Jerry: I think bands put other bands in tops, mostly as a way of tipping their hat to
what has influenced them . . . it’s a very comfortable way of doing that, rather than
spelling it out to a journalist, otherwise it’s bands that your friends are in . . . with
radio stations the band is most likely saying thanks for the support, again it’s the
subtlety of the message that is appealing . . . then that definitely extends into build-
ing an identity, as you say . . . i think the building of identity is the key appeal of the
whole thing . . . it’s so easy to do your own visuals too and that’s been important part
of music since day one! . . . though i think the real interesting part is that we don’t
see it as an “online” identity, we see it as “this is us,” plain and simple.

Early research findings on online interaction and social networks (e.g., Hodkinson
2007, boyd 2007), indicated that social networking sites support and facilitate mainte-
nance of already existent relationships. The issue of social capital in relation to social
networking sites (specifically Facebook) is explored by Ellison et al. (2007), who sug-
gest that there is always an offline element that connects users, such as shared class
(room) or school attendance.
Although this may have been applicable to some bands with MySpace profiles (e.g.,
bands who re-formed and are tracing their previous connections), for most up-and-
coming bands acquiring new fans and broadening their networks was of the utmost
importance. Bands, unlike individual users, were unlikely to refuse friend requests
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    441

from random fans. However, individual band members who created individual pro-
files, in addition to a band’s profile, were likely to be making connections that are more
in line with existing findings about online interaction, that of transferring offline con-
nections into online environments and the enmeshment of the two.

Embodiments

Writing about the “audio-visual turn,” Vernallis (2013) uses the notion of “the media
swirl” and the practice of “mixing board aesthetics” to conceptualize and contextualize
the new audiovisual culture, which according to her is indebted to music video practice
of “reconfiguring images and sounds” (ibid., 4). In this section I explore how MySpace
has facilitated some of those reconfigurations, and question the extent to which domi-
nant representations of gender have been challenged within and by this new environ-
ment, in self-representation of bands I observed.
The first wave of academic writing on music video followed the launch and success of
MTV in the 1980s. Informed by structuralist and poststructuralist approaches applied
in the study of film, it was later criticized for its overt focus on music video as a visual
text, as opposed to examining how this textual form combines music and visuals to
create meaning. Kaplan (1987) focused on the visual aspects of the music video, which
according to her provided scope for a variety of gazes and positions. For Kaplan, such
positioning of the music video questioned the homogeneity of sex roles and boundaries
of other cultural categories (1987). Goodwin (1993) addressed the convergence of image
and music in music video, distinguishing it from traditional film narratives. According
to him, the attention ought to be given to the relationship between musical and visual
elements as well as contextual placing of the product and possibilities for “tie-ins” asso-
ciated with the consumption of any visual text.
The recent revival in writing about music video places is within the broader con-
text of Web 2.0, characterized by participatory cultures within which co-production of
artifacts and meanings occurs. For Railton and Watson (2011), music video is a “ubiq-
uitous cultural product” owing to its multiplatform presence and on-demand viewing.
Understanding masculinity as “discursive, contingent, constructed and performed”
(ibid., 123) and adopting Connell’s notion (1987) of “hegemonic masculinity” as plu-
ral, nonmonolithic, and dynamic, they discuss the absence of the male body in music
video, achieved through employment of the strategies of deletion, displacement, and
disguise.
The shift from textual to visual representation of identity has been tremendously
transformative and embraced by all the bands under scrutiny, but particularly those
who had not had those opportunities prior to establishment of online platforms such
as MySpace. In 2006 it was difficult to find a band profile that did not feature a range
of band photographs. By 2007 it became a challenge to find a profile that did not
have a video of a band. In 2013 social networking is characterized by cross-platform
442   Danijela Bogdanovic

interaction, where one’s Facebook profile features links to videos on YouTube or sound
files on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, where Twitter updates are synced with Facebook
status updates and so forth, creating a further challenge of managing representation in
front of several audiences and across several platforms. The two main types of video
produced and featured by the bands I  studied on MySpace were recordings of live
performances and narrative music videos created to accompany a song. The former
were more prevalent, with bands having little input in their making as they tended
to be recorded by friends and fans using digital cameras or even mobile phones, and
uploaded to YouTube, from where they are embedded on MySpace profiles. They were
often of poor quality, thanks to their aim of capturing a live performance rather than
making a creative piece of media. However, with the increasing availability and rela-
tively low cost of mobile recording devices, a band performing live will usually be aware
of being recorded, and such awareness is likely to alter their performance. Generally,
individual band members will strive to adopt more of a “rock ’n’ roll” persona through
onstage behavior (posturing) and interaction with the audience, echoing the behavior
of well-polished, successful, mainstream acts. The performing body, rather than music
or lyrics, becomes the focus in capturing the performance. In this type of video the
male body is not deleted, displaced, or disguised (Railton and Watson 2011) but rather
exposed and foregrounded. In his discussion of indie rock, Bannister (2006) argues
that many indie bands disliked music videos and particularly their association with
MTV: “videos required a ‘fake’ performance (lip synching was especially abhorred) and
emphasized personal appearance, as opposed to sound” (81). Conversely, the ease with
which live can be captured and mediated in the digital age has meant that the recording
of the live performance became a common way of authenticating and promoting the
band and its image.
Two of the five bands I was observing featured semiprofessionally or professionally
done videos on their profiles. The Unstoppables uploaded three original videos on their
site, as well as clips of numerous live performances during the time of my observation.
The first video included the entire band and visually mapped on the lyrical narrative
of the song. It featured a bare-footed female protagonist, wearing a slinky, transpar-
ent dress on a cold, cloudy day, playing a part of a seductress, fading in and out of the
frame. Individual band members acted out a “desperate” seeking out and “hunting” of
the elusive creature, only to be brought together (as a group, the band) by their chase,
in the final scene, and with the woman absent. The portrayal of the woman as a siren-
like seductress, enticing the band to follow her before abandoning them, coupled with
the closure of the video reinforced the idea of bandhood and unity, with the woman/
temptress safely removed from the frame.
The second video captured a live acoustic rooftop performance dominated by low
angles and extreme close-up shots of two guitarists’ faces and hands, as well as detailed,
fetishizing close-ups of their guitars. The focus shifted between faces and other parts of
the musicians’ bodies (shoulders, necks, arms, and knees) and the “bodies” and “necks”
of their guitars. In addition to its voyeuristic qualities and compartmentalizing of the
body, the video drew the viewer’s attention to musicians’ close relationships with their
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    443

instruments, against the expanse of the sky and empty space around them. Close-ups
of picking the guitar strings foreground the skill, mastery, and control of the instru-
ment. This was contrasted with the lyrics describing a sense of loss and portraying
vulnerability, as well as the falsetto qualities of their voices. Such deliberate focus on the
performing body invited many comments on the band’s MySpace profile, for example:

Comment:
Nice video. It has some particularly nice shots of Luke’s crotch and Adam’s facial hair.
Give the fans what they want eh? Xx

Shot and edited by the band members, the third video appeared in the second part of
2008. It did not comply with the forms and conventions of a music video, although it
included some of the band’s recordings within the footage. I was drawn to it because of
its attempts to “archive” band-related practices through the themes of bandhood, fun,
creativity, success, and ordinariness. This was achieved through choice of content (clips
from rehearsals, snippets of interviews with band members, individual members doing
“ordinary” things such as riding a bicycle and ordering food, an excerpt from their
BBC live in session interview), as well as through visual choices made in the process of
editing such as using filters to achieve a vintage quality. Additionally, the footage incor-
porated fragments of several songs, thus quite literally “tying in” various aspects of the
bands’ existence: song writing, practicing, recording, performing, socializing—doing
a band.
The majority of other attempts at video making that I observed included use of a
cut-up technique, where live footage is combined with stills and rehearsal or recording
shots. This may have been the result of financial restraints or simply limited knowl-
edge of filmmaking and editing techniques. Kaplan (1987) identified five main types of
video being shown on MTV: romantic, socially conscious, nihilist, classical, and post-
modernist, examining their style, treatment of love/sex, and authority. Amateur or
semiprofessional music videos I observed on MySpace tended to fall into either clas-
sical (retaining linear narrative and maintaining the male gaze) or postmodernist (a
pastiche of nonlinear images) style categories. Classical type limits the multiplicity of
spectatorial positions (e.g., the Unstoppables’ described video above featuring a young
woman). However, the nonlinearity and experimentation of Kaplan’s postmodern type
provides the spectator with a possibility to construct meanings that are reliant less
on the spectatorial gender position and more on the familiarity with the techniques
used. In other words, the former is reliant on the content (plot, narrative, treatment of
“characters”) while the latter foregrounds the form (cinematic techniques/language).
The possibilities for visual representation brought about by new technologies are
exciting for bands. Seeing one’s band enacting a narrative in a music video or simply
seeing footage of oneself performing live can be stimulating and inspiring. Additionally,
a visual record or live footage allows bands to assess their performance and work on
their image and sound. At the same time, operating with nonexistent or limited bud-
gets, bands are reliant on their own technical knowledge and limited by their creative
444   Danijela Bogdanovic

abilities (an excellent musician does not necessarily make a decent filmmaker), subse-
quently following well-trodden paths of music video narratives and rarely challenging
what Kaplan refers to as “homogeneity of sex roles” (ibid., 90). Nonetheless, the conver-
gence of textual (comments, blogs), visual (photographs, videos), and musical (sound)
elements made MySpace a multitextual platform that provided its participants with
many opportunities to write themselves into being. Meanings created by employment
of diverse representational tools complemented each other, bringing together a range
of contexts and a variety of practices, inscribing identities and expanding networks.

Conclusion

Online spaces, as gendered and gendering, are an important locale for the study of
identity formation and self-representations of bands and artists. While facilitating con-
tinuation of debates about materiality and disembodiment, the arrival and capabilities
of Web 2.0 have further foregrounded the Internet’s hybridity:  the co-existence and
enmeshment of image and text, synchronous and asynchronous communication, and
the proliferation of amateur and professional artifacts (Nakamura 2008).
The availability of and access to social networking representational “tools” have
allowed the bands and artists to write themselves into being visually, in addition to
existing within online social networks textually and musically. Although the shift in
status from digital objects to digital subjects had the potential to disrupt the dominant
representations of gender marked by hegemonic masculinity, homosocial practices,
and assignment of gender-specific spectatorial roles and positions, the artists scruti-
nized and discussed in my study tended to translate offline dynamics onto online plat-
forms. This was achieved by employing strategies such as active exclusion of women
from online band spaces and visual reinforcement of bandhood ties through choices
made in managing the groups’ visual capital, as well as through textual and musical
coding of gender.
In an age of ubiquitous music, which is experienced and enjoyed across platforms and
increasingly tied to visuals, examination of how identities are inscribed and enacted,
as well as managed through networks and in front of multiple audiences, is of signifi-
cance. Politics of style, commonly tied to commercial goals, guided the visual represen-
tational choices of the bands under scrutiny, resulting in nondisruption of hierarchical
and hegemonic gender relationships of offline worlds. The reemergence and centrality
of the body in the representation and negotiation of online identities, as well as its sig-
nificance in live performance, calls for an approach that incorporates theorizing about
the importance of spectatorial gaze in co-creation of musical and gendered meanings,
by artists and audiences.
 Bands in Virtual Spaces, Social Networking, and Masculinity    445

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 PA RT   S I X

S ON IC
E N V I RON M E N T S
A N D M U SIC A L
EXPERIENCE

Our first two chapters of Part Six move the sonic environment of music into the
app—the software portal into the virtual. Used in conjunction with mobile media tech-
nologies such as smartphones and tablets, for some it allows access to the virtual album
and a more immediate experience of favorite artists. For others it accesses a therapeutic
and hyperreal immersive experience, a simulation and resemblance of physical reality
through technological means. “From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment
Enhancing: Consuming Ambiance as Listening Practice” explores Ambiance, a sound-
scape app that, as Thomas Brett reveals, has utility as a “noise-masker, sleep-inducer,
virtual travel destination, and relaxation and meditation aid” (Chapter 24). His discus-
sion is contextualized by a one-hundred-year tradition of environmental sound lis-
tening practices, ranging from Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement, Pierre Schaeffer’s
musique concrète, John Cage’s 4’33, and Brian Eno’s ambient music to the documen-
tary research of R.  Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project and Irving Teibel’s
Environments recordings. Brett’s four ethnographic case studies connect to this history
and explore the functionality of the Ambiance app, providing insights on how users of
the app integrate it into their everyday listening practices to “relax, focus, daydream,
450    Part Six: Sonic Environments and Musical Experience

and fall asleep” (ibid.). Despite sound preferences being shaped by individual personal
needs, every listener uses “Ambiance to create immersive, ambient soundtracks that
make use of both nature and human-made soundscapes” (ibid.). The case studies “sug-
gest that listening to soundscapes is no longer the specialist’s niche of the field recordist
or the environmental sound composer. Indeed, with apps like Ambiance, soundscapes
have become an accessible means of personal environment enhancing” (ibid.). As Brett
concludes, the listener uses Ambiance as “a way to cultivate mindfulness and experi-
ence a virtual, technological nature” (ibid.).
Whereas Brett’s discussion of ambiance apps hints at the utopian, Jeremy Wade
Morris reveals a more dystopian involvement, namely, how the Internet’s nondis-
criminatory reach has lent itself to commercial manipulations and capitalist practices.
As his research demonstrates, the market for popular recorded music is “indelibly
linked to its technologies of production, distribution and consumption” (Chapter 25)
and although musicians and labels have been slower than other sectors to jump into
application production for mobile devices, major artists such Björk and Lady Gaga
have recently released expensive and expansive app-based virtual albums. As Morris
observes in his chapter “App Music,” countless emerging artists and tech compa-
nies are exploring new ways to combine music and software, suggesting “apps as an
increasingly viable avenue for packaging and delivery of the popular music commod-
ity” (ibid.). Not least, the idea of partitioning the same commodity into multiple rev-
enue streams and so multiplying the opportunities for purchases and upgrades has
become an attractive proposition for the commercial sector of the music industry,
which raises questions as to “how virtuality is mobilized in the service of market-
ing and adding value to the music product” (ibid.). As Morris concludes, “It is clear
that app albums use the notion of the virtual to offer a range of interactivities for
exploring an album, but it is also clear that virtuality is consistently and iteratively
put in service of further splintering the music commodity into multiple component
parts” (ibid.). App albums thus present both possibilities and problems as they medi-
ate our aesthetic and affective relationships with cultural goods like music. Their
artistic potential is exciting, but they are nonetheless limited by the constraints of
their format and platform. As Morris points out, “The lack of integration and con-
nection to the other musical commodities in a user’s library ultimately limits the use-
ability of app-based albums” (ibid.). Hence, although “app albums might enhance a
focus on the album as an entire artistic work, it stands as an impractical way of han-
dling, sorting, and consuming the digital music commodity” (ibid.). Questions are
also raised as to whether app albums encourage new kinds of meanings and whether
these differ, if at all, from our previous experiences with the music commodity, not
least when it is being exploited for its capitalist potential. It is an issue that is of cen-
tral significance to Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso’s investigation, in Chapter 26, into Finnish
micro-independent labels, which subscribe to an uncompromising aesthetic and are
critical of hegemonic music industries, valuing autonomy at the expense of commer-
cial success.
 Part Six: Sonic Environments and Musical Experience    451

As Kaitajärvi-Tiekso explains, micro labels “have a complex relationship with

virtual music culture, which—although useful—undermines their economic infra-
structure and challenges their subversive position in the field of cultural produc-
tion” (Chapter 26). As such, there is an ideological challenge, and his discussion of
Ektro Records provides an investigative case study of “a label trying to achieve a bal-
ance between virtual online and physical offline music cultures” (ibid.). “Alternative
Virtuality:  Independent Micro Labels Facing the Ideological Challenge of Virtual
Music Culture—The Case of Finnish Ektro Records” explores the tension between
physical recordings as “concrete, collectible works of art,” and digital music as “dis-
posable and superficial” (ibid.). As he notes, Ektro differs from other active inde-
pendent Finnish micro labels in its production ideology, which includes a specific
artistic manifesto with its catalog, and an informed and radical critique of the cul-
ture industry by its founder, Jussi Lehtisalo. As such, Ektro relates to a longstand-
ing countercultural ideology, thus providing an essential cultural continuum from
the Finnish Underground of the 1960s, championing artistic autonomy and giving
“a voice to those to whom it has traditionally been denied by the gatekeepers, or the
record industry” (ibid.). Micro labels’ desire for autonomy is an important consid-
eration in distribution of recordings, and even though Ektro are using the Internet,
their online shop “not only sells its own productions but also functions as a ‘distro’
(ibid.) or small-scale order distribution company. “Electronic fanzines, mailing lists,
blogs, discussion forums, and social media like Facebook … have also generated
global fan networks” (ibid.), but as Kaitajärvi-Tiekso explains, whereas the “distribu-
tion of—and therefore access to—micro label releases has expanded, the profits used
to fund them have declined proportionally” (ibid.). The streaming service Spotify,
for example, in spite of its huge popularity in Finland since 2008, has not been eco-
nomically productive for micro labels. As Lehtisalo argues, “legal digital distribution
[is] a mere tool to make money” (cited in ibid.), with the result that “unauthorized
downloading of music is actually better for micro labels than the present situation,
where the profit appears to go mainly to the digital businesses, which are involved
neither in producing the records nor in creating the music and thus run no risk”
(Chapter 26). As such, Ektro distributes digitally to Spotify and iTunes, but “the focus
of the label remains on collectible physical releases” and the free virtual distribution
of recordings, where “the risks involved are also part of the excitement of releasing
records” (ibid.).
As Kaitajärvi-Tiekso observes, in the contemporary world “the problem is not
the virtual space but how it is territorialized, or colonized” (ibid.). This concern
is also relevant to Michael Audette-Longo’s investigation into “CBC Radio 3, an
online radio station that specializes in the broadcast and promotion of independent
[indie] Canadian music” (Chapter 27). More specifically, “Everybody Knows There
Is Here: Surveying the Indexi-local in CBC Radio 3” explores how CBC uses local
regions, institutions, and geographical locations to organize the website’s “database
452    Part Six: Sonic Environments and Musical Experience

logic” and how this, in turn, produces a narrative structure for CBC Radio 3’s indie
music programming by creating a semblance of localized contact and immediacy
(the virtual image of the indexi-local).
How CBC’s production of remediation interweaves with the service’s textual rep-
resentation of Canada’s myriad local music scenes, and the website’s representation
of CBC Radio 3 as “the home of independent Canadian music” (ibid.), thus raises
questions as to whether its operational mandate meshes with a more general treat-
ment of indie music as a localized subcultural experience that facilitates contact
and connection. The importance of place and local scenes as sites of empowerment
for indie music’s struggle against the recording industry’s corporatism provides an
insight into its history, where localized modes of production place a specific empha-
sis on aesthetic quality and the authenticity of localized musical experience. This is
reflected in how “the circulation of local regions in Radio 3 through DJ banter, news
stories, blog posts, and artist information locates the content and station as local
and Canadian through the recurring stress on the diverse regions and cities associ-
ated with Canadian indie music” (ibid.). As Audette-Longo observes, “Two iterations
of local regions have been identified:  One produces the ‘feel’ of the local through
a recurrent textual emphasis on local regions, and the other involves the circula-
tion of local regions as metadata organizing the circulation of data hosted by CBC
Music” (ibid.). “Abridging the sorts of interactions with the service’s database logic
with theories of virtuality indicates that individual understandings of Canadian indie
music emerges, in part, by interacting with the digital music service. The service, in
turn, draws on the existent knowledge and musical practices of musicians and listen-
ers alike to facilitate its functionality” (ibid.). At the same time, Indie’s “continued
circulation within CBC Music suggests … the broader and continued allure (and
malleability) of a subculture in which not only ‘our band could be your life,’ but also
‘our metadata could be your scene’ ” (ibid.).
Our final chapter of Part Six, “Mind Usurps Program:  Virtuality and the ‘New
Machine Aesthetic’ of Electronic Dance Music,” also discusses the evolving rela-
tionship between human (organic) and machine (computer), a central issue in the
discourse surrounding virtuality and music. As Benjamin Halligan explains, “With
respect to popular music … it was as if the tension between the idea of ‘electronic’
and ‘music’ dissipated once ‘music’ is qualified as essentially ‘not really music’ or
‘nonmusic’ by dint of that pejorative term ‘virtual’ ” (Chapter 28).
His premise is developed through an analysis of electronic dance music (EDM), at
the point of acid house, whereby “disco typically allowed the electronic to be a sound-
bed and beat for the human element of the music” (ibid.). As he explains, “What was
human arose from singing and playing instruments, with the resultant music then
‘treated’ and altered by the machine rather than, as would now become the case via
incorporation of the synthesizer into the computer (a move anticipated by machines
such as the Synclavier), the computer alone generating the music. EDM foregrounds
 Part Six: Sonic Environments and Musical Experience    453

the machine, which then constitutes the mise-en-scène of the sound, with a space
allowed for the human element” (ibid.). It is a thought that opens further the idea of
virtuality and how we experience the sonic environment of music: “The introduction
of the idea of virtuality allows EDM ‘before’ (principally disco, but also Motorik and
synthesizer pioneers of the 1970s such as Moroder, Wendy Carlos, and Jean-Michel
Jarre—analog EDM)1 to be considered in modernist terms, the integration of man
and industrial machine, with the latter at the service of the former. EDM ‘proper’—
that is, digital—is then postmodern, the integration of machine with machine, as a
closed loop.” As such, “The idea of virtuality—in its earliest understandings, in the
sense of ‘virtually human’ or ‘not quite human’—shifts the parameters of the debate
on computer-generated music” (ibid.). The virtualness of digital EDM is, as Halligan
observes, “ ‘post-human’ music that explores its own possibilities rather than offering
a mimicking of received forms of music. … The DJ … confronts panels of switches
and faders, and interacts with laptops and memory sticks, as he sequences and splices
extant music.” As such, the “bank of machines is a way of accessing, and so calling
into existence, another realm of information—and one that becomes self-sustaining
and infinitely mutable. The sense that data and information are already ‘out there’ in
the ether, and can be accessed and channeled via the computer, makes for a sense of
virtuality that is spiritlike: unknowable, invisible, ever-present” (ibid.). As Halligan
observes, “whether this state of affairs is depoliticizing and stupefying or liberating
and empowering remains … a matter of debate. … The common ground, however,
is clear: empowerment through art as a didactic and liberating engagement with the
proletariat” (ibid.). EDM, it is argued, “seems to contain an imagining of its own
constituency. That is, the EDM track projects the idea of its own enlightened listener,
while the enlightened listener can seek to fulfill that role” (ibid.).

Note
1. Particularly, for Jarre, the albums Oxygène and Equinoxe of 1976 and 1978.
 CHAPTER 24

F rom Environme nta l

S ou nd to V i rt ua l
E nvironm ent E nha nc i ng
Consuming Ambiance as Listening Practice

Thomas Brett

Since 2008, digital applications or “apps” for portable mobile devices such as cell-
phones, laptops, and tablets have become primary means of engaging with computer
technology and the virtual world. Hundreds of these concern music and sound, among
them numerous apps that play recordings of nature soundscapes and other sounds
for therapeutic listening.1 This article explores the history, design, uses, and social
meanings of Ambiance, a popular soundscape app. The first section contextualizes
Ambiance’s soundscapes within a tradition of environmental sound listening prac-
tices, from Erik Satie’s furniture music (musique d’ameublement), Pierre Schaeffer’s
concrete music (musique concrète), John Cage’s 4’33”, and Brian Eno’s ambient music,
to R.  Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project and Irving Teibel’s Environments
nature field recordings. The second section explores the design and consumer use of
Ambiance, including the process by which its soundscapes are created and the app’s
connections to freesound.org, a popular online sound database. This section also
draws on interviews with four Ambiance listeners to show how the app is used as noise
masker, sleep inducer, virtual travel destination, and relaxation and meditation aid.
The section concludes with a consideration of the formal and associative qualities of
several Ambiance soundscape types as sources of their therapeutic power. The third
section examines Ambiance listening practices as a means of cultivating mindfulness
and simulating a relationship with the natural world. This section offers a notion of
virtuality as a simulation and resemblance of physical reality through technological
means, drawing on psychologist Peter H. Kahn’s theory of technological nature (2011) to
suggest that recordings of nature soundscapes are kinds of virtualities that reproduce
physical worlds, audibly similar enough to real environments that they can function as
456   Thomas Brett

perceptual stand-ins for them. The concluding section suggests that using Ambiance
to listen to nature soundscapes is a useful therapeutic practice, especially for those
without regular access to nature.

A Tradition of Ambient Music

Listening and Environmental
Sound as Ambiance

I begin by situating the Ambiance app in the context of some of its conceptual pre-
cursors. Ambiance builds on an almost one-hundred-year history of conceiving of
music and environmental sound as ambiance. The idea of music as ambiance can be
traced back to 1917, when the French composer Erik Satie coined the term “furniture
music” (musique d’ameublement) to describe a repetitive, humdrum music that fur-
nishes a space by functioning as background sound. In brief pieces such as “Forged
Iron Tapestry” and “Phonic Floor Tiles” (each just a few measures in length), Satie
intended the music to be repeated indefinitely, to mask other nonmusical sounds
“without imposing itself,” and to create an emotionally neutral mood (2004, 63).2 Thus
with furniture music Satie conceived a looping music as environmental enhancer. This
idea was formalized in the 1930s by the American Muzak Company, which began using
recently developed radio technology to deliver music to factories and workplaces with
the goal of altering their acoustic environments. Muzak developed a technique to trans-
form popular songs into deliberately bland background music that would not be overtly
distracting, yet function on a subliminal level to increase worker productivity.3 In the
1940s, French radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer conceived his “concrete music” (musique
concrète) radio art pieces using tape recordings of environmental sounds. His best-
known piece, Étude aux chemins de fer (“Railroad Study”), features numerous train
sounds edited together to create a sequence of railroad soundscapes. Whereas Satie and
the Muzak Company shared the goal of creating background music that did not dis-
tract the listener, Schaeffer’s work focuses on the process of listening itself, proposing
an orientation he calls reduced listening “that ignores the source and origins of sound”
so as to focus on the “sonorous object” (l’object sonore) as “pure phenomenological
experience” (Demers 2010, 173, 175).
The phenomenology of listening characterizes 4’33”, a composition of silence devised
by the American experimental composer John Cage in 1951. It offers listeners an oppor-
tunity to attend closely to any and all incidental environmental sounds that might
occur during a performance of the piece. From Cage’s Zen Buddhism–influenced per-
spective, all sounds are equally music and musical, and 4’33” expressed a philosophy
that took seriously their significance. Cage’s dissolution of musical foreground and
nonmusic background, Muzak’s environmental music, and Satie’s furniture music all
coalesced in the ambient music of the English producer Brian Eno. In the early 1970s,
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    457

Eno’s approach was inspired by his hearing an LP recording of harp music playing at
low volume dissolve into the sound of rain falling outside his window. The blurring of
these two sound sources suggested to Eno a gentle tonal music that would not demand
one’s full attention but rather be “a place, a feeling, an all-around tint to [one’s] sonic
environment” (2004, 96). In the liner notes for his recording Music for Airports (1978),
Eno defined ambient music as sound that “must be able to accommodate many levels of
listening without enforcing one in particular; it must as ignorable as it is interesting.”4
Interest in recording and listening analytically to the ambient sounds of nature devel-
oped in the late 1960s, when field recordists began mapping and studying the acoustic
soundworlds or soundscapes of urban and rural environments. Led by composer and
writer R.  Murray Schafer in Canada, this research conceived of the soundscape and
its audition as a grand musical composition, recalling Cage’s notion that music can
include all sounds. Schafer’s World Soundscape Project aimed to document and catalog
diverse sonic environments on stereo recordings as well as encourage the study and
preservation of endangered sounds.5 Several publications emerged out of this research,
including Schafer’s The Tuning of the World (1977), a theoretical and practical guide for
listening to the everyday sounds of rural and urban acoustic environments, as well as
works by fellow Project members Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp.6 The World
Soundscape project also led to development of the interdisciplinary field of acous-
tic ecology, “a composite of scholarly, artistic, and political approaches for studying
sound’s relationship to the environment” (Demers 2010, 121), and inspired the practice
of soundscape composition, a form of electronic music containing audio field record-
ings of specific locations whose aim, notes Truax, is to “re-design the soundscape, and
reawaken people’s perceptual appreciation of its importance” (1996, 53).7 The legacies
of the World Soundscape Project’s recordings and the field of acoustic ecology have
been carried on in the practices of sound artists and researchers who document various
locales through audio recording.8
In the 1970s, American field recordist Irving S. Teibel released a series of soundscape
recordings on his Syntonic Research record label, appropriating the documentary
and analytical approach of Schafer’s World Soundscape Project for therapeutic ends.
Teibel’s Environments series comprised eleven extended field recordings (two side-long
tracks per LP) of ocean waves, forest streams, rainstorms, winter blizzards, animal and
insect sounds, and other nature soundscapes. In pursuit of a hyperreal and immersive
listening experience, Teibel processed his recordings through EQ filtering and addition
of synthesized tones. The subtitles of the Environments records had scientific-sounding
connotations that alluded to the records’ intended therapeutic use. For instance, the
cover of Environments 9, a recording of Pacific Ocean and Caribbean lagoon sounds
(Fig.  24.1), reads suggestively, “turn your hi-fi into a psychoacoustic device.” Other
releases in the collection promised “a new easy method of relieving tension” and
“totally new concepts in stereo sound.”9 Teibel’s Environments recordings inspired simi-
lar collections in the following decades. Numerous New Age music releases combined
nature soundscapes with synthesized and electronic musical textures to sonically evoke
a sense of being “relaxing, calming, and meditative” (Hall 1994, 23). These recordings
458   Thomas Brett

Figure  24.1  Syntonic Research Inc.’s Environments series of soundscape recordings, Disc 9
(photo by author)

situated electronic sounds in nature, while simultaneously giving nature’s soundscapes

an electronic soundtrack. A notable example of this approach is Wendy Carlos’s Sonic
Seasonings (1972), which mixes synthesizer music with quadraphonic recordings of
nature sounds. In the liner notes for the recording, producer Rachel Elkind (1972)
recalls Satie’s furniture music and Eno’s ambient concept in describing Sonic Seasonings
as “designed to be a part of the décor, so to speak—a sonic ambience that enhances the
listener’s total environment [. . .] Sonic Seasonings take listeners out of their environ-
ment and into the countryside of their fantasy.”
More than forty years after the documentary research of Schafer’s World Soundscape
Project and Teibel’s Environments series, soundscapes are easy to come by online, and
the ubiquity of digital recording technology has spurred websites that aggregate all
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    459

Figure 24.2  The freesound project (www.freesound.org; screenshot by author)

types of nature, industrial, and musical instrument sounds. One of the most prominent
of these websites is freesound.org, a collaborative project founded in 2005 and built
around Creative Commons–licensed audio samples (see Fig. 24.2).10 True to its name,
freesound is free to use, and anyone can browse, upload, and download sounds for use
in their own creative work in accordance with the site’s Creative Commons Sampling
Plus 1.0 license. The range of sounds at freesound is vast, among them thousands of
musical instrument samples and field recordings of nature soundscapes. For example, a
search for “rain” reveals more than fifteen hundred rainstorm recordings from all over
the world uploaded by amateur recordists.

The Ambiance App: Design and Use

It is with this one-hundred-year history of music and environmental sound as ambi-

ance that we arrive at the Ambiance app (see Fig.  24.3). Created in 2008 by Matt
Coneybeare, a computer programmer and musician in California, the first version of
the app included a few looped audio samples of white noise, rain, and wind sounds.
Released at the Apple App Store for $0.99, Ambiance reached number two on the
store’s sales charts and continues to be a popular download six years later. Indeed, doz-
ens of positive online reviews at the App Store suggest that many listeners have made
Ambiance’s soundscapes a part of their everyday listening by using the app to manage
their personal “audio environment” (Kassabian 2013, 16). Coneybeare characterizes his
460   Thomas Brett

Figure 24.3  Ambiance app home screen (screenshot by author)

app as an “environment enhancer designed to help create the perfect ambient atmo-
sphere to relax, focus, or reminisce” (pers. comm., Apr. 1, 2011).
Ambiance’s home screen interface lets users browse and download sounds, create
and share a personal sound library, make playlists and mixes of several sounds, and
record new sounds for use in the app. A click on the Store icon opens Ambiance’s
sound library, which is organized into twenty-seven categories, ranging from
Animals to Wind. Each category contains numerous sounds. For instance, Insects
offers twenty-one varieties, from “Merloth Park Crickets” to “Suburban Crickets,”
while Ocean offers fifty sounds, from “North Sea at St Cyrus” to “Yyteri Beach.” In
all, there are thousands of sounds in Ambiance that users can download for free,
and new sounds are added to the app regularly. According to Coneybeare, the most
downloaded sounds are nature soundscapes—especially rain and thunderstorm
sounds, ocean waves and water, and forest sounds. Other popular sounds are wind
chimes, Tibetan overtone chanting, whale sounds, binaural tones, and ambient
electronic music.
Ambiance’s library of soundscapes is mostly derived from the vast freesound.org
archive.11 Under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license, freesound allows
users “to sample, mash-up, or otherwise creatively transform” its audio samples “for
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    461

commercial or noncommercial purposes.”12 Coneybeare processes and loops the

freesound recordings himself so that they can be listened to as continuous sound-
scapes, and also to “creatively transform” them and avoid violating the terms of the
Sampling Plus 1.0 license.13 First, he applies a low-pass equalization filter to reduce
the recording’s low-frequency noise, such as rumble and hiss, which can interfere
with the clarity of the main sound. Second, he locates and removes human sounds
such as “door slams, noticeable human speech, and [car horn] honking” that might
be noticed after repeated listening and thus detract from the flow of the record-
ing (and the fantasy of a “pure” nature soundscape unspoiled by human presence;
pers. comm., Apr. 1, 2011). He also creates a second audio track in his audio editing
software, taking a portion of the end of the original recording and placing it at the
beginning of the new track to create a volume cross-fade between the two tracks.
When the two audio files are looped, the cross-fade creates the illusion of an end-
less and seamless soundscape. Coneybeare mixes down the crossfaded audio tracks
into a gapless MP3 file for use in Ambiance.14 Finally, he writes an impressionis-
tic description of each soundscape to give Ambiance listeners an overview of its
contents.15

Consumer Use of Ambiance:

Four Case Studies

In 2011, Coneybeare helped me contact three Ambiance users, Lilith, Jackson, and
Adam, who were beta testers for an early version of the app. Another user named Erica
responded to my call on the Ambiance online forum for volunteers willing to fill out
a listening questionnaire. In 2011 and 2012, the four of them corresponded with me by
email, answering questions of mine regarding why they use Ambiance app and how
they integrate it into their everyday listening practices. They also graciously sent me
MP3s and screenshots of their favorite mixes so I could hear their soundscapes. My
email correspondence with them is the basis of the four brief case studies to which
I now turn.

Lilith
Lilith K. is thirty-seven years old and lives in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. She down-
loaded Ambiance because of her interest in ambient, drone, and electronic binaural
sounds.16 She typically uses the app late at night to block out sounds in her neigh-
borhood, manage stress, and relieve anxiety. Her strategy is to listen to ten minutes
of sound while lying down just before sleep. She also listens while reading, shopping,
or exercising to help her stay focused. Lilith enjoys cicadas, crickets, rain, binaural
462   Thomas Brett

tones, and Tibetan monk chant because these sounds let her mind “just go blank.”17
She uses Ambiance’s remix function, blending binaural tones with the other nature
soundscapes, especially “all of the rain and thunderstorm sounds. It hardly rains like
that [in Houston] unless there’s a tropical thunderstorm off the coast.” She listens to
Ambiance’s soundscapes the same way she listens to music, as background sound:
“I pop my earbuds in and do whatever—work out, cook or read” (pers. comm., May
6, 2011). Lilith’s favorite Ambiance mix (Fig. 24.4) combines binaural tones (“Binaural
Tone”) with Thai jungle sounds (“Thai Jungle”). This mix has a low-pitched binaural
tone that slowly pulsates lending a somewhat ominous drone to the tropical jungle
insect and bird soundscape.

Figure 24.4  Lilith’s “Close your eyes” mix of binaural tones and Thai jungle sounds
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    463

Jackson
Jackson E. is a twenty-year-old university student in Florida who uses Ambiance sev-
eral times a week as a sleep and meditation aid to help him “relax and focus” and while
studying in the library “where there is no sound to escape from.” Jackson’s preference is
for wind and water soundscapes, but his favorite Ambiance sound is “Thinking,” a gentle
New Age music loop that consists of slow acoustic guitar arpeggios (playing intervals of
fifths and octaves) and a synthesized keyboard drone. Jackson uses Ambiance’s remix
function to mix the “Thinking” sound “with running water, birds, and wind chimes”
(Fig. 24.5). Similar to Lilith’s mix but with four sound sources instead of two (“Evening
Birdsong,” “Outdoor Fountain,” “Tea Garden Wind Chimes,” and “Thinking”), Jackson’s

Figure  24.5 Jackson’s “Thinking” mix of birdsong, outdoor fountain, wind chimes, and
ambient electronic music sounds
464   Thomas Brett

soundscape also has a somewhat ominous quality to it. Although the guitar arpeggios
outline a tonality in A, the addition of the “Tea Garden Wind Chimes” sound with its
pitches of B-flat and E-flat creates a Locrian-sounding scale. For Jackson, listening to
Ambiance is different from listening to music in that “music is a social thing” that he
listens to in the company of others, while he listens to Ambiance when he is alone or
wants to create the sensation of being alone (pers. comm., Apr. 7, 2011). (See Fig. 24.5.)

Adam
Adam F.  is a twenty-seven-year old from Dallas, Texas, who uses Ambiance mostly
to help him fall asleep and wake up in the morning. For him, listening to Ambiance
is different from listening to music in that the app is a “utility, not so much a source
of entertainment,” used mainly to suppress distractions and help him fall asleep and
wake up. Adam’s favorite sleep-inducing sounds are white noise, distant rain, and the
sounds of snoring. In the morning, he prefers what he calls “ ‘humans in nature’ sounds
like lawn sprinkler systems, children at a playground, and cars driving about the city”
programmed into Ambiance’s alarm clock feature. He uses Ambiance’s remix func-
tion “to mix and match [sounds] to build a ‘scene’ for falling asleep or waking up.”
For example, his “Sleeper Car” mix (Fig. 24.6) combines the sounds of cabin noise on

Figure 24.6  Adam’s “Sleeper Car” mix of snoring and train sounds

 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    465

a train (“Train—Onboard”) with light snoring (“Snoring”) “to simulate snoozing in

the sleeper car of a train” (pers. comm., Apr. 7, 2011). Like Lilith’s and Jackson’s mixes,
Adam’s “Sleeper Car” mix has a low-pitched rumbling hum to it, which in this case is
the muffled sound of a moving train as heard from an interior cabin. Against this rum-
bling hum are faint train horn blasts sounding intermittently in the background, along
with deep snoring sounds in the foreground of the mix. The combination of these two
sounds creates a soundscape of cinematic effect.

Erica
Erica W. is twenty-six years old and lives in Southern California, a few miles from the
beach. She describes herself as quite an anxious person who listens to Ambiance mostly
at night before bed to “feel safe and comfortable” (pers. comm., May 26, 2011). Erica
also suffers from tinnitus, a constant ringing sound in the ears, and she uses the app
to help her cope with this condition. She listens to dozens of nature and human-made
sounds, but her favorites are those that map domestic spaces, including “HVAC Unit,”
“Vent Duct,” “Shower,” and “Wii Menu,” a beguiling arpeggiating melody from the
Nintendo Wii home videogame console. Like Lilith, Jackson, and Adam, Erica makes
her own mixes combining household sounds with nature sounds. For example, in one
“real life” mix she calls “Home,” Erica combines the sounds of wind chimes, humming-
birds, a kitchen timer, dishes being washed, and the Wii videogame melody.
Although the accounts of Lilith, Jackson, Adam, and Erica are not a comprehensive
sampling of Ambiance listening practices, they nevertheless provide some sense of how
the app is used.18 Each listener has his or her sound preferences, which are shaped
by specific listening needs. For example, Lilith’s interest in drone and binaural sounds
draws her to the pulsating sounds of insects, and Tibetan overtone singing. Adam and
Erica use domestic and everyday human sounds though for different reasons; he uses
the sounds of children playing and car traffic as a wake-up alarm; while she uses the
sounds of air conditioners, vents, showers, and other household appliances to mask her
tinnitus and create a sense of safety. Each listener uses Ambiance as a noise masker (or
in the case of Jackson’s use of Ambiance in the noiseless library, as a silence masker),
sleep inducer, virtual travel destination, and relaxation or mediation aid. Each listener
also uses the app’s remixing function to make mixes of his or her favorite nature and
human-made sounds. Lilith’s blend of insect and binaural sounds; Jackson’s water, birds,
wind chimes, and the “Thinking” guitar sound; Adam’s train cabin noise and snoring
sounds; and Erica’s mix of household sounds are virtual listening spaces without real-
world equivalents. Lilith, Jackson, Adam, and Erica use Ambiance to create immersive
ambient soundtracks that make use of both nature and human-made soundscapes. In
this way, each listener is a composer-DJ of sorts, experimenting with “listening and
assembling” sound blends to experience the wonder of their effects (Rothenberg 2013,
165). In sum, these case studies suggest that listening to soundscapes is no longer the
specialist’s niche of the field recordist or the environmental sound composer. Indeed,
466   Thomas Brett

with apps like Ambiance, soundscapes have become an accessible means of personal
environment enhancing.19
With a sense of these listening practices, I now move to consider possible sources
of the therapeutic appeal of Ambiance soundscapes. First, I examine the formal attri-
butes of two popular sound types—water and insect sounds—to consider how they
might have inherently therapeutic qualities. Next, I explore how these and many other
Ambiance nature sounds are distinct from conventional musical presences and ful-
fill listeners’ preferences for natural sounds. Finally, I examine how Ambiance sound-
scapes can have therapeutic power by triggering in listeners nostalgia for their past
experiences.

Formal Attributes: From Water

and Wind’s White Noise to Insects’
Rhythmic Thrum

The sounds of ocean waves, rushing water, and wind all have a prominent white noise
component. White noise describes an auditory signal whose numerous frequency
bands each have equal intensities. Because of this equality of intensities, white noise is
perceived as a continuous droning, hissing sound (e.g., resembling the “sh” sound in
“wash”). Some studies indicate that the flowing, hissing quality of white noise is effec-
tive in improving concentration in office settings by masking other background noises20
and also useful for masking the effects of tinnitus (the perception of a ringing sound
in the ears from which Erica suffers), while others suggest that white noise decreases
cognitive performance in memory tasks.21 Whatever its potential positive or negative
impact on cognition, the drone of white noise sounds can have therapeutic impact
insofar as they induce a particular listening stance in which the noise itself ceases to
be noticed at all. It is this quality, philosopher Don Ihde notes, that allows white noise
to function as a background sound encouraging listeners to zone out and retreat into
themselves. Ihde describes the texture of this perceptual experience in which “ ‘white
sound’ [. . .] floats lazily around me, and I find I can easily retrieve into my ‘thinking self ’
and allow the floating perceptual presence to recede from focal awareness” (1976, 134).
Somewhat different from the white noise of water and wind sounds is the sound of cho-
rusing insects such as cicadas and crickets. This texture is a polyrhythmic and densely
layered pitched thrum or rhythmic humming with “thousands of rhythmic divisions
at all levels of pulse and design” (Rothenberg 2013, 92). Listening to interlocking and
overlapping insect sounds “composed of pulses and chirps produced at precise inter-
vals” (Pijanowski et al. 2011, 208) sounding simultaneously involves perceiving textures
that repeat yet continuously shift and change. In soundscapes such as Lilith’s favorite
“Thai Jungle,” insect chorusing produces a complex rhythmic drone out of a multitude
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    467

of brief percussive tones, creating an immersive soundscape that has an engagingly

3D-like perceptual depth.

Biophilia
The formal attributes of Ambiance soundscape types such as water sounds and insect
thrumming make them sonic presences with potential therapeutic appeal, but listeners
also bring their own experiences to their encounters with these sounds. Indeed, listen-
ing to recordings of ocean waves or chorusing crickets can trigger an aesthetic response
rooted in the human affinity for nature that contributes to the sounds’ therapeutic
value. Recognizing the positive impact of natural systems and processes on human
well-being, the biologist E. O. Wilson uses the term biophilia to describe the human
need to connect with nature. He defines biophilia as “the innate tendency to focus on
life and lifelike processes” and a “responding to a deep genetic memory of mankind’s
optimal environment” (1984, 1, 112). “The natural world,” he notes, “is the refuge of
the spirit, remote, static, richer even than human imagination” (ibid., 12).22 From this
perspective, the sound of ocean waves is appealing not only because of its formal white
noise characteristics; the sound may also resonate with listeners because of their beliefs
about its meaning and what it represents. In his article on the value of natural/nature
sounds, John Fisher asks how we can account “for the special value most of us ascribe
to nature sounds” as inherently appealing (1999, 28). Why, asks Fisher, do we generally
regard “man-made sounds as unattractive and the natural ones as attractive?” (ibid.)
He locates the perceived value and enchanting quality of nature sounds in both the
sounds themselves and how we listen to them. First, nature sounds like ocean waves
or chorusing crickets have an otherness that we find attractive because their sources
are beyond human agency and “they are not fully predictable or understandable by us”
(ibid., 36). Fisher elaborates:

Nature sounds are not like music, not intentionally produced to be appreciated as
expressive or aesthetic objects. Nor are they regimented into units as in music to be
appreciated in spatial and temporal separation from other sounds occurring simul-
taneously. They surround us, occurring at many levels and distances from us, with
no beginning or end. (38)

Second, Fisher suggests that our preference for natural sounds can also be explained
if we accept the idea that we hear sound causally and referentially (ibid.) and ascribe
affective power to a sound depending on what we believe it to be. Listening to a nature
soundscape and “being aware of its origin, we hear it as a powerful and richly com-
plex sound” that exemplifies “certain non-acoustic properties that we value, such as
interconnected belonging” (ibid., 35, 36). Thus, in their sonic complexity and the rich
web of associations to which hearing them gives rise, natural/nature sounds can accrue
perceived therapeutic qualities.23
468   Thomas Brett

Nostalgia
Finally, therapeutic power derives from the nostalgic aspect of particular Ambiance
soundscapes. As each Ambiance listener brings to listening encounters a personal his-
tory and unique experiences of place and subjectivity, the pursuit of nostalgia may
explain some of the sounds used to deliberately remind the person of specific past times
and places. Indeed, my follow-up discussions with Lilith, Adam, Jackson, and Erica
suggest that they interact with their Ambiance mixes by imagining they are situated
in places similar to or evoked by what they are listening to, drawing on their experi-
ences and memories of place and soundscape. For instance, Lilith speaks of imagining
“I’m in a place that I’ve visited before” when she listens: “Like beach sounds—I imag-
ine I’m at this beach that I visited in Thailand. Or like the ‘Oklahoma Summer Nights’
[sound]—it reminds me of actually visiting there.” Similarly, for Adam “the imagery the
sounds invoke” is a “launching board” for his imagination. Adam’s mix of train cabin
noise and light snoring, which simulates riding “in the sleeper car of a passenger train,”
is an attempt to build what he calls an “aural scene” recreating a train ride he used to
take as a child, noting he has “fond memories of taking a sleeper car from New Orleans
to Norfolk, Virginia, as a kid and that influenced the [mix].” Jackson imagines himself
in the place he is listening to, an imagining at the “back of my mind thinking about
whatever place the sound reminds me of.” And for Erica, the therapeutic power of her
mixes is “only effective if I imagine I am there.” Thus her “Home” mix prompts her to
“imagine that I’m sprawled out on the couch, watching TV, feeling warm and relaxed.”
In sum, each listener uses a soundscape mix as a virtual space onto which he or she can
attach memories. It is in this way that nostalgia contributes to the therapeutic power of
soundscape listening.

Soundscapes as Virtualities: Ambiance
Listening as Mindful Awareness
and Technological Nature

With some sense of how Ambiance is used by four listeners as well as a consideration
of how some of their favorite soundscape types might embody and accrue therapeutic
value, I turn to consider how Ambiance helps listeners cultivate a sense of mindfulness
and experience virtual nature. Mindfulness is a term that describes a quality of attention
and consciousness; it has ancient roots in Eastern religious-philosophical thought as a
step in the Buddhist “Eightfold Path,” whose ultimate goal is self-awakening.24 From
the Buddhist perspective, mindfulness is an attentive awareness of the reality of experi-
ence and the opposite of a delusionary mindset. Similarly, a definition of mindfulness
in Western psychology highlights a quality of attention focused on immediate experi-
ence and “an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance.”25
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    469

The mindfulness concept is a useful heuristic in the context of Ambiance soundscape

listening. The most commonly downloaded nature soundscapes in Ambiance, such as
wind, rain, and ocean sounds, do not have conventional musical goals yet “are much
more complex in their spectral and temporal shape than most other musical material”
(Truax 1996, 51). Further, these soundscapes are oriented around a repeating, iterative
present moment of sonic experience “not organized by the logic of development” but
instead designed for sensation (Kassabian 2013, 44, 48–49). From the perspective of
cultivating mindfulness, these nature sounds have therapeutic utility insofar as they
invite a listening focused on immediate experience without expecting conventional
goal-oriented musical teleology (e.g., “Where are these sounds going?”) or meaning
(“Is this a ‘happy’ sound or a ‘sad’ sound?”). In this way, listening to soundscapes to
relax, relieve stress, focus, or zone out can be considered a route to cultivating mind-
fulness through sound, self-regulating one’s attention through sound by sharing in its
patterns and contours.26 The popular nature soundscapes of Ambiance encourage lis-
tening without expectation of directionality or meaning but instead acceptance of the
affective qualities of their ongoing sonic presence.
Listening to soundscapes through the Ambiance app also offers an experience of
virtual nature. Here I use the term virtual to denote a kind of simulation and resem-
blance of a physical reality achieved through technological means. This simulation is a
virtuality in the sense described by Jean Baudrillard, who defines it as a “realistic image
in three dimensions” of the world. Virtuality, says Baudrillard, “tends towards the per-
fect illusion. [. . .] It is a ‘recreating’ illusion (as well as a recreational one), revivalistic,
realistic, mimetic, hologrammatic. It abolishes the game of illusion by the perfection of
the reproduction, in the virtual rendition of the real” (1998, 9). From this perspective,
the looped recordings of nature soundscapes in Ambiance are kinds of virtualities that
realistically reproduce the sonic patterns of physical worlds, audibly similar enough to
them that they create for the listener the sensation of being physically present in them.
It is ultimately through this power of virtuality as simulation that recordings of nature
soundscapes can have therapeutic effects on listeners.
With this notion of a virtual experience of nature in mind, I suggest that the sonic
simulations of Ambiance soundscapes are a form of what psychologist Peter H. Kahn
calls “technological nature,” which comprises electronic and digital technologies “that
in various ways mediate, augment, or simulate the natural world” (2011, xiii). Kahn’s
work explores the physiological, emotional, and cognitive effects of interacting with
technological nature through a series of case studies including experiments with digital
picture windows (ibid. 63). In one study on the effects of technological nature on the
emotional health of workers in windowless office spaces, Kahn has large flat-screen
video monitors installed that provide a live feed of the outside landscape. Kahn com-
pares the psychological effects of viewing nature through these monitors with the expe-
rience of viewing nature through real windows, as well as with the experience of having
no visual access to the outside landscape. The results show that experiencing techno-
logical nature through the video monitors has beneficial effects on workers’ emotional
health, though not as beneficial as experiencing actual nature through a real window.
470   Thomas Brett

One reason the effects of virtual nature are not as beneficial as those of actual nature
has to do with the limitations of our perceptual experience of virtual nature. Kahn
explains a shortcoming of video monitor viewing in terms of an issue of perception
known as “parallax,” whereby one can “change one’s perspective on the outside objects
by shifting [one’s viewing] position” (ibid., 84). Unlike a window looking out onto a
real landscape, video monitors do not allow one to shift the viewing position and thus
one’s perspective on the outside objects; in other words, the viewpoint through a video
monitor is static. Kahn’s research on the limitations of video monitor viewing suggests
an analog in listening to the looped soundscapes of Ambiance, which similarly present
a static sonic field whose spatial balance of sonic foreground and background remains
unchanged throughout the duration of one’s listening. As Fisher observes, the problem
with nature soundscape recordings is that “they give us one take, one set of balances,
excluding much and focusing on selected sounds, much as a photograph frames and
organizes a scene visually in a very specific way” (1998, 173). In the real worlds beyond
Kahn’s video monitors and Ambiance’s soundscape loops, the sensory experience of
place would shift constantly as one physically moves through it.
The parallax problem of experiencing technological nature—whether through video
monitors or through headphones attached to a mobile device—is a reminder of the sub-
tle and embodied ways in which we interact with actual nature through “constant shifts
in sensory figures and grounds, constant potentials for multi- or cross-sensory inter-
actions or correspondences” (Feld 1996, 93). Kahn labels these interactions a “nature
language” constituted by “patterns of interactions between humans and nature, and
their wide range of instantiations, and the meaningful, deep, and often joyful feelings
that they engender” (2011, 204).27 The vocabulary of this nature language comprises
“hundreds of interaction patterns” which “deeply involve multi-sensorial interactions
with a physical world that are difficult to even approximate technologically” (ibid.,
207, 208). Examples of such interaction patterns include being “in the flow of nature’s
dynamics”—for instance, experiencing the various flows of water, “on feet and hands,
immersed in water, plunging into water, moved by water” (ibid., 204). Further, each of
these interaction patterns “has stories attached to it” that evolve from our cumulative
experience with nature (ibid.). For Kahn, interaction patterns require us to be physi-
cally present in actual nature. In contrast, technological nature—a virtual simulation
of nature through digital video (or audio)—is always experienced as a diminished ver-
sion of our embodied, multisensorial experiences in the real world. Thus, if Khan were
listening with us to an Ambiance nature soundscape on headphones, he might note
that because we are not physically present in the soundscape we miss out on numerous
patterns of interaction that the experience of being there would offer us.
In describing the perceptual benefits and limitations of technological nature, Kahn’s
research speaks to the practice of listening to Ambiance soundscape recordings with-
out experiencing physically the environments from which the sounds derive. On the
one hand, this listening is not the same as experiencing multisensorial interactions
with a physical world and its ever-shifting mix of textures felt, seen, smelled, and
heard. For instance, merely listening to a mix of forest, insect, and water sounds is not
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    471

experientially the same as walking through a real forest, stopping to cup your hand into
a flowing stream while insect hum and birdsong surround you, the immersive mix of
environmental sounds constantly shifting as you move about. On the other hand, the
accounts of Lilith, Jackson, Adam, and Erica suggest that positive psychological effects
can be felt simply from listening to recordings of looped nature sounds. At the very
least, listening helps them relax, focus, daydream, and fall asleep. Moreover, all four
achieve a level of virtual interaction with their soundscapes by imagining they are situ-
ated in places similar to or evoked by what they are listening to. Drawing on their own
experiences and memories of place and its associated sounds, each listener adds to the
therapeutic power of the mix in the headphones.

Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed the history and design of the Ambiance app, described its
use through four case studies, and proposed Ambiance listening as way to cultivate
mindfulness and experience a virtual, technological nature. The functionality of the
app connects to histories and practices of ambient/environmental music and sound-
scape listening, nature field recording and acoustic ecology, appropriation of sounds
from websites such as freesound.org, therapeutic listening, and digital remix culture.
Ambiance’s conceptual precursors continue to resonate through the listening stances
encouraged by the app. Satie’s furniture music, Muzak, Schaeffer’s musique concrète
sonorous objects, Cage’s silent piece, Eno’s ambient music, as well as Schafer’s and
Teibel’s soundscape recordings all presume a listener who can engage what Eno called
“many levels of listening,” a listener who can variously ignore, pay attention to, be sub-
liminally influenced by, and find meaning in environmental sounds.
Ambiance engages these levels of listening by offering soundscapes as therapeutic
virtual listening objects. As I have shown, to listen therapeutically is to focus on the
effect of particular sonic qualities such as white noise (e.g., water sounds) or layered
rhythmic thrum (such as insect sounds). But soundscapes also have therapeutic effects
because of what they are believed to represent, how they fulfill listeners’ biophilic pref-
erences for nature sounds, and how they trigger listeners’ nostalgia for their past experi-
ences. Finally, Ambiance engages with remix culture, allowing listeners to mix together
unrelated sounds to create virtual spaces of listening in which binaural sounds cohabi-
tate with Thai jungle sounds (Lilith’s mix), or birdsong, chimes, and water sounds are
joined with New Age guitar and keyboard textures (Jackson’s mix), and so on.28 In sum,
Ambiance offers a customizable listening experience directed toward therapeutic ends,
and it is up to the app users to decide what types of sounds and sound mixes work best
for them. The case studies examined in this chapter suggest that the app is particu-
larly useful for city-dwelling listeners lacking regular and direct access to nature. Lilith,
Jackson, Adam, and Erica live far from the sounds of ocean waves and rainforests, yet
they listen to and remix these and other sounds in various combinations in order to
472   Thomas Brett

achieve particular body-mind states. When nature is at a great distance, using a sound-
scape app to recreate its ambiance is an effective way to simulate the feeling of being
there. With Ambiance, listeners connect with virtual nature through recorded sound-
scapes, experiencing a sensation of presence in their auditory imagination even though
in the actual world they are somewhere else.

Notes
1. For instance, there are radio station and jukebox apps, DJ remixing apps, music ID
apps, ringtone makers, music theory and ear training apps, virtual synthesizers, drum
machines, and effects processors, as well as instrument tuner and metronome apps.
2. Erik Satie cited in Cox and Warner (2004).
3. For a history of Muzak, see Lanza (2004).
4. Eno (1978 [1990]).
5. The first World Soundscape Project recording was The Vancouver Soundscape (1973).
This recording featured the sounds of Vancouver’s soundscapes along with Schafer’s spo-
ken commentary on the city’s acoustic design.
6. See Truax (1978, 1996) and Westerkamp (1974).
7. In The Tuning of the World, Schaefer presciently observed that the “blurring of the edges
between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking
feature of all twentieth century music” (1977, 111).
8. For example, Steven Feld and Chris Watson have released recordings of acoustic envi-
ronments including rain forests, bells, and ice glaciers. See Feld’s Voices of the Rainforest
(1991), Rainforest (2001), and The Time of Bells, 1 (2004), and Watson’s Weather Report
(2004).
9. Environments 7 (1976); Environments 3,(1971).
10. Other sound websites include www.soundbible.com, soundsnap.com, and soundrang-
ers.com. Unlike freesound.org, whose sounds are available for download free or charge,
these websites offer a combination of free sounds and sounds that require a fee for
download.
11. Some sounds are derived from other websites, including www.Soundrangers.com and
www.Soundsnap.com.
12. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/.
13. However, Coneybeare’s reliance on the field recordings of freesound users (who upload
their recordings without compensation) is not lost on one astute Ambiance user named
Frozo, who writes in a review at the Apple App Store: “They [Coneybeare] have some
nerve taking free sounds from a community share site and charging money for it as a
‘premium sound’. I’m sure [Freesound’s] creators wouldn’t be too happy that someone is
profiting on their work and generosity” (Frozo, Jan. 25, 2011).
14. “Gapless” playback refers to uninterrupted playback between the end of one audio file
and the beginning of the next.
15. For example, the description for the popular “Ocean Waves Against Rocks” soundscape
reads: “While tidal areas may seem like uninhabitable spaces due to the constant crashing
of the waves, the tide pools host some of the richest diversity in the ocean. As we hear
the water churning and gurgling through crevices between the wave-beaten rocks, we
 From Environmental Sound to Virtual Environment Enhancing    473

can almost picture the wealth of sea-life that calls this place its home. Crabs, starfish, sea
anemone, and octopus all inhabit these shallow maze-like waters.”
16. Binaural tones or binaural beats are auditory processing phenomena (literally, virtual
tones) that occur when two tones of slightly different frequencies are sounded simul-
taneously. A virtual third “beating” tone or pulsation is a perceptual gestalt by-product
of hearing these two differently pitched tones. For example, if a tone of 440 Hz is heard
alongside a tone of 430 Hz, a resulting binaural tone of 10 Hz is perceived.
17. Tibetan Gyoto monks practice overtone singing, in which groups of singers generate low-
pitched fundamental tones along with higher-pitched overtones to create the effect of two
pitches sounding simultaneously. An example of this singing in the Ambiance app is the
“Gyoto Monks Tantric Choir” sound.
18. Moreover, my cursory reading of hundreds of consumer reviews of Ambiance at the
Apple App Store suggests that the majority of listeners use the app in similarly therapeutic
ways, mostly as a relaxation and sleeping aid.
19. This environment enhancing is most effectively affecting when the soundscape listener
wears headphones. It was the science fiction novelist William Gibson who presciently
noted in the 1980s how the Sony Walkman portable cassette player had done more to
change human perception that any virtual reality gadget. Listening to a Walkman with
headphones, he says, “allows us to integrate the music of choice with virtually any land-
scape” (1989). Since then, other writers have noted the power of headphones to afford a
“bracketing of the world” that turns the listener’s attention inward (Stankievech 2007, 55).
For example, Charles Stankievech suggests “headphones create a mobile and continually
changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping him or her in a private bubble”
(57). Daniel K. L. Chua describes this sound bubble as “a cocoon in which the subject proj-
ects its ‘lifestyle’ to control its moods” (2010, 104). Similarly, Michael Bull observes how
headphone-wearing iPod users “aim to create a privatized sound world, which is in har-
mony with their mood, orientation and surroundings, enabling them to re-spatialize urban
experience through a process of solipsistic aestheticization” (Bull, in Sterne 2013, 199).
20. See Loewen and Suedfeld (1992).
21. See Baker and Holding (1993).
22. The psychologist Peter H. Kahn echoes Wilson’s notion of the aesthetic appeal of nature,
noting that the biophilia concept has been used to guide architecture and urban design proj-
ects that attempt to mimic nature’s organizing properties and characteristics—including
its deep resources of “refuge, mystery … and fractal patterning” in human-built environ-
ments (2011, 14). Biophilia has also informed the practice of using recordings of birdsong
to calm children receiving treatments in hospitals (Moss 2010) and research on the psy-
chological benefits of listening to birdsong (Barkham 2011).
23. Fisher’s explanation for our preference for nature sounds finds support from Pijanowski
et al. (2011), who note that the natural world “is the most information-rich environment
that humans can experience, and [. . .] some of the most important information conveyed
is through sound” (205).
24. See, for example, Hanh (2010), Smalley (2010), Boyce,(2011).
25. See Bishop et al. (2004).
26. The musicologist David Burrows suggests that music’s patterns and contours are a model
of human temporality. Music, says Burrows, “mimes the striding, the leaping, the hesita-
tions, the rocking motions, the twisting and turning of the human organism in its land-
scape and in its mindscape” (2007, 68).
474   Thomas Brett

27. In his use of interaction patterns, Kahn draws on architect Christopher Alexander’s classic
work A Pattern Language (1977). Along similar lines, Cheryl Foster proposes the concept
of the “ambient dimension” of aesthetic value to describe our “moodful, multisensuous”
encounters with nature: “The textures of earth as we move over them, the sounds of the
winds and the wildlife and trees, the moistness or dryness of the air, the nascent colors or
seasonal mutations—all can melt into a synthesized backdrop for ambient contemplation
of both the backdrop itself and the sensuous way we relate to it. Such experiences have
always been and remain distinctly aesthetic and, as aesthetic, constitute a form of know-
ing both oneself and the world anew” (1998, 134).
28. Considered collectively, the remixes of Lilith, Jackson, Adam, and Erica in effect remix
the ambient music listening and environmental sound as ambiance approaches of Satie,
Muzak, Schaeffer, Cage, Eno, Schafer, and Teibel.

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476   Thomas Brett

———. Rainforest Soundwalks: Ambiances of Bosavi Papua New Guinea. EarthEar. 2001, com-
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 chapter 25

App Musi c

Jeremy Wade Morris

The listener is no longer a passenger on a train stuck on a track that can

only go in one direction. Instead, with CD-I technology he or she is more
like a fish in an aquarium with the ability to move in any direction that
he or she wishes. Users would have to play the CD-I disc for 24 hours a
day, seven days a week well into the next millennium in order to hear the
same version of the song twice.
(Todd Rundgren, quoted in McCullaugh 1993)
Exploring Gaga’s existence as a cultural interface, the user will share in
the adrenaline of fame; as they build and share their own projects, chat
with one another, and watch in real-time on a virtual globe as ARTPOP
explodes onto the physical and virtual universe at once on November
11, our ‘BIG BANG!’ On this day, HAUS OF GAGA venges with forte to
bring the music industry into a new age: an age where art drives pop, and
the artist once again is in control of the “icon.”
(Lady Gaga press release, quoted in Dredge 2013b)

Two press releases, twenty years apart. The first, about the launch of musician Todd
Rundgren’s interactive compact disc album No World Order (1993), gives a glimpse
into the possibilities musicians and labels thought new multimedia technologies could
bring to the standard music CD. Rather than being locked into a predetermined listen-
ing journey, new interactive technologies and virtual features would allow listeners to
become users, passengers to become drivers, of their own musical experience. The sec-
ond is a press release for Lady Gaga’s 2013 album, ARTPOP. The album promises to be a
“multimedia experience that comes in different forms,” though the “most major way to
fully immerse yourself in ARTPOP” is through a software application (app) that will be
released simultaneously with the album. Available on a variety of mobile and computer
devices, the ARTPOP app will feature music videos, exclusive content, opportunities
to chat with Lady Gaga and other fans, and “Gaga-inspired games” (Dredge 2013b).
The app is the portal into the virtual world Lady Gaga is hoping to explode into. It is
478   Jeremy Wade Morris

different, at least rhetorically, from the physical universe of CDs and traditional album
distribution. It is through the virtual experience of the album that Lady Gaga hopes to
bring the music industry into its new age.
Lady Gaga’s app-based album is not yet the norm for music releases, though it is
part of a growing trend of experimentation with apps as a new format for the music
commodity. Like Rundgren’s CD-I and other enhanced CDs of the mid-1990s, these
newer app-albums are virtual platforms on which rest a series of promises for artists,
businesses, and fans alike: for artists they offer additional modes for creative expression
and connecting with fans, for consumers a more immediate experience of their favorite
artists, and for businesses an extra avenue for conducting commerce and branding.
Although musicians, record labels, and app developers are still tentatively testing out
ways to successfully combine software and music in app form, well-known musicians
like Björk, Sting, The xx, Fall Out Boy, Trey Songz, and a significant number of emerg-
ing artists are looking to apps as an increasingly viable avenue for packaging and deliv-
ery of the popular music commodity.
Accordingly, this chapter explores virtual albums, new and old, and how virtuality is
mobilized in the service of extending the possibilities for circulation and commodifica-
tion of digital music. I trace a history of app-based albums back to earlier experiments
with “enhanced CDs” and multimedia CD-ROMs from the early 1990s and argue
that virtual albums serve two distinct functions:  (1)  to re-embed digital music with
the materiality, context, and tangibility typically associated with physical formats; and
(2) to extend the ability to interact with music and musical artists to create a modular
and iteratively commodifiable music product. Although the newest expression of the
virtual album comes in app form, apps are part of a historical and continuously reit-
erating drive to overcome the limitations of the music commodity by infusing it with
additional informational content. Drawing on literature from popular music and new
media studies as well as from an analysis of select enhanced CDs and app-based albums,
this chapter uses the notion of the virtual to lay some initial theoretical groundwork
for understanding app music and its impact on the production and consumption of
music commodities. Through historical analysis and a close reading of the key features
of a range of virtual albums, I explore the possibilities and problems apps present as
they mediate our aesthetic and affective relationships with cultural goods like music.
Their artistic potential is exciting, but app-based albums are nonetheless limited by the
demands of the platforms and software that constitute them.

Virtual Albums

The popular music commodity is no stranger to format change. From sheet music to
records to tapes, CDs, digital files, and some of the less successful formats in between,
the industrial ebbs and flows in the market for popular recorded music are indelibly
linked to its technologies of production, distribution, and consumption (Burkart and
 App Music   479

McCourt 2006, Chanan 1995, Eisenberg 2005, Garofalo 1999). Although it is too soon
to suggest that app-albums might become an industrially and socially viable option for
consumption of popular music, turning our attention to this format, during its moment
of newness, opens up a whole series of questions about the object itself (i.e., the album)
and how users interact with the music commodity. As Jonathan Sterne has recently
argued: “Format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience
and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a technology
can operate” (2012, 7). Format, in other words, becomes a potentially useful concept for
exploring the meeting point of aesthetics, transmission, display, and use.
Before addressing the app-based album format and its history, I want to pause to ask,
What makes an album or musical commodity virtual? First, it should be stated that
virtuality is highly relational. Virtuality is not an essential characteristic of an object
or experience, but a claim rooted in a comparison to something else that is somehow
not virtual. The virtual world and universe in the press releases quoted in the previ-
ous section, for example, are virtual in relation to the physical world of shelves, retail
stores, compact disc jewel cases, and distribution trucks. The CD-ROM seemed virtual
compared to regular CDs because of the additional content it offered access to and
the subsequent possibilities this might have allowed for experiencing music. Similarly,
app-based albums seem virtual when likened to MP3s and other digital files because
the former provide capabilities that surpass the latter, like the ability to chat with the
artist or other fans and to experience the music through alternative kinds of interac-
tions beyond listening.
Part of new media’s virtualness comes from how new media build on and extend
previous media. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), in their discussion of what
makes new media seem “new,” attribute this process to what they call a twin logic of
immediacy and hypermediacy. All media remediate previous ones, by refashioning
older features and functions in new ways. The logic of immediacy suggests that new
media strive for a perceptual immediacy that seeks to present experience without medi-
ation (1999). Photography, in other words, was more immediate than painting because
the camera captured experiences in ways that seemed closer to our visual perceptions
of that experience. The logic of hypermediacy, on the other hand, suggests new media
seem new because of how they incorporate multiple media. The “windowed style” of
web pages, multimedia programs, or the cluttered visual space of a CNN television
news screen—with its tickers, logos, and alerts superimposed over newscasters—seem
new because they deliver a hypermediate experience. Ultimately, remediation gives new
media a perceptual advantage over preceding media:  “The supposed virtue of [new
media] is that each of these technologies repairs the inadequacy of the medium or media
that it now supersedes. In each case that inadequacy is represented as a lack of imme-
diacy, and this seems to be generally true in the history of remediation” (60). The lack
of immediacy is often overcome through hypermediacy; only by adding more mediated
sensorial experiences can greater immediacy be achieved.1 This logic, for Bolter and
Grusin, is nowhere more evident than in the case of virtual reality, a technology that
has become “a cultural metaphor for the ideal of perfect mediation” (95). The virtual, in
480   Jeremy Wade Morris

other words, suggests a drive for a more immediate experience over what came before it
but also one that represents an ideal kind of mediatic experience.
Returning to the music commodity, then, every new music format in a sense seems
more virtual than what preceded it because of claims to immediacy. For example, a
CD during the early years of that technology may have seemed more virtual than a
cassette tape or vinyl album, since it was digital rather than analog. Press descrip-
tions at the time describe how the CD’s digital nature gave the technology features that
made it sound more immediate. The CD’s possibilities for a broader dynamic range,
a higher signal-to-noise ratio, better channel separation, etc. all resulted in a sound
that was “clearer, sharper, and more exactly representative of the original performance”
(Kaptanis 1983). Digital recording processes seemed, to observers, more virtual than
analog ones because they relied on digital sampling of sound waves at discrete points
in time rather than the continuous mechanical impressions provided by analog record-
ing equipment. This virtuality, though, still allow a more sonically accurate experience.
It was, as one writer noted, “the most perfect alternative yet devised to putting a sym-
phony orchestra in your living room” (Mitchell 1987).2 With the live performance as the
gold standard, the CD’s virtual capabilities washed away so many traces of its mediation
that the listener might even imagine having a virtual symphony in her home.3 Prodding
the contours of the virtual a little further, we might even argue that almost any sound
recording is “virtual” considering how recordings are compiled, multitracked, mixed,
and edited into a seamless final product. Recordings are inherently virtual because
they are documents of performances that existed at another point in time, representa-
tions of a performance that are designed to sound instead like reproductions of them
(Auslander 1999).
Virtuality, then, makes the unreal real, by promising to make possible experi-
ences that would not be otherwise. This sense of the virtual is evident in much of
the early scholarship on the Internet, which extolled the virtues of virtual commu-
nities (Rheingold 1994, Smith and Kollock 1999, Wellman 1999, Licklider and Taylor
1968) and the possibilities presented by virtual identities that could be embodied and
expressed in modular fashion through computers and the Internet (Turkle 1984, 1995,
Bromseth and Sundén 2008). There was profound hope that in these virtual spaces
and communities—most of which were text-based multiuser environments at the
time—users could leave behind the physical traces of their bodies, lives, and identi-
ties and explore alternative and more fluid ideas of identity, race, gender, and sexual-
ity. Although further research has shown these online virtual environments were not
nearly as separate from offline nonvirtual spaces as was initially hoped (Dibbell 1993,
Nakamura 2002, Terranova 2004, White 2006), definitions of the virtual still retain a
link to notions of the intangible, the digital or online, and the immaterial.
In addition to the immediacy and hypermediacy they provide, digital and networked
technologies are described as virtual for another reason: they are seen as interactive.4
Interactivity is central to the claim of immediacy—and thus central to the claim of the
virtual—since it allows the user to intervene in the action, and in most cases modify it,
according to a set of choices (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Although these choices may be
 App Music   481

relatively limited in scope, the fact that they provide more choice than previous media
gives the impression of interactivity. The graphics or other sensory experiences of these
technologies may, as in the case of early virtual reality systems, seem laughable or prim-
itive, but the experience of those environments feels virtual because of the interaction
between the user’s actions and the outcome of the experience.
Interactivity, however, does not depend solely on the relationship between user con-
trol over media and feedback from that media (Collins 2013). In contrast to typical
descriptions of interactivity that envision a hierarchical ordering of interactive to non-
interactive technologies, Karen Collins suggests it is more fruitful to consider various
kinds of interaction, from physical interactions between users and media to sociocul-
tural interactions between users and media to interpersonal interactions between play-
ers around or through media and even perceptual or cognitive interactions with media
(2013). All of these interactions give media a sense of interactivity, and certain media
or technologies may make use of some more than others. Collins, writing on sound
and video games, pays special attention to the combination of sonic, visual, and haptic
features and how games variously make use these perceptual interactivities. Ultimately,
the combinations of interactivities lead to new meanings emerging from the experi-
ence. In other words, a game where a player presses a button and sees a character swing
a sword may have a different meaning from a game where a player swings the control-
ler and hears a swooshing sword sound to indicate that the character has just dealt a
lethal blow. Much like Chion’s insight (1994) that our experience of film is syncretic and
depends not just on the visual track or the audio track but rather on the combination
of the two, Collins argues that the virtual meanings created by games and other media
depend heavily on the range of interactivities at work (2013).
New technologies, then, are often presented as virtual compared to older ones, as
more immediate or hypermediate than previous technologies. Just as virtual reality
attempts to present an amplified version of reality, other new media aim to enhance
previous media through interactivity, immediacy, and hypermediacy. The newness and
the promise of virtual technologies, then, rests on their ability to supersede previous
media, but also to call forth ideas of the virtual itself. As such, the question I aim to
answer here is not whether these enhanced music products are or are not virtual, but
rather how virtuality is mobilized in the service of marketing and adding value to the
music product.

Enhanced Music

Virtual albums, I argue, strive to fill a double need. The first is to re-infuse digital music
with the materiality, context, and tangibility typically associated with physical formats.
The digitization of the music format, from records and tapes to CDs to digital files on
computers, has led to a re-envisioning of the paratexts (Gray 2010, Straw 2009) normally
associated with the music commodity (e.g., album art, jewel cases, record sleeves, etc.)
482   Jeremy Wade Morris

to more informational “packaging” features (metadata, thumbnail images, interfaces,

etc.). Music has undergone what I call an “interface-lift.” This process has allow new and
exciting ways for storing, sorting, and experiencing music; it has also led to the percep-
tion of reduced value of the music commodity, given that digital music is often seen as
“just data, metadata, and a thumbnail” (McCourt 2005, 250). For record companies and
artists there is hope that these new apps—which often permit adding exclusive content,
graphic-rich environments, and gamelike possibilities—might not only return value to
music packaging but ultimately lead to greater creative expression and a heightening of
the experience with the artist in question (Bruno 2008). This is why the ARTPOP app is
described as the “most major way to fully immerse yourself ” in the album.
The second hope for app-based albums is to use new technologies of music playback
and presentation to create unique musical experiences that extend interaction with
music and musical artists to create a modular and iteratively commodifiable music
commodity. Apps, and the mobile devices they are typically associated with, represent
an opportunity to access new audiences in new places or listening contexts. As one
Sony executive noted about apps, “it’s a great place to test out what people like, how
they use these and whether there is a long-term play toward packaging not just our
music but also our artist’s properties [. . .] so it’s easier for fans to interact with on all
mobile devices” (Sean Rosenberg, quoted in Bruno 2008). Understood in this context,
virtual denotes a process of reconfiguring the music consumption process from listen-
ing to a set of additional practices that enhance and make it more interactive. Although
no one using an app-based album might feel as if the performer is right there in his or
her living room, they might nevertheless feel that greater interactivity provides for a
more complete experience with the artist’s material.
In this regard, newer app-based albums, then, are part of a longer line of virtual
albums designed to infuse the product with as much information as possible to extend
the experience of artists and their music. Specifically, app-based albums follow the
efforts of tech and music companies in the mid-1980s and early 1990s that, during
the push for a multimedia revolution, rushed to create “interactive” and “enhanced”
compact discs. Enhanced CDs were attempts to create a new kind of music product by
loading it with audiovisual extras (e.g., exclusive content, games, audio remixes, etc.).
They were designed to offer musicians additional modes for artistic expression and
consumers a more complete experience of their favorite artists. They also represented a
means of profiting from the excess material that an artist generated through the process
of recording.5 Enhanced CDs often came at a much higher premium, retailing from
$20 to $50, which was more in line with the economics of the software industry at the
time than with regular CDs. Enhanced CDs were possible thanks to advances in CD
technology and revisions to the CD standard. The music industry had long used box
sets, reissues, and other such offers to infuse the music commodity with additional
content, but the advent of enhanced CDs allow similar possibilities but also a refram-
ing of how consumers could experience the music commodity.
Although the CD boasted vast improvements over traditional cassettes or vinyl
albums in terms of sound quality, the original “red-book” CD was relatively limited in
 App Music   483

its capacity for anything other than sound. As acceptance of the format grew, however,
advances in CD technology in the middle to late eighties brought a series of modifica-
tions to the CD standard. Most of these addressed the growing use of CDs in computers
and were known as the “rainbow books,” such as the Yellow Book (1988) for CD-ROMs
and the Green Book (1986) for interactive multimedia CD-Is (Pohlmann 1992).
Enhanced CDs and CD-ROMs were initially used for storage and archived
resources—the most popular early CD-ROM titles were digital collections of tradi-
tional encyclopedias and adventure games like Myst—but by the early 1990s some
musicians, artists, technologists, and record labels started exploring the potential these
formats held for music. Given that the technologies were still new and not widely
understood, conferences such as the 1992 Hollywood seminar entitled “Music Industry,
from CDs, Long Form VHS & Laserdiscs to CD-I and Video CDs” and other forums
brought musicians, record labels, and technology companies together to experiment
with how the computer could be put in service of music and entertainment products
(McGowan 1992). Labels started licensing their catalogues for inclusion in these new
formats (Nunziata 1992) and high-profile artists began releasing material in CD-I or
enhanced CD formats (McCullaugh 1992).
Todd Rundgren’s 1993 CD-I No World Order was one of the first attempts at provid-
ing an interactive and enhanced virtual experience. Available for between $15 and $25,
it was reportedly the “world’s first completely interactive music-only CD” (McCullaugh
1993). It offered users a sizeable selection (nearly four hours) of four-to-eight-second
bits of music that users could manipulate and recombine in a variety of ways, provid-
ing the near-infinite remixability Rundgren refers to in this chapter’s opening lines
(McCullaugh 1993). There were also “lava lamp” style visualizations that accompa-
nied the music, and basic text for users to navigate through the various sounds held
on the disc (McCullaugh 1993). For Rundgren—who called himself TR-I for Todd
Rundgren-Interactive from 1993 to 1995—interactive wasn’t just a type of CD; it was a
commitment to creating a virtual music product by enhancing it with additional con-
tent and allowing consumers to interact with that content in new ways (compared to
standard CDs). The CD-I was about using the promise of the virtual through an imme-
diate, hypermediate, and interactive enhanced digital platform to make other experi-
ences of Rundgren’s music possible. As he noted, it wasn’t merely a chance to “agitate
for greater technological developments,” but rather a conscious effort to “devise a way
to write, record and manage music that would allow it to be experienced in a way that
it had not been experienced previously” (quoted in McCullaugh 1993).
After Rundgren’s effort, a number of prominent artists released similarly enhanced
CDs, including Peter Gabriel’s Xplora1 CD-ROM (1993), David Bowie’s Jump (1994),
Prince’s Interactive (1994), Brian Eno’s Headcandy (1994), Sarah McLachlan’s Freedom
Sessions (1994), and Sting’s All This Time (1995), among others. Although some were
relatively simple, like Sting’s, which featured only extra interview content and addi-
tional music, most enhanced CDs were based on the concept of a virtual space (e.g., a
skyscraper, rooms within an artist’s home or studio, a secret world, etc.) through which
users could learn more about the artist, hear exclusive content, and play artist-related
484   Jeremy Wade Morris

games that would unlock further content. Bowie’s Jump ($49), for example, presented
users with a graphically elegant 3D virtual skyscraper and gave them the choice of
entering three rooms where they could watch music videos and interviews with Bowie
or play at a virtual mixing console to remix five audio-video tracks of Bowie’s single
“Jump They Say” (Langberg 1994, Keizer 1994). Echoing the promises of other virtual
technologies at the time, the multimedia-loaded and interactive album boasted, “The
future of music is here—and it’s in your hands” (Langberg 1994).
The level of interactivity offered by these virtual commodities was relatively lim-
ited to recombining sounds and images from a confined database. CD-ROMs were
certainly more virtual than a regular CD, but the content they presented was largely
recycled material from other albums or other media appearances. Their virtual nature
comes from the fact that they rested uneasily in the realm between software and music.
Although music as software is relatively commonplace in today’s music industries, it
was unclear at the time whether users were supposed to treat these commodities as
games or as music. Rather than a traditional studio production team involving record-
ing engineers and music producers, these commodities required teams comprising
tech start-ups, coders, technologies, and software programmers who knew how to craft
media for enhanced CD products. Jump, for example, was a joint project between the
multinational music company Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and a U.S. start-up
multimedia company called ION (in which BMG had a 50 percent stake). Jump took
almost fifteen months to produce and cost $500,000, over twice as much as it cost to
produce the audio album on which it was based (Arthur 1994). The extra costs and
materials were necessary, as ION’s founders argued, to meet evolving consumer expec-
tations: “You have to engage the viewer. They don’t just play music or play videos, they
play with them” (Ann Greenberg, quoted in Gillen 1994).
In other words, ION argued, consumers wanted a more enhanced and interactive
experience. They wanted virtual music. Unfortunately, press reports at the time sug-
gested this hope was not entirely indicative of a growing consumer demand for greater
user interaction with the music commodity. Enhanced CDs were expensive and met
with limited commercial success, at least as far as marketing music was concerned
(Trachtenberg 1996, Arthur 1994, Atwood 1997). Despite their lack of success with
consumers, enhanced CDs and CD-ROMs were an acknowledgment that these vir-
tual products offered ways to reconceptualize what could be included in the music
commodity and how virtual content might ultimately increase the value of the music
commodity.
Beyond the possibility of extra revenues, though, these virtual albums also presented
new constraints and controls over the music commodity. Not only were there technical
limitations on who could afford and play the software (e.g., CD-ROMs required spe-
cific drives and specific hardware and software platforms) but the CD-ROMs’ mingling
of software and audio also brought added ways of linking music listening to specific
ways of consumption (Morris 2012). As users started copying, ripping, and burning
digital files to their computers, ION’s later enhanced CDs focused on keeping digital
content secure and on ensuring it was accessed only by the purchaser of the CD-ROM.
 App Music   485

Initiatives like Sony’s ConnecteD or Gracenote’s CD-Key—which connected audio CDs

to multimedia content via the web only if an actual purchase of the product could be
authenticated—were both the result of ION’s strategy to provide labels with added con-
trol over this new format. Through watermarks and other primitive digital rights man-
agement schemes, enhanced CDs and CD-ROMs offered a way to repurpose excess
material and to reconfigure how consumers accessed that material.6

App Music

With these enhanced examples in mind, I want to scroll forward twenty years to look at
the similarities to the current push for app-based albums. The Wall Street Journal called
2010 the “Year of the App” (Dowell 2010) and Billboard noted that year end 2010 was
looking like a “Planet of the Apps,” stressing that developers and the music industries
were increasingly looking toward apps, on smartphones, computers, televisions, tablets,
and other devices, as a new platform for marketing and distributing music commodi-
ties (Bruno 2010). Despite this hype and a few high-profile app-albums from artists
such as Björk, Jay Z, and Lady Gaga, musicians have been relatively slow to reformat
their albums as apps.
The App Store launched in 2008 with numerous music and sound apps.7 From music
streaming and discovery services such as Pandora and Shazam to virtual instruments
such as Pianist, Drummer, or Band, to music creation software (like Propellerhead’s
apps), these apps introduced a set of touch-screen-enabled material interfaces for mak-
ing and interacting with sound. Eventually, artists started experimenting with what
possibilities the app format offered. Acts such as Fall Out Boy, Snow Patrol, Pink, Akon,
and American Idol contestant David Cook all released branded apps in late 2008 or in
2009. These were largely “companion” apps designed to complement the traditional
album purchase. They had games, information, and the capability to connect users to
artists and other fans, but they rarely contained the music itself. They were not, in other
words, app-albums. They acted as sites of aggregation, compiling an artist’s activity on
social networks, but rarely provided new musical material or experiences. Some art-
ists released more experimental fare, notably Brian Eno’s Bloom app, which let users
generate various sounding tones and drones by manipulating images (Miller and Helft
2009). As with earlier enhanced CDs, though, companion apps were largely recyclings
of repackaged or repurposed content.8
It took a few years for musicians and labels to stop thinking of apps as compan-
ion commodities and to start thinking of them as a format for the album itself. The
American-based musical duo Bluebrain released one of the first app-based albums (for
the iTunes Store), called The National Mall (2011). It was a “location aware” album,
scored to play sound samples as users walked through the National Mall monument
using the GPS function of a user’s device (Morris 2012). Björk’s release of Biophilia later
in 2011, though not the first app-album, was certainly the highest-profile and laid the
486   Jeremy Wade Morris

groundwork for the app-albums that have followed (Björk 2011a). Biophilia was avail-
able in other formats as well—as CD, digital download, and collector’s edition—but,
as with ARTPOP, the marketing campaign for it foregrounded the app as the primary
means of experiencing the new work. Biophilia is a mediation on our relationship with
nature, technology, and sound; the app (available only for Apple’s iOS devices) uses
visual, haptic, and sonic interactivities to explore these themes. A virtual album, all ten
songs are housed within the app.
A collaboration with some of the best sonic game designers for iOS, Björk assembled
a team of app developers to realize the album (Vozick-Levinson 2011). On opening
the Biophilia app, users are presented with a static album-cover-type page: a picture of
Björk with her name and the album title in a stylized white font. An additional caveat
is included (“Best listened with headphones”) as a reminder that the experience is
as much a sonic one as a visual one. After briefly flashing this splash page, a ghostly
descending vocal sample plays as the “homepage” spins into place. The user sees a set
of stars, planets, and galaxies, a highly stylized planetary atmosphere. Like the various
rooms and spatialized representations of earlier CD-ROMs, each Biophilia song forms
its own galaxy and users can swipe, pinch, and spin their way through the literal and
metaphorical space of the album. The sounds from each song play as users “fly” by the
various planets; touching a planet opens that song for further exploration.
Although the app appears to have no intended order, “Cosmogeny” acts as the intro-
ductory track. It comes with opening remarks from David Attenborough, the longtime
narrator of the BBC’s nature programs, who introduces users to the concept behind
the album and provides rudimentary instructions for using the app. Apart from this,
Cosmogeny offers several options for “listening” to each song:  “Song,” “Animation,”
“Score,” and “Lyrics.” “Song” plays the track accompanied by an automated tour
through the universe on the home screen. “Score” plays the song in its entirety while
traditional music notation scrolls along and lyrics play. “Animation” provides a simi-
lar functionality except the notation is based on visual representations of tone, voice,
instruments, etc., instead of classical notation. “Lyrics” links to a text file that includes
the song’s words. All the other songs follow the same menu structure, though they
also include a “play” feature, which takes users to a series of “games” varying with the
song. The games involve using the touch-screen interface to interact with or remix the
sounds from the song in question. The sounds become the raw material for the games
and activities, which range from fending off a viral attack to drawing with lightning, to
collecting crystals while traveling through underground tunnels. The games encourage
user actions that result in creation of new sounds using the main instruments or sonic
elements featured in the corresponding song.
Biophilia plays on several levels of the virtual. The app combines a series of virtual
instruments that allow users to create and remix Björk’s music. The app also presents
a series of virtual representations of the songs, be it as constellations or as interactive
visualized scores. The space created by the galaxies and the graphical representations
also provides a way of conceiving of the album beyond the traditional linear progres-
sion of the album (or even newer practices of shuffling through an album). To return
 App Music   487

to Collins (2013), each song offers a range of interactivities; some combine interactions
between visual and sonic attributes, others include haptic and cognitive interactions as
well. Although it’s possible to use Biophilia in a passive mode (simply hitting the Play
feature and listening), the games and interactive scores are part of what gives the app
its status as virtual compared to other formats of the commodity (i.e., the CD, or digital
files). Virtuality here is both the means and the outcome. In other words, the technol-
ogy presents itself as virtual and the result is multiple virtual modes for experiencing
the album.
Whether we are discussing enhanced CDs or app-based albums, virtual albums
represent a fusion of software and music commodities. The result brings a gamelike
vocabulary to the musical album; extra content needs to be unlocked, rewards need
to be achieved, levels need to be cleared, or points need to be gained (see, e.g., the
apps described in Luckerson 2013). App-albums have various “versions”; they also have
“bugs” and “crashes.” Underscoring its essence as software, Biophilia came with a tech-
nical support page and a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to guide users
through any technical problems they might experience. Although this kind of docu-
mentation and language is not normally associated with the music commodity, it is
now part of the semantic experience of music.
An illustrative example of this comes from the user complaints surrounding rap-
per Jay Z’s 2013 album Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail. Officially available at traditional
and digital retailers on July 9 of that year, fans who downloaded a special app for the
Samsung Galaxy phone had exclusive access to the work as an app-album on July 4
(Luckerson 2013). However, Samsung and Jay Z both faced extensive criticism when
it was discovered that the app was requesting unusual and privacy-infringing permis-
sions, such as a user’s GPS data, phone number, and the ability to access details from
any connected social media accounts in order to allow users to send out a status update
about the album and unlock extra content (Luckerson 2013). Although we don’t nor-
mally think of the music commodity as an opportunity for accessing personal and pri-
vate information, the app-album shares similarities to software programs that demand
similar permissions. Like the work ION did on its enhanced CDs for such initiatives as
ConnecteD and CD-Key, app-albums offer new potentials for monitoring, and struc-
turing, consumer behavior.
As albums become software—not just become like software, but actually become
software—they also bring with them a constellation of contingencies and conditions
typically associated with the software commodity. Biophilia, for example, is tied to
(relatively expensive) iOS devices. Users could get a CD or digital files of the songs
instead, but the only way to use the album’s extra features is through Apple-branded
devices. The format, in other words, depends on certain platforms and technologies.
Of course, the matter of formats and platforms is not new to music industries. The
switch to CD format, for example, entailed not only repurchasing favorite albums
but upgrading home stereo equipment. Even so, software formats are inherently tied
to their platforms, especially in an emerging market where there are a limited num-
ber of providers (as is the case with app stores and devices). Users looking to access
488   Jeremy Wade Morris

the app through other devices, as evidenced from the FAQs, were left with little
choice:

q. can i get biophilia on my computer?

a. we have not announced versions of biophilia for other platforms at this time. (Björk
2011b)

To address these format and platform issues, Björk later tried to mount a crowdfunded
campaign to port a version of the album to Android and Windows 8 devices, but she
shut the project down after not receiving enough investment (Dredge 2013a).
It wasn’t just the platforms that affected the album experience; even the version of the
iOS device made a difference for how the app worked.

q. i’m experiencing problems on my iphone 3g. why is this?

a. biophilia is optimized for the iphone 4, and ipad however, we worked hard to make
sure it also works on the iphone 3gs to reach the largest audience of björk’s fans. you
will notice reduced frame-rates and performance when using an iphone 3gs. (Björk
2011b)

The vocabulary of frame rates and optimization speaks to the fusion of software and
music, but it also suggests the experiences of the album are variable because of the
constraints of its format. Even with the correct device, users on the support page still
complain of bugs and crashes within the app. The developers respond by soliciting
information and promising to fix what they can in future updates. This kind of opti-
mization is not only inconvenient for users but also fixes the app in a certain point in
time to a certain range of devices. App-albums need to be continuously updated, either
to respond to bugs or to keep up with changes to the platform to which they are tied.
Tethered to its format and platform in a much narrower and more integrated fashion
than, say, the CD and the CD player, app-albums take on the logics of obsolescence
typical of software and computers (Parks 2007, Sterne 2007), a much faster level of
iteration and change than the music commodity has normally been accustomed to.
The iteration that takes place with app-albums is not just limited to the techni-
cal level; it exists at the commercial level as well. Originally released as version 1.0,
Biophilia has been updated six times since 2011 to reflect changed purchasing options.
The reason for the updates highlights another hope, at least for record labels, of virtual
albums: better control over circulation and consumption of the digital music commod-
ity. It was initially released as a free app with one song included. As the weeks went by,
new songs were made available and could be purchased in-app for around $1.99 (Pytlik
2011). Three singles were released in this fashion, between July and September 2011.
By October of that year, users could buy all ten songs within the app, though users
who decided to purchase it after January 2012 (version 1.5) had to buy the entire app
for $12.99. Unfortunately for early adopters, the staggered release schedule meant that
 App Music   489

those who bought the tracks as soon as they were released later had to pay for the full
app, despite already owning three or four songs. Although Björk offered a “one day dis-
count” for users who fell into this category, many of them missed the sale and resented
the distribution method as a result:

what’s the point to pre-existing users? We’re still ripped off for being early adopters,
now another update that does nothing to balance this inequity? What a joke! This
update just makes it easier for those who are buying now, & who gives a toss about
who paid nearly twice for the same? Not the developers, that’s for sure. Thanks for
that! Really cool of you! (iTunes Review by swearWords 2012)

Here the desire to control the flow of the music commodity and to dictate the release
windows for individual songs clashes with the iterative nature of the software revisions
and updates, leaving some users with little option but to make repeat purchases.
Although the problem documented here likely applied to only a limited number of
users, the idea of partitioning the same commodity into multiple revenue streams is at
the heart of the industrial and commercial push toward the app-album as a potential
format for music delivery. At a time when more users are downloading music for free
from file-sharing services, or streaming songs from services such as Spotify, YouTube,
or Pandora, the app-album represents to labels and some artists both the opportunity
to make albums valuable again as cohesive units and the chance to revive revenue from
the sale of music. The virtual nature of album apps makes the music they contain fluid
and recombinable, offering users a highly interactive environment for playing with the
sounds and samples that make up albums like Biophilia. But this same virtual nature
also presents a highly reconfigurable strategy for packaging and repacking the musical
content. Just as earlier enhanced CDs sought to raise the value of the CD commodity
by embedding it with additional footage, features, and interactivities, app-albums par-
cel up delivery of sounds and songs, multiplying the opportunities for purchases and
upgrades.9
As much as the potential for splintering revenue possibilities exists, the lack of inte-
gration and connection to the other musical commodities in a user’s library ultimately
limits the usability of app-based albums. App-albums are usually sold as distinct apps,
unrelated and unconnected to the rest of a user’s digital music library. To listen to the
album, users have to open the app and play it from there, rather than being able to
play it from the native music app. If users wanted to play it in conjunction with the
rest of their library, they would have to buy the digital files separately. Although the
app-album might enhance a focus on the album as an entire artistic work, it stands as
an impractical way of handling, sorting, and consuming the digital music commod-
ity. How would a music fan, playing music through a media player or portable MP3
device, add an app to the playlist? How would users sort and store the album, along
with the rest of their library? How would users who download multiple app-albums
deal with the increasing proliferation of individual albums on the home screens of their
devices? Virtual albums may take advantage of many possibilities of digital music, but
490   Jeremy Wade Morris

app-based albums actually undermine some of digital music’s most useful features and
qualities when it comes to everyday uses of music.

Conclusion

You inspired me to create something that communicated with images, because YOU
do, YOU communicate with me and each other with.gifs and pictures, and artwork,
graphics ALL DAY 24/7/ YOU’RE an ARTPOP generation. I’m hoping you will all
continue to grow together and stay connected through your creativity. much love.
love, gaga. (Lady Gaga, describing the ARTPOP app, quoted in Dredge 2013b)

Lady Gaga’s press release for ARTPOP finishes on this inspirational note. The promise
of previous virtual technologies reverberates in her description of using technology to
truly connect users. Like early virtual communities or the hope surrounding virtual
reality, the immediacy, hypermediacy, and interactivity of the app-album format will
provide, at least in Gaga’s rhetoric, greater connection and creativity between her and
her fans. Through these virtual experiences of her music and the virtual ties that form
around them, Gaga hopes to develop a version of the music commodity that might
even reconfigure traditional practices of listening and traditional modes of circulating
music commodities.
Although the fusion of software and music might raise fears about the game-ification
of the music listening experience, at heart is a deeper question about whether or not
the new interactivities that arise from app-based albums encourage new meanings and
ways of understanding music. If so, the question becomes, What kinds of new mean-
ings are possible from these virtual albums, and how do they differ, if at all, from our
previous experiences with the music commodity? The format is still too young and
under negotiation—and more research remains to be done on the aesthetic, economic,
and functional use of app-albums—before answering such questions. It is clear that
app-albums use the notion of the virtual to offer a range of interactivities for explor-
ing an album, but it is also clear that virtuality is consistently and iteratively put in
service of further splintering the music commodity into multiple component parts.
Even with the cozy rhetoric around community and the album as a gift in Gaga’s press
release, app-albums also evidence an extended marketing strategy that uses the virtual
to promise experiences valuable enough that they seem worth further investing in,
oftentimes repeatedly.
Despite their potential for novel aesthetic and artistic uses, these new possibilities
are complicated by the app-album’s virtual nature and the constraints that come with
music as software. Even artists and their labels recognize these commercial aims and
technical glitches. After Lady Gaga’s signoff above, she adds a postscript:  “p.s (start
asking for IPADS FOR XMAS!!) it’s gonna be so fun. but don’t worry. It will also be
released in the regular physical and digitals which will be unique and different to the
 App Music   491

app.” The most fully immersive Gaga experience requires the right platform and the
right software. But knowing that even the best-produced app-albums crash, hang, and
come with other contingencies, Gaga is hedging her bets and offering ARTPOP in mul-
tiple formats.

Notes
1. In some instances, Bolter and Grusin ascribe these logics to the technology itself rather
than considering the role developers and users play in shaping remediation. Though
I agree new technologies incorporate features of older media, I would argue it is impor-
tant to consider remediation as both a social and a technical process. New media refash-
ions older media because those who design and market new media use remediation to
help consumers adapt to otherwise unfamiliar technology.
2. Not all listeners were as excited by the possibilities of digital sound. Many audiophiles
still preferred vinyl, claiming it is “warmer” sounding and “truer” to the original record-
ing given that the inscriptions were continuous and not discrete (Davis 2007). However,
these defenses typically also relish in the audio artifacts created by vinyl (i.e., the crackle
of the needle), admitting traces of mediation.
3. As Philip Auslander (1999) notes, the idea of the performance as the gold standard by
which to judge recordings has given way, thanks to increasing mediatization in the 1980s
and 1990s, to a situation where there is now significant interplay between live perfor-
mance and recordings, with each one referring recursively to the other as the standard by
which to judge authenticity or “reality.”
4. It should be noted that interactivity is as much a marketing selling point as it is an essen-
tial feature of new media. Although I agree that new media are often presented as more
interactive, I recognize the “myth” of interactivity does a significant amount of work in
the cultural process of introducing and selling new media beyond simply allowing users
greater control over their media (Andrejevic 2007, Manovich 2001).
5. Depending on one’s definition of virtual, this process of offering additional content or
repackaging previously unused contents has its roots in reissues, box sets, and the like.
There were also attempts on early laserdiscs to create an enhanced music commodity for
that format, though these were movies that had audio, such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller
laserdisc.
6. These digital rights management schemes were primitive forms of more recent and well-
known technological protection practices, such as the Sony Root Kit incident. In 2005,
a computer security researcher discovered that Sony BMG had secretly included soft-
ware on some of its CDs that modified the user’s computer and prevented machines from
copying the contents of the disc. Not only did Sony’s attempts to control unauthorized
copying represent an invasion of privacy, the code that was installed on users’ machines
made them more vulnerable to other malicious software (Doctorow 2005).
7. Although the App Store let third-party developers create software for Apple’s iOS plat-
form, many companies had been designing apps for “jailbroken” iOS devices and selling
them in the Cydia store several months before Apple’s officially instituted outlet.
8. Two exceptions are French cover band Nouvelle Vague’s 2009 app, which held audio snip-
pets of the band’s previous material and an exclusive full track from their forthcoming
492   Jeremy Wade Morris

album, and Nine Inch Nails’ app, which offered fans mobile access to the NIN website and
to user-generated remixes of the band’s music.
9. This charge is not a new one for Björk. She has regularly produced special editions and
bonus DVDs as a way to mine more revenue from her albums. From remixes to reissues
to remasters, with live concert DVDs and three-to-five-disc special collections, Björk and
her record label have explored multiple ways for repackaging her music and peripheral
material (Pytlik 2006). Biophilia even had a limited edition handmade box that featured
exclusive material, an artistic booklet and essay, and a set of ten custom-made tuning
forks based on tones from the album (for approx. US$800).

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 chapter 26

Alternative V i rt ua l i t y
Independent Micro Labels Facing the Ideological
Challenge of Virtual Music Culture—The Case
of Finnish Ektro Records

Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

This chapter examines virtual music culture from the viewpoint of an independent
micro label (Strachan 2003), Ektro Records based in Finland. Micro labels are small
record producers who seek to separate themselves from hegemonic music industries1
and subscribe to uncompromising aesthetic and countercultural ideologies instead.
Acting as private patrons supporting marginal artistic alternatives, they seek to repre-
sent counterhegemony to the gatekeeping practices and utilitarianism of the corporate,
“major” music industries. These labels have a complex relationship with virtual music
culture, which—although useful—undermines their economic infrastructure and chal-
lenges their subversive position in the field of cultural production.
In the first place, micro labels have benefited from globalization and the elimination
of intermediaries related to virtual media. Easier access to more diverse music and
media including blogs, discussion forums, and social media has contributed to global
virtual music scenes (Peterson and Bennett 2004), which have absorbed previously
marginalized national musics. With their own online shops, micro labels such as Ektro
have been able to distribute their releases directly to these fresh “micro markets” that
are based on small niches (see Anderson 2004). Micro labels such as Ektro Records
specialize in physical formats, which they prefer over digital, intangible formats. As
reported frequently in the media, physical record sales have been declining since the
turn of the millennium, the digital distribution of music being suggested as the main
reason for it (Wikström 2009). This affects Ektro Records as well as other micro labels,
which produce smaller and smaller editions of every release. In addition, new virtual
streaming services in Finland such as Spotify have not been economically productive
for the small sales volumes of micro labels such as Ektro.
496   Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

Ektro regards physical recordings with information and artwork in the sleeves as
concrete, collectible works of art, while digital music is seen as disposable and super-
ficial. Despite adjusting to virtual markets, physical record production is challenged
ideologically. In the free distribution model, where digital music is distributed not
only for free, but also freely by anyone with less control of copyrights, promoted by
countercultural cyberlibertarians (Burkart 2010) or net labels, recorded music becomes
disarticulated from the commodity form of the physical recording. Free distribution
also challenges the role of any intermediaries between the audience and artists. Thus
the countercultural position of micro labels such as Ektro Records formed in the era
when physical records dominated is challenged:  micro labels have to compete with
cyberlibertarians in providing alternatives to the music industry and defending artistic
autonomy from commodification.
In order to survive these challenges, micro labels seem to have few viable options. In
the case of Ektro, new sources of funding, such as crowdfunding, or exploring new busi-
ness opportunities would be an ideological compromise. Growing revenues from com-
mercial digital music services—achieved for example through democratization—would
improve the economic situation of the labels. The countercultural mission of Ektro
is not entirely outdated; “colonization” (Burkart 2010) of the content on the Internet
imposes commodification also on free distribution of music, which takes place to a
great extent through authorized commercial services. If not to maintain economic
autonomy, virtual music culture will still be useful to Ektro for purposes of commu-
nication. There is also a need for visionary intermediaries, such as Jussi Lehtisalo of
Ektro, for curating the vast selections of music on the Internet. Thus Ektro is an excel-
lent example of a label trying to achieve a balance between virtual online and physical
offline music cultures.

Ektro Records and Independent

Micro Labels in the Finnish Context

Ektro Records2 was established for an art college project in 1996 by musician Jussi
Lehtisalo, who operates the label from his hometown, Pori, an industrial city of some
eighty thousand inhabitants known for its lively rock scene since the 1980s. Lehtisalo
has enjoyed a long career in the internationally acclaimed “avant rock” group Circle.
By February 2013, Ektro had released eight-four albums on CD, which vary greatly in
terms of musical style. The releases run the gamut from metal groups to electronic
avant-garde. The numerous groups, in which Lehtisalo himself plays or musicians are
involved from the groups in which he plays, such as Circle, cover roughly half of the
discography of the Ektro. The other half consists of releases by contemporary artists
from such countries as Finland, the United States, Germany, and Japan, as well as reis-
sues, such as albums by the Finnish progressive rock group Haikara from 1973 and the
American heavy metal group Jesters of Destiny from 1986 (Ektro 2013, Lehtisalo 2012).
 Alternative Virtuality   497

Ektro’s audience is as international as its roster of artists. Lehtisalo (2013) estimates

that roughly half of the releases are sold abroad, while the recordings with Finnish lyr-
ics are mostly bought by domestic audiences. Ektro also has a sublabel, Full Contact,
dedicated to vinyl-only releases, often cooperating with another Finnish label, Svart. In
addition, Ektro collaborates with other producers on various other labels, such as Super
Metsä and Ruton Music (Lehtisalo 2012, Discogs 2013, Ektro 2013).
From a broader perspective Ektro is aptly described by the concept of a “do-it-
yourself independent micro label,” constructed by Robert Strachan (2003) in his influ-
ential study conducted in the United Kingdom.3 According to him, the qualities of a
micro label consist of producing small, limited editions of approximately 250 to 3,000
copies from private addresses by one or two individuals. They (often artists, fans, and
record collectors) also take care of the distribution and promotion and other tasks
necessary for the release. In addition to their scale of operation, these labels—as well
as the artists they produce—share certain ideologies and aesthetic positions, forming
networks of communication and exchange, a process the Internet has accelerated after
Strachan conducted his study. In more detail, Strachan (2003, 17–18) refers to the “ideo-
logical characteristics of the DIY independent scene” as “a highly developed version
of the art versus commerce dichotomy that has been a central facet of rock culture
since the mid 1960s.” According to this dichotomy, the hegemonic, “major” corporate
recording industry is a corrupting institution from which the DIY independent scenes
seek to separate themselves with their alternative, autonomous, and more democratic
networks (see also Peterson and Bennett 2004). In addition, Strachan (2007, 260) aug-
ments the characteristics of the networks with the important notion of “engaged cul-
ture,” a concept used by the radical musician, theorist, and independent record label
founder Chris Cutler4 to describe “a high ratio of performers to consumers” (see also
Hodgkinson 2004, 222; Strachan 2003, 13; 2007).
Besides Ektro there are approximately seventy to one-hundred active indepen-
dent micro labels in Finland, among them Harmönia Records, Fonal Records, and
Helmi-levyt, most of which are more or less networked with each other.5 In compari-
son with these, the production ideology of Ektro Records is somewhat special—not the
everyday practices. Lehtisalo has radical opinions and visions, and his educated critical
statements on “culture industry” stand out among other Finnish micro labels. Most of
the latter claim to simply release music they like regardless of its anticipated economic
success, but according to Lehtisalo Ektro is building a specific artistic manifesto with its
catalog, which defies the calculating and risk-avoiding production logic of the major-
ity of record labels (Lehtisalo 2012, Haahti 2012, Häkkinen 2012, Koskinen 2014, Lind
2012, Martinkauppi 2014, Metsola 2014, Seppälä 2014, Sänpäkkilä 2012, Zherbin and
Kretova 2013).
However, any analogy between small Finnish labels such as Ektro and British micro
labels is not so straightforward. First, unlike Strachan’s case studies (2003, 2007), many
Finnish micro labels lack the attachment to “indie” or another single, definitive aes-
thetic genre. However, regardless of genre, the principal modus operandi of these labels
is similar. Likewise, the small punk labels in the United Kingdom, the United States,
498   Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

Canada, and Spain studied by Alan O’Connor (2008) and Tim Gosling (2004) also
negotiate between economic, ideological, and aesthetic values.6 Second, the national
context also needs to be taken into consideration. Although Ektro is networked inter-
nationally, the cultures of record production (Negus 1996) in Finland are different from
those in the United Kingdom. Since the scope of this article does not allow me to delve
into all these differences here, I  will concentrate on the most important one. As in
Strachan’s field, the “major” recording industry is also present in Finland, where it con-
sists of the same multinational corporations7 with their local sublabels and partners.
However, the market for music recordings in the United Kingdom is more than twenty
times bigger than that of Finland.8 As a result, a micro label selling under three thou-
sand copies of a release would be considered more marginal in the former than in the
latter. In fact, if we compare record sales, micro labels such as Ektro Records are not
very different from ordinary small labels in Finland. What becomes significant, then,
are the ideological qualities of their practices.

Ektro Records and Countercultural Ideology

Although the “engaged culture” of Finnish micro labels such as Ektro could be described
as a certain subculture or scene similar to those studied by Strachan (2003, 2007),
Gosling (2004), and O’Connor (2008), I find it more fruitful to compare them to the
counterculture of the 1960s, since the concept captivates the ideology of the label more
aptly (see Peterson and Bennett 2004; cf. Burkart 2010). In resemblance to the debate
on concepts such as postmodernism, there is ambiguity about what is meant by coun-
terculture in the field of popular music and cultural studies (Bennett 2014; Duncombe
2002; Roszak [1968] 1973, xi–xiii; Whiteley 2012a, 2012b; Whiteley and Sklower 2014).
Admittedly, as a fashionable word of the late 1960s, it is one of the many concepts to
escape exact definition, but it is nevertheless useful in capturing the ideology of Finnish
independent micro labels such as Ektro. As explained in more detail in this chapter,
the version of the countercultural ideology of the micro labels is connected with their
discontent with virtual music culture, while another version has articulated to cyber-
libertarianism, which in turn embraces virtuality.
Countercultural movements of the 1960s, even in their specific historical formations,
had a certain common ideological nucleus, which in turn has inspired the micro labels
as suggested by Strachan’s notion (2003) of the art versus commerce dichotomy cited
above. This dichotomy, which is manifested in the Romantic idea of an autonomous
artist, independent of economic success and thus critical of the bourgeois markets for
art, resonated strongly in the counterculture of the 1960s such as the British and the
Finnish Underground (Frith and Horne 1987, Rautiainen 2001, Salo and Lindfors 1988).
For example the former, active in the 1960s, evaluated artistic autonomy by questioning
the attachment to property by the prevailing culture, and exploring human conscious-
ness beyond political utilitarianism (Whiteley 2012). These values inspired the rock
culture, and eventually the DIY ideology of punk, also in Finland (Frith and Horne
 Alternative Virtuality   499

1987; Heima-Tirkkonen, Kallio-Tamminen, and Selin 1996; Rautiainen 2001; Strachan

2003; Whiteley 2012a, 2012b).
Contemporary micro labels such as Ektro reflect these countercultural values of
autonomy and the critique of utilitarianism by releasing records that challenge the
current market selection and logic of production with their own “alternative market”
(Whiteley 2012a; see also Strachan 2003, Whiteley 2012b). Like the micro labels in the
United Kingdom (Strachan 2003), Lehtisalo seeks to oppose utilitarian reasoning con-
cerning the success of his releases by placing artistic autonomy above all. Lehtisalo
considers it an important mission for Ektro to give a voice to those to whom it has
traditionally been denied by the gatekeepers, or the record industry. This attitude is
exemplified by a Warholian comment: “An accomplished connoisseur of art … doesn’t
despise anything … s/he just curiously observes all kinds of phenomena”9 (cf. Frith and
Horne 1987, 108–122; Whiteley 2012a). Lehtisalo claims that the logic of the Ektro brand
is supposed to be “suspicious,” to include contradictory artworks side by side, and thus
to constantly play with the expectations of the audience. He seeks to challenge canon-
izing opinion leaders, such as journalists, and avoids becoming “professional”—a threat
to creativity. The countercultural ideology is alive in the practices of micro labels such as
Ektro, which are always in the process of seeking to challenge the current cultural values
they consider hegemonic (Whiteley 2012a, 2012b; Lehtisalo 2012). This opposition does
not adapt to virtual space without friction, although as I will later argue, ideological cri-
tique of the markets can be found in one form even in the virtual music culture of today.

Autonomy by Distribution
and New Virtual Intermediaries
Distribution of recordings, an important factor to micro labels, is the part of record
production most affected by the shift from analog to digital record music. Micro labels’
desire for autonomy, or the counterhegemonic positioning against the “major” record
industry, takes on a material form in their distribution practices. They avoid the large
distribution companies owned by the multinational record companies, which domi-
nate the Western countries, including Finland.10 They rather prefer small networks that
consist of fans, musicians, other micro labels, and distros, small-scale mail order distri-
bution companies specializing in distributing the releases of micro labels. In the case
of a more popular label or release, the services of more established independent distri-
bution companies are required. Ektro has a distribution deal with Playground Music,
a reasonably large distribution company specializing in circulating the releases of a
plethora of “independent” labels in Scandinavia (Playground 2013). However, the most
important distribution channel for Ektro is the online shop on its website, through
which the label not only sells its own productions but also functions as a “distro” (Casal
2013, Lehtisalo 2012, Strachan 2003).
As the example above suggests, the Internet has had a huge impact on the distri-
bution practices of micro labels. In addition to more direct ways to distribute them,
500   Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

the whole concept of a physical recording has been challenged by digital distribution
via information networks, as witnessed widely in the 2000s. These networks have not
only extended micro labels’ mail order systems; they also implement the availability of
any record in digital format by any amateur producer to any user online (Jones 2002,
Wikström 2009, Young and Collins 2010). The implications of this to micro labels are
to be examined in more detail later in this chapter. Besides distribution, new ways of
communication such as electronic fanzines, mailing lists, blogs, discussion forums,
and social media like Facebook, or previously Myspace, have generated global fan net-
works around very small music niches, as in the case of Ektro. In the virtual space,
discussing and distributing music have intertwined. Producers, music makers, and fans
alike can share music not only through unauthorized file sharing but also sites such
as SoundCloud and YouTube in addition to the previously mentioned social media.
Digital music as well as physical recordings may be bought or sold legally through
online retailers, auction sites, or the home pages of labels and artists. At the same time,
music can be also reviewed and discussed (Peterson and Bennett 2004, Young and
Collins 2010).
These uses of the Internet have given birth to virtual music culture (Ayers 2006a)
and even virtual music scenes11 (Galuszka 2012, Peterson and Bennett 2004; cf. Burkart
2010). This development has increased demand for the music of smaller producers
through greater exposure, as for example in the case of Ektro, which is active in the
new media space. Chris Anderson (2004) suggests that this virtualization has also
generated an economic phenomenon he describes with the concept of “The Long
Tail”: e-commerce is not bound to any physical storage space and is therefore able to
offer greater selections of products. Anderson argues that this greater supply, combined
with the recommendation systems of online shops such as Amazon, has accelerated
the demand for niche products. This demand has transformed into flourishing “micro
markets,” although the question remains as to whether the individual micro labels as
discrete, separate units have benefited from the situation economically (see Lanier 2011,
2013; Muikku 2014; Resnikoff 2013; Strachan 2007; Anderson 2004).
The most optimistic scholars have predicted that the World Wide Web would pro-
vide a direct link between artist and audience, which undermines the role of the inter-
mediaries such as record labels, distributors, or retailers (Galuszka 2012, Strachan
2007, Young and Collins 2010). This “disintermediation” (Jones 2002) has been seen
as the potential for balancing the distribution of income within the music industries,
considered uneven in some studies (McLeod 2005, Rodman and Vanderdonckt 2006,
Strachan 2007, Young and Collins 2010). However, Sherman Young and Steve Collins
(2010; see also Jones 2002) have questioned this view by showing how the e-commerce
related to music recordings resembles, if anything, “re-mediation,” replacement of the
old intermediaries with new digital ones such as online shops, digital distributors, and
solutions for transferring money. Nonetheless, these developments are even more com-
plex: as well as using the aforementioned intermediaries, micro labels have been able
to distribute their physical releases through their own online shops more directly to
Anderson’s “micro markets.” As the number of units sold by distributors is diminishing,
 Alternative Virtuality   501

the online shop—lacking intermediaries who take a share of the sales—is more and
more important to Ektro (Casal 2012).
If the distribution of, and therefore access to, micro-label releases expanded, the
profits used to fund them have declined proportionally. Overall record sales in the
industrialized countries have been declining for at least a decade, as the massive media
coverage on the issue informs us.12 This major shift in the revenue-generating mod-
els of the music industries has also involved micro labels, forcing Ektro Records, for
example, to press smaller editions of its releases. Though there is an increasing reduc-
tion of demand for physical recordings, Internet-based music services are growing in
popularity—yet they generate substantially smaller profits than physical formats do.
Micro labels with small digital distributors have had difficulty in gaining any royalties
from one of the most popular distribution channels, YouTube (see Bakula 2012, Sisario
2011).13 As Lehtisalo suggests, the revenues from streaming services such as Spotify,
in spite of its huge popularity in Finland since 2008, have not satisfied micro labels14
(Lehtisalo 2012, Sänpäkkilä 2012).
The flow of revenue and the ambiguity of contracts have aroused discontent with com-
mercial digital distribution among Finnish micro labels. Lehtisalo’s attitude toward the
digital music business is very cautious (see also Burkart 2010). He considers the new
commercial digital distribution channels as exploitative mechanisms whereby the mid-
dlemen such as distributors and retailers gain most of the profit, to the detriment of artists
and labels. One of the most popular digital music companies in Finland, the streaming
service Spotify, has gained steady international media attention highlighting the small
amounts of royalties the company has paid to the artists and record labels it has distrib-
uted (see e.g., Lindvall 2011, Sisario 2013). The “major” labels are also reported to have
acquired shares of Spotify, thus securing better contracts with the company (Lindvall
2011). Lehtisalo regards legal digital distribution as a “mere tool to make money”15 (as
opposed to making art) and argues that unauthorized downloading of music is actually
better for micro labels than the present situation, where the profit appears to go mainly to
the digital businesses, which are involved neither in producing the records nor in creating
the music and thus run no risk (see also Lanier 2013b). Furthermore, he claims that those
who believe purchasing legitimate digital music benefits the artists are being misled:

In my opinion, if the Internet has got so far out of hand, then let the songs be there,
may they play on out there, wherever. But as far as these digital sales, they are totally
incomprehensible! . . . someone collects the money, and someone else is proud of
having officially bought [a digital recording] somewhere. Well, s/he certainly may
have officially bought it, but it’s a shame that you can only spot the official aspect in
everybody else’s salary—with an insignificant margin—and not in the pocket of the
person who has created the work. As it is, I don’t know whether the creator of the
work really wants the penny or not.16

He also believes that even though it might be true that some artists earn big profits from
digital sales, these are few and far between (see Lanier 2013b, Lindvall 2014b, Resnikoff
502   Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

2013). Despite these somewhat bitter comments, which render him on the skeptic side
in the debate over the profitability of authorized digital music services to artists and
labels,17 many Ektro releases are distributed digitally to Spotify and iTunes; according
to Lehtisalo, even the smallest profits bring at least some income (Lehtisalo 2012).

The Romanticism of the Physical Format

In addition to the issues directly related to the new music economy, there are also other
reasons micro labels such as Ektro Records—although deeply rooted in virtual music
culture—eschew digital distribution. The focus of the label remains on collectible phys-
ical releases because, according to Lehtisalo, digital music is disposable and lacks the
aesthetic qualities of the physical recording (cf. Trainer’s Chapter 22 in this volume, on
the intentional inauthenticity of chillwave artists). In the ideology of Ektro, echoed by
many other micro labels, physical records, unlike digital and intangible music formats,
are perceived as concrete works of art; the work does not comprise just the music but
also tangibility and artwork in the sleeves.18 For Lehtisalo, digital music is “the future
for those who are surely interested in everything … but the content itself,”19 implying
that music files are more disposable and as such lend themselves to generating quick
profits more readily than physical records. The superficiality of digital music use is
further illustrated by his view on how file sharers gather large collections without the
intention to familiarize themselves with the music (Lehtisalo 2012).
Lehtisalo is also intrigued by the economic risk involved in producing physical record-
ings, since along with the investment involved, there is also a deeper appreciation of
the product. Much in the same vein, David Keenan (2013; cf. Reynolds 2004) appraises
the “private press”—physical releases funded by “private” aficionados—in the music
journal The Wire. The economic risk of a production emphasizes the autonomy of the
producer, involving the notion of a Romantic individual who gives her or his every-
thing for the sake of art (Frith and Horne 1987). By contrast, Lehtisalo admits to trying
not to spend too much money on producing excessively large pressings for today’s ever-
shrinking markets (Lehtisalo 2012).
There are also other reasons for this appreciation of the physical materiality, which
has nevertheless articulated with the digital age. In the “engaged culture” of micro
labels, the essential networks with fans, often artists or other labels, have been tradi-
tionally created and sustained to a great extent by exchanging physical releases or by
virtue of encounters at the merchandise table after live shows (see Burkart 2010; see
Ayers 2006b for the convergence of virtual and “analog” music culture). Ektro has built
a carefully thought-out distribution catalog for its online shop, made up of the releases
it has obtained through exchange from other micro labels. Besides, many of the owners
and fans of micro labels such as Lehtisalo are enthusiastic vinyl record collectors and
thus see micro-label productions to a great extent as a part of record-collecting culture.
Likewise collectors, who mainly concentrate on rare, often small editions, are impor-
tant customers for small labels (see Reynolds 2004, Shuker 2010). The demand for
 Alternative Virtuality   503

certain small or otherwise scarce editions has resulted either in an outburst of expen-
sive new vinyl pressings or extremely high prices in the secondhand market, rife on
many websites such as eBay, Discogs, or even Facebook (see Reynolds 2004). The pur-
chase, sale, exchange, and discussion of vinyl records—in other words, all networking
related to the culture of record collecting—have also become increasingly virtual. The
same applies as well to the exchange practices of micro labels: the web is more and more
often the forum where the word on great artists, releases, or YouTube videos is spread.

Virtual Counterculture Challenging

Physical Record Production
As demonstrated above, micro labels such as Ektro are not enamored of virtual releases,
and yet, like the average listener, a proportion of the audience of micro labels has
largely turned to virtual distribution of recordings. The main target audience for micro
labels are enthusiastic music fans, and as such, also often active file sharers (see e.g.,
Goldsmith 2011, Lumbleau 2013). The young generation of popular music fans, born in
the Internet Age, are generally more familiar with intangible, digital music formats such
as MP3 and streaming than with physical records (see Bakula 2012). The equivalent of
counterculture—or the DIY ethos of punk—in the virtual realm is cyberlibertarianism
(Burkart 2010), which disputes copyright legislation and controlled, commercial distri-
bution of music; like open-source software, music must be produced and experienced
commonly without demarcations in terms of financial resources for producing or pur-
chasing, not consumed (see Goldsmith 2011; cf. Bennett 2014). It is not a coincidence
that there are connections between the cyberculture celebrating free access to informa-
tion, including digital music outside markets, and the ideology of the counterculture of
the 1960s; many of the first innovators of information networks in Silicon Valley were
influenced by the countercultural movements (Lanier 2011, Turner 2006, Burkart 2010).
Free digital distribution of music on the Internet distances recorded music from
(simple) commodification. For example, Patryk Galuszka (2012) examines nonprofit
net labels, which have emerged since the turn of the millennium. Contrary to tradi-
tional micro label practices, net labels function outside record markets, since the music
is produced and distributed for free. As Galuszka (2012) argues, “The advent of the
Internet and digitalization made it possible to distribute recordings that were made for
reasons other than profit.” This represents the economic autonomy of recorded music
even more thoroughly than micro labels, which have to cover their physical record pro-
duction expenses by selling commodities. On this basis, the free distribution model of
net labels can be claimed to be the ultimate expression of anti-elitist artistic autonomy,
as there are not even “negligible” commercial expectations (see Keenan 2011) and the
music can be accessed for free.
Moreover, free digital distribution of music questions the need for any
intermediaries—distributors or even net labels—between the audience and artists
504   Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

(see also Negus 1996); in the cyberlibertarian utopia, any music can be uploaded and
accessed digitally by anybody wishing to do so.20 In a state of free access, as artists gain
the tools to distribute their productions straight to the listeners, the former as well as
the latter are perceived as truly autonomous of any gatekeepers such as radio stations
or record labels, whether countercultural or mainstream.21 Hence, the virtual music
culture evolving around free distribution of music challenges the traditional posi-
tion of micro labels as countercultural intermediaries providing an alternative to the
commerce-driven “major” record industry.

Discussing the Role of Micro Labels

in Virtual Music Culture
The question arises as to whether Finnish micro labels such as Ektro are able to adapt
to virtual music culture, and, if so, how. In order to survive change and retain its found-
ing ideals and level of activity, Ektro seems to have few options. One option would be
to seek new sources of funding, such as crowdfunding, net services to gather donations
from ordinary people for charity, or art projects such as record releases by presenting
them to the public (see D’Amato, Chapter 30, in this Handbook). In the case of Ektro,
this option is not really viable because of Lehtisalo’s fascination with the autonomy of
private funding. To him, asking for contributions for releases is “begging for alms,”
a threat to autonomy and a concession to utilitarianism. In this view, with echoes of
Romanticism discussed above, a release is supposed to be a bold expression, whose suc-
cess or popularity is not to be tested beforehand (cf. Frith and Horne 1987).22 “If one has
no funds to release, then one doesn’t release,”23 as Lehtisalo explains his practical point
of view. For him, the risks involved are also part of the excitement of releasing records.
With the decline of CD sales, the music industries have sought to find further reve-
nue streams from outside of recordings, in the form of licensing copyrights, live shows,
or producing innovative merchandise, a practice dubbed the “360-degree model.”24 For
Lehtisalo, the countercultural patron and self-respecting artist-producer, who is dis-
enchanted with pondering the popularity of his releases, licensing music for movies
or advertisements is not attractive either. Lehtisalo acknowledges that there are “huge
margins” connected to “publishing contracts and the like, but that doesn’t concern my
world because I represent a different branch of science … I mean, I don’t know what
they are! To put it playfully.”25 At least Lehtisalo can recoup some of the losses from
decreased record sales with live shows, which are increasingly in demand thanks to free
distribution of digital music. When it comes to merchandise, Ektro has taken advan-
tage of its artist brands by producing some t-shirts, but the main attraction for Ektro
Records, Lehtisalo claims (2012), is releasing records.
The threat facing micro labels of cyberlibertarians and the culture of free distribu-
tion being superior in terms of autonomy, being even more about the music and less
about the markets than micro labels are, is not concrete. Lehtisalo understates the supe-
riority on the basis of artistry with his arguments on how file sharers concentrate on
 Alternative Virtuality   505

the quantity of music at the expense of quality (actually listening to music and not
just downloading), and considers digital music as a lesser format of recording (see
also Keenan 2011; cf. Goldsmith 2011). That cyberlibertarian free distribution is less
commodified than micro-commercial productions of micro labels could be disputed
on many accounts. Many of the popular channels facilitating music sharing, such as
YouTube or plain search engine pages, feature advertisements, which connect them
to commodification. The information technology companies, such as ISPs and hard-
ware and software producers, also benefit economically from free content to which
their products facilitate access (see Cutler 2011; Lanier 2011, 2013). As the popularity
of commercial music services that are freely accessible, such as YouTube or Spotify,
shows, there is also a shift from unauthorized sharing of copyrighted material to autho-
rized sharing.26 This kind of phenomenon could be paralleled with the Internet music
scholar Patrick Burkart’s notion (2010, 7)  of “colonization,” where public culture is
repressed under the copyright-based business model and surveillance of multinational
corporations. The sharing culture has been transformed into a market.27 Even the pub-
lic network—including unlicensed music files—has become to a great extent a compu-
tational cloud controlled and monitored by large corporations such as Google (Lanier
2013a, 2013b; see also Dredge 2014a).28
As described before, at present the revenues from commercial virtual distribution
advantage economies of scale at the expense of less-popular music. Democratization
or mere growth of the share of revenues from popular services such as YouTube or
Spotify29 could relieve the economic pressures imposed by virtual music culture on
micro labels (see Lindvall 2011; Sisario 2011, 2013). This could be implemented, for
example, by competing streaming services set up by national broadcasting corpora-
tions,30 which in Finland played a similar role in radio broadcasting by paying rea-
sonable royalties for radio play (Kurkela and Uimonen 2011). One option would be a
master platform, a nonprofit social network, as outlined by the Cultural Capital Project
(Dahlman, deWaard, and Fauteux 2013). It would replace diverse music services, such
as social media, streaming, and crowdfunding, with one resembling an online pub-
lic music library, where micropayments are transferred directly from fans to artists.
However, it seems unlikely that private companies are willing to lose their hold on the
digital music business.
In any case, virtual music culture will need visionaries such as Lehtisalo, who enthu-
siastically channel alternative, diverse musical perspectives. Despite the utopian visions
of a democratically accessible network of information, in the age of a vast music supply
there must be agents who are able to connect the right artists with the right audiences
and vice versa—intermediaries of a kind, be it an artist wearing a t-shirt featuring the
name of another artist or sharing her or his playlist on Facebook (see Fleischer 2010).
After all, the cultures of the digital realm and physical records are not so separate.
Virtual music culture is taking place not only on the Internet but also outside of it, in
the offline environment where we users live our everyday lives (Brusila 2010, Lee and
Peterson 2004, Sterne 2006). Virtual music culture does not have to be regarded as
something separate from the “traditional” material music culture, as this would suggest
506   Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

a clear binary distinction between virtual and nonvirtual (Castells [1996] 2010). In
addition, there is increasingly no such thing as music culture purely isolated from the
Internet anymore in the contemporary world, as the examples of vinyl record collecting
above demonstrate. For Simon Reynolds (2004), “file-sharing culture is … communal
record collection.” Furthermore, Burkart (2010, 135–136) notes that “the collector and
the cyberlibertarian share the values of individual autonomy over technology and of
shared access to culture,” referring to commercial music services, where digital music is
not totally owned but only rented from the producer, whereas file sharers and collectors
can do what they please with the records or music files they own (cf. Goldsmith 2011,
Lumbleau 2013). From the viewpoint of Ektro, virtual music culture is not a problem
as such, so long as the money circulating in the legal services ends up with the right
parties.

Conclusions
The virtualization of music cultures has meant, in a nutshell, easier access to more
diverse musics and wider means of communication, which has embraced—and is
embraced by—micro labels. However, during the past five years the economic auton-
omy of micro labels has diminished with record sales, in spite of—or because of—legal,
commercial digital distribution. In addition, cyberlibertarianism has challenged the
degree of counterhegemony of micro labels in terms of ideology and their intermediary
role. Although virtual culture has recently caused problems for labels, it may also prove
to be the answer for them. In the end, the problem is not the virtual space but how it is
territorialized, or colonized. At present, it seems that the most popular digital distribu-
tion channels are increasingly being taken over by big corporations consisting of new
players, such as Apple or Google, and the good old major labels through companies like
Spotify. In this game, micro players are losing out in terms of both turnover and audi-
ence. At the other end of the Internet spectrum, cyberlibertarians are keeping alive the
old Romantic dream of the counterculture by promoting totally free content—which
does not benefit micro labels, who are in need of concrete funds to produce their phys-
ical artworks. If the international community managed to strike a balance between
these radically opposing positions, say, by agreeing on reasonable revenues, the future
might look brighter for micro labels. Otherwise micro labels with strong ideological
commitments will have to adjust to this contradictory situation—and this will force
compromises. At least they have their artistic visions and the Romantic ideology on
their side; releases with a great economic risk can be seen by the audience as radically
authentic and invested with enthusiasm and irrational love for music when compared
with free material. According to the laws of supply and demand, what is not easily avail-
able is considered to be valuable. In this case, the original records, not their musical
content, would be of value.
Even if the virtual space turns out to be split between artists seeking the lowest com-
mon denominator to gain profit from the small revenues and net labels doing it free just
 Alternative Virtuality   507

for fun, Ektro should not worry. Should it happen that the fan community, on account
of its small size, fails to support the label’s production, the lure of its ideology remains.

Notes
1. The theory of hegemony is a model of power relations, where the hegemonic formation
is seen as dominating other formations in a complex discursive struggle for controlling
the cultural, economic, and ideological terrain (e.g., Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Williams
1977, 108–120). In this chapter, I  consider “major” record labels hegemonic because of
their popularity and leading role in determining the “normal” economies and practices
of record production.
2. Referred to throughout the chapter as plain “Ektro.”
3. Strachan sometimes uses the form “micro-independent label.” However, I prefer the form
“independent micro label.” In the former, “micro” might be mistakenly understood to
refer to the degree of independence and not to the size of the label, suggesting that the
label in question is somehow only a little bit independent, while in fact it endeavors to be
totally independent (or “macro-independent”). I am grateful for this remark to Morten
Michelsen from the University of Copenhagen.
4. Cutler was a leading figure in the Rock in Opposition (to the music industry) move-
ment, an important part of the counterculture in the UK in the 1970s. My thanks to Tony
Mitchell from the University of Technology, Sydney, for commenting on this chapter and
sharing his knowledge on Cutler.
5. The exact number of labels varies all the time as new labels are established and old ones
closed down, and it is hard to estimate because of the low degree of organization among
micro labels and the lack of any statistics on that account. For example, according to my
previous study only a few of the fifty members of the association of Finnish indepen-
dent record labels IndieCo meet Strachan’s micro-label qualities. However, I have esti-
mated that roughly 2,000 record titles, 75 percent of all titles produced commercially in
Finland in 2010, were produced outside the two industry organizations, IFPI Finland and
IndieCo. (Kaitajärvi 2013.) Of these, at least 250 were produced by independent micro
labels, in my rough estimation.
6. See also an article on “private press” by David Keenan (2013).
7. “The majors” (or the “Big Three”) include, after the merger of Universal and EMI in
2012, three companies (the other two being Sony and Warner) controlling approximately
75 percent of the markets in Western countries including Finland (see Wikström 2009,
IFPI 2012).
8. In 2011 the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) reported approximately $1.24  million
(£795.4 million) of “industry income” (BPI Yearbook 2012 2013a) whereas its equivalent
in Finland, IFPI Finland, reported income of $55.1  million (€41.3  million; IFPI 2012).
In addition, according to BPI Yearbook 2012 (2013b) “UK music consumers have con-
sistently been amongst the highest spending in the world” with revenue per capita of
$22.90 in 2011, and for Finland the figure $13.00 is presented in the Record Industry in
Numbers (2013). The threshold for the platinum record award is, in the former, 300,000
copies, and in the latter 20,000 copies. In addition, Strachan (2003) estimates there are
230 micro labels functioning in the United Kingdom, whereas in Finland 50 to 60 accord-
ing to my studies (the amounts depend on the strictness of definition; Strachan [2003, 14,
508   Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso

Appendix 1] notes that he has excluded genres like “psychedelia” or “hardcore punk” from
his study).
9. “Harjaantunut taiteentutkija … ei halveraa mitään … se vaan kiinnostuneena tarkkailee
kaikenlaisia ilmiöitä” (Lehtisalo 2012).
10. Record distribution in Finland was taken over by the then-multinational giants EMI,
CBS (Sony), and Universal as late as in the 1990s. However, Fazer, the largest record label
in Finland at the time, had a national distribution monopoly in the 1970s and 1980s and,
for example, forced the “ideological” label Love Records to create its own distribution
(Muikku 2001, 133–163).
11. The concept of “virtual” is used as given in the previous examples. I understand them, and
use the concept myself, referring to the meaning of “not physically existing as such but
made by software to appear to do so” (ODE 2012; cf. Castells ([1996] 2010, 403–406). This
use of the concept should not be confused with its meaning for example in the philosophy
of Gilles Deleuze ([1977] 2002, 148–152; 2004, 44; see Massumi 2002, 21, 31–37, 137–138).
12. However, it has to be noted that the overall sales including both physical and digital for-
mats were reported to show growth in 2012 (IFPI 2013).
13. In contrast, some record labels such as the “majors” were able to sign a special royalty deal
with YouTube (Sisario 2011; see also Dredge 2014b).
14. However, the profitability of Spotify depends on the case and is difficult to estimate
because of the complexity of the economies of recorded music; there are many factors to
be considered, such as promotional value, or interrelation of modes of distribution (down-
loads, streaming, physical recordings, file sharing, etc.; see Mulligan 2014, Resnikoff 2013,
and cf. Herstand 2014). It has been argued that Spotify could be the most profitable way
of distributing recorded music to artists and record labels in the near future (Herstand
2013; cf. Lindvall 2014a, Luckerson 2014, Trichordist 2014). Nevertheless, at the moment
there are no studies on how the growing popularity of streaming influences small labels,
but it appears that the streaming income for artists and labels with small audiences is
significantly small (Lindvall 2014b, Sisario 2013; cf. Muikku 2014).
15. “Se [digitaalinen musiikki] on vain tapa ansaita rahaa.” (Lehtisalo 2012). Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are my own.
16. “Mun mielestäni siis, jos se ny netti on kerran ryöstäytynyt noin käsistä, niin olkoon ne
biisit siellä sit, soikoon ne jossain sit tuolla ihan mis sattuu. Mut tota must se digimyynti
nyt on ihan käsittämätöntä! Et . . . joku kerää . . . rahaa, ja sit joku saa ylpeyttä niinku et
ne on . . . virallisesti . . . ostanu jonkun levyn jostain. No varmaan onkin niinku viral-
lisesti ostanut, mutta se on vaan harmi että se virallisuus näkyy kyllä kaikkien muiden
tilipussissa—ihan mitättömällä katteella—kuin esimerkiks sen joka on tehnyt sen teoksen.
Et emmä nyt tiedä että haluuks se teoksen tekijä sit yhden pennin vai ei” (Lehtisalo 2012).
17. One of the loudest opponents of Spotify is Thom Yorke of Radiohead, who withdrew his
solo music from the service in July 2013.
18. In addition to reasons having to do with vinyl collecting culture, for Perttu Häkkinen
(2012) of Harmönia Records, a label concentrated on electronic dance music, vinyl is also
essential thanks to DJing.
19. “[Digitaalinen musiikki] on varmaan tulevaisuus … joillekin sellasille, … jotka ei
varmastikaan oo kiinnostuneita … itse siitä sisällöstä” (Lehtisalo 2012).
20. “The cloud” is a technical term referring to a network that hosts digital information such
as music, which can be accessed from a number of locations (Wikström 2009; see also
Lanier 2013b).
 Alternative Virtuality   509

21. The net labels Galuszka (2012) examines are mainly motivated to publish the music by the
owner of the label.
22. In his article on private press, Keenan (2013) considers crowdfunding sites such as
Kickstarter as populist gatekeepers that potentially dismiss truly creative, i.e., dissident,
artists.
23. “[J]‌os ei ole varaa julkaista, niin sitten ei julkaista” (Lehtisalo 2013).
24. Considering the 360-degree model as an economic solution for every artist is being criti-
cized by computer scientist, writer, and composer Jaron Lanier (2010, 89–90).
25. “Joku voi sanoa … et kyl mä ainakin saan hirveitä katteita … mut se liittyy … näihin
tämmösiin publishingin sopimuksiin ja kaikkiin muihin sellasiin mut se ei taas koske
mun maailmaani sen takii koska … mä edustan eri tieteenalaa. Tarkotan … sitä … et,
mä en tiedä mitä ne on. Tällain leikkisästi sanottuna” (Lehtisalo 2012).
26. YouTube has not been considered authorized unanimously as it has distributed copy-
righted material uploaded by users without negotiating with the rightholders over remu-
neration; many copyright societies negotiated a contract with the company in 2013 (see
also Dredge 2014a, 2014b).
27. Furthermore, the vast supply of music and other cultural products has increased the com-
petition for the audience, which in general has forced an increase in marketing budgets in
the more established music industries (see Wikström 2009, 126).
28. Google, for example, collects huge amounts of information by monitoring its users and
the Internet. The information is sold further as customer behavior profiles (Google 2014,
Lanier 2013b).
29. Spotify’s revenue contracts with artists and labels are classified information. It is spec-
ulated that some contracts are more favorable to artists and labels than others, espe-
cially since most of the major labels have become important shareholders of Spotify
(Lindvall 2011).
30. In the United States, where there is no national broadcasting company, this is naturally
not a realistic scheme for the future.

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Interviews by the Author
Haahti, Hannu, owner of the label 267 lattajjaa. Digital recording. Dec. 19, 2012, Helsinki.
Häkkinen, Perttu, representative of Harmönia Records. Digital recording. Oct. 30, 2012,
Helsinki.
Koskinen, Jani, owner of Combat Rock Industry. Digital recording. Feb. 18, 2014, Helsinki.
Lehtisalo, Jussi. Digital recording. May 10, 2012, Tampere.
Lehtisalo, Jussi. Email. June 18–July 19, 2013.
Lind, Antti, owner of Helmi Levyt. Digital recording. Aug. 15, 2012, Helsinki.
Martinkauppi, Janne, representative of Verdura Records. Digital recording. Feb. 28, 2014,
Helsinki.
Metsola, Mirko, representative of the label Airiston Punk-levyt. Digital recording. Apr. 12, 2014,
Turku.
Seppälä, Roope, representative of the label Temmikongi. Digital recording. Feb. 5, 2014,
Helsinki.
Sänpäkkilä, Sami, owner of Fonal Records. Digital recording. Aug. 23, 2012, Tampere.
Zherbin, Dmitri, and Alexandra Kretova, owners of the label Jozik Records. Digital recording.
Oct. 23, 2013, Helsinki.
 chapter 27

Every b ody K nows

There I s  H e re
Surveying the Indexi-local in CBC Radio 3

Michael Audette-Longo

The Acorn is an independent (indie) rock band based in Ottawa, Ontario, that dis-
plays clear affection for the city in their biography, which opens with this descrip-
tion: “Ottawa used to be a lumber town … beneath the federal veneer, its rural origins
linger, drenched in woodsmoke, bar-brawls and glinting saw blades. Two hours down
river from Montreal, the woods get a little thicker and the air a little cleaner. It’s a place
where the city lights merge with constellations, and where The Acorn was born” (The
Acorn n.d.). This excerpt advances a romantic representation of the city that pushes
into the foreground its origins as a lumber town (refracted through images of wood
smoke, bar fights, and blades), while also stressing its close affiliation with nature
(through its description of thickening woods and city lights blurring with stars). The
biography effectively reimagines Ottawa by chipping away at the city’s “federal veneer”
(for Ottawa is Canada’s capital and public service jobs make up one of the city’s core
fields of employment). At the same time, it also draws out a close connection between
the Acorn and Ottawa by locating the band’s emergence within the city and invoking
the city’s historical development as a means to describe the band.
I begin with this example because it gestures to two iterations of locality with which
this chapter is concerned. On the one hand, the biography’s invocation of Ottawa ges-
tures to the sort of emotional, creative, and professional investments into a local music
scene that have been identified as central to the indie rock subculture (Cohen 1991,
Straw 1991, Shank 1994, Kruse 2003, Stahl 2003). Local music scenes provide “both
the geographical sites of local music practice and the economic and social networks
in which participants are involved” (Kruse 2010, 625). Along these lines, since the
group formed in 2004 they have released a number of albums on the Ottawa-based
independent record label Kelp Records; written songs about Ottawa and the broader
Outaouis region; regularly play and organize shows in and around the city (including
 Everybody Knows There Is Here    515

the successful music and culture festival Arboretum); and keep their earlier albums in
print on Kelp, even after moving to the larger, Toronto-based independent record label
Paper Bag Records in 2007. In this capacity, Ottawa can claim a base of listeners, musi-
cal peers, and institutions, or indeed, local “economic and social networks,” that shape
and have an impact on the group’s career and musical practices. On the other hand, this
biography appears on a number of websites and digital music services affiliated with
the group, including their website (the Acorn) and their “artist” pages on CBC Music
(CBC Music a) and Paper Bag Records (Paper Bag Records). The biography is one piece
of the Acorn’s larger online profile; Ottawa circulates, in turn, as one of a number of
keywords to navigate through that profile.
This chapter draws these two iterations of locality into dialogue with one another
through a close reading of CBC Radio 3, an online radio station that specializes in
broadcast and promotion of independent (indie) Canadian music. It argues that the
service produces an interactive experience of Canadian indie music that both extends
into, and resonates with, Canada’s diverse network of local music scenes. This produces
a remediation of locality being dubbed the indexi-local. To survey the indexi-local,
first the website’s “database logic” (Manovich 2001, 218–221) and customizable features
(including playlist, search, and listening functions) are shown to produce an interac-
tive experience of Canadian indie music. Second, foregrounding of local regions in the
station’s myriad texts is highlighted and argued to produce the “feel” (Berland 1990) of
locality within the service. Third, mobilization of local regions as metadata organizing
the circulation of music and information within the music service are shown to bridge
the participatory features of the website and the locative function of the service’s textual
stress on local regions. These features—grouped under the larger conceptual short-
hand the indexi-local—suggest the allure of interaction, which resonates across local
indie music scenes, user interactions with this particular service, and the database logic
of new media. Highlighting this imperative illuminates the broad range of embodied
interactions with indie music that cut across (and tie together) the online and offline.
Furthermore, the service’s remediation of locality as an interactive experience of
Canadian indie music reifies CBC’s operational mandate to promote culture that both
reflects and appeals to the regional diversity and makeup of Canadian audiences.

Defining the Indexi-Local

The indexi-local is a “virtual image” of the local that emerges in this digital music
service. Framing the indexi-local as “virtual image” situates this chapter’s engage-
ment of the virtual alongside Deleuze’s mapping of the virtual (1977, 112), in which
he suggests that each “actual object” has multiple “virtual images” that circumscribe
it. To move from these virtual images to the actual object involves a process of “actu-
alization,” which emerges through embodied interaction (Lévy 1998, Weheliye 2002,
Hansen 2004, Fuller 2005). Embodied interactions can move in any number of ways
516   Michael Audette-Longo

and produce any number of experiences (interest, disinterest, affection, participation,

passivity, etc.). Framing the indexi-local as virtual image asks after the experiential
potentiality of listening to, and indeed interacting with, the service.
Meanwhile, arguing that the service remediates locality is another way of phrasing
that the service produces both a new “picture” of the local and a style of “relating”
to it that emerges in between the service’s textual representation of Canada’s myriad
local music scenes, the service’s database logic, and the circulation of local regions as
metadata. This is influenced by Bennett’s definition (2000, 63) of locality as “a series
of discourses, which involves ways of picturing the local and one’s relation to it.” The
indexi-local involves both indexing and locality and the potentiality of experiencing
locality in a directional manner online, as in an index. An index appears in books,
working to direct the reader to particular subjects contained in a book through subject
headings and page references. An index breaks down a book through its core subjects
and renders it navigable. This same fundamental operation repeats within Internet
indexes, albeit with those subject headings operating as metadata that organizes the
circulation of data within a website, as well as the types of results appearing within
search engines. Local regions are one type of metadata that works alongside a textual
stress on local regions. This effectively interpolates the diverse local regions and scenes
making up Canadian indie music into the service and creates an experience of the local
in this music service based in search and data retrieval processes.
Remediation provides a conceptual framework to examine the formal specificity of
this service’s mobilization of local regions in its design, which hinges on such features
specific to new media as cross-media distribution, incorporation and reshaping of old
media within this service’s design, and the attempt to produce an immediate experience
within this mediated context (Bolter and Grusin 1999). As virtual image of the local, the
indexi-local is “real but not concrete” (Shields 2003, 2). Moreover, its actualization is
contingent to embodied interaction within this digital music service, which expresses
these converging medial tendencies.

Introducing CBC Radio 3

CBC Radio 3 emerged in the early 2000s as a relatively autonomous music news web-
site and radio station devoted to broadcasting and promoting independent Canadian
music. Radio 3’s development fits within broader initiatives enacted by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation to develop an online service, capture a younger audi-
ence demographic, and facilitate development of independent Canadian musicians
(Belanger and Andrecheck 2005). In 2005 a licensing arrangement was arrived at with
the satellite radio station SiriusXM, which provided CBC Radio 3 with its own satellite
radio channel (Gill 2004). It remained in these formats until 2012, when CBC Radio 3
became both the model for, and clustered within, CBC’s broader digital music service
CBC Music. Now CBC Radio 3 is one of two “Community Pages” featured within this
 Everybody Knows There Is Here    517

service—CBC’s terrestrial music station CBC 2 is the other page—that also streams
alongside a wide-ranging number of genre stations (including world, electronic, hip
hop, pop, aboriginal, and rock). Key infrastructural features of CBC Music shared with
Radio 3 (and rooted, in turn, within the original design of Radio 3) include Artist Pages
(CBC Music b), which have information about musicians, mp3s, and links to online
retailers (both independent Canadian music retailers and Apple’s digital iTunes Store);
a Concert Calendar (CBC Music c), which posts when and where musicians are tour-
ing in Canada; user profiles for nonmusicians (CBC Music d); and an embedded music
player that appears in and across CBC Music’s disparate pages.
CBC Radio 3 is both a music stream and website. Its music stream is not limited to any
particular genre. Promoted as “the home of independent Canadian music,”1 the station
defines independence as music produced and distributed on an independent record
label (i.e., a record label that stands outside of the recording industry’s major label sys-
tem). This institutional, rather than generic, definition enables the station to program
a substantial variety of genres, including heavy metal, pop, electronic, and hip hop. Its
only limits:  that the music programmed be Canadian and independent. Canadian is
defined in terms of musician location and not whether the label is Canadian. Thus, bands
like Japandroids and Arcade Fire are broadcast on the service because the groups are
Canadian (located in Vancouver and Montreal, respectively), even though their record
labels are American (Polyvinyl and Merge, respectively). There are a variety of shows
and radio personalities organized within a regular broadcast schedule that is available to
stream on CBC Music’s embedded music player, as well as the SiriusXM Satellite radio
channel and CBC Music app (for Android and iOS devices). A selection of these shows
are cut up and later made available to stream outside the broadcast schedule. There are
also podcasts offered by the service: The R3-30, a weekly countdown show of the top
thirty songs on Radio 3; and the CBC Radio 3 podcast, which serves as a compendium
of content hosted by popular CBC Radio 3 personality Grant Lawrence.
Complementing CBC Radio 3’s on-air programming is its website, which largely
revolves around a blog (CBC Music f) used by various radio personalities to promote
upcoming features on its web stream, post links to stories about indie music (Canadian
and international), and provide additional content (such as trivia, lists, polls, photo-
graph slideshows, etc.) that entertains and engages readers. It also furnishes links to
the station’s podcasts, broadcasting schedule, and the Artist Pages of musicians played
within the service. These features illustrate what Bélanger and Andrecheck have identi-
fied as the website’s “magazine styled” content. Yet R3 is also highly mobile, circulat-
ing as a tag (“Radio3”) that links other sections of the broader CBC Music website to
the CBC Radio 3 homepage (and that homepage in turn to those other webpages).
Radio 3 also circulates across a number of social media sites, having profiles on Tumblr
(http://cbcradio3.tumblr.com/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/cbcradio3), and
Twitter (https:/twitter.com/CBCRadio3). Radio 3 weaves together a number of media
formats and social media services in its broadcast and promotion of independent
Canadian music. The abundance of content and access points facilitates listener inter-
actions with the website and music service.
518   Michael Audette-Longo

Our Music Service Could Be Your

Scene: Interacting with Radio 3

Much of the interaction that takes place within Radio 3 revolves around membership,
which is available to users free of charge (or more precisely, at the cost of either an
email address or a Facebook account). With a membership one receives a profile, for
which one must select a username. Members also have the choice to supply a profile
image and biographical information. With a membership, a variety of personalization
options emerge. For instance, possessing a membership enables listeners to create play-
lists, which are posted to their profile page. Songs can be added to playlists through
the embedded music player; from listings of previously played podcasts, and from the
Artist Pages of a musician. Once a playlist has been made, it can be made public (and
shared) within CBC Music as well as outside of the service (through social media ser-
vices such as Facebook). Members can also comment on blog posts and engage in dis-
cussions within these threads with both blog post writers and other members. One can
also “like” a variety of areas within the website, from blog posts to playlists shared by
other members to musicians. When one chooses to like a musician, one’s profile name
appears on the musician’s profile page, while the musician’s name appears under a sec-
tion of the member’s profile entitled “My Likes.” This quantifies the number of fans
a particular musician has within the service. Through creation of a membership and
maintenance of that profile, members can interact with the service by creating a per-
sonalized and social listening experience.
For users who do not set up a profile, interaction still takes place through their navi-
gating a cross-section of texts pertaining to independent Canadian music. Listening
to web streams, podcasts, and songs; reading news stories and musician biographies;
and searching through live concerts, musicians, and blog indexes are such styles of
interaction that fit with the browsing practices typical of Internet usage (Carr 2011).
Interacting with Radio 3 through reading, searching, and clicking through hyperlinks is
a form of navigation, in other words, through the website’s “database logic.” According
to Manovich (2001, 218), a database “is defined as a structured collection of data. The
data stored in a database is organized for fast search and retrieval by a computer.”
He further suggests that the database is a key logic defining online media, with data
being searched and retrieved through the open-ended and largely interactive quality
of Internet praxis hinged on browsing, searching, and reading, or indeed, processes of
data retrieval.
Steve Pratt, the director of CBC Radio Digital Programming, explains this potential
to interact in this way: “They [listeners to R3] can share stuff, they can create a person-
alized music experience rather than having people at CBC making the choice on their
behalf …” (Shaw 2009, E9). This is a bit disingenuous, for listeners are still picking
through an existent database of songs and news stories made available by CBC to pro-
duce their listening experience. Indeed, there is an abundance of information across
 Everybody Knows There Is Here    519

this website: indexes of blog posts, genre categories, broadcast schedules, program list-
ings, and songs. This abundance is an opportunity for listeners to create understanding
of Canadian indie music. Fuller (2005, 14) has argued that creativity happens within
the exchange between an engaged reader and a list of existent information; or as he
explains it, lists “always open up into a matrix of immanent universes. Each of the
elements in a list is hypotactically stacked in relation to the immanence of what it is
next to, what it abuts to and differs from. Such hypotaxis is virtual, that is, for its actu-
alization it demands power to the imagination.” Levy (1998, 48)  stresses this sort of
creative and imaginative engagement between a reader and text more broadly, arguing
that:  “The space of meaning does not exist before the text is read. It is while mov-
ing through the text … that we fabricate and actualize meaning.” By extension, the
abundance of information made available by Radio 3 provides each individual with a
branching representation of Canadian indie music. It is up to the reader to follow the
hyperlinks, listen to the songs, and read the stories as a means of creating (or indeed,
actualizing) understanding of Canadian indie music from what is both offered by the
service and known by the user.
Radio 3 produces an interactive listening experience through its original content
and the dovetailing infrastructure of music playback and customization features sup-
plied by CBC Music that hinges on listeners navigating through wide swaths of data
(songs, genre names, artists, news stories, etc.) and “actualizing” their understanding
of Canadian indie music. Abridging the sorts of interactions with the service’s database
logic with theories of virtuality indicates that individual understandings of Canadian
indie music emerge, in part, by interacting with the digital music service. The service,
in turn, draws on the existent knowledge and musical practices of musicians and listen-
ers alike to facilitate its functionality.

Local Feel: Locating Canadian

Indie Music in CBC Radio 3

Before setting up a profile or creating a playlist, on entering Radio 3’s website one
encounters a cross-section of news stories and blog posts related to the topic of inde-
pendent Canadian music. Across these diverse texts—whose span runs from lists to
musician profile pages, from interviews to polls—there is a clear focus on the musical
activities of Canadian indie musicians. Furthermore, the cities and towns that musi-
cians come from tend to be the most recurrent piece of information communicated
to readers of the website and listeners of the music stream. For example, in a blog
post promoting an exclusive stream of the indie pop band Bend Sinister’s album Small
Fame a few weeks before its release in the summer of 2012, Bartlett (2012) highlighted
the band’s residence in Vancouver, British Columbia, writing in the opening sen-
tence, “Vancouver progressive-pop band Bend Sinister is releasing its first full-length
520   Michael Audette-Longo

album in four years on July 10.” Writing more than one year later for an entirely dif-
ferent exclusive album stream for Tegan and Sara’s Polaris Prize short-listed album
Heartthrob, Kinos-Goodin (2013) opened the story by writing,: “Tegan and Sara Quin,
the twin-sister, singer-songwriter duo from Calgary, Alta., couldn’t have asked for a
better 2013.” These sorts of stories share space with podcasts devoted to the musical
histories of cities like Winnipeg (Lawrence 2012b). Artist Pages feature stories on vari-
ous Canadian music institutions (Burns 2012), and even maps of the cities in which
the “50 greatest Canadian albums of the ’90s were recorded” (Warner 2014), all of
which feature information about the cities and towns in which Canadian indie music
circulates.
Geographic locations spread across CBC Radio 3. In light of the previous section,
they work as another element in Radio 3’s database of Canadian indie music, with
which one can interact. Yet they also work more systemically, locating the listener and
content in the myriad local regions through which Canadian indie music circulates. In
this respect, local regions produce the “feel” of locality within the radio station. In her
study of commercial broadcast radio, Berland (1990, 189–191) argues that the “feel” of
locality is produced through advertisements for local businesses, local news stories,
and the highlighting of the city in which a radio station is situated in DJ banter. The
emphasis on location that cuts across the radio station’s myriad texts aligns a terres-
trial radio station to the city in which it is located. Berland surmises that this locative
function is necessary because of the abundance of nonlocal content broadcast within a
radio station. In other words, highlighting local regions in a wide cross-section of texts
reinforces that station’s localness, a necessary reminder of the station’s location that
emerges in reaction to the largely international content broadcast on Canadian com-
mercial radio stations.
Similarly, circulation of local regions in Radio 3 through DJ banter, news stories,
blog posts, and artist information locates the content and station as local and Canadian
through recurring stress on the diverse regions and cities associated with Canadian
indie music. Highlighting Tegan and Sara’s location in Calgary or the centrality of the
recording studio The Hive for Vancouver-based indie musicians (Burns 2012) invokes
those cities, connecting listeners and the station to those particular locations. In this
respect, the abundance of local regions represented within Radio 3 does not work as
a reaction to (or a gloss on) a surplus of non-Canadian content; instead, it defines the
content’s Canadianness in terms of the diverse regions that constitute Canada. This is
an important clarification to make because Radio 3’s broadcasting conditions depart
from those defining terrestrial commercial broadcast. As an online branch of Canada’s
public broadcaster, first and foremost, the amount of advertising aired is minimal.
There are no commercials aired within Radio 3’s music stream. The commercials that
do air are limited to the time that the web stream loads, as well as to banner ads fram-
ing Radio 3’s web page. These commercials tend to promote larger, national, and inter-
national businesses and brands (such as Canadian banks, automobiles, fast food, and
insurance companies). Although Radio 3’s home station is identified as Vancouver,
Radio 3’s broadcast emerges through a distributed network of CBC recording studios
 Everybody Knows There Is Here    521

spread across Canada. Audiences listening to Radio 3 either through the music stream
or through satellite radio are decidedly not indigenous to Vancouver, with the stream
and website being available to listeners across Canada and around the world. Indeed, as
of this writing Radio 3 is not geoblocked outside of Canada and does not follow any par-
ticular time zone (Gill 2004). Thus the stress on location emphasizes the abundance of
local regions making up its broadcast of independent Canadian music. This visualizes
the branching structure of Canadian indie music, comprising a number of disparate yet
interlinking scenes.
Straw (1991) has unpacked the largely interlocal circulation of a local music scene.
Specifically, local music scenes are not self-contained; instead, they interlink with
other scenes in myriad ways, whether through the movement of touring musicians
or the exchange, adoption, and adaptation of sounds and genres in and across scenes.
The overall effect of this semiotic and musical exchange between scenes is that they
become “overlaid upon each other” (378). For Straw, the overlay of scenes explains
the national and international popularity of local music scenes, or indeed, the fact
that there is always more than one local music scene in the field of indie rock. On
Radio 3, this layering of locales moves from a subtler idea of how music and people
move to a more concrete textual emphasis on Canada’s complexly branching structure
of resonant indie music scenes. As such, they serve to illustrate and reinforce to the
everyday listener how exactly CBC Radio 3 is “The Home of Independent Canadian
Music,” that is, in terms of the diverse regions and locales shaping Canadian indie
music. The service’s textual stress on the local regions in which Canadian indie music
circulates resonates with the discourses and practices of location specific to broadcast
radio, producing the “feel” of the local, and indeed, interlocal, in this service. This is
one iteration of locality in the service, along with the deployment of local regions as
metadata.

Our Scene Could Be Your Metadata:

Local Regions and/as Metadata

In the midst of outlining the “database logic” of new media, Manovich (2001, 220–221)
places a particular amount of stress on the amount of data accumulating in a web-
site, writing: “They [websites] always grow. New links are continually added to what
is already there.” The constant addition (and concomitant accumulation) of data
within a website increases the demand for information management (Munster 2013).
One such technique of information management is metadata, or indeed, the data
generated about data that guide searches and retrieval. In Radio 3’s website, the data
perpetually in accumulation pertain to Canadian indie music. Local regions circulate
as one type of metadata that define and direct the circulation and retrieval of songs
and stories.
522   Michael Audette-Longo

Metadata organize CBC Music’s catalogue of music and information, of which Radio 3
is merely one part. Though focusing on the wider CBC Music service in this section,
circulation of local regions as metadata has implications for Radio 3.  This capacity
becomes clearest within two sections of the broader CBC Music website: the service’s
Search feature and Concert Calendar, which both render transparent this particular
technique of information management. If one searches the keyword “Ottawa” (CBC
Music g) within the CBC Music service’s search bar, a variety of search results are
returned, including musicians situated in Ottawa, music videos from or about Ottawa,
concert recordings and live music sessions recorded in Ottawa, and music-related
stories about Ottawa. One can seek out as much information about a given city as
is wanted, across the wider CBC Music service. Meanwhile, there is also a Concert
Calendar (CBC Music c) that can be searched through a number of categories, whether
by artist, city, genre, or province. Searching Ottawa in this part of the website pro-
duces a list of concerts (including venue location) happening in that particular city
on any day of the week. Searches can be limited by genre (rock, aboriginal, dance,
etc.). This organizational capacity is also evident in the Artist profile page of musicians
programmed on CBC Music. For example, on the Acorn’s profile page (CBC Music
a), their geographic location in Ottawa Ontario appears directly alongside the band’s
name and music genre. Geographical identifiers are mandatory pieces of information
required when a musician sets up a membership, alongside the musician’s name and
genre. Consequently, these pieces of information appear on each and every Artist Page
of the musicians programmed within and outside of Radio 3, from bands with smaller-
scaled regional and national followings (like the Acorn, or Montreal, Quebec’s, Braids)
to larger-scaled Canadian indie bands like the Japandroids or Arcade Fire that have
garnered international attention.
With the circulation of local regions as metadata, they become important pieces of
information that, alongside other typical pieces of metadata such as artist name and
album information, work as “paratexts” defining and directing the circulation, retrieval,
and representation of digital music (Morris 2012). Boehm (1999, 181) has suggested that
the process of designing metadata must necessarily be “influenced by the context in
which these objects [database content] are based.” Radio 3 provides such a context for
the broader music service. More precisely, the myriad texts that stress local regions can
be treated as supplying this particular keyword for searches, which produce results that
span the website of the broader CBC Music service. Thus the locative function specific
to Radio 3 dovetails with metadata, giving listeners and browsers a prompt they can
follow, in turn, to navigate through the CBC’s catalog of music and information. Yet
these directions are still contingent to the reader’s choices on how to move through
and actualize his or her understanding in relation to the music service’s database logic.
Thus metadata operate ambiguously: on the one hand, metadata render concrete the
keywords that appear across the station’s texts, furnishing cues for the listener to follow
in navigating through the website and music service; on the other hand, they are entan-
gled within the creative inclinations and existent knowledge practices of the listener.
 Everybody Knows There Is Here    523

Mapping the Indexi-Local:
Remediation and Locality

Two iterations of local regions have been identified:  one produces the “feel” of the
local through a recurrent textual emphasis on local regions, and the other involves
circulation of local regions as metadata organizing the circulation of data hosted by
CBC Music. Yet how is locality remediated as the indexi-local? In their definitive work
on remediation, Bolter and Grusin (1999, 5)  identify two intertwining “logics” that
shape the formal and experiential specificity of new media technologies:  hyperme-
diacy and immediacy. Hypermediacy involves incorporating and reshaping disparate
“old” media and cultural forms within a “new” media object. Radio 3’s incorporating
and reshaping such “old” media as radio (through music stream and podcast) and the
music press (through its concert calendar and blog posts) exemplifies this tendency.
Meanwhile, immediacy pertains to the goal (and ideal) of new media making possible
an immersive experience that effaces the very medium facilitating the experience. In
this capacity, immediacy involves ensuring a noninterrupted listening experience by,
for instance, minimizing the time it takes for a web stream to load, producing buffer
time frames that ensure the web stream doesn’t become choppy, and ensuring that one
can click through the website without the music player stopping. While these primar-
ily infrastructural features of the website facilitate the service’s functionality, they also
contribute to the indexi-local.
In terms of “hypermediacy,” the “feel” of localness typical of a local music scene
is incorporated into Radio 3 and reshaped in the pursuit of creating an interactive
listening experience through the search-based methods of interaction through data
retrieval outlined above. In his influential history of American indie Our Band Could
Be Your Life, music critic Michael Azerrad (2001, 10) argues that indie rock provides
listeners with a unique style of connecting: “The indie movement was a reclamation
of what rock was always about. Rock & roll hinged on a strong, personal connection
to favorite bands, but that connection had been stretched to the limit by … imper-
sonal stadium concerts and the unreality of MTV. Indie bands proved you didn’t
need those things to make a connection with an audience. In fact, you could make
a better connection with your audience without them.” The local music scene—with
its smaller venues, grassroots promotion, musical networks, and independent record
stores—offered the means to realize such “personal connection” outside of the cen-
tralized, corporatized, and mass-media-extended mainstream music. This is largely
predicated in cultivating a distinct subcultural identity (Kruse 1993, Shank 1994),
realizing a communal experience through listening to music in more intimate music
venues (Fonarow 2006), and producing one’s own music in alternative and grass-
roots musical, entrepreneurial, and media networks (Lee 1995, Hesmondhalgh 1999,
Kruse 2003).
524   Michael Audette-Longo

This cross-section of writing treats the local music scene as a site in which a
vast range of the creative, musical, and social affiliations shaping indie rock music
come into formation. Will Straw (2005, 412) has identified an “excessive” quality in
the social and musical practices that shape a local scene: “Scenes emerge from the
excesses of sociability that surround the pursuit of interests, or which fuel ongoing
innovation and experimentation within the cultural life of cities.” Straw’s claim for
experiential excess resonates with previous research by Barry Shank (1994, 128) on
the live show, which, he describes in this way: “Within this fluid stream of poten-
tial meanings, the audience and the musicians together participate in a nonverbal
dialogue about the significance of the music and the construction of their selves.”
Both authors identify the potentiality of musical experience—or indeed, its virtual
qualities in the context of the local musical scene. For Straw, it involves an excess
of sociability that makes a scene vibrant; meanwhile, Shank identifies such abun-
dance as central to processes of identity formation. In both instances, the local scene
provides the “sites and sounds” that promote opportunities for creating social and
musical affiliations. Kruse (2010) has suggested that online and social media do not
efface local scenes; rather, they extend these scenes (and the myriad social and musi-
cal affiliations that make a scene make sense) online, whether in terms of produc-
tion and promotion, with bands, venues, and labels using websites and social media
services to promote their services and connect online (to fans, venues, labels, musi-
cians, songs, etc.) or in terms of consumption, with fans using such media to access
and engage with music scenes. This sort of application is evident on Radio 3, which
gives listeners and musicians alike a platform to actualize the excess of a scene’s
“cultural life.”
Hibbett (2005) shifts attention away from local music scenes, musicians, and issues
of production and distribution in his work on indie rock’s online circulation, by focus-
ing instead on issues of taste. He draws out a suggestive analogy between the cultivation
of distinct tastes in indie rock subculture and the algorithmic logic of recommenda-
tions engines mobilized by online retailers like Amazon. For Hibbett, there is mini-
mal difference between the two. The pursuit of the sorts of “personal connections”
described by Azerrad with music and culture circulating outside of the mainstream
largely involves accumulation of specialized knowledge, achieved through informed
purchasing and shared subcultural sensibilities. This accounting resonates with charac-
terizations of indie rock music as “record collector rock” based in collecting and culti-
vating good taste (Bannister 2006, Straw 1998). Hibbett (2005) concludes that the sorts
of specialized collecting and consumption practices valorized as markers of subcultural
distinction are really no different from the sorts of purchasing recommendations that
emerge on websites like Amazon. Indeed, buying based on comparisons between what
you like and what others who like what you like also like display an algorithmic logic.
This usefully highlights an experience of indie rock that cuts across a local music scene
and online interactions, that is, as the actualization of personal connection through
creation and cultivation of a listening profile. The style of interaction that hinges in cre-
ating, curating, and sharing playlists; reading about Canadian indie music; and clicking
 Everybody Knows There Is Here    525

through links and stories within CBC Radio 3 meshes with, and draws on, this sort of
personalized listening experience.
Although the music service is not producing a facsimile of a local music scene, the
potential to connect is nonetheless remediated, reshaped through the service’s dovetail-
ing of database-hinged interactions, local regions that produce the “feel” of local, and
deployment of local regions as metadata. The indexi-local is the “virtual image” of this
remediation: experiential potentiality that emerges through embodied interaction with
this service. Specifically, the potential to actualize connections often taking place in
the local scene—that is, the excess of sociability—emerges through the service’s reme-
diation of locality as interactive web experience, guided through deployment of local
regions as metadata tied up with the organization, indexing, and retrieval of data. It is
in this incorporation and reshaping of locality that we can begin to grasp at the indexi-
local, emerging as potential to interact with on the one hand the service through the
frame of the local music scene, and on the other the local scene through the service.
In both instances, the indexi-local emerges as “virtual image” (Deleuze 1977, 112) of the
local, produced through the service’s remediation. This has been examined through the
chapter’s closer reading of this digital music service, as a means to conclude that Radio 3’s
remediation of locality as an interactive experience of the service will be shown to reify
CBC’s operational mandate to promote culture that reflects Canada at the local and
national levels.

Conclusion

In an interview with Grant Lawrence promoting the release of CBC Music, Steve Pratt
described the music service as an attempt to capture and expand the online com-
munity that had been cultivated over the previous decade within CBC Radio 3. As he
explained to Lawrence (2012a): “[CBC Music is] Radio 3 on steroids. It’s taking the
idea of Radio 3, which is an amazing music community built around a specific type of
music and adding twelve brand new communities around other types of music that
are not independent Canadian music.” As mentioned above, Radio 3 existed as an
autonomous website and radio station until the advent of CBC Music in 2012. Though
Radio 3 was linked to the broader CBC homepage, features like the Concert Calendar,
Memberships, and the ability to create and curate playlists were unique to this par-
ticular website. Incorporation of this service, and indeed, these features in the design
and development of CBC Music indicates the broader allure of this style of connecting
for the CBC.
As Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC operates through government funds. Its
broadcasting license is subject to specific conditions laid out by the CRTC (Canadian
Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission) and generally demands that
the service produce and provide distinctly Canadian content for Canadian audiences
that “informs, enlightens, and entertains” (CBC). Its broadcasting conditions are laid
526   Michael Audette-Longo

out in the Broadcasting Act, and though dealing with a vast range of issues (from
bilingualism to cultural diversity), there is one particular broadcasting requirement
relevant to this chapter, the first one: “Be predominantly and distinctively Canadian,
reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the
special needs of those regions” (CBC). Pushing the various cities and towns through
which Canadian indie music circulates into the foreground of the service effectively
visualizes Radio 3’s predominant and distinctive Canadianness through its emphasis
on the diversity of local regions that constitute Canada. Furthermore, the station’s
interactive features and emphasis on local regions effectively quantify the regional
diversity and listening patterns of its listener base. Indeed, the membership tally,
“like” features, and “play” counts produce a quantifiable number of listeners, musi-
cians, and song plays within the broader CBC Music service. Each song play is cal-
culated, so that the number of individual playbacks can be counted by musicians
and the service. These features generate analytics, in short, the means to measure
and quantify listeners’ usage of the service. In this light, providing an interactive and
accessible music service for listeners and musicians alike quantifies the requirement
to produce a service that is shaped by, and reflective of, Canada’s diverse regional
makeup.
Taken altogether, this examination of Radio 3 and CBC Music produces a complex
topography of Canadian indie music’s circulation in between local scenes and online
sites. Canadian indie music is a marketing hook for Radio 3, furnishes the CBC with
precise analytics of usage, and is contingent to the multiple potentialities of experience
and knowing that emerge at the intersection of digital music service and listener, or
indeed, computer and human body. What is particularly interesting is that the service
draws on the virtuality of local musical experiences—that is, the excess of sociabil-
ity and information that makes both a local music scene and indie music meaning-
ful (Shank 1994, Straw 2005)—and places this front and center through the searching
and navigation functionalities that make databases make sense (and that introduce, in
turn, further potential to interact). Yet, what are the implications of this for the study
and understanding of indie music? The scholarship on this subculture tends to pivot
between celebrations of its empowering qualities (Kruse 1993, Shank 1994), and dis-
missals of it as a historical referent with minimal contemporary significance (Lee 1995,
Hesmondhalgh 1999, Fisher 2009). Its continued circulation within CBC Music sug-
gests another narrative, that is, the broader and continued allure (and malleability) of a
subculture in which not only “our band could be your life,” but also “our metadata could
be your scene.”

Note
1. This slogan appears in web stream identifications, CBC Radio 3’s Tumblr page (http://
cbcradio3.tumblr.com/), and CBC Music’s description of this particular “community
page” posted on CBC Music’s home page (CBC Music e).
 Everybody Knows There Is Here    527

References
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Bannister, Matthew. 2006. “ ‘Loaded’:  Indie Guitar Rock, Canonism, White Masculinities.”
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Bélanger, Pierre C., and Philippe Andrecheck. 2005. “CBC’s Electronic Radio 3: Connecting
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Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation:  Understanding New Media.
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———. d. Sign In. http://music.cbc.ca/#/login.aspx.
———. e. Home. http://music.cbc.ca/#.
———. f. CBC Radio 3. http://music.cbc.ca/#/radio3/blogs/.
———. g. Search Results—Ottawa. http://music.cbc.ca/#/search/?q=Ottawa.
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New York: Clarendon Press.
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and New York: Continuum.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism:  Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK, and
Washington, DC: Zero Books.
Fonarow, Wendy. 2006. Empire of Dirt:  The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press.
Fuller, Matthew. 2005. Media Ecologies:  Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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———. 2012b. “The Weakerthans, Cannon Bros, Chic Gamine:  The Birth of Canadian
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 chapter 28

M ind Usu rps Pro g ra m

Virtuality and the “New Machine Aesthetic”
of Electronic Dance Music

Benjamin Halligan

Metal Machine Music

The beginnings of the idea of virtuality, with respect to popular music, seem to signal
a break with the imaginings of genres of electronic dance music (EDM) in the decades
prior.1 It was as if the tension between the ideas of “electronic” and “music” dissipated
once “music” is qualified as essentially “not really music” or “nonmusic” by dint of that
pejorative term “virtual.” Previously, the incremental introduction of—in the most gen-
eral terms—“machines” (computers) into the otherwise “organic” (human) endeavor of
popular rather than avant-garde music making in the 1970s had met with both criti-
cal hostility and fascination. Such distaste was tempered by circumspection: this jarring
combination, for better of worse, made for the future, as already anticipated by authors
such as J. G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess (whose use of the term clockwork orange indi-
cated just such a flesh-and-metal entity). Positions were taken in what was perceived to
be a cultural debate. The anti-disco backlash of the late 1970s, perhaps the first collective
expression of such distaste, has been well documented.2 And disco forms part of a domi-
nant cultural narrative in the West in which disco first wrong-footed psychedelia and
progressive rock (Prog) by appealing to lower common denominators, only to be righ-
teously trounced by punk in turn, after disco’s brief interregnum, which was given over
to love songs and commerce. Articulations of the experiential and the angry, in Prog
and punk respectively, are founded on a sense of a human presence, relating his or her
interactions with the world. Artistry, in this respect, is found via an unfettered access to
the music and musings of the individual. The drum machine, with its on-off switch, and
the synthesizer, with its dashboard and plastic keys and cord and plug, seemed closer to
kitchen appliances, utilitarian and soulless. Appliances, then, are associated with music
530   Benjamin Halligan

for those disinterested in instruments, and ignorant of culture and tradition. The dia-
lectic is clear: automaton music for commerce (4/4 time signatures; love and sentiment;
harmony and easy listening; background noise rather than foreground art), human
music for artistry (complicated or collapsing time signatures; untrained singers and
engulfing or offensive elements of noise in the listening experience, and this as the era of
Prog and punk, demanding of or deserving one’s full attention). This tension was even
articulated in the very first broadcast minutes of MTV: “Video Killed the Radio Star” by
the Buggles, in which the countercultures of the “Age of Aquarius” are now replaced by
a “plastic age,” where the fake and synthetic have overcome the authentic and organic.3
At the same time, disco’s own radical prehistory in 1970s gay and multiethnic sub-
cultures, and the seemingly paradoxical integration of the machine (the music-making
computer) into an affective music of sexual desire, suggest that the “popular” element
of this popular music was at first potentially progressive rather than just dumbly popu-
list. Could it have been the resultant destabilization of dominant cultural narratives, in
disco music and cultures—or, at least, its potentials—that inflamed, if not prompted,
anti-disco ire? As I  have argued elsewhere (2010), disco’s boundary-crossing nature
and non-heteronormativity became an enabler for the prolongation, or reprise, of the
Summer of Love of 1967. This time the Summer lives on in the spread of free love into
the urban hinterlands, and in the entrenchment of the pleasure society (as opposed to
the militarized, drafted society of the Cold War and its proxy conflicts).
In this narrative, disco’s heroes, Abba or the Bee Gees for example, become compa-
rable to the Beatles or Pink Floyd and, as with idiosyncratic pioneers such as Kraftwerk
and Giorgio Moroder, are belatedly hailed as innovators. But disco’s denizens are
active and dancing rather than, as with psychedelia and Prog, essentially inactive
or—stoned—physically deactivated. So disco is the music of socialization and interac-
tion, and sexual intercourse, sandwiched between musics of contemplation and day-
dreaming (psychedelia, Prog), and alienation and violence (punk, postpunk). Disco is
the music of male grooming in contrast to the unkempt and unwashed of psychedelia,
and the sweat-, spittle-, mucus-, and sometimes blood-soaked of punk.
But disco’s rapid remaking into the pleasure culture of the milieus of high commerce,
and in this the erasure of its radical prehistory and blunt curtailing of its sonic odyssey,
would have damaged the case of those who perceived a revolutionary impulse in disco,
related to the counterculture of the first Summer of Love. Indeed, what may once have
been seen as a “temporary autonomous zone,”4 and so allow revolutionary potential to
germinate, would have been perceived as the very opposite once disco was lifted from
the underground and reconstituted for hotel dance floors—from unique gay clubs such
as the Anvil or the Mineshaft to the ubiquitous Holiday Inns.5

Virtual Machine Music

It is with EDM of the late 1980s, at the point of acid house, that the break with the imag-
inings of genres of electronic dance music in the decades prior occurs.6 If this shift can
 Mind Usurps Program    531

be read in terms of technology, it is not so much in terms of technological advances but

how technology is understood and used. To talk of “computers” is too vague, although
the transition from analog proto-computer to digital computer is a useful timeline
since the freedoms of the latter allow an abandonment of musician-centered music
making. The more generic term machine encompasses this period of radical change in
the methods of making popular music, moving from strings on instruments to switches
on machines.
The machines used for EDM are not so much a minor concern within the sonic dis-
course, as akin to the roles of domestic appliances. Rather the machines, in remaking
the music-making process, remade the music. Disco typically allowed the electronic
to be a soundbed and beat for the human element of the music. What was human
arose from singing and playing instruments, with the resultant music then “treated”
and altered by the machine, rather than, as would now become the case via incorpora-
tion of the synthesizer into the computer (a move anticipated by machines such as the
Synclavier), the computer alone generating the music. EDM foregrounds the machine,
which then constitutes the mise-en-scène of the sound, with a space allowed for the
human element. The metal machine, as it were, accomodates the sense of an ontology
of authenticity:  one can still imagine or picture the musicians playing. And the Bee
Gees, Kraftwerk, Abba, and Moroder were hailed for innovative thinking, that ability
to work with the future rather than in spite of or against it. The virtual machine is less
suggestive: Where, materially, is this music coming from? The ontology is uncertain.
In a popular cliché of the time, the garret-dwelling artist/musician is reimagined as the
lone, anonymous teenager, building up tracks on the PC in his bedroom—a program-
mer, not a musician.
Such an ontological difference colors the imaginings of virtual music. EDM is often
desexed music, and would seem to shun spectrums of sound and harmony that ren-
dered all these previous genres (psychedelia, disco, punk) nuanced, and distinctive,
and possessing and possessed of an emotive ambience that united groups of people
as they reacted in unison. The camaraderie of the love-in (joint sharing, the orgy, the
commune), the intellectual circles that identified with Prog (of a shared background of
privilege according to many commentators, including Macan 1997, 144), the synchro-
nized dancing of disco, and the boisterous mosh pits and pogo-ing of punk, all func-
tioned to call and assemble disparate members of their tribes for a coming together and
communion. A constituency emerges. EDM is more often a matter of isolation. And,
despite the civil concerns and the politics that surrounded the legality of early raves,
and the dangers and political education suddenly on offer for those participating in this
subculture,7 the music itself seemed disconcertingly apolitical.
In rave, the most retrogressive aspects of the above-mentioned analog music genres
(to their detractors) seemed to be in operation: the apolitical “dropping out” of psyche-
delia, the navel gazing and fantasy of Prog, the unthinking hedonism of disco, the nihil-
ism and anti-intellectualism of punk. Intimations of the political radicalism of EDM
generally look to the anarchistic state of affairs of the events as they were organized and
run. Massed ravers, as trespassers and drug fiends, are a priori detrimental to the run-
ning of civil society. But beyond such antisocial concerns, the question of affect comes
532   Benjamin Halligan

into play:  a mindset is created that is somehow intrinsically against this civil society
too … and then persists, with the “come down” stretching back into the office hours of
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday … and almost taking the worker on to Friday, when
it begins again. But no automatic radical import can be assumed. This constituency
is fatally fragmented. Unlike the “classical” modern model of dropping out of society,
associated with the first Summer of Love, the raver still seems to get to the office. The
entrepreneurialism of early rave organizers (of a kind of grassroots, libertarian capital-
ism, presenting itself as in opposition to the petit-bourgeois moralism of the tabloids)8
is often noted, and some of these figures have in turn become reactionary commenta-
tors and establishment figures. Rave’s classlessness ensured that a segment of privileged
tourist “weekenders” (a modern variant to those described by Miller 2001), who were
clearly keen on a brief period of life-altering experiences, could be accommodated and
returned to work intact. And this wariness about the politics of rave can be coupled
with the still-limited thematic concerns of much of EDM, in stark contrast to the out-
spokenness of punk and postpunk, and even the anti-Thatcherite tone (and antiwar and
antifascist positions) of so much pop music of the 1980s, institutionalized in Red Wedge.
In short, before the general election of 1987, a Union activist may have attended a Red
Wedge gig, and felt at home with the familiar sloganeering in the music. After that elec-
tion, and defeat for Labour, a young Tory may well have relaxed at an all-night rave.9
In talking of the Happy Mondays, as foundational to the fledgling Manchester
dance cultures of the late 1980s, Reynolds offers the assessment of a track that is “an
immensely agreeable mantra for a state of mindlessness” (quoted in Nice 2011, 395).
Agreeableness, however, is not without a radical political import, as Fringeli also notes
in respect to Marx’s anticipated “empire of freedom” (2011, 6, sect. 1), and even as the
basis of Eagleton’s discussion of the freedoms of communism (2010). Mindlessness,
or oblivion seeking (to paraphrase Isabelle Eberhardt), in another strain in EDM
subgenres, is reinterpreted in New Age terms:  the Gaian mysticism of Spiral Tribe
(Reynolds 2013) and, as Reynolds puts it, the “syncretic spirituality mishmashed from
chunks of Tao, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, hatha yoga, Mayan cosmology, and Wicca,
then spliced with alien abduction theories and other renegade forms of parascience”
of psytrance (2013, 551). But such aspirant quasi-theological positions are predicated
on the idea of the merging of human (“hardware”) and program (“software”) and the
resultant melding of machine and spirituality. For St. John, this makes for a second
coming in “an assemblage of electronic, computer and audio-visual technologies that
has descended amidst contemporary youth, [so that] techno-rave anticipates a post-
humanity awakening” (2004, 22). One could speculate that this acceptance of technol-
ogy was particular to a certain generation: those born circa 1970, who would then have
been particularly receptive to the “home computer” revolution of the 1980s, and in turn
would have seen information technology as entirely enabling and freeing, a cultural
norm, and empowering for themselves and their contemporaries as they forged a new,
computer-founded, culture.
There is no denying the TAZ potential of the rave in terms of its context. In its earli-
est days, to organize such an event was literally a case of finding and establishing just
 Mind Usurps Program    533

such a zone:  a field or warehouse or (combining the two) a farm barn, far from the
ambit of the police. To an extent, the music found an identity, if not necessarily a form,
through this search for place and existence—where successful (those notable raves that
have since passed into urban legend) or, as can be surmised by a track such as Kektex’s
1998 “Hackney Council Are a Bunch of Cunts,” otherwise. And to experience the zone
fully, and to find oneself suddenly in receipt of the freedoms allowed, typically then
translates into a “what on earth am I doing?” moment, during flashes of self-awareness,
perhaps at the point of remembering tomorrow’s career obligations (on the Monday that
follows the Sunday morning into which this Saturday night extends).

Head Music

Irrespective of the equivocation and uncertainty as to the seemingly radical or

consciousness-raising import of the EDM event, its extant texts mostly seem circum-
scribed and curtailed within the usual and often trivial pop concerns. 808 State’s “Pacific
State” (1989), Nightcrawlers’ “Push the Feeling On” (1992), and, closer to the late 1990s
rave revival, Layo & Bushwacka!’s “Love Story [vs Finally]” (2002; the Tim DeLuxe mix),
in the cold light of day, yield nothing that, in itself, can be read as countering cultural
or societal norms. If anything, the songs seem complacent in their concerns—romantic
or sentimental, or just vague and unintelligible. Of course, the missing element in
this consideration is neurological:  the results of a sound system that delivers bass
into the body, and the reading of the music while cognitively incoherent from rec-
reational drug use. Hence “dance drugs are body technologies” (Rietveld 2004, 54).
But “in Techno,” as D’Andrea notes of this foundational interpretative qualifier, “it is
arguable whether drugs are mandatory for ‘understanding’ digital music or achieving
group acceptance” (2004, 247).
The cold light of day is not the light that most appropriately illuminates the music
since the music is a matter of the affective (and so prompts the finding of a method-
ology, in terms of critical writing, that can take this into account). Indeed, to fail to
account for this affective context is to find that the music, and event, makes little sense.
In his writings (of the 1920s and 1930s) on his experiences under the influence of
hashish, Walter Benjamin notes how the mind’s processing of music seems to lose
objectivity, even to the point that the music seems to operate directly on the brain.
Benjamin talks of the “rush switches of jazz,” and that “there were times when the
intensity of acoustic impressions blotted out all others” (2006, 125). And, in addition
then to space closing in, with a tunnel vision between sound and cognition, a linear
experience of time seems to vanish too:

Allegorical dismemberment. The music to which one listens under the influence
of hashish appears, in Baudelaire, as “the entire poem entering your brain, like a
dictionary that has come alive.” [from “The Poem of Hashish”] (138)
534   Benjamin Halligan

In this, what would seem to be how a narrative (words, in the dictionary here, but by
extension, sung lyrics) unfolds in its own time is replaced by an instantaneous occur-
rence of all information. The perception of time is decoupled from the dissemination
of information as a process that occupies tranches of that time. The addled dancer
perceives, and acts on, a perception of time that is often unique to him or her. One
thinks of the dancing of the lone, intoxicated reveler that can last, uninterrupted, for
hours, and who sometimes dances in slow motion and often in a corner—but as if
imagining being at the center of the attentions of admiring others. A phenomenologi-
cal experience of time overrides those more standard responses to time. Reynolds notes
that techno makes for “an immediacy machine, stretching time into a continuous pres-
ent … ‘where now lasts longer’ ” (Reynolds 2013, 469; author’s italics). “When exactly,”
Rapp provocatively asks, “is Saturday?” (2010, 143) Saturday seems to spread across the
nights and days of the entire weekend. Such temporal confusion is also something of a
foundational myth of acid house music.
In these ways the extant texts cited above must be read as looking to achieve a sonic
discourse that can only be properly untangled, and acted upon, on the dance floor, or
in the field. But these tracks are not like free jazz. What is described as the usual in
them, above, also applies to their standard 4/4 beat. Any phenomenological freedom
that arises still adheres to this template, typical across pop musics, along with the ways
in which the regimented is offset by the relatively free, and the anticipated with the
surprising.
The standard in this respect is exemplified in “Love Story [vs Finally]”: in common
with the sonic patina of late 1980s dance tracks, a gutsy, even gospel-like, vocal tarries
but does not tally with the restraint that is otherwise imposed by a pulsing, electronic
beat. The voice then is presented as organic and human, as denoted by its lack of regi-
mentation and its emotional inflections. The promo video, in a straightforward way,
assembles this dialectical relationship too: a dancer freely moves in an autoerotic way
while seemingly subject to the constant scan of a computer’s laser as if under surveil-
lance, or subject to experimentation. The scanning does not impede the dancing but
rather allow a baroque interplay of light and shadow across limbs and head in constant
motion (see Figs. 28.1–28.4).
Such a juxtaposition was also apparent in Moroder’s disco work with Donna Summer,
which provocatively combined the most biologically organic (the orgasmic groans of
Summer, singing “Love to Love You Baby” and “I Feel Love,” of 1975 and 1977 respec-
tively) with the most electronically inorganic (synthetic sounds, suggesting computer
processor chatter, drum machine beats, or looped drums and bass lines), establishing a
mise-en-scène of human versus computer.
808 State and Nightcrawlers reverse this otherwise expected sonic organization.
“Pacific State” assembles a busy, bustling beat as a soundbed for a jazzy alto saxophone
solo. The solo is mixed so that it sounds as if it emanates from some distance away, even
to the point of lagging behind the beat—as if from a beach party, heard in the distance, or
even imagined, and hence the song’s distinctive “Balearic dreaminess” (Stanley 2013, 626).
What is typically denoted as human first flows through the machine; the solo sound
Figures 28.1–28.4  Beauty as in the (electronic) eye of the beholder: promo video for Layo &
Bushwacka!’s “Love Story [vs Finally]” (2002)
536   Benjamin Halligan

Figures 28.1–28.4  (Continued)

itself is treated, and could easily be taken for a synthesizer, so that an electronic reso-
nance is now present in the timbre of a brass instrument. For “Push the Feeling On”
the beat incorporates sampled vocals (where the lyrical content is ambiguous), and a
synthesizer solo again freely wends across this nuanced soundscape. In the bluntest
 Mind Usurps Program    537

possible way, the tracks meld a “lower register” (the beat, repeated samples, the regi-
mented and the expected: the matter of a computer program) with an “upper register”
(the voice, the surprising, the freer: a creativity denoting the human mind).
How, then, experientially, such tracks come to function is another matter—and
perhaps one with an overwhelming number of determinants when the live life of
the track is considered, with alterations via mixing and remixing, in the sequencing
of the track, in terms of a demographic, the sound and lighting systems, and so on.
Anecdotally, very apparent differences in dancing indicate the profound differences
between tracks: swaying and smiling for “Pacific State,” maybe hands pointed in the
air and freely mimicking conducting; the orbit of frenzied arms around the body for
“Love Story [vs Finally]”; on-the-spot walking for “Push the Feeling On,” with arms
rarely moving higher than ninety degrees from the body. These differences also speak
of the “moment,” in the sense of the scheduling of blocks of time, of the dance event too.
Such a curatorial organization acknowledges the “full on” response needed by Layo &
Bushwacka! which then places the track at the point of the most energy to expend.
And, as with “Not Over Yet” by Grace (1993–1995) or “The Weekend” by Michael Gray
(2004), the track’s chorus is an anthemic legend, perhaps akin to Benjamin’s “rush
switch,” which momentarily unites individuals, potentially through a unification of
dance gestures and movements, and singing along, at the point of the chorus. Reynolds
refers to EDM’s “E-motionalism” in this respect (2013, 544). “Push the Feeling On” is
a relative easing off, and so found a few hours after, as energy wanes. And the “come
down” ambience of “Pacific State,” which, as with Robert Miles’s “Children” (1995), is
designed to slow down the body and chill out rather than rile up the sensibility (and so
attempt to engender a safer passage home), means that the track is typically found at
the very end, or as an outro, to the entire set.
In all these examples, the beat seeks to discipline the body in the alignments of the
tempo of the dance and the movement of the body, and the dancer’s breathing. And,
as bolstered via neurological alteration, and in respect to the immense durations of the
set, the beat becomes a locking in of the body, into the music and its event, and the
regulation of the body to the segmentations of time in the event, and flows of intensity.

EDM’s “Metal Guru”

However, the “upper register” of the track alleviates the monotony of such discipline.
This is the path to freedom that is offered to the dancer, allowing the mind to wonder,
irrespective of this locking in of the body. This register is freer, and empathetic, the
strata of human articulation found above, or in the midst of, the computer-generated
soundscape. And it is via the emotional “holding onto” this upper register, or mental
alignment to this sonic compass point, that the drug experience can be negotiated. This
register is akin then to Ariadne’s thread, guiding the individual through the endless
maze of the music, leading and shaping the trip. Whiteley has made this argument, in
538   Benjamin Halligan

a nascent form ([1992] 2004), in relation to unexpected chord changes in “Strawberry

Fields Forever” by the Beatles (1967). In this, the Beatles are understood to signal their
experience, and so guru status, to the listener—and thus offer their guidance (“Let me
take you down …”) for the aspirant acid user. This guru trope also occurs in the per-
son of the actually existing singer: the crazed live performances of Arthur Brown, for
example, who seems to combine, or “channel,” the roles of orchestra conductor, dervish,
pronouncing medical doctor, court jester and pre-Christian spiritual leader, or in Jim
Morrison’s stage persona, which, as Milton argues (2012) in respect to the “happen-
ing” nature of concerts by the Doors, drew directly from the Living Theater’s quasi-
ceremonial pageantries of madmen and seers. And, likewise, as I have argued elsewhere
(Halligan 2010, 2013), the upper register of EDM also acts as guru and “drug buddy.”
Rave cultures drew heavily on notions of a guru, seen or unseen, as the enlightener
or shaman—the DJ, singer, mixer, performer—the “intelligence” behind, or through,
the computer music, and with “the engineer as poet, as weaver-of-dreams” as Reynolds
put it (2013, 466). Academic writing is particularly credulous in this respect, falling
between anecdotal sociological observations and willful obscurantism. In the “sha-
manic resurgence” comes “mystical experiences accessible to the ‘children of Babylon’ ”
(Baldini, drawing on DJ Goa Gil’s terminology, 2010, 171). For the “democratized sha-
manism characteristic of both cyber culture and the psytrance movement” (Ryan,
2010, 189), and “digital shamanism” (D’Andrea, 2004, 246) in general, the shaman fig-
ure “combines art, technology, and religion” (248) so that, for the raver, “the merging
with technology becomes a cyborgian rite of passage” (Rietveld, 2004, 59). The results
stretch to reported “telepathy, mystical visions, paranoia, ego dissolution, excruciat-
ing pleasures” and so forth (D’Andrea, 2004, 249). A typical sociological approach is
to find in these phenomena a secular-age belief system, based on fun and the more
exotic elements (to Western eyes) of world religions. Other writers find in the event
a kind of psychic multiculturalism (and one that, despite its supernatural providence,
still crudely differentiates along us-and-them lines). Hence “certain kinds of electronic
music are attributed the capacity to induce trancelike states [. . .] evoking images of
shamanic tribal rituals in South America, India, Africa and elsewhere” (Ryan 2010, 191),
and allow “primordial communication” (quoted in Rietveld, 2004, 47). The musicians
offer similarly Orientalist perspectives, Spiral Tribe saying “It’s all voodoo pulses. From
Africa [… w]e’re not trying to get into the future, we’re trying to get back to where we
were before Western Civilization fucked it all up” (quoted in Reynolds, 2013, 175). The
ravers are cast as disciples who are led, en masse, to shared feelings, a synchronicity of
e-motionalism, shared experiences of the night, and shared resources too.
But rave cultures more typically diffuse this guru figure: she or he is no longer present,
no longer the center of attention on a stage of performance, or just exists virtually—a
sampled vocal from some long-retired or deceased singer. (For many writers, the intro-
duction of globe-trotting superstar DJs thus realigned rave along standard consumer
lines, with an EDM “pop star,” to its detriment.) For EDM, the guru is software, run-
ning now independently of its first programmer: music from the virtual sphere. The
guru is, more properly, the ghost (of the dead or absent human) in the machine. Or,
 Mind Usurps Program    539

along the favored theological lines: this guru is the unseen Holy Spirit rather than a
Christ-like divine and actual presence, electrifying and guiding the crowd.
In this case, and especially in house, acid house, and techno, this guru element, in
the upper register (which can be termed “the guru register”), can be manifest as little
more than a series of blips or bleeps, cutting across the groove, or the sonic patina, of
the track. In trance, the guru register can be one sustained chord or sound, enveloping
all other musical components, or blending them into itself. To appropriate Marc Bolan’s
term, this articulation is EDM’s “metal guru.” But at the same time the nature of this
articulation, in the freer, upper register, allow a reading of EDM that moves beyond the
seemingly limited and trivial imaginings of the extant music in favor of a concern with
the imaginings of the raver.

The Idea of Virtuality

The introduction of the idea of virtuality allows EDM “before” (principally disco, but
also Motorik and synthesizer pioneers of the 1970s such as Moroder, Wendy Carlos,
and Jean-Michel Jarre—analog EDM)10 to be considered in modernist terms, the inte-
gration of man and industrial machine, with the latter at the service of the former.
EDM “proper”—that is, digital—is then postmodern, the integration of machine with
machine, as a closed loop. The idea of virtuality—in its earliest understandings, in the
sense of “virtually human” or “not quite human”—shifts the parameters of the debate
on computer-generated music.
But more generally the idea of the changing relationship between man and computer
was, in itself, a key ontological question of the postwar years, and a matter of existen-
tial struggle for Cold War warriors (computers programmed to autonomously enact
“mutually assured destruction,” and so on). During the time of civil crises of the late
1960s, the relationship took on a way of imagining the contested future. When Shaull,
for example, addresses the “two prototypes of the new man who is emerging in our
time: the revolutionary and the technocrat” (Oglesby and Shaull, 1967, 199), the indica-
tion is that technology will soon impose a new and absolute divide between those in
and those outside the coming order. Even more apocalyptically, the computer—faceless
and stateless, but rapidly becoming the face of and controller of the state—seemed to
be on the verge of abandoning old strategies (enslaving and remaking man) in favor
of simply replacing man altogether. Such “future shock” tension made for a theme of
much 1970s popular culture.
In this context, the proto-virtual nature of disco comes in the unashamed replace-
ment of musicians with computers—most clearly, drummer to drum machine. Disco
music’s distinctiveness is often found in its not-quite-human sonic glaze. And disco
was not hesitant in presenting itself as the music of the future, in a number of ways.
What was alarming to cultural commentators, then, in cultures associated with disco
was how the computer regulated freed emotion, in leisure time and leisure spaces, in
540   Benjamin Halligan

addition to exerting ever more control over work practices and the workplace. Just as
the computer controlled the speed of the conveyor belt in the Fordist model factory, the
computer came to determine the rhythm of erotic activity in the discotheque—and, in
this, held out the promise of free love, making good on the project of the “Summer of
Love” of a decade or so before, or at least fulfilling the demands for sexual freedom. For
moralists and science fiction naysayers, this development was characterized as a pro-
cess in which the human is gradually stripped of his or her free will in order to access
pleasure once entering this pact with the computer.
The virtualness of digital EDM does not creep into, and contaminate, real life in
this disco and 1970s sci-fi way. Digital EDM already is “post-human,” music that
explores its own possibilities rather than offering a mimicking of received forms
of music. Electronic drums, in analog EDM, were often still drums to be played by a
drummer. The DJ, in contrast, confronts panels of switches and faders, and interacts
with laptops and memory sticks, as he sequences and splices extant music. The DJ
booth resembles a cockpit, with its rows of push buttons, ergonomically circular steer-
ing wheels, and screens. The music can even continue on autopilot if the DJ is absent
(see Figs. 28.5–28.7).
As with a PC connected to the Internet, this bank of machines is a way of access-
ing, and so calling into existence, another realm of information, and one that becomes
self-sustaining and infinitely mutable (see Fig.  28.8). The sense that data and infor-
mation are already “out there” in the ether, and can be accessed and channeled via

Figures  28.5–28.8  DJ as technician:  K-Klass DJ at the Venus Club (Manchester, UK), Sept.
21, 2013
Figures 28.5–28.8  (Continued)
542   Benjamin Halligan

Figures 28.5–28.8  (Continued)

the computer, makes for a sense of virtuality that is spiritlike: unknowable, invisible,

ever-present. The relationship between the DJ, virtuality, and dancers is one of inter-
locking interactivity, and the flow of communication is a loop that connects them all
(see Fig. 28.9):

1. The virtual realm as supplier

2. DJ as accessor
3. The dancers as supplicants
4. Supplicants as requestors
5. DJ as requested
6. Requests to the virtual realm, return to 1

Californian Ideology

Whether this state of affairs is depoliticizing and stupefying or liberating and empow-
ering remains, as noted above, a matter of debate. In classic modernist terms, this
debate can be read in terms of aesthetics and politics, and Jameson offers (NLB 2007),
for its leftist, Cold War–era manifestations, a polemic that arises from the positions
of Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, and Lukács. The common ground, however, is
clear:  empowerment through art as a didactic and liberating engagement with the
 Mind Usurps Program    543

Figure  28.9 The loop in action:  shout outs and shout backs, across the mixing desk.
(“Revolution,” Venus Club, Manchester, UK, Aug. 10, 2013)

proletariat. In postmodern terms, where such an ambiguity comes to be the defining

characteristic of popular cultures, the entire field is problematized by virtuality.
For Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, writing in the mid-1990s, virtuality is
read as the coming condition, and as imminent and radically transformative to popu-
lar cultures, politics, and aesthetics. What they anticipate has a postmodern ahistori-
cism too: countercultural, bohemian currents seem to mix and meld with neoliberal,
antistate positions, in the understanding of an individual’s agency, at the time of what
they identify as the Californian Ideology. And agency for the individual, in an age of
social media (which Barbrook and Cameron are able to discuss, in its very earliest
stages, via the flirting that apparently occurred on the French proto-Internet Minitel
network), is computer-facilitated. To put it in very crude terms, this agency is not the
freedom granted to slaves, once their chains have been removed:  freedom of move-
ment, freedom of choice, freedom to work for, in part, their own financial gain. Rather,
this agency is the freedom that is possible for those who remain enslaved or choose
enslavement, that is, surrendering their lives to the computer-city. But the myth of such
a killer computer-city can also be seen as a reprise of a Marxian notion of the uprising
of the enslaved workers; the human ultimately revolts against the machines, and seeks
to overthrow their central computer. But is the revolt itself enabled by the freedoms
first granted by the computer? This is the fundamental question in terms of theorizing
EDM, even to the extent that positions can be taken that find the culture depoliticizing
and liberating, or stupefying and empowering, to find the terms employed above now
reordered counterintuitively.
544   Benjamin Halligan

It is arresting that, in his response to Barbrook and Cameron, Bifo moves against their
assumptions made about the “natural” inclinations of human agency, and so anticipates
debates beyond the debate anticipated by The Californian Ideology. Pace Foucault, and
Deleuze of The Society of Control (1990), Bifo argues that the human element becomes
diluted in this process of entering, effectively, the computer-city. The disciplinary “code
of behaviour is being imprinted directly onto the mind through models of cognition, of
psychic interaction,” and discipline is thus to be achieved “through the dissemination
of techno-linguistic interfaces inducing a cognitive mutation” (Bifo, n.d.).
Toward the end of The Californian Ideology, Barbrook and Cameron touch on EDM
as an art form for the coming virtual age: “Digital artisans can create a new machine
aesthetic for the information age. For instance, musicians have used computers to
develop purely digital forms of music, such as drum ’n’ bass and techno” (1995). An
endnote introduces one such figure, Goldie, whose music at that point (Timeless was
released in 1995) was a kind of concept-album-sized psychedelic junglism, and who is
quoted as noting that the EDM phase is a new beginning, with potential now to “push
it and push it and push it” (where “it” is drum and bass; the “push” means to progress).
For Barbrook and Cameron, this “new machine aesthetic” is a product or byproduct,
or artifact, of “the information age,” and makes for a revised rationale for how the art-
ist functions in society:  how, as they conclude, “the developers of hypermedia must
reassert the possibility of rational and conscious control over the shape of the digital
future.” In this, they note a European–North American divide, with the latter elitist and
of the Californian Ideology while the former is “inclusive and universal.” This is the
divide that critics of the Californian Ideology, such as Bifo, have noted as showing the
limitations of the revolutionary imagination of the authors; national boundaries rather
than class commonalities determine the battle for the coming digital future, bucking
the idea of “[digital] workers of the world, unite!”
However, in the notion of the mind usurping the program, of the guru register,
and of the coming together of the EDM event, there is an echo of the imagining of a
Europeanized Californian Ideology: “rational and conscious control” in the figure of
the DJ and mixer, and the “inclusive and universal” in the experience of the massed rav-
ers, virtuality tamed and channeled for egalitarian, internationalist ends. In fact, taken
as a whole in terms of this new music subculture, and understood to exert a centrifugal
force over other youth cultures, EDM or the experience of EDM would seem to have in
part prompted the reformist, “European” position of the Californian Ideology.
A sociological or ethnographic study of rave cultures would perhaps reveal how this
imagining, of a Europeanized Californian Ideology in EDM, was or was not played
out at the time (or even, via police records, a study of arrests and offenses, types of
drugs found in possession, and class determinants of sentences then handed out).
However, the connection between EDM and the idea of virtuality is perhaps more use-
fully considered with respect to the self-conception of EDM rather than the behaviors
of denizens of raves. EDM seems to contain an imagining of its own constituency. That
is, the EDM track projects the idea of its own enlightened listener, while the enlight-
ened listener can seek to fulfill that role. The guru register can, after all, only operate
 Mind Usurps Program    545

apostolically, preaching to the faithful, converting the nonbelievers to the cause; but it
is first necessary for these apostles to verify the presence of the Messiah.
What then seems to occur is an exchange of fantasies—akin to a dysfunctional
marriage, where each attempts to live up to the other’s notion of the person he or she
wanted to marry. In respect to questions of straight popularity, this idea of an exchange
is easy to grasp: the audience really does make the track, in terms of both responsive-
ness and the properly democratic nature of popularity. A bad or badly placed track will
empty the dance floor, and a DJ spinning unpopular tunes will be a financial liability to
the owners, managers, and staff of a club. A good track will be played for decades, and
will therefore effectively shore up the customer base. So it is a matter of the reception
of the text, rather than authorial intentions (in keeping with structuralist thought, and
Barthes’s “death of the author”), that fully comes into play in this process. Fantastical
projection (which still may, of course, be problematic) is more appropriately under-
stood as a matter of the audience’s use of the track. The alchemy of the effective DJ, in
operation across the loop outlined above, seems to involve understanding the needs
of the audience at certain points, and how and when a certain track dropped into the
mix can fulfill those needs. There is even, in preemptive mixing (where a few bars or
vocal snatches may be mixed into the previous track), a testing or teasing, or in Freud’s
term, a fort/da operation (where the child reenacts the loss and gain of a desired object
repeatedly). The question is articulated in this operation:  Will this desired track be
given a full playing? And the audience response (a new wave of energy, affirmative
cries from the dance floor, or indifference) ensures or derails that outcome respectively.
Unlike Prog or punk, such communication in or between the EDM soundscape and
the dancer is not a matter of a wide-eyed mimicking of events or figures on stage or
record sleeves—sartorial influence, shared attitudes to work, and so forth. For EDM
there is often no central stage, no performer, no display of musical prowess, no clear
beginning or definite end. (And even the superstar DJs mentioned above seem unglam-
orous and, appropriately for archivists of popular culture, middle-aged and scruffily aca-
demic in appearance.) Ontological questions arise in this circumstance. What is it that
we are listening to? Where does it come from? (Since, via a good PA, the answer is all
around: multidirectional rather than “from” the stage area.) And, with respect then to a
lack of a narrative centered on performance (an appreciation of a concert, of musician-
ship, of a delivery of favorite songs, as seen live), why are we listening? Why are we here?
And, in terms of where one stands, In what direction do we look? For Chris Cunningham
and Aphex Twins DJ sets, there is virtually nothing “live” to look at—often just a bobbing
head, glimpsed but mostly obscured by laptop screens. Such questions occur naturally in
this circumstance since what is understood to be authentic in live music performances,
and unique to a certain moment and space alone, is at best problematic in EDM and at
worst altogether absent. Thus Reynolds identifies a conceptual far shore: mortal absence
as typifying some dance musics (“zombie music”), via the voice and sounds of the since-
departed, electrified and virtually brought back to life (2013, 456).
Svenonius connects the standard narrative of the live music event to the feudal-
capitalist organization of entertainment: loudness used to exert dominion over the
546   Benjamin Halligan

performance area, preventing its “alternative” use (as a social space) by consumers,
and where “elitism in their [DJs’ and bands’] case is conveyed through their occu-
pying a stage, which implies a relationship with management or ownership of said
space and sense of importance” (2012, 236). Once this model is abandoned,11 through
the decentered nature of the delivery of the music, a void opens up. Without these
standard narratives of live music, the guru register can come to the fore to occupy
that void.

“Afro-Left”

Leftfield’s 1995 single “Afro-Left” (on “The Afro-Left EP,” and from their album Leftism,
released the same year) could be said to mark fairly extreme uses of the tendencies
that have been described above as the guru register and an imagined constituency.
The majority of the track consists of an uninterrupted beat and synthesizers, on top of
which a berimbau is played and a singer talks and intones at length (the track is seven
and a half minutes) in a foreign language, one that sounds sub-Saharan African. The
singer is mic’d closely, so as to create, in the vocal track, a sense of intimacy, the sound
of being spoken to at close quarters, even of the mouth speaking directly into the ear.
The vocal track is effective in riling the audience up into a frenzy, spurring on the
dancing (and this was particularly so in live renditions of the album in 2010), and its
unintelligible foreignness blocks all but an impressionistic response to the voice. What
is being said? It is not clear. But the cadences of this voice across the substantial length
of the track engender a trancelike state nonetheless. (Indeed one of the EP’s B-sides,
“Afro Ride,” is a minimalist trance remix.)
The credited singer, Djum Djum, is in fact literally unintelligible: the vocal is a pas-
tiche of a black African-sounding language. Djum Djum, who it may be surmised is
behind the tribal mask on the cover of the single, which is credited to “Leftfield fea-
turing Djum Djum,” is reputedly the less exotically named Neil Cole. The track could
be dismissed as a kind of EDM blackface variant since the pastiching of foreign lan-
guages is a mainstay of racist comedians. Even the name is vaguely racist: repetition as
a necessity for semicivilized savages, as with Bamm-Bamm of The Flintstones. In addi-
tion, the track invokes colonial myths concerning Africans and rhythms and, in that
the guru register is given over to a mythical African, the indigenous wisdom of those
“closer to nature” or “purer” in state, able to cast powerful spells on those who have lost
this “ancient knowledge,” and so induce innocent Westerners into primitive practices.
The inlay and CD itself contain blurry images of a black African; is the implication
that Leftfield found him in a jungle or desert, and mixed him into British EDM, thus
allowing access to the witch doctor for British ravers via “Afro-Left”? Is it Djum Djum
himself who commandeers the mixing or field recording, and his voice, now didg-
eridooesque, self-Vocodered toward the end of the track? Or, that Leftfield remakes
trance-inducing African rituals in an EDM context (as with the cover image, speakers
 Mind Usurps Program    547

replace the eye holes of Djum Djum’s mask), since the two cultural practices are clearly
basically the same?
However, the idea of the guru register and an imagined constituency goes some way
to placing the track outside such Orientalist critiques. The track, considered as vir-
tual music, primarily becomes a matter of reception by its audience. And the addled
listener, while perhaps still subscribing to these dominant Western narratives of the
ethnic Other, could be said to be in a situation where diminished responsibility can
be reasonably claimed. Djum Djum’s authenticity is not so much the point; it is the
perception of his authenticity, in respect to his sudden presence in the new machine
aesthetic, that determines the track. In terms of the mass psychology of the dance floor,
and the virtuality of EDM and its futurist aspirations, and the track and its guru reg-
ister as a phenomenological matter, this Western looking to old but nonthreatening
and nonsexualized stereotypes suggests a frisson of Afro-futurism. To participate in
“Afro-Left” is to work the loci of wisdom that are Other and unintelligible—that are, in
a crudely negative correlation, simply non-Western. “Afro-Left” imagines that just such
a mindset occurs, and can be nurtured, and that this mind then overturns the given
(Western) program. And Afro-futurism, even in the privileging of the “primitive” for
the guru register, is not capitalist futurism. Leftism closes with “21st Century Poem,” in
which a number of questions that suggest a prerevolutionary situation on the part of
the oppressed are asked: “How many dreams terrorised, til we rise? / [. . .] / How many
homes set alight, til we fight?”
Recent critical work on the failure to imagine noncapitalist futures—the “Capitalist
Realism” theorized by a number of left critics, and a central concern of Fisher’s (2009)—
reveals something of the progressive nature of this vaguely oppositional, non-Western
imagining in the dominant, neoliberal political economy. In this context, “Afro-Left”
functions as a multicultural “world party.” Its imagined constituency comes to operate
in a way to dissolve demarcations between Western and developing worlds, favoring
the “Third” over the “First” in terms of the orientation of its subcultures. The effi-
cacy of this aspiration is achieved via the virtual. As with the European variant of the
Californian Ideology, revolution is bred within and through the circuits of the machine.

Notes
1. Though no one song or genre or artist seems to exist at this intersection, and speculative
science fiction writing had grappled with notions of a coming computer-infiltrated sub-
jectivity and computer-maintained state of existence for most decades of the last century,
by the mid-1990s such thinking was increasingly becoming the norm in anticipation of
vastly enhanced, and global, computer communication networks.
2. For a broader discussion, see Shapiro (2005, 194 and 226).
3. For a fuller discussion, see Edgar, Fairclough-Isaacs, and Halligan (2013, 1–3).
4. The “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ) is a mainstay of critical writing on music cul-
tures but more generally denotes an area of free—i.e., unpoliced—activity, where, as TAZ
theorist Bey puts it, “the universe wants to play” (2003, 22). This is in stark contrast to
548   Benjamin Halligan

what Deleuze, pace Foucault, described as the modern “society of control,” something
“equal to the harshest of confinements” (Deleuze 1990). Marxian theorists typically con-
ceive of the TAZ as either the horizon of freedom, and pole of an emergent new society,
or, drawing on Bakhtin, a temporary and prescribed or allowed relief from that society of
control, and a relief that therefore only ultimately maintains the existence of that control.
5. For impressions and recollections of disco’s radical gay prehistory, see White (1986).
6. This chapter focuses on the British experience of rave and EDM since, as Clover notes
(2009), the coming together of disparate elements of subcultures occurred in a fairly
unique way in the United Kingdom.
7. Particularly so for a subculture supposedly awash with recreational drugs, and a sub-
culture that—in its earliest days, as Fringeli notes (2011, 7, sect. 6)—necessitated self-
organization and collectivity.
8. See, for example, comments from Paul Staines (Anonymous 1989).
9. This was even seemingly the case for future Conservative leader David Cameron;
see (Barkham 2009). The actual video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=f5RLNdWQPps (accessed Aug. 2013).
10. Particularly, for Jarre, the albums Oxygène and Equinoxe of 1976 and 1978.
11. Noise theorist and activist Mattin offers a number of instructions to this end, in “eleven
ways of SAYING NOTHING” (2011, unpaginated, in the section “Idioms and Idiots”).

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Audiovisual Material
The Beatles. 1967. Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane. UK: Parophone. R 557. 7” single.
The Buggles. 1979. Video Killed the Radio Star. UK: Island Records. WIP 6574. 7” single.
808 State. 1989. Pacific State/Cubik. UK: Simply Vinyl (S12). S12DJ-062. 12” EP.
Goldie. 1994. Timeless. UK: FFRR. 828 614-2. Compact disc album.
Michael Gray. 2004. The Weekend. UK: Eye Industries. 9868865. Compact disc single.
Jean-Michel Jarre. 1976. Oxygène. France: Les Disques Motors. 2933 207. LP album.
Jean-Michel Jarre. 1978. Equinoxe. France: Disques Dreyfus. FDM 83150. LP album.
Kektex. 1998. The Next Phase/Hackney Council Are a Bunch of Cunts. UK: TeC. TEC K. 12” EP.
Layo & Bushwacka! 2002. Love Story [vs Finally]. UK:  XL Recordings. XLS154CD (Tim
DeLuxe mix). Compact disc single.
Leftfield. 1995. Leftism. UK: Hard Hands. HANDLP2D. Vinyl album.
Leftfield featuring Djum Djum. 1995. The Afro-Left EP. UK:  Hard Hands. HAND23CD.
Compact disc single.
Robert Miles. 1995. Children. UK: Platipus. PLAT18. 12” EP.
Nightcrawlers. 1992. Push the Feeling On. UK: 4th & Broadway. 12 BRW 258. 12” EP.
State of Grace (renamed Grace). 1993. Not Over Yet. UK: Perfecto. PERF 1T. 12” EP.
Donna Summer. 1975. Love to Love You Baby. US: Oasis. OCLP 5003. LP album.
Donna Summer. 1977. I Feel Love. US: Casablanca Records. NBD 20104. 12” single.
 PA RT   S E V E N

PA RT IC I PATORY
C U LT U R E A N D
F U N DR A I SI N G

Our final three chapters explore the developing relationship between the Internet
and funding, an issue that has surfaced across the Handbook. In a period of dwindling
investments in music, and artists who have not yet reached a degree of popularity that
guarantees, to any real certain extent, potential investors, “Music represents one of the
primary sectors where fertile ground has been found for crowdfunding” (Chapter 30).
Yet the relationship between the project initiator and potential funders is complex and
often problematic, demanding both an investment in time and effective communica-
tion skills, while highlighting the importance of self-management. As such, Part Seven
provides both a historical overview of crowdfunding and insights as to how best to
develop that crucial relationship between producer and fan/funder.
For those readers who are less familiar with its practicalities, Mark Thorley’s
opening Chapter 29, “Virtual Music, Virtual Money: The Impact of Crowdfunding
Models on Creativity, Authorship, and Identity,” examines the pros and cons, bring-
ing professional insight into how the Internet offers musicians the possibility of con-
necting directly with their fans and audience, who, as potential funders, form part
of a “virtual alliance” with the producer, who also works virtually: “The project is
pitched, fans coalesce around it, and it is funded and most probably sold—all virtu-
ally” (Chapter 29). But as Thorley reveals, “Although virtual facilitation is leading to
an undeniable shift, the reality is unlikely to be as straightforward as the utopia that
552    Part Seven: Participatory Culture and Fundraising

has been suggested” (ibid.). A review of the changing role of the producer reveals
both the breadth of backgrounds and the work involved in running a crowdfunded
project. As he observes, in terms of identity the project initiator may see himself or
herself as, for example, singer, musician, or music arranger and may not be conscious
of a shift in identity toward that of producer. Nevertheless, he or she has to take
responsibility for a combination of logistical, creative, and financial functions.
The first objective, then, is to outline and justify the term producer (as a collective
to refer to such a range of creative practitioners) by examining the work involved in
running a crowdfunded project. Motivation is a key issue, not least because crowd-
funding can be used to fund a wide variety of projects—including music, technol-
ogy development, film, literary works, and software—as well as compete against the
huge range of media content the Internet brings. Similarly, underestimating the role
of cultural intermediation, not least that of the artist and repertoire (A&R) person
and the guidance this brings with it, can create problems and “risk of failure in a
crowdfunded project” (ibid.). As Thorley observes, “A key aspect of crowdfunding is
the manner in which the producer retains ownership of the work” (ibid.), but even
though this may suggest more control, “it may be over a limited set of opportunities”
(ibid.). As he explains, facilitating a more direct connection between producer and
audience can have a liberating effect, one that fosters overall diversity, but this has to
be balanced against the risk of pitching a product yet to happen, and the extent to
which the various types of crowdfunding platforms have control, influence, or insight
into the creative process. Identification of the crowdfunded project as “the next stage
of virtual music development” (ibid.) provides an interesting hook into a discussion
of “the specific nature of a crowdfunded project” (ibid.), its often DIY approach, and
why quality and the ability to construct offerings that are attractive to fan funders
remains an important part of the decision-making process. Not least, “Crowdfunding
involves significant shifts in the behavior of the funders” (ibid.) thanks to the increase
in uncertainty and responsibility, and as such there must be “reasonable hopes of
getting something from the experience” (ibid.). After all, “this commitment dictates
whether a project finds a wider audience” (ibid.).
The significance of Thorley’s observations is evidenced in Francesco D’Amato’s
chapter, “With a Little Help from My Friends, Family, and Fans: DIY, Participatory
Culture, and Social Capital in Music Crowdfunding.” As his case studies reveal,
DIY requires construction of both social networks and social capital, and here
“the participative web offers new opportunities,” enabling “users to establish
new ties based on shared interests and objectives” (Chapter 30). The importance
of social networks for crowdfunding DIY cultures is, as D’Amato sagely notes,
fundamental:  in a virtual environment “no community generally equals no
funding” (Lawton and Marom, cited in ibid.). This shift toward a “DIWO [do-
it-with-others] … new business mentality” (Lawton and Marom, cited in ibid.)
is evidenced in the number of musicians who adopt crowdfunding as a means of
 Part Seven: Participatory Culture and Fundraising    553

finding “the resources necessary for self-production of specific projects” (ibid.),

and the associated importance of dedicated business platforms “with their own
interests and business models” (ibid.). D’Amato’s insight into construction and
management of social networks and capital is informed by “in-depth interviews
with both musicians and backers, as well as quantitative analysis of data concern-
ing the networks of backers of specific campaigns” (ibid.). The success of his first
case study, Honeybird & the Birdies, resulted from the band’s self-management
approach and their “intense live activity,” which afforded “opportunities to build
social networks” (ibid.). This included “a relationship with Enrico Gabrielli, a
musician of the more popular group Calibro 35, who later produced the album
financed through crowdfunding” (ibid.).
In contrast, Fabrizio’s project, Cobol Pongide, lacked the support of a booking
agency and experienced difficulties in consolidating and maintaining a relationship
network. As D’Amato observes, “The lack of an external critical point of view on the
project and the weakness of some virtual relations simplistically labeled as fandom
can end up being two limits to the DIY in virtual environment” (ibid.). An analysis
of funders reveals both the importance of establishing strong ties—“the difficulty
of activating the participation of individuals outside the preexisting networks of
contacts”—and the implications of failing to reach established campaign goals (ibid.).
As he concludes, “An effective crowdfunding campaign therefore requires specific
resources and skills, for both the accumulation of social capital prior to the campaign,
as well as for the work involved in converting the social capital during the campaign
and for the promotion outside of one’s own networks. Obviously, such resources and
skills are not equally distributed” (ibid.).
Justin Williams and Ross Wilson also explore the implications for artist-fan inter-
activity on the Internet. As they observe, even though crowdfunded musical proj-
ects “have their roots in earlier forms of patronage … the online iteration … has
new implications for the value of composition as labor, the added value of paratex-
tual products, and the relationship between fan-consumers and artistic creativity”
(Chapter 31). “Music and Crowdfunded Websites: Digital Patronage and Artist-Fan
Interactivity” examines three case studies: Maria Schneider on ArtistShare, Amanda
Palmer on Kickstarter, and Public Enemy on Sellaband. It offers “a comparative analy-
sis of the methods, ideologies, and level of interactivity in each instance of crowdfund-
ing” (ibid.). As they explain, “A current challenge for record labels and music-related
companies is how best to mix traditional and emerging business models in order
to take advantage of fan-consumer behavior in what has been called Web 2.0”
and its “crucial part in not only the crowdfunding model, but also in the online and
offline identity of the artist and consumer in the digital era” (ibid.). More specifically,
as “online platforms have been able to mobilize fan communities worldwide who
wish to help fund a project” (ibid.), this also raises the question of motivation and
rewards: “whether or not the paratextual products are actually incentives to invest or
554    Part Seven: Participatory Culture and Fundraising

whether or not they [the fan communities] wish to fund these projects in support of
the artists regardless of these extra items” (ibid.).
With online artist-fan interactivity shifting the balance from a passive audience to
an active user of the media, it has become increasingly evident that online intimacy in
the artist-fan relationship can contribute to an artist’s success by cultivating both an
identity and the necessary online following that leads to crowdfunding. As a resource,
social networks can “achieve things people either could not achieve by themselves, or
could achieve with great difficulty” (Field, cited in Chapter 30). Williams and Wilson
agree:  “Crowdfunding sites vary in their rhetoric and branding that they use, but
most emphasize the agency of the fan in the process” (Chapter 31). A selective and
comparative list of crowdfunding websites (Table 31.1) illustrates how “the collective
or the crowd has become of high symbolic value in Web 2.0 and potentially can be
transformed into exchange value through digital patronage” (ibid.). As a Web 2.0
phenomenon, crowdfunding “allows the consumer to engage in what Vincent Miller
calls ‘networked individualism’ … actively supporting artists and sharing one’s tastes
with a network of like-minded fans, and then broadcasting those tastes to one’s other
communities to help shape her or his online identity. The notion of collective intelli-
gence is thus placed on the fan’s choice in artist, rather than the creative output of the
artists themselves” (Chapter 31). It is worth noting that all three of their case studies
arguably benefited “from the increased ideological (and often monetary) value on
the ‘user’ or ‘crowd’ in Web 2.0 participatory cultures, as well as the convergence of
the online retailer with the crowdfunded digital patronage system” (ibid.). As such,
even though investments by funders attracted different rewards, the key to success
remains building and sustaining a relationship between the artist and his or her fans.
Without such interactivity—as all three chapters demonstrate—successful crowd-
funding is unlikely. The key to success, as Williams and Wilson conclude, depends
on the funder’s belief “in the person or group’s artistic vision and abilities in order to
see it as a worthy endeavor” (ibid.).

References
Field, John. 2008. Social Capital, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Lawton, Kevin, and Dan Marom. 2010. The Crowdfunding Revolution. Self-published.
CreateSpace.
Miller, Vincent. 2011. Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage.

Additional Recommended Reading

Anderson, Tim. 2014. Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for
an Emerging Service Industry. New York: Routledge.
Anderton, C., A. Dubber, and M. James. 2013. Understanding the Music Industries. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
 Part Seven: Participatory Culture and Fundraising    555

Collins, S., and S. Young. 2014. Beyond 2.0: The Future of Music. London: Equinox.
Crossley, N., S. McAndrew, and P. Widdop. 2014. Social Networks and Music Worlds.
New York: Routledge.
David, Matthew. 2010. Peer to Peer and the Music Industry: The Criminalization of Sharing.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Glanville, Jo. 2015. Smashed Hits 2.0: Music Under Pressure. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hardy, Phil. 2013. Download:  How the Internet Transformed the Record Business.
London: Omnibus Press.
Jones, Michael. 2012. The Music Industries:  From Conception to Consumption. Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Kernfeld, Barry. 2011. Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Klein, B., G. Moss, and L. Edwards. 2015. Understanding Copyright: Intellectual Property in the
Digital Age. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Knopper, Steve. 2009. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Music Industry
in the Digital Age. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kot, Greg. 2010. Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Kretschmer, Martin, et  al. 2001. “Music in Electronic Markets:  An Empirical Study.” New
Media and Society 3: 417–441.
Maguire, J., and J. Matthews. 2013. The Cultural Intermediaries Reader. London: Sage.
Marshall, Lee, ed. 2013. The International Recording Industries. New York: Routledge.
Park, David. 2007. Conglomerate Rock:  The Music Industry’s Quest to Divide Music and
Conquer Wallets. Lanham: Lexington.
Rogers, Jim. 2013 The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age. London:
Bloomsbury.
Stahl, Matt. 2013. Unfree Masters: Popular Music and the Politics of Work. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Tschmuck, Peter. 2006. Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry. Dordrecht: Springer.
Wikström, Patrick. 2009. The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
 chapter 29

Virtual Mu si c ,
Virtual Money
The Impact of Crowdfunding Models on Creativity,
Authorship, and Identity

Mark Thorley

With the traditional record company model, the path between music creator and audi-
ence has been seen to be complex, and managed by a series of cultural intermediaries.
This situation has often been criticized from the perspectives of music creator and
consumer alike. For the musician or music producer, it often meant trying to “mold”
the creative output just so a record company would fund the work. From a consumer’s
point of view, it often meant that music became homogenized, and there was a lack
of diversity. In short, the cultural intermediary decided what got funded, and what
consumers heard.
Born in the virtual environment, emergent models of crowdfunding are now chang-
ing this situation by allowing musicians to connect directly with their audience, who
can then fund projects. The project is pitched, fans coalesce around it, and it is funded
and most probably sold—all virtually. This is arguably the next stage of virtual music,
where not only do the producers work virtually, but the fans as funders also form part
of a virtual alliance. Taking common criticism of cultural intermediaries at face value,
this is an attractive proposition. Projects that would otherwise not be funded can be
realized, and consumers (if they can be called that) enjoy a diversity of choice previ-
ously not available to them. In short, the energy previously tied up in cultural interme-
diation finds liberty with the music creator and the audience.
Compared with the era of recorded music, crowdfunding has been in existence for
a very short time.1 So although virtual facilitation is leading to an undeniable shift, the
reality is unlikely to be as straightforward as the utopia that has been suggested. Further
examination is therefore needed, in particular how crowdfunding has an impact on
558   Mark Thorley

creativity, authorship, and identity. These issues are explored here, in relation to the key
elements of producer, product, and fan.

Producer

Crowdfunding can be used to fund a wide variety of projects beyond those of a musical
nature; technology development, film, literary works, and software are just a few of the
more obvious examples. In the field of music, it has been adopted by music compos-
ers, bands, solo performers, recording engineers, and DJs, again to name just a few.
The range of creative practitioners and their backgrounds is therefore extremely wide.
For example, the background and creative abilities of a jazz music composer are very
different from those of a DJ, though they could both be said to be grounded in music.
The first objective then is to outline and justify the term producer as a collective, to
refer to such a range of creative practitioners by examining the work involved in run-
ning a crowdfunded project.2 As part of such a task the initiator must conceptualize
the project, formulate a plan, estimate the costs involved, consider the formation of
a team to realize the project, and pitch the project in the virtual environment. These
skills can be far-removed from those traditionally considered as fundamental to the
role of, for example, a composer, singer, or music arranger. Furthermore, in the tra-
ditional record company model, these tasks would be undertaken by someone other
than the composer, singer, or music arranger. Crowdfunding therefore necessitates a
fundamental shift in role whereby, as a form of vertical integration, the project initia-
tor has to take responsibility for functions further up the value chain (Porter 1998) or
cultural production chain (Pratt 2008). In its combination of logistical, financial, and
creative functions, the role becomes more akin to that of a music producer, as outlined
by Burgess (2013), or a broadly defined Producer (Du Gay et al. 1997). It is important
to note, however, that the project initiator may not be conscious of this shift when she
starts, or even coordinates a project once funded. In terms of identity, the initiator may
still see herself as, for example, singer, musician, or music arranger. Crowdfunding’s
attraction to the music creative’s sense of identity then belies the shift in role away from
more familiar territory, and the development of the project may well expose this issue.
Having defined the group as producers, the questions that arise relate to the motiva-
tions to adopt crowdfunding and the implications of the newfound freedom and respon-
sibility. Additionally, questions arise related to the degree of creative influence producers
are willing to give to funders and their attitude to intellectual property they own.

The Motivation to Adopt Crowdfunding

In comparison to the era of recorded music, crowdfunding is a very new phenom-
enon, but one that has grown significantly and gained much interest. According to the
 Virtual Music, Virtual Money    559

Economist (2012), in 2007 there were fewer than 100 crowdfunding platforms, though
this rose to an estimated 536 by the end of 2012 (Massolution 2012). Anyone actively
engaged in using the Internet for commercial or creative means is unlikely to have
missed the attention crowdfunding has gained. There are, however, particular attrac-
tions for music-oriented projects.
The most obvious attraction for producers is the apparent lack of cultural interme-
diation or gatekeeping. That is, rather than having to seek financial support from say, a
record company, manager, or music publisher, the producer can connect directly with
the audience. The presence of cultural intermediaries or gatekeepers has always been
somewhat problematic for those who wish to take their music to a paying audience,
often being seen as a barrier between the audience’s money and the creative practitio-
ner. As Hirsch (1972, 128) notes, for a cultural good to reach an audience, it must “first
succeed in (a) competition against others for selection and promotion by an entrepre-
neurial organization, and then, in (b) receiving mass media coverage in such forms as
book review, radio station airplay and film criticism.” Crowdfunding alters this situ-
ation in that there is no competition for selection by an entrepreneurial organization
such as a record company, and in principle a diminished need to receive mass media
coverage. Thus the barriers to entry to the music business (complex, capital-intensive
logistics, large marketing costs, winner-takes-all market) outlined by Kretschmer et al.
(2001) seem to have been removed or lowered by the continued technological develop-
ments facilitated by the Internet. Crowdfunding may also appear attractive from an
artistic or philosophically motivated point of view, particularly where the producer
has strong opinions about the influence and policies of, say, a major record company.
Dealing directly with an audience may well appear to be a less corporate way of taking
music to an audience.3
Such a motivation toward crowdfunding can therefore be said to be reactive in its
basis. That is to say, it is based on lack of success, dissatisfaction, or desire not to engage
with the cultural intermediation, which has, for many years, been taken as unavoidable.
This frustration or dissatisfaction associated with new project funding access being
controlled by the cultural intermediary has parallels in the funding of new business
ventures. On this point, inability to convince investors of the value of new ventures
has been explored widely (Shane and Cable 2002, Chen et al. 2009), as has the issue of
finance for young ventures (Berger and Udell 1995, Cosh et al. 2009). Given that 75 per-
cent of unsigned music artists still want to sign a record deal (International Federation of
the Phonographic Industry 2012), crowdfunding seems largely an alternative where the
traditional method does not appear to be working. This motivation is somewhat naïve
and simplistic in reality, however, and can present the producer with unanticipated
challenges. Fundamentally, it ignores the fact that the crowdfunded project still has to
compete for support. But in this case, it is not just against other producers to secure
a record contract or similar arrangement; it is instead against all of the other things a
crowdfunder could spend his or her money on (including goods or experiences other
than crowdfunded projects). Furthermore, assuming that there are crowdfunders will-
ing to commit funds, the producer must still compete for the crowdfunders’ attention
560   Mark Thorley

against the huge range of competing media content that the Internet (in addition to
more traditional media) brings. Whether the crowdfunded producer appreciates this
situation and the challenge to the role, or has the creative skills to undertake the neces-
sary work, is not guaranteed.

Freedom and Newfound Responsibility

The homogenization and globalization of cultural products has been examined and cri-
tiqued extensively in the literature. For example, UNESCO (1982) refers to the notion
of cultural goods becoming marketable commodities, Schiller (1989) outlines how pub-
lic expression has been commoditized, and Robins (1995) explains the concept of the
media space as a global market. Earlier, Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) referred to the
issues of standardization in music. Given that these concepts are related to the discon-
nection between producer and audience often resulting from an increase in control of
global entertainment companies, any emerging practices that facilitate a more direct
connection can have a liberating effect. Just as the control of global media companies
limits diversity, circumnavigating their control may facilitate diversity.
For the producer, crowdfunding seems to present an opportunity for extensive cre-
ative freedom, thus fostering overall diversity. As many crowdfunding platforms can
entail little or no cost to join, there is no need for the producer to tailor the offering to
one particular actor or agent to recoup the investment. If the project is funded, then the
producer can take the project forward with a high level of creative freedom. This is par-
ticularly attractive from an aspiring producer’s point of view as the need to satisfy one
particular person or entrepreneurial organization is removed. Additionally, being able
to exert creative freedom is attractive to established producers who have previously
been in contractual arrangements with record companies (Thorley 2012). Such new
freedom does come with responsibility, though—the responsibility to not only pitch a
project to an unknown group of funders, but also to manage and execute the project
should it be successful in being funded.
Even so, this new responsibility can be problematic as rejecting the role of cultural
intermediation can be based on underestimation of the creative extent of the cultural
intermediation role, in terms of both depth and breadth. First, in terms of depth, a
common understanding of the gatekeeper in the music industry is the artist and rep-
ertoire (A&R) person who decides which artists are signed to a record company and
which are dropped. In reality, the A&R role additionally includes guidance on pro-
ducing appropriate material, deciding which producers to work with, choosing what
studio to record in, and so on. Although this could be seen as a constraint on creative
freedom, there is arguable value in its function of “articulating production with con-
sumption” (Du Gay et  al. 1997, 5). Seeking creative freedom without thought to this
concept therefore increases the risk of failure in a crowdfunded project. Most at risk
in this aspect is the aspiring producer with limited previous experience; he would be
most in need of such input. This is somewhat ironic as it is often the aspiring producer
 Virtual Music, Virtual Money    561

who is attracted to crowdfunding because of the unlikelihood of getting funding via

more traditional means. Second, in terms of the breadth of cultural intermediation,
such a stance is reflective of an underestimation of the role of many business functions
in the creative process. As Negus (2003) notes, the significance of business affairs and
accounting personnel can be unrealistically played down, when in fact they contribute
to the creative process.
Achieving creative control from the standpoint of being a creator is therefore under-
standably aspirational; but when it is simply seen in terms of the freedom attained, it
can be problematic. In actual fact, there is valuable creative work needed that is tradi-
tionally encompassed in the cultural intermediary role. To further complicate matters,
pitching and managing a crowdfunded project actually presents novel creative chal-
lenges. Gaining the support of a crowd is arguably more hit-and-miss than pitching
to one organization. Although the potential pool of funders is global, their motiva-
tions are relatively unknown and diverse compared to an entrepreneurial organization
that is simply looking to contract producers in order to produce an economic return.
Furthermore, the crowdfunded producer is pitching a project yet to happen, rather
than selling a product to a consumer. Creatively, this is a complex and novel challenge,
which the producer (particularly if she still sees herself as a music creative) is not neces-
sarily equipped to meet.

The Extent of Creative Influence the Producer

Expects from Crowdfunders
The record company exerts considerable influence over the recording artist in the tra-
ditional model. Such influence extends from dictating the output of the recording artist
before being contracted, agreeing on what material should be recorded and released,
and overseeing future directions. In this instance, it is the investment the record com-
pany makes that gives them the power to do so. Although their control can and has
often been criticized, there is an equal point of view from the industry itself pointing
out the high cost of artist development (International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry 2012), the return from which must be maximized through control. Recording
artists or producers effectively surrender large elements of creative control in order
to see their work funded and developed; crowdfunding changes this dynamic. As has
been noted, this desire to be free from cultural intermediation is much of the appeal.
The question then arises as to how much creative control producers are willing to sur-
render to their new funders, and the implications of this decision.
The first point of note is that compared to the traditional model, there are more
funders. For this reason, their individual influence is diluted. Second, they are likely
to be geographically and socially diverse, as crowdfunding is now largely facilitated by
the Internet. Therefore, the funders do not possess the focused influence coalescing
around a commercial objective that the traditional record company has. There is, of
562   Mark Thorley

course, much evidence of the influence of crowds and fans. For example, Jenkins (2006,
53) outlines the “voluntary, temporary and tactical” affiliations bound by intellectual
and emotional investment. But the important aspect is that once a project is pitched
virtually, potential funders can either back it or not. There is no room for negotiation
or influence over the product, as would be the case with the traditional model. This
presents a very different dynamic from the traditional record company model, and one
that shows a diminished level of feedback through loss of the cultural intermediary.
In the traditional model, a record company or other backer could decide not to con-
tract a particular artist or producer, who may then (on the basis of feedback) take time
and effort to develop further before returning. In this way, even before the contract is
signed, the record company is providing creative influence, the aim of which is to syn-
chronize product with potential market audience. With crowdfunding, there is no such
process. If the offering is not attractive to funders, then the project fails and it is back to
the drawing board. The producer can, of course, change the project and repitch it later.
However, the project has not benefited from the same meaningful creative feedback so
they have limited information as to why the project failed and how the situation can
be rectified.
The type of crowdfunding platform chosen also has some part to play in how much
influence the funders are given by the producer. With a reward-based offering, the
relationship is more like patronage. In this instance, it is “here is the producer; here is
what they seek to do, here’s what you get, please back it.” Examples of such platforms
include the better-known examples such as Artistshare and Kickstarter, right through
to niche platforms such as Artisteconnect, which is based in Manila in the Philippines.
Backers may be offered insights into the creative process, special edition merchandise,
or custom performances, but no real influence over the creative output. With an equity
or lending-based model such as 99Funding, Crowdfunder, or the Polish MegaTotal, the
funders’ return is a financial one based on the success of the project. In this instance,
the producer’s creative output must be better aligned to the needs of the market for the
project to produce a return to the funder. Therefore, the producer is surrendering more
influence to the market on the creative work just by choosing this type of platform.

Producers’ Attitudes toward Intellectual Property

A key aspect of crowdfunding is the manner in which the producer retains owner-
ship of the work. Closely related to creative control, this is in contrast to contractual
relationships with record companies, which take ownership of the recorded works. In
addition to being the author, then, the producer in retaining ownership becomes the
person who decides how to protect and exploit the work.
This is an attractive proposition as the producer not only retains greater value in the
work, which she has authored, but also the control over what to do with the work. It
again highlights the change in the creative practitioner’s role in becoming a crowdfund-
ing project producer, and the shift in responsibility up the value or cultural production
 Virtual Music, Virtual Money    563

chain. A traditional record company would exploit ownership of the work to maximize
economic and perhaps critical success, and the recording artist would have limited say
in how this takes place. For example, recordings could be licensed to various territo-
ries, and so on. However, in retaining ownership of the recorded work, the producer
has more control over such exploitation, even if the opportunity to do so is likely to be
more limited. First, the producer is unlikely to have the same network of established
business relationships from which the opportunities arise. Second, the producer does
not have the same expertise to exploit recorded works that a traditional record com-
pany would have. In retaining ownership, the medium of crowdfunding exposes the
producer to the need to have different creative skills to make the most of this. As has
already been indicated, if she is not aware of the shift in role (still seeing herself wholly
as a music creator), she is unlikely to have or appreciate the need for such skills. The
result is that while having more control, it may be over a limited set of opportunities.

Product

Traditionally, music consumers bought what the music industry would refer to as
product. Whether as recorded music items in the form of vinyl, cassette, or CD, or as
merchandise, ownership of a tangible product has been fundamental. Crowdfunding
is fundamentally different in that even though tangible goods are involved, the com-
mitment sought is that of funding to make a project happen. This presents further
questions, namely, how this can be considered to be the next stage of virtual music
development and the specific nature of a crowdfunded project.

The Crowdfunded Project as the Next Stage

of Virtual Music Development
Technology’s impact on music production has been well documented, from use of the
project studio (Newell 2000, White et al. 2013) to distribution via the Internet (Gordon
2005, Mewton 2001, Ashurst 2000). It has often been stated that the lower cost of music
production software and hardware has democratized music making, offering opportu-
nities to those previously excluded from the activity. In a similar way, the Internet has
opened up opportunities for music producers to have their music heard through sites
such as SoundCloud and YouTube.
Producing any music-based project still involves cost, even if it is only the time of
the participants. Although the tools of creation and production have never been more
available, they do have a cost. Similarly, the time to use (or learn to use) these tools,
or indeed to contract the time of others in their use, involves some cost. It is at this
point that crowdfunding comes in as arguably the next stage of technologically enabled
564   Mark Thorley

virtual music development. In this case, though, emergent technology is facilitating the
project realization process specifically through providing the funding to do so.

The Particular Nature of a Crowdfunded Project

When a potential recording artist is presented to a record company, music publisher, or
management company, the established structure and culture dictates its form and qual-
ity. The expectation is that the artist will already have certain developed characteristics,
such as having material recorded and produced professionally, having stability of per-
sonnel, having an established fan base, and so on. This has become even more impor-
tant lately as the music industry commits less investment to talent development and
becomes more risk-averse. The same quality hurdles do not apply with crowdfunding,
as there are no “quality” specifications required by crowdfunding platforms. This high-
lights the importance of considering culture (in addition to technical and economic
processes) when examining the production of culture (Du Gay et al. 1997). In this case,
the culture within the established structures of the music industry has developed to
the point where anything presented needs to be of a certain quality. Furthermore, the
quality is judged as “professional” if it adheres to the values and standards set by profes-
sionals in that field (Ursell 2006). By way of contrast, the culture of crowdfunding has
had less time to develop, is more accessible, and therefore is more DIY in its approach.
Though certain platforms make some suggestions on quality, these are not particularly
prescriptive.
There are no requirements of quality for a crowdfunded project, but this does not
mean it has no importance. In actual fact, as Mollick (2013) notes, the “preparedness”
(or quality) of a crowdfunded project is pivotal to its success in being funded, and a
poorly prepared project will have less likelihood of being funded. So, though the tech-
nological platform of crowdfunding is democratizing and supposedly eradicating the
traditional gatekeeper, the crowd still considers the quality of the project in its decision
of whether to fund or not. But because the project can be pitched with little or no cost
(unlike preparing to engage with a record company), the crowdfunded producer can
(and often will) ignore issues of quality.
A further issue is related to the fact that the producer is not really offering a tan-
gible music product, but instead the opportunity to become part of the project, help-
ing facilitate its execution. How far removed from the concept of a traditional music
product the offering is depends partly on what type of platform is adopted. With an
equity-based platform, the funder is essentially being offered a financial return from
a music project (be it a recording, a tour, etc.) in return for early commitment to the
project. What the funder receives is first financial but second experiential, by virtue
of being involved in the project. With a reward-based platform, the offering is even
further removed from the production of a music product and more experiential. So
though they receive no financial return, funders may gain privileged access to the cre-
ative process, receive diary updates, video messages, personal performances, and so on.
 Virtual Music, Virtual Money    565

Much of the appeal of these offerings is that they are unique and very different from
the tangible product that may actually be the result of the project. On a related point,
though much of the hype associates reward-based crowdfunding with music projects,
this model actually drives less funding revenue than expected, and typifies lower-cost
projects (Massolution 2012). In fact, equity-based and lending-based (where the funder
is paid back rather than retaining ownership) crowdfunding is most effective for digital
goods, including music. Overall, these offerings are, to a greater or lesser extent, not
music products, but experiences that provide gratification to the funder. Furthermore,
being able to construct offerings that will be attractive to funders is actually very com-
plex. First, the geographic, social, and economic background of the potential funders
is diverse, so the offering needs to be tailored to a particular group who show the most
likelihood of becoming funders. Second, the producer may have limited creative skills
and resources available to construct the offering. Even if the idea of providing video as
part of the project pitch and video updates throughout may be attractive, this demands
a further set of creative skills. A deficit in this skill set is likely to mean poor quality and
lower likelihood of success, or if the project is funded, dissatisfaction on the part of the
funder participants.

Fan

The term fan funding is often used as an alternative to crowdfunding, in recognition of

the crucial role fans play in the process. A producer may still be a producer, whoever
is funding the work, but changing the fan into the funder or investor (Ordanini et al.
2011) is a new phenomenon. As fans engage earlier in the process, considering them
to be customers, audience, listeners, or consumers is no longer sufficient, or indeed
accurate. A variety of questions therefore emerge when considering the crowdfunder,
for example, the question of their motivation to engage with crowdfunding and how
their relationship with the producer has changed. Additionally, what do these aspects
say about their role in the production process?

Crowdfunders’ Motivation
Crowdfunding involves significant shifts in the behavior of the funders. First, they put
their funds into the experience of a future project, rather than a product. Second, they
make this commitment earlier on in the production process and not at the end stage, as
was previously the case. This change brings significant risk and lack of clarity because
with a yet-to-be-realized project, the fan as funder does not know exactly what the out-
come will be. This observable risk is consistent with the work of Bendapudi and Leone
(2003), outlining the increase in uncertainty and responsibility as drawbacks of cus-
tomer participation. Furthermore, with an unrealized and unproven concept, there are
566   Mark Thorley

no groups of consumers to feel allegiance to, and the project may not even take place
should sufficient funds not be raised. To engage with these risks, there must be motiva-
tion, and they must have reasonable hopes of getting something from the experience.
Because the motivation of crowdfunders has received so little attention, uses-and-
gratifications theory can provide some useful insight. Lull (1995, 73)  describes this
as “how audience members positively influence their own media experiences,” and
furthermore, its relevance to the Internet-mediated communication is supported by
Ruggiero (2000). The theory, rather than examining what the media do to people,
examines what people do with media. Its functionalist view is relevant to crowdfund-
ing in that funders are making a positive and conscious choice to engage with a project
for their own gratification.
In applying the theory, the work of McQuail et al. (1972) is relevant in categorizing
motivation into a series of “media-person interactions,” namely surveillance, personal
identity or individual psychology, personal relationships, and diversion. An insight into
what the fan has become can be gleaned by seeing how these apply to engaging with
crowdfunding. First, the concept of surveillance refers to the use of media as a form of
information gathering, to keep in touch with and understand what is going on around
in the world. Staying up to date with the latest developments is particularly pertinent
with music, where fashions change, new bands and artists emerge, and new works
evolve. With crowdfunding, then, this concept is a relevant and particularly strong one
as the potential crowdfunder is actively seeing what musical projects are in develop-
ment as a way of engaging with what is happening and yet to happen. Second, personal
identity and individual psychology refer to how an individual uses media to define and
express himself or herself. This applies to music because identifying with a particular
genre, artist, or band is an established mode of self-expression. With crowdfunding,
the crowdfunder’s early engagement and financial support reflects a particularly strong
affinity with the producer who is being funded, and a sense of identity is strongly asso-
ciated with the producer’s work. Third, the concept of personal relationships concerns
how media are used to connect with others and facilitate social interaction. Discussing
new music releases or favorite songs or recordings would fall into this category. With
crowdfunding, joining with others to fund a project, or wanting to see a project realized
and heard by others would fulfill a motivation of personal-relationship gratification.
Last, diversion is the use of media for purposes of entertainment, escape from everyday
life, or perhaps fantasy. With crowdfunding, researching projects and funding projects
provide such a diversion and the opportunity to engage with an activity different from
their normal role. It is not just a matter of engaging with media to escape, as in the case
of listening to music or watching a film. It is, in fact, an opportunity to escape an every-
day role and become an influencer and facilitator of future music projects.
The balance of these differing motivations can be used to suggest the kind of identity
the music consumer has adopted by engaging with crowdfunding. For example, if the
motivation is largely driven by a sense of personal identity and diversion, this signals
a strong shift toward someone wishing to be involved in deciding what projects get
realized on the basis of her own orientation of what is worthy of funding. This may be
 Virtual Music, Virtual Money    567

grounded in a strong allegiance to the producer or to the genre of music that is being
produced. In this behavior, the consumer/funder effectively becomes a form of cultural
intermediary herself in the sense that from her own identity and opinions, she is con-
trolling what music meets a wider audience. She may well share a frustration with the
mainstream music industry and believe that crowdfunding affords the opportunity to
promote greater diversity. In this way, the consumer-funders can “act as agents of the
artists, selecting and promoting offerings” (Ordanini et al. 2011, 456). Alternatively, an
emphasis on diversion and personal relationships could mean that the funder gains
gratification from being part of a group, using allegiance to its actions to define himself.
Or, if the funder’s motivations are concerned more with surveillance, personal identity
and personal relationships, he is more likely to want to influence the crowd toward
particular projects.
Uses-and-gratifications theory shows how crowdfunding is used by the funders to
achieve certain personal and psychological outcomes beyond those sought by merely
being music consumers. Furthermore, it actually demonstrates crowdfunding as
an extension of the theory. That is, rather than merely influencing their own media
choices, they are actively influencing the media choice of others because what they
chose to fund may result in a project finding a wider audience. This presents a signifi-
cant shift in role, and in doing so, the funder is starting to use and develop new creative
skills around project evaluation, music analysis, creative project investment, and so on.

The Relationship Between Fan and Producer

The shift in engagement with the project on the part of the crowdfunder brings about
a change in relationship between this person and the producer. With the diminishing
role of the intermediary, there is a much more direct relationship between the producer
and the fan. From the producers’ perspective, there is evidence that they are very con-
scious of the proximity with the funders (Thorley 2012). This gives rise to two distinct
responses. First there is feeling the pressure of being responsible to the funders who
have shown faith in the project. Second, in other cases, the producer is able to describe
the positive feeling of knowing that funders are already behind the project and fully
committed to the producer doing as he sees fit. From the funders’ perspective, this may
be part of the appeal, knowing that their commitment is seen and appreciated directly
by the producer as a reflection of belief in the creative work to be produced. Their
earlier and deeper involvement in the project means much more of the experience is
shared with the producer, hence satisfying elements of uses-and-gratifications theory
discussed already.
This new proximity of relationship has some significance when considered in the
context of attitudes toward the traditional music industry. Music fans can also appear
dissatisfied with the homogenization and globalization of music, and disappointed to
see particular artists or genres treated favorably. So, when a producer appears disen-
franchised with an existing contractual arrangement, fans can share this feeling and
568   Mark Thorley

thus the two become united in a wish to satisfy each other’s needs another way. In
engaging with crowdfunding, as Potts (2012, 361) notes, “participatory fans are shaping
that revolution through resistance to the cultural norms imposed on both the artist and
the fan for years by the recording industry.” The fan develops “a common understand-
ing of a shared identity” with the producer (Mũniz and O’Guinn 2001, 413).
The shift also has the potential to produce new and interesting results through works
of co-creation. In the traditional model, the fan would have little influence over the out-
put from a producer. However, with crowdfunding, the producer can actually facilitate
creative input from the funder. This is possible because of the directness of the relation-
ship, the fact that the producer owns the intellectual property of the work, and because
the funder may be looking for different gratification from that of simply purchasing
a music product. Examples of this have included offering rewards that facilitate the
writing of a song with the producer, playing on a track, and so on. Though creatively
interesting, this does give rise to questions of creativity and authorship. So, for example,
the producer may have to facilitate the work of a funder who really has no creative abil-
ity, since it is merely the ability to buy the offering that has allowed the collaboration.
Also, questions of authorship arise whereby the creative input of the funder would tend
to go unrecognized financially (otherwise the funder would not be paying for it). But
if the resulting work is to generate revenue, the question of how much (if any) of the
resulting revenue should go to the crowdfunder who paid to collaborate and contrib-
uted creatively arises.

The Crowdfunders’ Role in the Production Process

Although the crowdfunders’ input may not be explicitly creative, the fact that this com-
mitment dictates whether a project finds a wider audience means that the funder is
taking on a creative decision-making role. This is in some ways akin to Negus’s point
(2003), referred to earlier, regarding the role of business affairs and similar functions in
decision making. In changing from that of a music consumer, the new role poses ques-
tions about the funder’s position within the production process.
There is evidence that producers do not necessarily want or see the need to surrender
any influence despite the fact that crowdfunders may be looking for gratification from
having more influence. This is first evident from the choice to adopt crowdfunding as a
way to realize projects. By choosing such a medium, the producers wish to be unshack-
led from the creative control of cultural intermediaries. This is very evident from those
producers who have had previous contractual relationships with entrepreneurial orga-
nizations such as record companies, though it can also be the case with aspiring pro-
ducers, where they simply want to be free to be creative in whatever way they see fit. It
therefore seems unlikely that they will want to surrender any creative control or input
to the funders, since doing so would negate one of crowdfunding’s attractions. There
is also empirical evidence that producers give little thought to what funders would like
them to write, record, or produce (Thorley 2012). Consequently the potential exists for
 Virtual Music, Virtual Money    569

conflict between how funders see themselves related to the production process and
how producers see them. Though the producer wishes to surrender little or no creative
influence, the crowdfunder may be looking to satisfy his own desire to be part of the
production process.
Furthermore, producers could actually be missing an opportunity by not valuing and
facilitating a creative role for the funders. As has been outlined, having control over
intellectual property is not all that useful if the producer does not have the expertise
or opportunity to exploit it. However, producers do have the freedom to be more flex-
ible with the intellectual property in a way that a record company would be unlikely
to. Examples of this include producers who offer crowdfunders the opportunity to co-
write songs with them in return for a funding pledge. Overall, there are a multitude
of ways in which funders could become creatively part of a project, and in doing so
satisfy a diversion-oriented gratification. Depending on the creative contribution of
the crowdfunders, the project may actually benefit from their input, the outcome of
which is effectively a co-creation. On this point, the powerful potential of using emerg-
ing technology to co-create has been examined previously. For example, Tapscott and
Williams (2006) advocate peer production, Lessig (2008) examines sharing, and Shirky
(2010) investigates aggregation. In bringing the work of producer and funder to a more
collaborative point, questions over authorship do arise. For example, does the funder
have any rights over the intellectual property owned, or does the fact that she has had
to pay for this input mean that perceptively her input has little value?

Conclusion

A wide range of music creators and practitioners become producers when they adopt
crowdfunding. But their motivation can be problematic, as it is often reactive and
underestimates the change in role and the work of cultural intermediation. It does
bring freedom and the potential of diversity, even if there is also responsibility asso-
ciated with the peculiar and novel challenges of such a new medium. The degree to
which crowdfunding producers must surrender creative influence can depend on the
platform, while the lack of feedback from potential funders can affect any further itera-
tions of the project. Lastly, retaining intellectual property is highly attractive, but the
producer may not necessarily have the skills or perhaps the awareness of how to exploit
the work to its full potential. These factors have some key implications for the producer.
First, crowdfunding shifts the identity and role of the creative practitioner toward that
of producer; if the creative person is not aware of this, he or she is unlikely to be able to
meet the challenges of managing a crowdfunded project. Second, it demands a whole
range of creative skills previously tied up in cultural intermediation, which the person
may not be conscious of, or have the ability to meet. There are also a set of creative
skills peculiar to crowdfunding, which because of the adolescent nature of the medium
are relatively unexplored and ill-defined. Third, granted there is attraction in retaining
570   Mark Thorley

ownership of the works, but the producer may not have the awareness or expertise to
make the best of this control.
In terms of product, it has been outlined that crowdfunding is the next natural stage
of virtual music development in that rather than purchasing music virtually, projects
can be funded virtually. Quality is an issue, however, as crowdfunding platforms do
not have the same accepted requirements of quality that the established structure and
cultures of the music industry do. This is an issue because quality has a direct influ-
ence on whether a project is funded. Furthermore, a crowdfunded project is no longer
a music product, but an experience offered to the funder. These factors imply that the
producer is managing something quite novel, and even with extensive freedom, the
likelihood of success depends on understanding the medium and having the creative
skills to approach it.
For the fan, crowdfunding presents significant opportunities to become involved in
the producer’s project. Crowdfunders themselves display a complexity of motivations,
and even if it is unclear as to what precisely this makes them (as it depends upon plat-
form, project offering, and their own orientation), they are not now music consumers.
They may be looking to have some creative input of their own to satisfy their gratifica-
tions, and this additionally underlines the shift in identity from consumer to the poten-
tial end point of co-creator. The outcome for them is definitely more experiential than
as end consumer—feeling part of a process, getting some insight from the producer,
deciding what gets to market, and so on. The proximity of the relationship suggests
greater awareness of responsibility on behalf of the producer; along with the funder, the
producer can become allied against the perceived inadequacies of the traditional music
industry. Furthermore, there is potential for co-creation within this alliance as the pro-
ducer controls the intellectual property. Nevertheless, this can be facilitated only by an
appreciation of the shift in identity of the funder and a valuing of input on behalf of the
producer. The funder is then having a great deal more influence over the producer’s
work, which can be in conflict with why the producer has adopted crowdfunding. There
is, in fact, the potential for co-creation, which has been used as part of a crowdfunding
offering. However, this brings many questions relating to the crowdfunder’s stake in
any works produced as co-creator. Overall then, identity has shifted away from being
a consumer, and if it goes as far as co-creation to satisfy the particular motivations, the
identities of producer and fan merge. Clearly, there are opportunities for them to use
and develop new skills via the medium, which can provide particular gratification.

Notes
1. The first use of the term crowdfunding is commonly attributed to Mark Sullivan, in
FundaVlog in August 2006.
2. Chávez-Aguayo takes on this role in his Chapter 12, “Live Opera Performance in Second
Life: Challenging Producers, Performers, and the Audience.”
 Virtual Music, Virtual Money    571

3. This issue also arises in Chapter  26, Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso’s “Alternative

Virtuality: Independent Micro Labels Facing the Ideological Challenge of Virtual Music
Culture—The Case of Finnish Ektro Records.”

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 chapter 30

W it h a Lit tle H e l p from

m y Friends, Fa mi ly,
and Fa ns
DIY, Participatory Culture, and Social Capital
in Music Crowdfunding

Francesco D’Amato

DIY and Social Capital: The Scenes

and the Participative Web

Although the term “do-it-yourself ” seems to imply a totally autonomous and individ-
ual management of artistic production, like other forms self-production also implies a
social and collaborative dimension (Becker 1982). Studies on the musical scenes have
surveyed this dimension, insofar as they are conceived as a set of informal social net-
works and grassroots collaborations that support a “sort of do-it-yourself (DIY) indus-
try,” an alternative to the large corporations consisting of “small collectives, fans turned
entrepreneurs and volunteer labor” (Peterson and Bennett 2004, 5).
In turn, the networks and collaborative relations that inform scenes and DIY prac-
tices in some cases have been analyzed through the framework offered by studies on
social capital. This expression defines how social relationships can constitute a resource
“to achieve things people either could not achieve by themselves, or could achieve with
great difficulty” (Field 2008, 1). This availability of support does not depend merely on
the existence of social ties, but rather on the quality on which they are founded: “It is
important to treat the concept as a property of relationship” (161). Accumulation and
investment of social capital constitute social practices that require specific resources
574   Francesco D’Amato

to be efficient in light of particular achievements. The networks of relations on which

social capital is founded can also condition the individuals in the network itself, or con-
stitute competitive advantage for those who are not members of the network or who
lack the resources and skills to benefit from it.
In studies on musical scenes, Reitsamer (2011) and Hartman (2012) analyzed self-
production and self-management practices focusing on formation and activation of
social capital. Both studies highlight how accumulation of social capital is fundamen-
tal to developing the reputation and career of musicians and DJs, and even more so
in contexts or periods when they experience lessened chances of being supported
by traditional companies. DIY requires construction of networks and social capital,
through intense networking and numerous collaborations. This work requires notable
quantities of time and communications skills. In such a work utilitarian ends tend to
mix with friendly associations (Reitsamer 2011). Networking includes formation of
ties, both horizontal and vertical, for example, on the one hand frequenting of clubs,
bars, and venues where one is more likely to meet with other members of the scene;
and on the other, cultivation of relationships with subjects who occupy a central posi-
tion or have more connections, such as promoters (Hartman 2012). Credibility and
reputation, which favor accumulation of social capital within the self-production
scenes, depend not only on talent, but even more so on the commitment, the determi-
nation, and the professionalism demonstrated, on self-promotional skills and sharp
market orientation, testifying to the erosion of the “art vs. commerce” contraposition
in DIY cultures.
DIY implicates, therefore, an investment in social relations and informal collabo-
rations that substitute for conventional financial resources and organizational mod-
els. The participative Web offers new opportunities to articulate both networking and
possible collaborations between a plurality of subjects interested in participating in a
specific project, hence allowing a single artist to draw in various ways from the wealth
of networks (Benkler 2006). In general, the Internet enables users to establish new ties
based on shared interests and objectives and to make active use, in new ways, of com-
plex and diversified social networks (Easley and Kleinberg 2010).

Music Crowdfunding

Crowdsourcing has now become an extremely popular term to define various forms
of Web users’ participation in carrying out institutional activities or realizing individ-
ual projects by providing various types of contributions (Howe 2008). One variation
of crowdsourcing entails finding funds mostly through accumulation of numerous
microfinancings, which is defined as crowdfunding. Lawton and Marom (2010) con-
sider crowdfunding as an outlet of the counterforce to previous factors diminish-
ing social capital, exemplified by the artists who “leverage their past works and their
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    575

existing trust circle base to get funding for their projects,” beginning with friends and
family “of utmost importance to many crowdfunding initiatives” (73); “no commu-
nity generally equals no funding. One needs to come to the table with a decent anchor
audience and do some ‘moving and shaking’ thereafter to secure funding” (73–74).
Those groups establish the “trust signal” that can attract further investors and allow
the campaign to go viral (73), a sort of “peer effect” I  will refer to later. Therefore
“DIWO is also an important new business mentality” (75). Although he does not use
the term crowdfunding, Henry Jenkins (2008) illustrates real and hypothetical cases
of such practice as examples of participative grassroots dynamics potentially capable
of sustaining niche cultural productions.
Music represents one of the primary sectors where fertile ground has been found
for crowdfunding, above all thanks to the crisis suffered by traditional entrepreneurial
subjects and by their business models (plus a drastic drop in public financing for live
events in many contexts). Since 2005, there has been an exponential increase in musi-
cians who adopt crowdfunding to find the resources necessary for self-production of
specific projects, the overwhelming majority of whom are young artists embarking on
their career or better-known artists working in niche currents, as well as the number of
dedicated Web platforms. The latter are not neutral instruments but new intermediar-
ies, services with their own interests and business models. These subjects contribute
to the social construction of crowdfunding, through both structuring technology and
the discourses used to promote themselves and legitimizing the proposed version of
the practice (e.g., microdonations vs. microinvestments; D’Amato 2011). Most of them
tend to present themselves as services that empower artists, offering tools for funding
their projects while maintaining copyrights, increasing independence, and gaining more
economic advantages than would be possible through more traditional music compa-
nies. Fans and music lovers are in turn represented as holding the power to improve
the artists’ conditions and to solve the problems related to the filtering criteria and the
inefficiencies of the traditional music industry. At the same time, discourses promoting
crowdfunding, as well as many Web services, point out the necessity to cultivate such
resources, soliciting intrinsic motivations and offering various types of rewards if the
goal should be reached.
In this chapter I intend to examine the management of social networks and social
capital to support self-production on the part of little-known young musicians who
have autonomously planned, designed, and managed crowdfunding campaigns. In par-
ticular, I aim to draw attention to the relationship between types of social relations and
potential benefits, resources and the work necessary to construct and mobilize social
capital, and the advantages and drawbacks experienced by musicians. I  draw on in-
depth interviews with both musicians and backers, as well as on quantitative analysis of
data concerning the networks of backers of specific campaigns.1 In particular, I analyze
two case studies that exemplify divergences and convergences found in different cam-
paigns, maintaining references to other cases investigated and other researches on the
same topic.
576   Francesco D’Amato

Two Case Studies: Honeybird &

the Birdies and Cobol Pongide

Honeybird & the Birdies is a multi-instrumentalist trio who define their music as a
blend of world music, antifolk, indie rock, and tropicalia. The group was born in 2006
and consists of the American Monique, initiator of the project; Paola, and Federico
(who joined in 2011 to replace the previous bass player). They sing in several lan-
guages (English, French, and some Italian dialects) and they perform on stage with a
bizarre and colorful look, proposing an energetic live show enhanced with entertaining
choreographies.
Cobol Pongide is a toy music project created in 2007 by Fabrizio. The music, which is
almost exclusively instrumental, mixes electronic and new wave idioms made entirely
with toy instruments, videogame consoles, and old computers with an eight-bit audio
synthesis. Fabrizio himself makes videos in 3D graphics—mostly concerning space and
robots—to accompany his music. Such videos are uploaded on his webpages and pro-
jected on screen during his live performances.
Hence the two bands propose strong identity projects in dissimilar genres, however both
niche, supported by live shows of great impact. Their crowdfunding campaigns, however,
had very different results. The Honeybird campaign aimed to collect $5,000 through the
U.S. platform Kickstarter to finance their second album, You Should Reproduce. From
March to May 2012, the campaign—denominated “You Should Coproduce”—abundantly
exceeded this objective, collecting more than $7,000.2 The Cobol Pongide campaign,
which had set a goal of €2,000 to finance the second album, Vita da Spaziale, failed
instead to reach its objective, collecting a little more than €900 in six months, from May
to October 2012, on the Italian platform called Produzioni dal Basso.3
The members of Honeybird and Fabrizio both had extensive experience in music
before moving ahead with these two projects. Federico had played in many groups
since high school and, with one of these, had made three albums and toured Italy. Paola
was part of a female pop-rock group in Catania, her home town. Before moving to Italy,
Monique had worked as a studio assistant in Los Angeles, coming into contact with
groups like Primus and Rage Against the Machine, while also dealing with bookings
in Italy. Federico emphasized several times that Honeybird, unlike other groups with
whom he had played, is made up of particularly determined people caring about self-
management. A strong example in Federico’s case was set by his older brother, who had
undertaken a musical career as a sound technician with Subsonica (one of the leading
groups in Italy):

The fact that I was living with him and saw how things happened from the inside
conditioned me incredibly in my approach to music, because it gave me the sen-
sation that certain things were possible. . . . This immediately gave me a very
determined approach; I remember that when I was playing with my group in high
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    577

school, I was the one that paid more attention, I believed in it more. . . . I liked the
Honeybird project a lot immediately because it was made of people who were not
only talented, but were above all determined, and it is difficult to find people who
are both talented and determined. (Personal Communication)

Federico considers that the equal involvement of all the band members in the project
management is significant:

The very special thing about Honeybird, that gives it an extraordinary strength, is
that the band has a leadership but it’s very open, all the musicians have a say and any
decision is discussed by everyone, which is something pretty rare in my experiences,
and the result is that all three of us feel totally involved and we give 115%. (Personal
Communication)

Before the crowdfunding campaign, Honeybird had already self-produced an album

in 2010, toured extensively all over Italy supported by a small booking agency, and
performed some concerts outside of Italy. A track from the first album was used in the
soundtrack of the award-winning Italian film entitled La Passione, made and inter-
preted by a famous director and actors. In 2011 they had also won Italia Wave, one
of the best-known and most prestigious Italian festivals for new bands. In the band’s
self-management approach, the intense live activity and the participation in diverse
contests represent opportunities not only for visibility with the public, but also to build
social networks:

Winning Italia Wave was in and of itself fantastic, but also something that brought us
many contacts and new relationships. We are often in touch with them [Fondazione
Italia Wave] and they are the ones who sent us to the Eurosonic festival in Holland
and to another festival in Bratislava. . . . Paola maintains relations with some local
promoters even after concerts, not only to come back to play but by keeping tabs
on their activities in general, because in the end small promoters are often peo-
ple who do this job for cultural and social aims more than for profit, and so even
they like being followed in their adventure, similar to the musician’s one. (Personal
Communication)

Thanks to this approach, they have also embarked on a relationship with Enrico
Gabrielli, a musician from the more popular group Calibro 35, who later produced an
album financed through crowdfunding:

We met him at a summer festival and Monique began asking thousands of ques-
tions, she got his phone number and continued sending him messages and asking
him things, until one day in the rehearsal room, while we were thinking about mak-
ing the album, she suggested trying to ask Enrico to produce it, and that’s what we
did; but if she had not followed up on the meeting with thousands of questions and
genuine and authentic curiosity about the things that had brought her to him, he
wouldn’t have been so accessible, to the point that he took only half of what we were
578   Francesco D’Amato

supposed to pay him, to further help the band, and this makes you understand the
bond that had been generated in this way.

Federico manifests extreme awareness of the importance of this approach for the band’s
future career:

This may not be what all groups do, maintaining relations with various situations, and
yet I have always considered relations to be important in the working field . . . and
Monique and Paola are fantastic because they maintain contact with everyone,
and this in the long run is profitable because it creates a support network.

Fabrizio (Cobol Pongide) had been the guitarist of a post-rock group in the Roman
indie scene in the mid-1990s. In spite of a self-produced CD that got great reviews
and numerous live concerts, the group broke up after only two years. Later, Fabrizio
undertook a number of jobs and studies. Although the Cobol Pongide project was
launched in 2007, the first album came out only in 2009. However, over those two years
in between, Fabrizio performed in many live concerts, almost exclusively in the context
of the Italian “eight-bit” music scene, which was particularly dynamic at that time:

Between 2008 and 2009 I traveled lots with other people who were into eight-bit; it
was a popular phenomenon, the venues called you, we were a group of musicians in
Italy and abroad. There were the headquarters, in the Roman one we were about ten
artists, there was the headquarters in Milan with about the same number, then in
Bologna and other places, not to mention the French and English ones, so we played
a lot. But then in 2010 the thing faded out quickly and there was no more interest
in this music. After 2010, there were fewer gigs but I began playing alone. (Personal
Communication)

In addition to the 2009 album, which obtained numerous positive reviews in various
Web magazines, in 2010 Cobol published an EP for Elpa, a Latvian niche net label with
a good reputation; it gained a review for the band in the important music publica-
tion Rumore. Cobol live performances are continuing but less frequent than those of
Honeybird, lacking both the support of a booking agency and an approach like the one
described above:

I’m not a person who looks for live gigs, all the ones I do are because people look
for me and find me. So considering that I am not one who bothers looking, if not
rarely, things are not going badly, because people call me anyway. I don’t sweat it out
because when I do nobody pays any attention to me, so what should I do?

To this view, Fabrizio tells an anecdote:

One month ago I wrote to the guys of Libera Mente in Padua, a place for live music
on whose website is written “contact us.” They never answered. Now they have
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    579

written telling me “Kenobit gave us your name, nice stuff, why don’t you come and
play?” I was tempted to tell them “What do you mean, I wrote to you before, I asked
if I could play at your place and you never answered,” now they write to me because
“Kenobit gave us your name.” All in all, it seems like if you promote yourself it’s use-
less, your name must arrive from other channels.

Other episodes highlight both an approach that is substantially different compared to

that of Honeybird and some difficulties in consolidating and maintaining a network of
relationships:

At the time there was this section on the Repubblica website, called Talent Scout,
by Fabrizio Galassi, who had fallen in love with my album, and in addition to
promoting it unabashedly he found me three big gigs, and there I  understood
that if you have someone who works for you it is all very different; then I—as
usual—did not maintain the relationship. Even at the Black Out Festival people
liked my music, organizers said that they would have called me back. I waited for
them to call and never got in touch with them, obviously they forgot. I don’t have
consolidated relationships with the promoters of the clubs where I have played.
For example, the clubs of the Pigneto area, where now there are a lot of gigs, in
the end are people who don’t like me much, because they are a sort of group that
I don’t belong to. . . . It is not just a network of acquaintances, it is a lifestyle. It’s
not like you say, “I call once in a while,” you have to spend a lot of time with them,
be that kind of person.

Both Honeybird and Cobol use social media, especially Facebook, to communicate
with their fans and contacts. However, even in this case there are differences. Honeybird
tend to post more informal and light-hearted communications concerning the daily
experiences of the band, meetings with musicians and promoters, movements dur-
ing the tour, reaching a frequency of up to one post per day in some periods. Fabrizio
instead uses his own page mainly to inform people about his live performances or to
post new videos, and only recently also about toy keyboards and other topics related
to the poetics of the project. But he complains of very few interactions with his fans
through Facebook:

I don’t know why my contacts are passive about the things I do. Even when I post
things, I don’t get many responses. In my fan base it’s not like everyone is so inter-
ested in the topics I  talk about. Honestly I  don’t know what people who like my
music are interested in, I have this incapacity to be aware of the things that people
find interesting about my project. I don’t understand if they put “I Like” on my page
to say “I like your project” but then it ends there, or if it means “I like your project
and keep me updated on all whatever stupid idea crosses your mind.”

The lack of an external critical point of view on the project and the weakness of some
virtual relations simplistically labeled as fandom can end up being two limits to the
DIY in virtual environment. This issue will be brought up again later.
580   Francesco D’Amato

The Campaigns

Honeybird managed the campaign with the same logic of co-working used in every
activity. The presentation video was made in English to exploit the positioning of the
Kickstarter platform and Monique’s contacts, and filmed with the help of their friends
working at Centro Sperimentale di Cinema. The band members promoted the cam-
paign through extensive activities on social media, especially Facebook:

The first day we had a notable impact, many shared, then after the first two days of
sharing on social media we began sending personalized e-mails to friends and rela-
tives to explain everything. It was important to write to people personally as well as
communicate on social networks.

Moreover, Honeybird paid a small external press office, managed by a friend, for the
launch on official channels (at the beginning of the campaign, halfway through, and
just before the end): “As it was the dawning of the crowdfunding explosion in Italy [the
news] had a certain resonance, we had an interview with la Repubblica, it came on very
strong.” Unlike Fabrizio, Honeybird guessed they could count on the support of a musi-
cal scene of which they feel a part, so fellow musicians represented a specific target of
their communication:

When we addressed musicians we oriented the communication more toward the

matter of how music in general can survive in an era when no one invests, so we
focused a lot on this slogan “you should coproduce,” which became a bit of a motto
in that circle, a sort of anthem for all, not only for us. It was a strong gesture, every-
one felt a bit represented, and after five days we began asking musicians for a picture
of themselves with a card saying “you should coproduce Honeybird.” About 12–13
arrived and we posted all of them on social networks. For us it was a natural process
because we represented a bit of that part of the indie scene made up of groups who
create original music and earn little, working hard and touring Italy for two cents.
Many groups have supported the campaign, putting their face and a card out there
saying to support us, and in this way it became a bit [of] a collective thing. Even
local promoters helped us a lot, because clubs would repost news on the campaign,
and this brings you a very specific target.

Finally, an observation on the role of rewards established for the various classes of
backers:

I don’t believe that someone has made a donation for a specific reward. I  rather
believe the rewards worked a sort of folk function, making the project more color-
ful and characterized because they focused on the group’s likeability and originality.
There were a few examples of rewards, including a course in the dialect of Catania on
Skype, which Paola [who is from Catania] then did for a girl in Barcelona, or a concert
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    581

for bass solo on Skype, that I did for Monique’s friends in the United States. But there
were also many who gave €50 and then said, “I’m not interested in the reward.”

This consideration is particularly interesting in that it reflects what emerged in inter-

views with financial backers in other campaigns (D’Amato forthcoming). Despite all
the strategic attention they usually get, acquisition of rewards does not seem an incen-
tive to investors, especially when backers are people who already know and appreciate
the musicians; rather, they symbolically express the burden of reciprocity on which
the type of relationships that form social capital are founded. This is also true in the
case of eventual profits pointed out by the platforms adopting the profit-sharing model
(ibid.). As these are generally microinvestments, the results are microprofits, which
have a mostly symbolic value. Federico highlights instead a second potential “storytell-
ing function” of the rewards, insofar as they contribute to building the image of the
band or of the project for which funds are being asked.
Living in Rome and having performed only in Italy (at the time of the campaign),
Fabrizio chose the Italian platform Produzioni dal Basso, since he imagined counting
mostly on people who already knew him:

I don’t envision crowdfunding as being disconnected from the friendship and

acquaintances network, I see it truly as a sort of favor you are asking, and then if
someone else falls into the net, even better.

Actually, even Fabrizio dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy to promot-
ing the campaign, seeking to make it “fall into” as many people as possible from outside
his friendship network:

I did mail-bombing, I wrote to all the magazine and blog journalists, I must have
sent four hundred e-mails, and I succeeded in having 2–3 important bloggers writ-
ing about the campaign. Moreover, I  made three eight-bit-style cover songs with
corresponding videos, where at the end I spoke about the campaign, and I put them
on YouTube and on PdB and sent them to other communities. For example, I had
made a cover of the Star Trek theme song and sent it to all the Trekkie and sci-fi
sites, I made a cover of “Moon River” and I contacted all the sites that spoke of the
song or the 1950s movies, then Bowie’s Life on Mars, which even got some unex-
pected reviews. All in all, I looked for anyone who could be interested and sent the
video with an e-mail to explain the project.

All this work generated notable visibility, more than three thousand visits on the cam-
paign page, but except for some feedback there was little return in terms of involvement
and donations. The biggest negative surprise was another one:

I got very little response from my network. I was surprised because besides the fan
page, where there are no friends but real fans, even the almost 800 contacts on my
profile page, not being in Fabrizio’s name but as Cobol Pongide and considering that
582   Francesco D’Amato

I never ask anyone for friendship, leaving out two- or three hundred friends, all the
rest are people who asked me [for] friendship because they saw me play. I expected
therefore a different response, given that the numbers of the profile and fan pages
are real numbers.”

Economic Capital and Backers

Networks

Considering now the composition of the backer networks of both projects, it is possible
to distinguish between strong ties, weak ties, and strangers.4
Honeybird collected $7,089.82 thanks to 141 backers, of which 122 (86.5 percent) were
people already known by members of the band and 19 (13.5 percent) unknown. Taking
into account the fact that the band counted 2,200 previous contacts on Facebook, the
main tool used to spur people to finance, only 5.5 percent of them participated as back-
ers. Further segmenting the backers already known, 57  percent of them were from
among the strong ties, 30 percent from weak ties.
Table 30.1 highlights the number of strong and weak ties among backers known by
each of the three members and among their exclusive ties (i.e., those backers known
only by one of the three). 72 Percent of the ties are shared by at least two members
of the band. The table highlights the weight of Monique’s network, in terms not only
of overall number of ties but, above all, of exclusive ones. It is evident that the biog-
raphy of a band can influence the capacity of its individual members to amplify the
overall network through exclusive ties, as in the case of a band made up of people
who have known each other for a short time or come from different places. Although
Federico joined Monique and Paola after quite a while, the origins of Monique and her
assignment—promotion to foreign networks—seem to have had a stronger influence
on the distribution of exclusive ties.

Table 30.1 Known and Exclusive Ties of Honeybird & the Birdies9

Ties of the Band Member Exclusive Ties of the Band Member

Strong Ties Weak Ties Strong Ties Weak Ties Donations ($) Total Ties

Name Tot % Tot % Tot % Tot % Tot % Tot %

Monique 48 34 61 43 10 7 23 16 1,009 14.2 109 77%

Paola 61 43 20 14 1 0.7 - - 100 1.4 81 57%
Federico 27 19 35 25 - - 5 3.5 156 2.2 62 44%
Band 80 57 42 30 122 86.5
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    583

The strong ties contributed 82 percent of the total financing, while weak ties contrib-
uted almost 14 percent and the remaining 4.4 percent came from strangers (Fig. 30.1).
More specifically, the average donation from strong ties, which constitute 57 percent of
the backers, is equal to $72.50 (€54), that of weak ties is $23 (€17), and the 19 strangers
donated an average of $16 (€11).5 However, these numbers change considerably if we do
not take into account Monique’s parents, who alone donated a total of $2,800. Without
their contribution, the campaign would have been limited to $4,289, and according to
Kickstarter regulations the band would not have been able to benefit from that amount,
having failed to reach its established goal. Moreover, the percentage of contributions
by strong ties would drop to 70  percent of the overall financing, with an average of
$38.50. Indeed, the campaign would have abundantly exceeded the goal even without
the donations from new contacts acquired during the campaign, that is, from people
who were not already acquainted with any band member ($309 total).
Finally, as expected, the largest amounts were donated mostly by strong ties: eigh-
teen of the twenty people who donated between $50 and $100 and nine of the twelve
who contributed between $100 and $500 (while the only two people who donated more
than $500 were, in fact, Monique’s parents). In particular, 62 percent of the strong ties
donated amounts between $25 and $100 (Fig.  30.2), while half of the weak ties and
unknown backers donated $10 and $24 (Figs. 30.3 and 30.4).
Moving to the Cobol Pongide campaign, we find that the €925 collected came from
59 backers, of which three-quarters were already known—23 strong ties and 21 weak ties
(respectively 39 and 36 percent of the network)—and only 15 (25 percent) from strang-
ers. Fabrizio’s Facebook contacts at the beginning of the campaign numbered about
760; therefore the percentage of ties that donated is about 5.8 percent, almost identical
to Honeybird’s. Furthermore, the number of strangers who financed Cobol (15) is just
a little smaller than those who financed Honeybird (19). These data seem to indicate
that the two campaigns did not differ in efficiency, with regard to mobilization of the

4.4%

13.7% Strong Ties

Weak Ties

81.9% Strangers

Figure 30.1  Distribution of the total amount collected by Honeybird & the Birdies among types
of backers
 3% 0%

9%
11%
$1.00–$2.99

16% $3.00–$9.99
$10.00–$24.99

23% $25.00–$49.99
$50.00–$99.99
$100.00–$499.99
Over $500
39%

Figure 30.2  Strong ties (graph)

0% 2%
2%
7% 5%

$1.00–$2.99
$3.00–$9.99
$10.00–$24.99

33% $25.00–$49.99
$50.00–$99.99
50%
$100.00–$499.99
Over $500

Figure 30.3  Weak ties (graph)

0% 0%
5% 11%

5% $1.00–$2.99
$3.00–$9.99
32% $10.00–$24.99
$25.00–$49.99
$50.00–$99.99
$100.00–$499.99
Over $500
47%

Figure 30.4  Strangers (graph)

 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    585

13.5%
Strong Ties

Weak Ties
34.1% 52.4%

Strangers

Figure  30.5 Distribution of the total amount collected by Cobol Pongide among types of
backers

previous contacts and involvement of new subjects, in spite of the fact that Fabrizio was
alone and had fewer resources.
The average backing instead amounted to €15.60, much less than that of Honeybird
(even taking into account the exchange rate and excluding Monique’s parents). In par-
ticular, the twenty-three strong ties contributed 52.4 percent of the total collected, with
an average donation of €21, while the weak ties contributed 34 percent, with an average
contribution of €15. The remaining 13.5 percent came from strangers, with an average
of about €8 (see Fig. 30.5).
In this case, the largest quotas were made by strong ties, with quotas of €10 mostly
from weak ties, and quotas of €5 mostly from strangers. Although nearly half of the
strong ties donated quotas between €20 and €50, a good 91 percent contributed quotas
between €5 and €10.

Bonding Social Capital in Real

and Virtual Space

In both campaigns the strong ties were the most willing to donate, especially for larger
amounts. There were only four exceptions to this rule, strangers and weak ties making
contributions significantly higher than average; in three cases, these were individuals
involved in cultural production, of whom two expected to make use of crowdfunding
for their future projects. One example is Angelo, a designer who funded Cobol Pongide
but was unknown to Fabrizio:

I work as a freelance professional in the design sector. I know them [Cobol Pongide]
through a friend who made me listen to them. My friend knows one of them and
while suggesting things to listen to he talked to me about this musical project. I was
586   Francesco D’Amato

curious about the possibility of using this type of financing that perhaps I will use
to develop one of my ideas. I thought of ordering more than one copy to help the
project and through it I discovered crowdfunding. I hope that the same thing hap-
pens for my project when it will be ready for financing.

Such results confirm an indication that emerged in other cases analyzed in the past
(D’Amato and Miconi 2012), the relevance of solidarity based on shared experiences or
similar problems, in the rare cases of funding by people who had no previous relation-
ship with the creative person.
Between the two campaigns analyzed, a remarkable difference is the margin between
the number of strong ties and other types of contacts. In the case of Honeybird the
former were double the weak ties, while in the Cobol campaign the difference is mini-
mal. Certainly the fact that Honeybird had three members influenced this situation,
but their group could count on an initial network that was decidedly more extensive,
also in proportion.6 Much of this difference can be explained by the differences in both
the daily social relations and the self-management approach, which emerged clearly
through the interviews. Moreover, the average donation from all types of backers was
higher in the Honeybird network, with a particularly significant margin on the strong
ties (even without counting Monique’s parents).
Both campaigns shared two criticalities, also found in previous studies (D’Amato
and Miconi 2012). On the one hand is the difficulty of activating the participation of
individuals outside the preexisting networks of contacts, even when—as in the case of
Honeybird—the group can count on the support of a press office and colleagues inside
the scene, as well as on acknowledgments such as winning a widely known festival. On
the other, there is the fact that the vast majority of existing contacts on social network-
ing websites do not participate in the financing, not even with a minimal contribu-
tion. With regard to the first point, a study by Carey Sargent (2009), concerning how
independent musicians with a DIY ethos use the Web to cultivate and mobilize social
capital for the purpose of gaining visibility and access to a wider public of strangers,
highlights the enormous difficulties of musicians going beyond the social circles with
which they already have a direct relationship.
Concerning the second point, it seems evident that the personal pages on the SNSs
(social networking sites), often used by industry professionals as a measure of an art-
ist’s fan base, do not automatically designate a community of “true fans” (Kelly 2008),
but rather a network of contacts whose level of engagement may vary considerably.7
Accepting or requesting friendship on SNSs and clicking on “I Like” buttons are simple
gestures that require no particular effort or—precisely—engagement, therefore not
necessarily indicating a very significant interest. By contrast, the ease of connection
certainly enables expansion of one’s network of ties, especially through establishing
weak ones, as well as maintaining and reinforcing strong ties (Ellison, Steinfield, and
Lampe 2007). Where there is little interconnection and interaction among the nodes
of the network defined by the personal page of an emerging artist, this network tends
to be more a manifestation of networked individualism than a community (Baym 2010,
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    587

Rainie and Wellman 2012); for this reason it is generally lacking in the qualities that
favor formation of bonding social capital capable of providing a strong support for proj-
ects of a predominantly expressive nature and representatives of shared tastes, interests,
and feelings. Transforming one’s own network of contacts into a community, rich in
the social capital that the musician can benefit from on occasions like a crowdfund-
ing campaign, requires that the musician(s) have not only the capacity to develop a
project—either with a strong identity or efficiently anchored to a genre or an exist-
ing musical scene—but also the resources and skills for continuous (inter-)actions of
engagement, capable of stimulating interaction and sharing even between network
nodes. Moreover, with few exceptions, the crowdfunding Web services do not work as
community catalyzers. Rather, they appear to be sets of ego-centered and departmen-
talized networks, as demonstrated by the low number of backers who support more
than one campaign (D’Amato and Miconi 2012).
An effective crowdfunding campaign therefore requires specific resources and skills,
for both accumulation of social capital prior to the campaign and the work involved
in converting the social capital during the campaign along with promotion outside of
one’s own networks. Obviously, such resources and skills are not equally distributed.

Concluding Remarks: Leveling
and Amplification of Differences

ICT’s [Information and Communications Technology] such as digital file sharing and
on-line social networking sites (SNSs) allow musicians to produce, distribute, and pro-
mote their own music, but not without cost. The musicians spent surprising amounts
of money on media promotional materials. . . . Musicians also spent surprising amounts
of time and energy, treating peer-to-peer promotion as a second job. Flexible labor,
Internet, and computer access at work were thus important resources for musicians, as
were marketing and technical skills learned in school or on the job. (Sargent 2009, 470)

Although Sargent’s research does not deal specifically with crowdfunding, analogous
considerations emerge in previous studies on crowdfunding for musical and cultural
projects (D’Amato 2011). A number of creators briefly mentioned the “unsustainable
amount of time” they had to invest, while others elaborated further on this topic8:

Time, time to learn, phone calls to ask friends, sending e-mails, distributing post-
cards at festivals, trying to spread the word as much as possible. The down side is
that if you don’t have time, you can hardly do self-management. Often it happens
that you cannot keep up with your projects, but to have to also do all those jobs that
enable you to pay your mortgage, life, etcetera . . . and the last thing is that often you
do lots of stupid things, because communication is not something you can impro-
vise . . . even if it may seem easy . . . you can hurt someone’s feelings, you can use the
wrong tone of voice. (Tommaso, Personal Communication)
588   Francesco D’Amato

The necessary investments in terms of time evidently penalize, above all, artists who
operate individually rather than as part of a group. Communicating in the proper way
can be difficult too, requiring skills that not everyone has. Some musicians, committed
to crowdfunding on the ArtistShare platform as illustrated by Mark Thorley (2012),

found the effort needed to be considerable, and an interruption to their usual flow of
work. In essence, the role of mediating between the audience and their creative and
technical processes was originally ignored or underestimated, and latterly, under-
appreciated. Providing insight into a creative process is not as easy as it sounds and
recording artists and creatives are generally unaccustomed to having to commu-
nicate what they do whilst they go along. It therefore means putting considerable
thought into articulating a process which generally comes innately, reflecting on the
process, disrupting the rhythm and trying to translate this into a form which the
audience can value and understand. Providing consumers with the right informa-
tion so that they can comprehend the production or creative process is again one
which has traditionally been met by the cultural intermediary. . . . Here, the artists
are articulating production with consumption themselves instead of the cultural
intermediary. However, two new and distinct challenges arise, namely, the ques-
tionable ability of the artist to understand consumers, and secondly, the fact that
these are not merely consumers, they are participants in a project yet to happen.
(Thorley 2012)

Such considerations bring to mind one limitation of self-management already pointed

out by Fabrizio, namely, the lack of a point of view outside one’s own work, which in his
case influenced the difficulty experienced in understanding his own contact networks,
to whom he turned for support. In spite of the Web being potentially rich in resources
useful to articulating a (self-)production process, and that new Web 2.0 tools greatly
facilitate collaborative practices, the individual skills and resources that musicians are
capable of implementing in order to exploit the full potential of these media are gen-
erally limited and unequally distributed, so that they may end up amplifying existing
imbalances and asymmetries.

If you are a normal, sociable person, who lives the life of an artist integrated in the
system, you have a good chance because you are essentially asking people a favor,
and they often grant it willingly, because you’re friendly and you are part of a group,
more than for your music or your project. So in my personal situation [the Internet]
is not such a revolutionary tool because I don’t have great relationship skills, and
this shortcoming has repercussions on my relationship skill for crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding is an amplifier of relationship and emotional skills, a rationalizer of
emotional relationships, if you’ve got them it becomes a useful tool, if you haven’t
got them it only amplifies your difficulties. (Fabrizio, Cobol Pongide)

The “peer effect” mentioned by Lawton and Marom, also observed by studies on the
music crowdfunding website Sellaband (Ward and Ramachandran 2010; Agrawal,
Catalini, and Goldfarb 2011), represents another amplification of differences concerning
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    589

the initial availability of social capital. Both studies found that the behaviors of inves-
tors seem to be very responsive (1) to information devices such as popularity lists on the
website, (2) to the level of updates and blogging activity about the projects, and (3) to
the cumulative level of funding already raised. Therefore, the greater the number of
individuals who participate in the initial phases, the greater the probability of attract-
ing other users. Furthermore, this behavior concerns mostly distant backers, those who
tend to have weaker ties or none to the musician, while the geographically closer back-
ers are those who more frequently tend to intervene in the initial phase of the campaign
(Agrawal et al. 2011).
The fact that varying capacity to construct and mobilize relations capable of sup-
porting attainment of specific objectives can determine competitive advantages does
obviously not constitute a specificity of the virtual environment. For example, it should
suffice to think of the capacity, among many emerging musicians, to attract a large
number of individuals in those contests where victory depends on an audience vote,
or the capacity to guarantee a club promoter the number of attendees required so as
to perform there. Such differences may also depend on structural conditions, such as
in this example the distance between the location where the contest takes place and
the area where the vast majority of the musician’s contacts live. These are ever more
frequent phenomena, also pointed out by Hartman (2012) in his study on the Boston
scene, where club promoters and booking agents select musicians who bring in a bigger
audience. Musical and self-promotional skills tend to mix as components of the more
general capacity under evaluation, ability to aggregate audience.
Other differences, and possible advantages, can derive from the notoriety already
reached and from the centrality (or its absence) within the social network that makes
up a scene. The first aspect is discussed by Mark Thorley in his research on ArtistShare:

Now the artist needs to get exposure for their project amongst a competing mael-
strom of other Internet content. This is why ArtistShare is adopted so widely by art-
ists with previous recording contracts, and established careers. In this instance, they
already have an established fan cohort, and have already proved themselves capable
of delivering music recordings to market. If they were fledgling artists, the challenge
to get participation off the ground would be unrealistically difficult to achieve with
the ArtistShare platform. (2012)

Hartman instead highlights how the number and type of connections within the scene
influence the varying capacity to convert social capital into monetary capital. Finally,
from the analysis of other campaigns, another factor capable of attracting people—and
donations—emerged: reporting of the campaign by authoritative or influential persons
outside the perimeters of both the platform and band contacts, such as famous journal-
ists or bloggers or a mention in a music magazine (D’Amato and Miconi 2012).
It is interesting to observe that this is nothing new, despite the still-common rhetoric
concerning the capacity of Web 2.0 to level differences and privileged positions. To the
extent that the Internet  allows both differences and privileged positions to facilitate
590   Francesco D’Amato

and empower processes that enable formation and conversion of social capital, level-
ing constitutes a possibility. It is one that coexists with possible reproduction or even
amplification, in virtual space, of asymmetries and imbalances inherent to the various
investment capacities in and of social capital. However, as Field (2008) observes, capac-
ity is often due not simply to individual ability but to structural conditioning. In con-
trast, the multiplication of backers characterizing the “peer effect,” as found in the study
on Sellaband, presents significant analogies with the many declensions of the “power
law, which traces the inequality of the web, and the rule of preferential connection, that
measures its consolidation over time” (Miconi 2011, 130).
Finally, a further uneasiness expressed by some musicians who conducted crowd-
funding campaigns concerns the perception of a progressive lack of alternatives to the
new game, with its rules and its costs:

In my opinion, there are not any alternatives. Finding a sponsor is very difficult . . .
so the only thing to do is get the community to participate in the project. Restoring
this sense of participation that we have lost a little. Fan funding, according to me, is
the only way. (Maria Teresa, Produzioni dal Basso)
It’s a lot of work to keep 684 contacts updated. And it took me a little more than a
year to gather the sum. . . . Again this is a lot of work and I am not sure I want to do
that again. But as labels sign less and less I’m not sure I have another option apart
from self-funding the album. (T-Ka, Sellaband)

These two citations exemplify a sentiment shared among some emerging artists,
namely, that crowdfunding, like use of other self-management tools, is not an option
as much as the only possibility in a period of dwindling investments in music and in
artists who have not yet reached a degree of popularity that guarantees, at least to a
certain extent, potential investors. At the same time, DIY seems to shift from alterna-
tive and niche practice to mainstream discourse, in that it is part of the broader com-
mentary on participative culture and is promoted by the plethora of new services and
businesses that support it. Future analysis and research is needed to widen the investi-
gation into such issues. This could consist of considering various ways in which musi-
cians communicate and enhance the value of their projects to potential investors—as
in crowdfunding—and how this affects a reciprocal understanding and cultural inter-
mediation of the music.

Notes
1. Data elaborations have been worked out by Milena Cassella.
2. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/honeybird/you-should-coproduce-the-birdies.
3. http://www.produzionidalbasso.com/.
4. According to the responses to a questionnaire (given to musicians and backers), family,
good friends, and people with whom there is frequent interaction around strong shared
interests were considered “strong ties.” “Weak ties” were acquaintances, people with
 With a Little Help from my Friends, Family, and Fans    591

whom there is occasional and nonspecialized interaction, and people with whom there is
no interaction but who appear in the contact directories and address books.
5. Currency conversion (July 1, 2013) has been displayed for further comparisons between
the two campaigns.
6. In a band, a certain number of shared contacts among members is inevitable, so the num-
ber of contacts that make up the entire band network does not increase in proportion
to the number of band members. The fact that Fabrizio’s contacts correspond to almost
a third of Honeybird’s does not imply that if Cobol had had three members they would
have had a network just as extensive.
7. In a famous post on his blog, which gained much popularity among musicians and pro-
fessionals in the music industry, Kevin Kelly defined a true fan as someone interested in
every bit of information concerning the beloved artist and willing to buy anything he or
she produces, or to support any initiative undertaken.
8. This paragraph reports a few quotes by musicians from other bands involved in music
crowdfunding on different web services, which were researched in 2011 and D'Amato and
Miconi 2012.
9. The percentages represent the number of personal ties on the network total. For exclusive
ties, the figure relative to donations was added, in absolute value and in percentage of
the total.

References
Agrawal, Ajay, Christian Catalini, and Avi Goldfarb. 2011. “Friends, Family and the Flat
World:  The Geography of Crowdfunding,” https://www.law.northwestern.edu/research-
faculty/searlecenter/workingpapers/documents/AgrawalCataliniGoldfarb.pdf (accessed
May 18, 2012).
Baym, Nancy. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets
and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
D’Amato, Francesco. 2011. “Utenti, azionisti, mecenati. Analisi della partecipazione alla pro-
duzione culturale attraverso il crowdfunding.” Studi Culturali 8(3): 373–394.
———. Forthcoming. “Investors and Patrons, Gatekeepers and Social Capital: Representations
and Experiences of Fans Participation in Fan Funding.” In Ashgate Research Companion to
Fan Cultures, ed. Linda Duits, Zwaan Koos, Reijnders Stijn. Farnham: Ashgate.
D’Amato, Francesco, and Andrea Miconi. 2012. “Produzione culturale, crowdfunding e capi-
tale sociale: Uno studio empirico su Produzioni dal Basso.” Sociologia della Comunicazione
43: 135–148.
Easley, David, and Jon Kleinberg. 2010. Networks, Crowds and Markets. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ellison Nicole B., Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe. 2007. “The Benefits of Facebook
‘Friends’: Social Capital and College Student’s Use of Online Social Networks Sites.” Journal
of Computer-Mediated Communication 12: 1143–1168.
Field, John. 2008. Social Capital, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Hartman, Keri. 2012. “Capital Transformation in Boston Music Scenes.” Sociological Insight
4: 59–72.
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Howe, Jeff. 2008. Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business.
New York: Crown .
Jenkins, Henri. 2008. Cultura convergente [Convergence Culture]. Milano: Apogeo. Original
English version, 2006. New York: New York University.
Kelly, Kevin. 2008. “1000 True Fans.” The Technium, http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php (accessed June 25, 2013).
Lawton, Kevin, and Dan Marom. 2010. The Crowdfunding Revolution. Self-published.
CreateSpace.
Miconi, Andrea. 2011. Reti: Origini e struttura della network society. Bari (Italia): Laterza.
Peterson, Richard A., and Andy Bennett, eds. 2004. “Introducing Music Scenes.” In Music
Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, 1–16. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Rainie, Lee, and Barry Wellman. 2012. Networked. The New Social Operating System.
Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
Reitsamer, Rosa. 2011. “The DIY Careers of Techno and Drum’n’Bass DJs in Vienna.” Dancecult:
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Sargent, Carey. 2009. “Local Musicians Building Global Audiences.” Information,
Communication & Society 12(4): 469–487.
Thorley, Mark. 2012. “An Audience in the Studio—the Effect of the Artistshare Fan-Funding
Platform on Creation, Performance, Recording and Production.” The Journal on the Art of
Record Production 7, http://arpjournal.com/an-audience-in-the-studio-the-effect-of-the-
artistshare-fan-funding-platform-on-creation-performance-recording-and-production/.
Ward, Chris, and Vandana Ramachandran. 2010. Crowdfunding the Next Hit: Microfunding
Online Experience Goods, http://www.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/workshops/nips2010css/
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 chapter 31

Musi c and Crow dfu nde d

Website s
Digital Patronage and Artist-Fan Interactivity

Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

This chapter surveys the recent practice of crowdfunding musical projects online, and
how the relationship between artists and consumers/patrons comes to fruition through
these business models. We suggest that these practices have their roots in earlier forms
of patronage,1 but the online iteration of crowdfunding has new implications for the
value of composition as labor, the added value of paratextual products, and the rela-
tionship between fan-consumers and artistic creativity. We look at three main case
studies—Maria Schneider on ArtistShare, Amanda Palmer on Kickstarter, and Public
Enemy on Sellaband—for the purposes of comparative analysis of the methods, ideolo-
gies, and levels of interactivity in each instance of crowdfunding.

Online Fan Cultures

A current challenge for record labels and music-related companies is how best to mix
traditional and emerging business models in order to take advantage of fan-consumer
behavior in what has been called Web 2.0. The term has suggested an evolution in Web
activity, with an increased focus on user participation and collective creation. It is rep-
resented by software that supports websites used for accessing knowledge, social net-
working, blogging, and tagging (Lister et al. 2009, 207). The phenomenon that we will
focus on is the use of crowdfunding for music projects, but before addressing our main
case studies, we will investigate the tools and process of connectivity within the Web 2.0
environment, as this performs a crucial part in not only the crowdfunding model, but
also the online and offline identity of the artist and consumer in the digital era.
594    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

Over the past twenty-five years, the Internet and its users have helped foster a para-
doxically organized yet chaotic environment online, powered by new forms of media
and technology that support the age-old desire for communication. As Vincent Miller
reminds us, Internet-based technology is a “set of social relations” that incorporate the
use of those technologies (2011, 3). Not only is the Internet now a significant part of
daily life, “it also has become a new site for the articulation of all types of grouping and
communities” (190).
The relatively new environment of digital cultures,2 constantly shifting and evolv-
ing, has raised new questions for more traditional models of business, creation, and
distribution. In his eBook The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, Andrew
Dubber notes that the constant change in technology in the music industry benefits
those willing to accept and adapt to new media rather than those who sit and predict
the music industry’s demise altogether (2007). The music industry has weathered simi-
lar transitions, often owing to technological change, for instance, print publishing to
recording to broadcasting to streaming; and media formats have also changed, from
wax to vinyl, to the cassette and minidisc and compact disc, and to the digital formats
present today (MP3, MP4, WAV, etc.; Sterne 2012). There have also been moments of
decentralization catalyzed by the birth of new popular music styles, which have in turn
made major labels reconsider their portfolio of artists.3
Azenha (2006) argues that ultimately these new technologies and styles reinforce
existing social hierarchies and relations:  majors eventually purchase the paradigm-
shifting independent record labels, but prior to this, the situation gives the appearance
of instability and decentralization. Labels currently have to deal with issues such as
piracy and an increased range of consumer choice (in style and in format). For artists,
the digital age has become a useful promotional tool, but the ease of the download may
encourage music to become a free promotional tool rather than a commodity in itself,
and if this is the case, how does one encourage the step from listening to purchasing?
And what exactly is now being purchased?4
In terms of fan-artist interactivity, Web 2.0 allows the possibility of communication
through a number of social media websites, including Twitter, Facebook, and discus-
sion forums. Artists can post rehearsal footage and other information, and viewers can
respond in myriad ways. For instance, if a user decides to click the “like” button on
an artist’s Facebook page or YouTube video, this would then begin a chain reaction of
events across multiple platforms passing through various online networks; the “like”
then appears to users connected to the artist and gives them the chance to interact
through a direct link. The “like” is then sent across to the artist’s other pages, which
are in synchronization with the Facebook page (such as a ReverbNation page, which
is a promotional site similar to MySpace but with more features, in particular music-
specific promotion tools including banners, upcoming events, and global or local sta-
tistics allowing the artist to track the development of his or her career and fan base).
The user can then be directed to ReverbNation through a widget present on the page.
From this point, the user has the opportunity to follow the path to the artist’s YouTube
or Twitter page, or even the artist’s personal website. The personal website may have a
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    595

list of upcoming gigs, and once this is clicked, the user is then taken back to the artist’s
Facebook page advertising the event. This may seem like a chaotic network of data, but
the user’s journey demonstrates an opportunity to connect to one or more artists, to
communicate and interact with other fans, and also to archive their own content (fan
videos, blogs, etc.). Lister et al. quote Henry Jenkins:

New media offered “new tools and technologies that enable consumers to archive,
annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content,” and these tools led to “a range
of subcultures that promote Do-It-Yourself media production.” The affordances of
the web to fans and DIY culture enthusiasts all coincide with the era or “trans-
mediality,” “economic trends encouraging the flow of images, ideas, and narratives
across multiple media channels and demanding more active modes of spectator-
ship.” (2009, 222)

It is in this new digital environment that users may desire to become more involved in
the creative process and develop relations with the creators of the products they con-
sume (Jenkins 2006). The consumers of the new interactive media give instant feed-
back, opinions, and choices that have a direct effect on the outcome of the artist and,
in turn, the industry. Companies also have to make sure that the “user,” with its height-
ened status, is catered to appropriately.5
In addition to fostering interactivity, artists also put time into cultivating an identity
and online following, distributing songs through digital platforms and interacting with
users. The artist has to negotiate her or his own “artist identity” online while encourag-
ing connection and interactivity with fans who also have prominent online identities
in their own networked worlds. Similarly, the Internet gives users an opportunity to
modify or eschew their real-life identity and create a new online identity (or identities),
reinforced through profile pages and blog posts.
Another important tool that falls under the Web 2.0 landscape is the use of a blog
or forum. Blogging, in addition to being a promotional tool, can break down the
divide between artist and fan, as both parties can respond to blogs through comments.
Singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer’s blog is largely personal and diarylike, expressing
individual opinions on topics, and encourages users to comment and link to external
sources. Jill Rettberg writes that “following a blog is like getting to know someone”
(2008, 4).6 Kyle Bylin goes so far to say that music blogs are now the new A&R (artists
and repertoire), but they are simply one extension into social media, and independent
YouTube music clips often still have a larger audience than music blogs (Bylin 2013).
Nevertheless, these Web 2.0 features such as blogs and video sites do have the potential
to shift fan focus and encourage reevaluation of the places and communities where
music is consumed and experienced.
Though online retail has been popular for two decades, since the late 2000s there
has been an increase in what is often referred to as “crowdfunding.”7 Tim Kappel
defines crowdfunding as “the act of informally generating and distributing funds, usu-
ally online, by groups of people for specific social, personal, entertainment or other
596    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

purposes” (2009, 375). In the case of the music industry, independent artists are able to
post, on one of many platforms, a proposal for a project. Fans are then able to donate
a specific amount of money toward the project; in return they will receive certain
rewards set by the artist. The first company to engage with this business model was
the U.S. website ArtistShare, founded in 2001 by musician Brian Camelio. After some
success with the model, others soon followed, notably Sellaband (2006), SlicethePie
(2007), Kickstarter (2008), Pledge Music (2009), and Rockethub (2012). All these sites
use slightly different terminology for funders and additional rewards through funding,
and sites often advertise their crowdfunded “success stories” (see Table 31.1 for a com-
parative list of various crowdfunding websites).
One distinction between crowdfunded website types is ex ante crowdfunding,
which describes financial funding to achieve a mutually desired result (i.e., Obama’s

Table 31.1 Crowdfunding Websites
Year Percentage
Website Started Based Founder Cut Notable Artists Incentives

ArtistShare 2001 USA Brian Camelio Sign-up Maria Creative

fee and Schneider, experiences
percentage Billy Childs with the
cut artist and
insight into
the creative
process of the
project
Kickstarter 2008 USA Perry Chen, Free Amanda Rewards
Yancey registration, Palmer, Chris chosen by
Strickler, 5% of every Huelsbeck, the artist
Charles Alder project Five Iron for differing
Frenzy pledge
amounts
Sellaband 2006 Germany Johan Free Public Enemy, Rewards for
Vosmeijer, registration Hind, pledging
Pim Betist, Nemesea and insight
Dagmar to creative
Heijmans process
PledgeMusic 2009 London, Slava Rubin, Keeps Charlie Limited-
New York, Danae one-third Simpson, edition
Los Angeles Ringellmann, of revenue Ginger Tina products, and
Eric Schell Dico, Ben insight into
Folds Five the creative
experience
RocketHub 2012 USA Brian Meece, 4% fee on James Rewards for
Jed Cohen, funds Portnow donations
Vladimir raised (Games)
Vukicevic
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    597

presidential campaign) and ex post facto crowdfunding, which is financial support

offered for a completed product (Kappel 2009). Kappel divides the betting model (e.g.,
Slicethepie.com, which has since changed character but previously followed UK online
gambling site systems) from the investment model (e.g., Bandstocks), where any prof-
its are split (unequally) among the artist, the website, and the fan investors. In terms
of the betting and investment models, the benefit here is that the fans have even more
reason to help promote the band and encourage copies to be sold. Ex post facto sites
like Kickstarter or ArtistShare, where money is released only if an artist reaches the
target, are the more popular of the two types. As of June 2012, the reward-based model
was making the most money in the crowdfunding industry, at 79 percent compared to
equity-based (for financial return), donation based, or lending-based crowdfunding
platforms (Bizshifts-trends 2012).
Crowdfunding ideology borrows from both democratic and capitalistic language,
and existed long before the Internet.8 Offline cases in music began more than three
centuries ago in England, with the rise of the public concert in seventeenth-century
London. Financial support for these concerts was not from private patronage (either
from the church or nobility), but as an annual subscription by the concert attendees
(Chanan 1999).9 Many independent artists in the twentieth century would ask friends,
family, and fans to help fund creation of an album, often receiving some sort of credit
on the album itself. Online crowdfunding also creates a stream of financial support
when larger, more risk-averse companies refuse to support a project, such as the fan-
funded British film Four Lions (2010), which was initially rejected by the BBC and
Channel 4. Subsequently, creator Chris Morris asked fans in a mass email to contribute
between £25 and £100 for which they could be an extra in the film (Moats 2008).
Crowdfunding sites vary in the rhetoric and branding they use, but most emphasize
the agency of the fan in the process. For PledgeMusic, the website states, “Hands-on,
direct to fan: the new business of making music.” At the top of the Kickstarter website,
the site opens with “Bring creativity to life,” and ArtistShare states, “Where fans make
it happen.” As Browne tells us, crowdsourcing mixes business rhetoric with the “aspi-
rational language of contemporary art” (2008, 35), and these sites seem to emphasize
the user and her or his crucial role in artistic creation. The more recent crowdfunding
sites seem to mix the several types of online communities onto one website, combin-
ing communities of transaction (for the buying and selling of goods), communities of
interest (to bring together participants with similar topics of interest), communities of
fantasy (allowing participants to create new environments), and communities of rela-
tionship (sharing personal experiences and networks of support; Miller 2011).
In the 1960s, Elias Canetti wrote in Crowds and Power that crowds can be manipu-
lated by rulers (1962). More than forty years later, James Surowiecki (2005) wrote that
crowds have wisdom, and that collective wisdom can create a potentially more accurate
outcome than individually conceived ideas. The collective or the crowd has become of
high symbolic value in Web 2.0 and potentially can be transformed into exchange value
through digital patronage. User-generated content becomes increasingly ubiquitous
online, as is the freedom to support certain artistic endeavors over others.10 Freedom
of choice may also be one of the appeals of charity websites, though artists like Palmer
598    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

stress the fact that crowdfunding does not involve a “donation”; it is a purchase of tan-
gible items, an exchange of money for goods and services (Berkowitz 2012).11
Yet for all the rhetoric and ideology of change and disruption in the “new” music
industry, there are numerous elements in the process that remain the same. As Kappel
writes, “While other aspects of the traditional recording industry structure are ques-
tioned and challenged with DIY alternatives, the mechanisms by which recordings are
financed have remained relatively conventional” (2009, 377). Here Kappel is referring
to the costs and expenses behind producing an album, despite technology distribution
methods being more widely available through the Internet; the cost to professionally
record, master, and promote globally can still range between $20,000 and $60,000,
which for an independent artist can seem daunting. Kappel goes on to explain how by
using the crowdfunding model the consumer essentially takes on the role of the record
company by funding artists the consumer believes in to produce a valued product. But
in many ways, the artist takes on numerous roles previously reserved for record com-
pany departments, such as marketing and promotion.
The ability to gauge fan interest via crowdfunding websites and social networking
sites can also help determine tour locations. The website Songkick has launched a ser-
vice called Detour, where a fan can pledge to buy tickets for a band to come to one’s
city of choice. If there is enough interest, then the power of the crowd encourages the
band to play there. In return, the band receives some guarantee of an audience and
revenue, similar to crowdfunding’s reduction of sales risk. For example, fans of a band
in relatively close cities (e.g., Sheffield, Derby, and Nottingham in the UK) will bid
on their own city, and the highest bid earns the visit. Will Smale (2013) describes the
process: “Essentially a form of crowdfunding, fans who wish to bring a certain band
to their hometown or city can start a petition or ‘pledge’ via Songkick. You enter your
credit card details on Songkick’s website or app, and how much you would be prepared
to pay. If a sufficiently large number of people also pledge, then Songkick informs
the band in question and its promoters.” The music industry has often been a busi-
ness of risk assessment and of avoiding long-term financial risks, hence the portfolio
model of signing multiple bands on one label, and both crowdfunding and bidding for
a band to play in your city seems an efficient way to acquire some audience response
beforehand.12
Although music has been funded by individuals or groups in the past (see our earlier
discussion of patron and patronage), these online platforms have been able to mobilize
fan communities worldwide who wish to help fund a project. The websites vary in their
design and interactive features, and use their own terminology for similar processes;
for one example, the terms for those who wish to crowdfund a project on Kickstarter
are called “Backers,” on ArtistShare “Participants,” and on Sellaband called “Believers.”
There are a number of levels of financial support, and attached to it are different types
of “rewards”: ArtistShare calls these elements part of an “Experience” which you log
into on a “Dashboard” of the project online. Sellaband calls these “Incentives.” We
would like to call these reward elements paratextual products. This is because the artist
is asking for money to create a single product, in most cases (an album, a film, a video
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    599

game, etc.), therefore placing a single product at the heart of the crowdfunding proj-
ect. The extra rewards are considered paratextual, outside the primary funded project,
but are seen as additionally valued gift items in exchange for funding the product.13
Sometimes these are tied up with process, as with a phone call or an in-progress video,
and sometimes they are items that help promote the artist brand, such as a t-shirt.
Perhaps as a response to the ephemerality of the digital era, paratextual products often
emphasize the physicality or “limited edition” nature of an object, as with a handmade
art book or signed musical score. A larger, more ethnographic investigation of funders
would be needed, however, to see whether or not the paratextual products are actually
incentives to invest or whether or not they wish to fund these projects in support of the
artists regardless of these extra items.

Case Study 1: Maria Schneider

and ArtistShare

Jazz orchestra composer Maria Schneider (b. 1960)  began her professional career
in 1985 as Gil Evans’s assistant before working with Bob Brookmeyer as a freelance
arranger. In the early 1990s, she formed her own jazz orchestra in Greenwich Village.
In 1994, the band released their first album, Evanescence, to great praise, and Schneider
has since been commissioned for a number of pieces worldwide (Sturm 1998, v). At the
time of this writing, she has won three Grammy Awards (ten nominations) and numer-
ous Downbeat magazine awards for best composer, arranger, and big band (winning
all three in 2010; “Maria Schneider Sweeps” 2010). Her album Concert in the Garden
(2005) was one of the first projects on ArtistShare as the website was launched in 2003.
Her other successful fan-funded projects include the albums Sky Blue (2007), Winter
Morning Walks (2013), and the 2010 Birdland commission “Lembrança” and the 2012
Newport Jazz Festival commission “Home” (see Table  31.2 for crowdfunding break-
down of “Home”). The recordings and scores can be purchased from ArtistShare exclu-
sively, and some even have “play-along” recordings for musicians to solo and improvise
over her pieces, encouraging yet another form of interactivity.
ArtistShare was the first of its kind, asking fans to support creation of a piece of
music online.14 In return, the fan-patron receives information on the compositional
process and other “rewards.” In the most extreme case, Schneider invited her most
generous patron (“ArtistShare Executive Producer Participant” Little Johnny Koerber)
to the Grammy Awards, where the album Sky Blue was nominated and won. Through
the ArtistShare model, the artist may be paid up to 80 percent of revenue as opposed to
10 percent or less from major record labels, which will be after recuperating recording
and other costs.15
In Thorley’s study (3012) of ArtistShare artists, interviewees pointed to ownership
of material and reduction of cultural intermediaries as a positive aspect of the website,
600    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

Table 31.2 Maria Schneider’s 2012 Newport Jazz Festival Commission (“Home”)

Amount Rewards Numbers Available

$125—Enhanced Listener Creative insight + Personal guide + Unlimited

Participant
$150—Study Score Participant
$235—Score and Parts Participant
$2,500—Commission Participant
Inspirations behind piece + Study score +
Credit listing
The above + Performance and Technique Unlimited
footage
The above + Signed score page + Individual Unlimited
parts with the score
Above + Invitation to rehearsal + Original Only four
page of score + Access to project calls + available
Invitation to premiere

as well as facilitation of a more direct route between “participant”/funder and artist.

Some artists, however, did not like having to add video clips and snippets of in-progress
work to the site (as “additional value”) as it slowed down their compositional progress
(2012, 7).16 Schneider is not one of the artists who state this annoyance, however, and
she is extremely positive regarding all aspects of ArtistShare and her relationship
with them. She is, by far, the most successful artist on the website and relies on a
loyal fan base to help commission new works and purchase products related to them.

Case Study 2: Amanda Palmer

People love supporting artists. That is a fundamental trust the music industry has
overlooked as they’ve tried to figure out ways of tricking people out of their money.
They work on the assumption that people would rather rip artists off, and it’s abso-
lutely not true. (Palmer, quoted in Berkowitz 2012)

It is safe to say that singer-songwriter, alternative rock, punk cabaret artist Amanda
F. Palmer has been the poster child of music crowdfunding since her successful 2012
Kickstarter campaign in which she raised more than $1 million. Previous to this, she
was a member of the duo the Dresden Dolls, which developed a cult following before
signing to Roadrunner Records in 2002. In 2008, she released her solo album Who
Killed Amanda Palmer? on Roadrunner and received generally positive reviews.
On February 9, 2012, Palmer announced on her blog her next project, post-label
(she left Roadrunner), with the Grand Theft Orchestra. The Kickstarter campaign
was pitched with a three-minute video of Palmer holding up large cue cards (an
intertextual reference to the video for Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”)
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    601

to announce that she has made the album but is looking to cover recording debt,
promotion costs, and tour costs. Unconventionally for crowdfunding, Palmer was
asking for support after the product had been created, but explained that the more
money she received, the better the packaging and accompanying art books would
be. She ended the video with the messages “We are the media” and “I love you.”
On April 20, 2012, the album preorder was launched (with a Kickstarter goal of
$100,000), and the one-month campaign raised a total of $1,192,793, with 24,883
backers.
The successful campaign received large-scale media attention, including some refer-
ring to the $1.2 million as “donations.” Palmer responded with a lengthy blog post enti-
tled “Where All This Kickstarter Money Is Going” on May 22, 2012, and explained the
problem with traditional labels and how they spend money, and how exactly she spent
the money. This included payments for staff, paying off previous debts, creating the
CDs for distribution, art books, tour expenses, the 5 percent cut from Kickstarter, and
5  percent cut from Amazon, which processes the credit card payments. The album,
Theater Is Evil, was released in September 2012.
Palmer asked fans via her blog (August 21, 2012) to support her tour by playing on
stage as backup musicians. Fans in a given city could play in the band though without
payment, something that received vast amounts of criticism from musicians who felt
those fans should be compensated for their time and musical skills (Abebe 2013, Clover
2012, Lindvall 2012, Wakin 2012).17 Palmer eventually decided to rebudget her tour and
expenses and pay the musicians who supported her on her gigs. The same Internet
technologies that allowed Palmer to connect and rely on the services of her fans became
the technology that allowed a public critique, and ultimately led to a change in her eco-
nomic behavior.
Nitsuh Abebe has written how Palmer’s approach is no different from free-market
capitalism; “Neither is it new to ‘give music away for free,’ which every musician now
does, like it or not” (Abebe 2013). Despite the arguable lack of novelty, bloggers have
also commented that Kickstarter is ideal for an artist like Palmer, “a recognized art-
ist who has always cultivated a close relationship with her fans” (Berkowitz 2012). In
other words, the fans already feel a sense of loyalty, and such a campaign allows cur-
rent fans to feel more active in supporting her, in effect creating publicity that draws
in new fans.
Palmer is an example of an artist who actively engages with her fans both in the Web
2.0 climate and in the physical world. She uses a high degree of social networking, from
her own blog to Twitter and other fora. She frequently “retweets” comments from fans
and answers their questions, and even asks fans to provide accommodation during her
tours. In her thirteen-minute talk at the 2013 TED conference,18 she discusses “The Art
of Asking”:

And the media asked, “Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage
piracy. How did you make all these people pay for music?” And the real answer is,
I didn’t make them. I asked them. And through the very act of asking people, I’d
602    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you.
It’s kind of counter-intuitive for a lot of artists. They don’t want to ask for things. But
it’s not easy. It’s not easy to ask. And a lot of artists have a problem with this. Asking
makes you vulnerable. (2013a)

As controversial as Palmer is, few can deny that she has a loyal and substantial fan base,
which will continue to support her musical endeavors online and offline. She does this,
in part, by producing goods and ideologies that promote a sense of unmediated com-
munication between artist and fan (see Table 31.3).

Table 31.3 Amanda Palmer Kickstarter Campaign

Amount Receive Backers

$1 Digital download 44,744

$5 Digital download, PDF of lyrics, and artwork 6,356
$25 Limited-edition CD + Deluxe download 9,333
$50 Limited-edition vinyl + Artwork, lyrics + Thank-you card 1,347
$100 Signed art book + Deluxe download 488
$125 Signed art book + CD + Deluxe download 1,603
$250 Art opening party + Signed art book + CD 5
$250 Summer mailbox invasion + Surprise arts series + CD + Deluxe download 65
$300 Signed art book + Mailbox invasion + Deluxe download 298
$300 VIP Art opening party + Performance + Signed art book + Deluxe 50
download
$300 VIP Art opening party + Performance + Signed art book + Deluxe 88
download
$300 VIP Art opening party + Performance + Signed art book + Deluxe 74
download
$300 VIP Art opening party + Performance + Signed art book + Deluxe 83
download
$300 VIP Art opening party + Performance + Signed art book + Deluxe 46
download
$300 VIP Art opening party + Performance + Signed art book + Deluxe 50
download
$300 VIP Art opening party + Performance + Signed art book + Deluxe 6
download
$500 Custom turntable + Vinyl and CD + Signed art book 38
$500 Personal sharpie portrait + Signed art book and CD 6
$1,000 Donut with Amanda with VIP pass to show + Signed CD and art book 4
$1,000 Custom turntable + Vinyl and CD + Signed art book + Mailbox invasion 28
$1,000 Neil Gaiman and Kyle Cassidy: The Bed Song photo book + CD and 72
signed art book
$5,000 Amanda Palmer house party 34
$10,000 Art-sitting and dinner with Amanda Palmer 2
$10,000 The Grand Theft Makeover 0
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    603

Case Study 3: Public Enemy

In the late 1980s U.S. rap scene, the group Public Enemy became representative of a
certain brand of “political rap” that included important social messages in its lyrics,
encouraging others to protest and resist white patriarchy. The production team, the
Bomb Squad (Hank and Keith Shocklee, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, Chuck D, Gary G-Wiz,
Kerwin “Sleek” Young), outstandingly accompanied these lyrics with a heavy collage of
digitally sampled material, often from earlier African American artists. Despite being
a highly profiled rap and hip-hop group, one may wish to consider the case of Public
Enemy as a crowdfunding failure, in the sense that they failed to meet their initial
financial crowdfunded goal.
Public Enemy announced on October 6, 2009, that they were using the
Netherlands-based company Sellaband to crowdfund their next album, asking support-
ers for $250,000 in total.19 By December 2009, two months later, they stalled at 28 per-
cent of their financial goal. In April 2010, Public Enemy announced a new, lower target
of $75,000, which they reached in October 2010. Some fan funders were frustrated
because the two albums that became the product of the campaign, Most of My Heroes
Still Don’t Appear on No Stamp and The Evil of Everything, were provided as a down-
load before their paratextual products (physical CD copies of the album) were avail-
able. In August 2012, a message was sent to “Believers” informing them that physical
copies would be shipped in September before they were physically available elsewhere.
A number of funders wrote frustrated comments to Sellaband, citing lack of commu-
nication and writing that they still had not received their items in October. This was
soon followed by a direct message from Chuck D (lead rapper of PE) who requested
customer addresses again and promised to fulfill all orders by the end of 2012 (adding
“Please note that the exact date cannot be determined due to worldwide shipping”).
The loss of shipping data and time lag may also be due to Sellaband’s going bankrupt
shortly after the successful PE campaign; it was resold to an investor in Munich and
relaunched a few days later. Two years after the funding target was reached, in October
2012, Public Enemy released the two albums digitally to funders (known as “Believers”)
and on more traditional digital distribution sites like iTunes, soon followed by global
distribution of the physical CDs.
Despite labels of universality and freedom often ascribed to the Internet, there exists
a large and often-neglected issue with distribution, as can be seen in this case. Although
digital formats can offer greater freedom surrounding distribution, the physical (or
the nondigital) often becomes the “added value” object perceived as the incentive to
crowdfund. Consequently, these extra items cost more to make, and they take more
time to distribute, and they may be subject to differing national customs and shipping
laws. Online crowdfunding is a product of digital cultures, but the value of physical
products is still deemed to be higher than digital ones in many cases. The digital turn,
604    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

as with any new technology, is therefore a mix of old and new and never a wholesale
shift from one system to another.
“Incentives” for the project included attendance at a studio session ($10,000, which
no one purchased), a backstage pass to concerts for three years ($5,000), and an exclu-
sive CD ($25). (See Table 31.4.) As stated earlier, fans were initially frustrated and con-
fused by the delay regarding CDs and backstage passes, but one could argue that the
interactivity of consumer feedback also helped rectify the situation, making more open
the conversation between the artist, distribution, and the fan funders.
A number of bloggers and writers have theorized reasons for the lowering of Public
Enemy’s financial target for the project and why it was unsuccessful at first. First, some
considered a disjuncture between price and reward; for example, the $250 t-shirt was
deemed too expensive for fans. Second, an already successful, canonical rap group may
be seen as going against the DIY ethos of crowdfunding (Public Enemy was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013). Some see crowdfunding as reserved for
artists or bands that are just starting but also have a very loyal fan base. A band that has
already sold millions of albums may seem less worthy of such fan support. The reality
is that artists who have a significant following (e.g., Schneider, Palmer, and Ben Folds
on PledgeMusic) are often the ones that have success on crowdfunding websites, but
genre could be another factor in crowdfunding success or failure in that there seem to
be fewer hip-hop artists crowdfunding albums online than in other genres.
Third, Chuck D has been supporting MP3-only albums since 2007; providing physi-
cal recordings may be costly, time-consuming, and against his own business agendas
for digital distribution. Lastly, Public Enemy did not create any sort of close connec-
tion between themselves and the fan patrons. Bloggers who wrote about the campaign
concluded there was a lack of effort on the part of Public Enemy to connect with the
fans and deliver. This may have been for a number of unspecified reasons, including
the bankruptcy of the company and its European base, but for whatever reasons neither
Public Enemy nor Sellaband communicated actively with fans. The model from Mike
Masnick of “CwF RtB=$” (Connect with Fans and give a Reason to Buy) becomes a
useful strategy for artists who want fans to purchase their products (Masnick 2009;
Dubber 2011–12, 58).

Table 31.4 Sellaband Public Enemy Campaign

Amount Incentive Believers

$25 Exclusive numbered CD 1,178

$100 2 CDs and name in booklet 190
$250 All of the above + Limited-edition T-shirt 56
$500 All of the above + Autographed CD 19
$1,000 All of the above + Backstage pass for three years 10
$5,000 All of the above + Producer credit on album 0
$10,000 All of the above + Studio visit 0
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    605

Palmer and Schneider, in contrast to Public Enemy, connect with fans in very dif-
ferent ways, arguably creating two types of intimacy.20 Palmer publishes numerous
blog posts, tweets, and pictures of her day to day. Fans cite her music as the big draw,
but Palmer is an example of someone who communicates at a high level with her
fans. Schneider is a more traditional model of jazz composer, in the Romantic-era
composer tradition. She writes highly personal music about childhood and other
experiences (e.g., “The Journey Home,” “The Pretty Road,” and “Home”). She lets
listeners know through emails, videos, and program notes the subject of her pro-
grammatic, instrumental compositions, and she makes videos and sends emails
with her compositional progress. There is a sizeable distance between Schneider
and her fans compared to Palmer, for example, seeing how Palmer controversially
invited her fans to play in her orchestra on tour for free, whereas after twenty years
playing with the same musicians Schneider is “really starting to trust” them. Social
conventions in the jazz idiom create a sense that the type of networking and inti-
macy we see with Palmer is not expected for a jazz orchestra composer. Schneider
exemplifies the “great composer” who would not change a note for a donation of any
size, but one does receive a level of the creative process and programmatic elements
explained.
Palmer also initiates the conditions for a high level of interactivity with her patrons,
whereas Schneider invites little or no interactivity, communicates less often, and encour-
ages participation primarily through “participant” status as funder. Public Enemy may
provide an even lower level of communication extramusically; the messages could be
said to be found in the rap lyrics alone (which may be sufficient for fans). In other
words, the interactivity is found in the rap discourse within the track. All three case
studies arguably benefit from the increased value placed on participatory cultures in
Web 2.0,21 which have their origins in previous fan cultures but arguably make it easier
to support and communicate with artists.

Conclusion

Public Enemy, Maria Schneider, and Amanda Palmer offer important case studies for
exploring popular music economics, fan participation, and the notion of the crowd
in Web 2.0. In light of Public Enemy’s post-Sellaband UK success (the single “Harder
Than You Think” reaching number four in the singles charts, number one on R&B,
thanks to its use on UK television Channel 4’s 2012 London Paralympics coverage), it
will be interesting to monitor their next crowdfunded endeavors, and if they choose to
incorporate more interactivity or if they inhabit the more widespread licensing model
of iTunes exclusively. As many have now seen Palmer reach a level of success beyond
what is expected from independent artists, some may wish to cease crowdfunding her
projects, but given her loyal fan base it would seem likely she will continue to have
products funded if she chooses to engage with the practice again. Equally, Schneider
606    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

will likely continue to be supported by her fans, U.S. arts funding bodies, and commis-
sions from universities and jazz festivals.
Furthermore, a comparative study of price points and rewards may reveal insights
regarding audience reception and ideology. In the case of Public Enemy, a number of
believers purchased the CD, but no one was willing to pay $10,000 for the opportunity
to spend time in the studio with the band. Many groups and artists put the highest
value on the personal or intimate: Maria Schneider offers personal phone calls and an
invitation to rehearsals, premieres of performances, and award ceremonies. Amanda
Palmer brings her band to play at a house party, perform at a dinner party, or even
provide a makeover and photo shoot. Public Enemy’s personal connection in the stu-
dio was offered but not taken. In Palmer’s case, we also observe a greater variety in the
stratification of funding price points. One of Dubber’s maxims, “Forget product—sell
relationship” (2011–12, 89)  is important here, although what would be considered a
relationship could range on a spectrum between a fan connecting with the music and
with the artist or group, or a mix of both.
All three of the case studies in the chapter arguably benefit from the increased ideo-
logical (and often monetary) value placed on the “user” or “crowd” in Web 2.0 partici-
patory cultures, as well as the convergence of the online retailer with the crowdfunded
digital patronage system. This crowdfunded system has its origins in previous fan cul-
tures, but what the digital platform adds is ease of supporting and communicating with
artists. Though the ArtistShare website promotes little or no interactivity in its own
virtual world, the heightened importance of user-generated content elsewhere may add
to its success, and is an increasingly important type of patronage in a typology of fund-
ing streams for artistic products.
ArtistShare’s promotion of Schneider paradoxically reinforces longstanding ideas of
authorship and of the “great composer” while revealing the less-mystical and more-
everyday elements of the compositional process to those who pay for it. At the same
time, it aggrandizes the artist while placing emphasis and value on the crowd as fan
base and patron. With this business model, compositional process itself becomes of
high exchange value, in addition to, and perhaps of more value than, the product for the
most dedicated of fans. Palmer and Public Enemy mention less the compositional pro-
cess, although Palmer is most transparent about her day-to-day workings via her blog.
Schneider, Palmer, and Public Enemy form case studies in the ongoing history of
patronage for musical and artistic products, including their use of American rheto-
ric surrounding the ideological dichotomy of individualism and egalitarianism (Locke
1994). Palmer relays a free-market spirit and a democratic air of accessibility to her
comments on crowdfunding, for example. In response to comments from others who
state that artist Björk should not crowdfund projects because she is perceived to be a
rich, successful artist already:22

It doesn’t—shouldn’t—matter if she’s got a hundred gazillion Icelandic rune-coins

squirreled away in the bank or not a rune-coin to her name:  she should—ANY
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    607

artist should—be allowed to take advantage of the direct-to-audience tools that are
available to us.
I think this is sad: in a weird new twist of fate, the old guard of “celebrity” art-
ists like her are now being attacked for using a platform that . . . what . . . should be
reserved for starving musicians only? (Palmer 2013b)

Palmer does acknowledge that Kickstarter acts as gatekeeper for projects in that not
everyone who wants to crowdfund is allowed to do so by the website moderators. Her
thoughts on Kickstarter provide an example of Internet-based democratic ideological
rhetoric (“ANY artist should”)23 intersecting with the realities of cultural intermediar-
ies such as businesses, which have a certain degree of control in the process (Kickstarter
takes a cut from successful projects, so it is in their interest to filter the prospective
projects before launching).
The crowd/fan as patron arguably has gotten an increased sense of value in the
Web 2.0 era, as user-generated content and interactivity shift the focus onto an aes-
thetic of the consumer. Although the three case studies have provided little user-based
co-production in terms of content, the new industry focus on crowdfunding projects
draws power from the increased value of these online communities.
For some, the “hive mind” of open source culture and the emphasis of the crowd in
Web 2.0 are seen as threats to authorship. Jaron Lanier, for example, believes that sites
such as Wikipedia encourage a “digital Maoism” that does not put authorship, or the
idea of an individual point of view, at a high priority (2011, 47). Music crowdfunding,
however, does not seem to eschew the importance of the single auteur: there is argu-
ably some demystification in Schneider’s creative process, but she is nevertheless the
single author and praised as such. Public Enemy are also valued as a creative entity,
and Amanda Palmer is often categorized as a singer-songwriter with many value-laden
associations, not least the notion of a strong single authorial voice. In a way, the funder
needs to believe in the person or group’s artistic vision and abilities in order to see it
as a worthy endeavor. Crowdfunding as a Web 2.0 phenomenon allows the consumer
to engage in what Vincent Miller calls “networked individualism” to thrive (2011, 199),
actively supporting artists and sharing one’s tastes with a network of likeminded fans,
and then broadcasting those tastes to one’s other communities to help shape her or his
online identity. The notion of collective intelligence is thus placed on the fan’s choice in
artist, rather than on the creative output of the artists themselves.
Despite digital music piracy and laments over the threatened decline of the music
industry (Knopper 2009, Kot 2010, Rogers 2013, Hardy 2013), many would argue that
music has not been “devalued.” Dubber believes that “music is more highly valued in
our culture today than it ever has been at any point in human history. It just doesn’t cost
as much. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make money from it” (2011–12). The suc-
cess of crowdfunded artists points the way forward through making forms of patronage
more accessible and diversified, and suggests that such funding streams are still in place
for established artists deemed to be of value by their patrons and consumers.
608    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

Acknowledgements

The initial stages of this research were the product of two small grants, seed funding
from the Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute and a grant from the Undergraduate
Researcher Scheme, both based at Anglia Ruskin University. Versions of the research
were presented at the Leeds International Jazz Conference (March 2012), International
Musicological Society Conference (Rome, July 2012), International Association
for the Study of Popular Music, UK Branch (Salford, September 2012), American
Musicological Society (New Orleans, November 2012), Royal Musical Association
Annual Conference (London, September 2013), and invited research seminars at the
University of Huddersfield (February 2012), Goldsmith’s College (October 2012),
University of Nottingham (April 2013), University of Manchester (May 2013), University
of Cardiff (December 2013), and the University of Sheffield (March 2014). We would
like to thank the many who contributed to discussion and feedback from these events,
and as well as Katherine Williams and David Trippett for helpful comments on earlier
drafts of the chapter.

Notes
1. As our peer reviewer observed, patronage has been interpreted in terms of status and rel-
ative power, but this is very different from fan relationships, whereby investors would be
described more simply as funders, contributors, and consumers. The authors, however,
use the terms patron and patronage consciously and define a crowdfunder as a patron
in the sense that she or he financially supports the creation of a product beforehand, as
opposed to more traditional consumers and fans, who purchase products after creation.
Though not as widely used in popular music studies and given their disciplinary ground-
ing in musicology, case studies are placed within a longer history of institutions and
actors that fund creative activity. For longer histories of musical patronage, see Bishop
(2013) and Hurd (2015).
2. To refer to “digital cultures,” according to Gere, “is to call up, metonymically, the whole
panoply of virtual simulacra, instantaneous communication, ubiquitous media and
global connectivity that constitutes much of our contemporary experience” (2008, 15).
3. These moments include the late 1910s (with ragtime) and the 1950s (with rhythm and blues
and rock and roll), and many would argue that the current Internet era has decentralized
some of the mainstream distribution streams controlled by the majors (Azenha 2006).
4. Dubber suggests that music consumers follow the pattern “hear-like-buy” in that “People
hear music, then they like music, then they buy music. In that order” (Dubber 2011–12, 58).
5. Here we are not trying to suggest that we see a large-scale shift from passive users/fans to
interactive participation in the Web 2.0 climate. Fans and audiences were extremely active
and participatory before the Internet as well, though we would argue that the nature of
some activities has now changed (or diversified), and that in crowdfunding, higher value
has been placed on the collective consumer by the production side, and at an earlier stage
in the process.
 Music and Crowdfunded Websites    609

6. Rettberg also discusses how businesses use blogging to create a human voice for the com-
pany to attract the attention of consumers (2008).
7. For extensive discussion and theorization of crowdfunding, including a number of
(mostly nonmusic-based) case studies (e.g., Veronica Mars Movie, gender and sexual
reassignment surgeries, and documentary films in Turkey), see Bennett, Chin, and
Jones (2015).
8. We are using the term democratic to refer to language used in crowdfunding, as opposed
to a social model, whereby a fan-musician relationship is supported by donation of money
for belief in a particular project. In essence, citizens may freely “vote” with their wallets to
back an artist; however, the balance of power can lie with the supporters as the size and
belief of the fan-base determines whether the campaign is successful. Despite donations
the risk is limited owing to site policies; however if successful, the “vote” is still seen as an
investment in the proposed content.
9. The first public concerts were organized by John Bannister, a musician himself, in 1672 in
London. It was in 1678 that the charcoal merchant and music enthusiast Thomas Britton
began to charge a subscription, whereas Bannister’s concerts were free (Chanan 1999).
Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign sold thirty-four “house parties” (at $5,000 each)
and in some ways resembles the Schubertiade, a nineteenth-century informal concert
supported by fans of Franz Schubert, more often than not with Schubert himself in
performance.
10. We are using the term freedom consciously and at a distance, in the spirit of Adornian
critiques of “consumer freedom,” acknowledging that a similar phenomenon may be at
work in the freedom to support creative projects online.
11. Palmer says, “It’s been sort of crushing to see the headlines that say ‘Fans Donate a Million
Dollars to Amanda Palmer’. … If you’ve ever run a small business, you understand how
painful that is, because there’s no donation about it” (Berkowitz 2012).
12. Crowdfunding efforts to bring a band to certain locations have a precedent in British
fans funding £39,000 through online message boards to bring the progressive rock band
Marillion to Britain for its 1997 world tour (see Golemis 1997, and Masters 2001, 2013).
13. Paratextual products may have properties that resemble the primary funded object, as
in the case of a limited-edition autographed CD, but are nevertheless not the project/
product that one is asked to fund (though this could potentially overlap, as with a digital
download of an album and a limited-edition CD of the same album, in the case of Public
Enemy).
14. Camelio has tried to patent this specific online model (U.S. Patent No. 7,885,887, “Methods
and apparatuses for financing and marketing a creative work”), which he applied for in
2003 and was granted in 2011. Kickstarter filed a lawsuit in February 2012 as preemp-
tive because the company felt Camelio would enter litigation after attempts to organize a
financial arrangement between companies were unsuccessful.
15. ArtistShare artists predominantly reside in North America, and the majority of music
produced by the platform is jazz (but product genres also include classical, comedy, pop,
and others). For more on ArtistShare, see Thorley (2012).
16. Interviewees also comment that the patron-participants had no say in the studio or at any
stage in the compositional process.
17. In 2014, this opportunity to perform with an artist became a paratextual product in itself,
as singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright crowdfunded the recording of his opera Prima
Donna (on PledgeMusic). As a reward, those who donated $99 toward the project could
610    Justin A. Williams and Ross Wilson

sing the chorus of “Hallelujah” on stage with Wainwright as part of a choir in various
cities on tour (e.g., London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York), though the concert
ticket was not included in the price.
18. TED (technology, entertainment, design) is a nonprofit company dedicated to the spread
of ideas; it invites high-profile speakers to their conferences.
19. Sellaband was launched on August 15, 2006, and was based in Amsterdam until its bank-
ruptcy and sale to a Munich investor in 2010 (Agrawal et al. 2011).
20. Miller notes, referring to Gidden’s The Transformation of Intimacy, “We crave relation-
ships that allow us to open up to others, and not just in the romantic sense, because in late
modernity, the demand for intimacy becomes part of an overall project of self realisation”
(2011, 170).
21. For more information on participatory cultures, see Jenkins (1992, 2006) and Delwiche
and Henderson (2013).
22. Palmer’s blog post was in response to heavy discourse and debate surrounding Björk’s
Kickstarter in January and February 2013, asking for money to reprogram her iOS
Biophilia app for Windows and Android. She had asked for £375,000 but made only
£15,400 in ten days of the thirty-day campaign and swiftly had it shut down before the
campaign ended, presumably for fear of not reaching the financial goal of the project.
23. Davidson and Poor write, “The rhetoric and ideologies around crowdfunding are a con-
tinuation of the long established rhetoric of the digital sublime” (2015, 292). Their article
points out that crowdfunding will advantage culture producers with certain personality
structures and disadvantage others.

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 Au thors’  Bl o g
Final Thoughts on Music and Virtuality

Edited by Paul Carr

This chapter is a transcription of a private blog. Initiated by the editors and Paul Carr, it
was designed to provide an opportunity for the Handbook’s contributors to share ideas
and develop concepts they had proposed in their individual chapters with the aim of
facilitating further dialogue and a deeper understanding of the relationship between
music and virtuality. Topics cover all seven parts of the book, ranging from virtual
performers, virtual composition, and the impact of digital technologies to practices
of virtuality within the music itself. The Authors’ Blog also asks and discusses the sort
of questions that students and researchers new to the relationship between music and
virtuality will find useful, and it was fascinating to observe how the subject of ontol-
ogy continues to emerge as a philosophical debate. Hopefully this will inspire further
research in the field. The discussions are presented more or less as they appeared on
the blog, with only minor edits to syntax. It is now publicly accessible at https://music-
virtuality.wordpress.com. This is now a living document, so feel free to add your own
thoughts to the discussion.
Paul Carr: To get the conversation going, I thought it would be useful to put forward
a couple of my own thought processes when considering the relationship of music and
the virtual. For me, it starts with a basic question: To what extent can music actually
be representational? I suppose the very fact we are engaging with this book suggests
that we believe it can be; so if this is the case, how? As my chapter [5]‌highlights, the
supposed “representational” nature of music goes back a long way; I note Augustine’s
writings as an example of a belief in music’s capacity to represent “eternal beauty”
(something which he had great problems with), an assertion followed by later scholars
such as Francino Gaforio (1451–1522) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who both con-
sidered music to be a representational reflection of the divine.
When considering these issues at a fundamental level, I have found Kant’s famous
proposition that we can’t know “the thing in itself ” to be the key: so, to what extent can
614   Authors’ Blog

we bridge the gap between the purposiveness of music (its function unto itself) and how
purposeful it is to us? I imagine most of the chapters in this collection will be engaging
with the “purposeful” in music (although I may be wrong)—so as a starting point it
would be useful to understand where contributors consider the ontological presence of
music to be, and if or how this changes with different styles of music.
My chapter is on Frank Zappa, who unquestionably considered many of his compo-
sitions to be an ongoing process, made of multiple instances that exist atemporally in
time and space. He used techniques ranging from multitracking to sampling, to simply
recording most of his live concerts to assist the realization of his personal philoso-
phies. And when we listen to them, they exist only in a virtual dimension. For me, this
enables the musicologist to relate the construction of his music to philosophies such
as Perdurantism and Organicism, to name only two. So, a few questions to get the
conversation going.

1. What do we mean by virtuality in music? Can it exist only outside of Kant’s “the
thing in itself ”?
2. Are there any philosophies contributors found useful when considering music
and the virtual?
3. Are there any “universals” when considering the virtual in music, and if so, what
are they?

Philip Auslander: Thanks, Paul, for kicking this off. I’m not entirely sure I under-
stand what you’re saying when you refer to Zappa’s music as existing only in a virtual
dimension when we listen to his recordings.
My starting point is to suggest that there needs to be a distinction between “virtual
music” (whatever that is; I honestly have no idea what the phrase could even refer to) and
virtual performers and performances. There is, of course, a sense in which all recorded
performances are virtual, either because of the spatio-temporal gap between the situa-
tion of the recording and that of the listener or because recordings capture events that
never actually occurred in quite that way (particularly true for Zappa) or represent an
idealized listening experience (this is equally true for studio and live recordings). Some
might also be willing to characterize music performed by a computer or other machine
as a virtual performance, especially if inclined to consider performance as something
specifically human in nature (I don’t). For example, the works Zappa composed for the
Synclavier can be thought of as virtual performances in that they were programmed by
Zappa but “played” by a machine.
For me, the concept of a virtual performer is entirely unproblematic. By “virtual
performer,” I mean a performer who exists only in a mediated form. Musicians’ avatars
who perform in Second Life would be examples, as would the back-from-the-dead
versions of Elvis and Tupac who have performed recently, and the cartoon figures
who at one point performed as Gorillaz, and the virtual Madonna and Black-eyed
Peas that employed the same technology. In our chapter [2]‌, Ian Inglis and I are argu-
ing that the Beatles became virtual performers after they ceased concertizing in 1966.
 Authors’ Blog   615

They never stopped performing, but only as figures (sometimes cartoons) on a televi-
sion or movie screen.
The two concepts “virtual performance” and “virtual performer” have no necessary
relationship to one another. “Real” musicians can create virtual performances, while
virtual performers such as machines can give “live” performances of “real” music (at
least in my estimation).
I’ll stop here and look forward to some interesting dialogue.
Paul Carr: Thanks Philip. You raise a really interesting distinction between “virtual
music” and “virtual performers and performances.” As you say, the gap between the
listener and the recording arguably always makes music “virtual,” in particular after
the studio started being used as a compositional tool. There are by default many artists
and bands in the modern recording era who could fall into this category. For example,
I was watching a documentary on the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours1 just this
week, where the engineer discussed how the great majority of the individual tracks
were recorded in incongruent times and places. In Zappa’s case—I suppose I am taking
into account his compositional intentions—his compositions were often intended to
be an ongoing process, which overtly and intentionally fused the spatio-temporal gap
you referred to. The Synclavier example you mention is really interesting, as I think
Zappa actually used his musicians in this way: I mention in my chapter how, unlike
John Cage, who aimed principally to eliminate the intentionality of the composer,
Zappa attempted (via his recording processes) to negate the intentionality of the per-
former, proving (in his mind) that the composer and compositions were what made
the music “great.”
Cora S. Palfy: I am so happy that you raised the two questions you did: “What is vir-
tual music?” and “What is a virtual performer?” I am similarly confounded by the idea
of virtual music. I think virtuality means an entirely different thing when referring to
music versus referring to the performer. I’ll come back to how virtual music might be
defined, but I wanted to extend how we are discussing virtual performance/performers.
The definition you’ve provided of virtual performers can be refined by thinking
about what we mean when we say “real” in the context of artists. Certainly, audiences
understand a performer or performance as virtual when it is mediated in some regard.
However, all performers are mediated; even when they are on stage, they have micro-
phones, sound technicians, and speakers filtering their sound. The performer could
have a manager explicitly preening their image, how they speak, what they do on stage.
Even in the context of liveness, therefore, there is an element of mediation. All this
relates to my chapter [16], the formation of an artistic identity, a concept intricately
linked with the media releases that represent the artist. Everything related to an artist
working through a production company is mediated and controlled to communicate
a certain identity. So does this mean that there ever is a “real” performer, even when
an audience sees them on stage? This question problematizes when we call something
virtual or not.
I would suggest that the term virtuality defines a simulated entity or event that
seems very real to those experiencing it (much like the Second Life performers that
616   Authors’ Blog

lose themselves in the reality of a simulated world). This implies a level of psychologi-
cal validity to a virtual event, that the audience feels that they are in some way involved
with the virtual thing, whether that be the music, performer, or performance. Though
my work does not extend beyond the virtual performer and the establishment of iden-
tity, I’m comfortable asserting that the behavioral markers we observe through autho-
rial mediation (through performances, CDs, lyrics, music videos, interviews) give us
a glimpse of a person, with a personality, ideologies, and beliefs. Because people use
these types of behavioral markers in the world daily to construct identities for those
around us, it is quite easy to construct an artistic identity from information associated
with an artist. Thus, there is a type of virtual persona developed, one for whom we can
foster expectations and even (in certain circumstances) form relationships. This leads
precisely back to my opening statement: even though an audience member may never
glean a firsthand experience with an artist, they are still able to conceive of a virtual
artistic agent who is responsible for the work.
To just sort of open the door a little further (and go beyond my own chapter), this
raises the question of what “virtual music” would mean if we thought of it in terms of
simulated, mediated experience. Can music be virtual, or is it always the performance
that is virtual? I am still unsure how to define virtual music, but I am certain it is com-
plicated by how we think of performance and the influence of recording.
Philip Auslander: Maybe not a very substantial comment, but one I feel like making
anyway! Related to intentionality, it seems to me that some musicians’ deployment of
virtuality has to do with control, or more to the point, a fantasy of control. From what
you say, this seems to be the case for Zappa: his resort to the Synclavier and his treat-
ment of his musicians as a human Synclavier (from everything I know about Zappa,
you’re right on the mark there) has to do with asserting the composer’s control over the
entire music-making process and enacts a fantasy of that control. Similarly, the Beatles
felt that the situations in which they were performing live were beyond their control
in ways they found discomfiting. Many of the virtual performances they created later,
such as the promotional films for “All You Need Is Love”2 and “Hey Jude,”3 show them
in the recording studio, a situation they control, in the company of an assortment of
other people. They are able to relate these other people in relaxed, pleasurable, and col-
laborative ways that were impossible for them in real life as Beatles and global celebri-
ties. Their virtual performances thus reflect a fantasy of control, but also of community,
that was impossible for the real people.
Paul Carr: Really interesting, Philip. Just a very quick response. I think in Zappa’s
case, this “fantasy of control” also manifests itself in his ruthless control over copy-
right (something which is continuing after his death via the Zappa Family Trust), the
conducting of his band in live concerts, the bizarre way he recorded musicians’ private
conversations and turned them into personal “compositions,” his independent record
releases, and his campaigning for freedom of expression against the Parents Music
Resource Centre in the mid-1980s. Despite this quest for total control over the creative
and production processes, his music is still massively bootlegged and played by numer-
ous tribute bands all over the world!
 Authors’ Blog   617

Cora S. Palfy: This is a really interesting comment, particularly from the standpoint
of my chapter, which deals with the authorial mediation. I’m going to link back up to
some of the above comments, but I think that Phil is absolutely right about control and
identity—through the mediation of artists, production companies maintain meticu-
lous control over what is seen, heard, and associated with the artist and their artistic
product. I would refine Phil’s argument that virtuality is less a product of the artist’s
making and more a product of how music is often produced and marketed.
Benjamin O’Brien: I’m intrigued by this notion of “fantasy of control.” Fantasy, of
course, cannot be “controlled” by any one individual and projected onto a mass; we are
free to think despite what we are being told—the wonder of art! I’m reminded of an
article by the ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino regarding Peircian semiosis,4 which
refers to documented interpretations associated with Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the
Star Spangled Banner. Though most listeners recognize the anthem, they hear “bombs,”
“birds,” and “thunder” in Hendrix’s realization. Although this fantasy may exist among
many listeners and there is certainly control in his playing, there is no way to determine
when listeners associate and hear these fantastical sonic events. Zappa, on the other
hand, was a historically known control freak. His musique concrete works are but one
example of his fixed virtual performance. This issue of artistic intention is certainly
notable, but again, a virtual performance leads to greater problems of interpretation.
Or is it any more than a “normal” performance?
Cora S. Palfy: I appreciate your comment, however I think you are neglecting that
there is context surrounding an artistic work. Works are strategically released for impact
(think Lady Gaga’s Born This Way CD5; a coincidence that it was released within a time
of restricted rights for the gay community? I think not). I think that context absolutely
sets the tone for how a musical product is consumed and becomes meaningful, and an
artist does not escape concurrent historical and social events just because they are a
cartoon, hologram, or otherwise. You are right insofar as people are free to think criti-
cally about fantasy and artistic meaning, but an audience’s thoughts are also guided by
the external information, history, and context surrounding a work. There’s no escaping
it (unless, perhaps, you stand at a temporal remove).
Philip Auslander: I think that virtual performances can present specific problems
of interpretation and evaluation, at least from a traditionalist perspective. For example,
Miles Davis’s edited recordings are hard to interpret and evaluate in relation to the val-
ues traditionally associated with jazz (liveness, spontaneity, improvisation, etc.). This
must be genre-specific, however. I’m not sure that the same issues come up in genres for
which virtual performances are the norm (somewhat arbitrarily, I’ll choose Eurodisco).
Of course, no one can ultimately control what anyone else thinks. That’s why I used
the phrase fantasy of control in the first place. I also don’t think this is necessarily about
controlling the audience’s interpretation of the music as much as what the music is and
how it is performed (Zappa) or the social circumstances under which it is made and the
audience’s relationship to the artist (the Beatles).
Finally, I would like to reverse the question posed above. Are there any examples of
musicians using virtuality in service to a fantasy of diminished or relinquished control?
618   Authors’ Blog

Paul Carr: In terms of using virtually as a relinquishment of control, the first

example that comes to mind are the stem mixes put forward by artists such as Peter
Gabriel,6or even the concept of artists giving permission for remixes of their work in
general. However, if one looks at this cynically (sorry; this is something I have a ten-
dency to do), it could conversely be looked at as another form of publicity—in order to
gain more control! I suppose it depends if we are considering the specific track being
remixed, or the overall “control” of the market an artist is attempting to dominate. As
opposed to a relinquishment of control, I  would consider that more a “transferral,”
from the artist to the fan (in the case of Gabriel) or other musicians (with the basic
remix), although as stated, I consider these instances more of an ideology than actually
“relinquishing.” I would be interested in examples of artists who genuinely “give away”
elements/samples of their music, not in the style of Radiohead’s In Rainbows 7 (which
once again had an ulterior motive of seeking more control) but more at the individual
track level, facilitating instances where a specific sample, for example, is included in
multiple compositions by numerous artists.
Paul Draper: “Fantasy of control”? Or, “a fantasy of diminished or relinquishment
of control.” Indeed! The chapter by Frank Millward and me [14] is about examining
our own practice-based work: new music created through asynchronous file exchange,
from improvisation, to some degree of “assembly”/composition (?). “Music in perpet-
ual beta” and the idea that music is never really finished.
The idea that we need to come to terms with is that of displaced temporal
­“in-the-moment” responsive performance, which is negotiated in the “virtual/phased”
timescapes of current communications processes.
This was always the case in “tracking”—each part being added subsequently—but
now such processes are transacted in the virtuality of cyber and as such gain more flu-
idity in relation to content creation, the idea of improvisational response and the sub-
sequent materials/“stems” being independent works and not part of a controlled single
focus of “making a record,” that is, possibly put out there as “free music” (for remix, etc.),
or an indie album, or as forms for live performance and ongoing improvisation, etc.8
Two points, first, regarding David Borgo’s notion of “phase space”9 in improvisation/
performance: that the critical moments are in those of negotiation and trajectory. For
Borgo (critically) this occurs in the live F2F domain; in our case however, these very
“phase spaces” are displaced via asynchronous “virtual performances” or musicking
(and eventually, as “virtual music”).
Second, and similarly perhaps, in the tacit effects of cultural displacement, differing
time zones and particular working conditions that may be pressing, affecting (or not)
to a greater or lesser degree than other phased spaces.
Paul Carr: Thanks for the links to the music. I would really need to read your chapter
to fully understand what you guys are attempting to do philosophically. I may under-
stand more, once I have read the Borgo book too. At the moment, I am trying to deci-
pher how exchanging ideas across the Web makes the music ontologically different
from the recordings taking place in a recording studio—or recording studios. Also,
I am interested in where you position the creative process in terms of Philip’s notion of
 Authors’ Blog   619

a “fantasy of control.” Do you have any plans to open the stems to the public domain,
so other artists can contribute?
Paul Draper: Regarding the ontological differences, etc.: in the case of improvisa-
tion, and Borgo’s work in particular, his essential ideas about so-called phase spaces
are in the real-time F2F negotiations that take place. In the case of asynchronous col-
laboration this is time-delayed and essentially reworks the notion in various ways.
Improvising with a long pause is kind of weird (virtual music?), but as each of our
“cases” or distance “phases” progresses we keep coming back to this as a way to try to
better understand our work, even if through (sometimes humorous) miscommunica-
tion at times (given UK-Australia time zones, working commitments, response times,
email etiquette, slang, etc.).
Given the above, the other element here we’re thinking about is in the “cultural dis-
placement” between us. There would appear to be very different assumptions about all
sorts of things in the two countries, and also our immediate academic interfaces with
fine art. My predisposition to want to mix things together and “make a record,” Frank’s
perhaps to want to do performance art, provoke, etc. I guess “fantasy of control” also
applies to this aspect as well.
Yes, doing stuff on a DAW, then asking for overdubs, I do a lot. But this mirrors
conventional studio practice to my mind (i.e., virtual = so what?). Here then, we’re
attempting to back up a little further into the early collaborative/improvisational
phases, then to early “composition,” I  guess. There were some stems/phases in this
process where other overdubs/musicians became involved, but they were largely
unaware of the ongoing “argie bargie” between Frank and myself. A  very different
process.
The stems are already in the public domain, as per the website linked to SoundCloud
posts, or where other aspects of the work are up on Ohm Studio as multitrack stems.
However, this is not something we’ve actively pursued in the project to date, but rather
is part of the concluding remarks in terms of lack of closure, future possibilities, etc.
(right next to live performance, for that matter).
Philip Auslander: To return to my original postulate that virtual space provides
a stage on which musicians can enact a fantasy of control, it seems that these per-
formances can take several forms. Musicians can use virtual space as a platform for
controlling the music itself and its performance (Zappa), the social circumstances of
its performance and its audience (the Beatles), or the performers (Gorillaz, virtual
Madonna). On the other hand, virtual space can also be a platform on which these very
same functions can be decentered, distributed, opened up to multiple participants and
thus rendered somewhat indeterminate, etc.
Paul Carr: I  agree with all of this, Philip. I  wonder if anyone has considered the
“virtuality” inherent in our (as listeners) interpretive acts—mainly, via the limitations
of our language. The logocentric nature of our acts of analysis has been considered by
some (Mendelssohn through to Philip Tagg) to focus arguably more on abstractions
that music signifies, rather than the music itself. They would argue that the music is
not vague, but our language is. This begs the question: Is the language we use when
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discussing music reflecting the reality of musical meaning, or in fact constructing our
own version of it? What part does our language play in the virtual?
Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen: I have found this stream very interesting and inspiring.
To the many clever observations and ideas about virtuality, I  would add only that a
characteristic feature of the “virtual” is that there often exists a nonvirtual parallel. On
the one hand, several virtual phenomena have developed from nonvirtual phenom-
ena. The Digital Audio Workstation, for example, is a virtual studio built on a nonvir-
tual model; it encompasses a virtual mixing console, virtual instruments, and software
signal-processing effects that are all either imitations or remediations of existing studio
hardware. Likewise, holograms/avatars such as Hatsune Miku are virtual pop stars who
are simulating nonvirtual (human) pop stars. On the other hand, certain virtual phe-
nomena may not have developed directly from a nonvirtual counterpart but are nev-
ertheless understood best in comparison to one. For example, the new musical arenas
introduced by the Internet, such as YouTube, MySpace, SoundCloud, and so on, can
be framed most constructively as virtual musical archives or virtual distribution plat-
forms whose structures evoke these nonvirtual parallels. What we can draw from this
is that, although the virtual world might in fact be just as “real” as the nonvirtual world,
the worlds resonate with one another in novel ways. What is natural or normal in the
context of virtual reality might seem uncanny and bizarre, even surreal, in the context
of nonvirtual reality. Still, though we operate with different laws for these two realities,
our understanding of the virtual usually relies on our familiarity with the nonvirtual.
Most interesting of all, this can generate an experiential friction, in the sense that we
might find ourselves understanding the virtual reality as completely natural and real
even as we also understand it as unnatural and unreal.
I discuss [in Chapter 15] mashup music using the term virtual bands, because the
ontological presence of a mashup “band” is to be found only in the virtual domain (I
am here referring only to the typical A+B mashup, comprising full-length samples of
two vastly different artists/bands). As I argue, part of the aesthetics of mashup music
lies in the listener’s awareness of the band’s virtuality, and of the fact that the mashed
artists/bands would hardly perform together in a nonvirtual reality. When listening
to mashup music, we constantly oscillate between processing the mashup as a virtual
band and comparing this virtual collaboration to the individual band’s nonvirtual
existence—that is, the mashed songs’ original context(s). It is arguably in this oscil-
lating space between virtual and nonvirtual reality that the ironic meaning making of
mashup music happens.
Yet we might well wonder, at this point, whether the border between what is con-
sidered virtual reality and what is considered nonvirtual reality remains constant, or
whether it is instead in constant flux—that is, whether or not our conception of some-
thing as virtual is prone to alteration. For example, I find that Paul Carr’s notion of
“virtual music,” in the way he describes it—as the juxtaposition of tracks from various
times and spaces—made more sense in the early era of magnetic tape recording than
it does now. This is because when the opportunity represented by multitracking was
first introduced, the spatio-temporally coherent musical form was the standard, and it
 Authors’ Blog   621

continued to be the standard (in live performances) for a long time to come. Thus, the
music represented by the multitrack recording was, in a sense, “virtual” in comparison
to a nonvirtual reality. Now, however, when live performances can be made to match
recordings and vice versa (for example, spatio-temporal fragmented music is now just
as common in live performances as in recordings), and when so-called virtual music
(understood in Paul Carr’s sense) is, at least within the field of popular music, just as
common as “nonvirtual music,” I wonder whether we experience the virtuality aspect
of this music as “virtual” at all anymore.
Paul Carr: I very much like the idea of the listener juxtapositioning the “real” against
the “virtual,” with the latter only being virtual in light of the former. The idea of the
mashup resonates strongly with Zappa, as he often horizontally fused two tracks next
to each other from incongruent times and places. For example, he would often record
backing tracks in the studio and import a guitar solo from a live gig he had recorded sev-
eral years before. The pervasiveness of this process with Zappa has resulted in websites
of fans tracking the “real” “clues”—which is itself an interesting phenomenon. What
I would like to add is that this tracking of the “virtual to the real” works only when you
recognize the “real.” We are already at a generation that doesn’t recognize the “James
Brown snare drum sample,” so this process has potentially ceased for them. I suppose
it is the same with cover versions, when specific generations believe the cover version
to be the “original” (this has happened to me many times personally)—only to find it
was originally recorded twenty years previously. For me, this raises the question that,
despite our best efforts to engage with reality as we think it is, this perception is often
incorrect—due to the limitations of our tiny brains! I would also like to add that for me,
this process does not occur only with songs, or fragments of them, but also sounds. For
example, there is so much music around at the moment that is blatantly influenced by
eighties sounds, so for me I am constantly referring current sounds back to an “original”
that are often associated with memories of my youth (but that’s another story).
Philip Auslander: I agree that identity is always already a construct, but this does not
mean it isn’t real. People often think, for example, that because Judith Butler considers
gender identity not to be natural but to be constructed of sedimented layers of repeated
behavior, gender identity is not real. But this is hardly Butler’s point. Gender identity is
very real; it is legally and socially encoded and enforced in all kinds of ways. Similarly,
there are no professors in nature. My performance of the identity of professor derives
purely from social convention. As a follower of Goffman, however, I  insist that this
does not mean it isn’t real. In fact, it’s a very important part of my reality. The point is
that “real” does not mean “natural,” or something similar.
Nevertheless, I’m interested in the idea that the virtual depends on the nonvirtual for
its significance. This makes sense to me, as does the idea that as our sense of what is real
shifts, so does our sense of what is virtual, but I’m not sure how fine-grained the rela-
tionship needs to be. For example, even though all the various components of Second
Life have real-world analogs (or pretty much all of them), there is no real-world analog
for Second Life itself, as a whole. At that level, Second Life may be a self-referential
virtual world. That’s part of its appeal, I think.
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In reference to Paul’s recent posting, I’m not sure I  see the value in mapping the
vocabulary of “real” and “virtual” onto questions of origin(ality). In what sense is the
Monkees’ version of “I’m a Believer”10 “real” and the version by Donkey (from Shrek)11
“virtual”? I  understand that the Monkees’ is the original version and Donkey’s is a
cover. Except that the Monkees’ is not actually the first recording of the song, since
Neil Diamond, who wrote it, recorded it before they did. So, our understanding of the
Monkees’ version as the “original” and all others as “covers” is not ontologically based;
it is a cultural construct that derives purely from the fact that the song was a huge hit for
the Monkees and is closely associated with them as a result (and perhaps they gave the
song its definitive reading, but that’s a qualitative assessment). In one sense, then, the
idea that the Monkees’ version is the original is virtual to begin with. But what purpose
is served by applying that term in this context? Is “virtual” to mean “non-original,” or
“derivative,” or “second order,” or something like that? For me, this is not where the
value and pith of the idea of virtuality resides.
Paul Carr: I  take Philip’s point regarding listeners’ perception of “original” and
“cover” versions getting slightly away from the point of the virtual; maybe I took my
original point one step too far there. But looking at it from a broader perspective than
that, I  do see a distinction between the “song” (i.e., the chords, basic form, lyrics,
and melody) “I’m a Believer” and the various arrangements of it (which may include
stylistic differences, alternative chords, different production techniques, etc.). I con-
cede that it makes no difference what the actual “original” arrangement is, but there
has to be an ontological difference between the basic concept of a “song” and its
“arrangements”; for me, the former is made up of all the instances of the latter. This
links to the philosophy of perdurantism, which would suppose that the song also
includes all of the live performances that have occurred too. For me, the ontological
space between the small (arrangement) and large (song) is something I find really
interesting.
Philip Auslander: If you’re saying that a song is defined solely through its arrange-
ments, performances, etc., that it has no ideal and ontological status apart from these
instantiations, then I agree completely. On the other hand, if you’re suggesting that the
song somehow determines these instantiations, I disagree completely. For me, a song is
simply raw material that enables performances.
Paul Carr: I  am saying the song is defined by its multiple recordings and perfor-
mances; it is the result of multiple instances, including those that will take place in the
future. When discussing an individual performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, Jean-Paul
Sartre was clear that he was not listening to “the symphony,” but an individual instance
of a work that is ultimately “heard in the imagination.”12 That is where I am coming
from. I have not really thought about if or how a song may determine these instances.
Does someone else have thoughts on that?
Philip Auslander: I probably don’t agree with the “heard in the imagination” part
because it suggests that the composition is an ideal type of which the various perfor-
mances are instances or tokens. I probably feel that the composition cannot be heard at
all except through specific instantiations.
 Authors’ Blog   623

Paul Carr: Sure. The “heard in the imagination” was a paraphrase from
Sartre—although it does resonate with me philosophically. As you say: the idea is that
performances, etc., are “tokens” of a “type,” which we are calling the song. However,
I  also understand the idea of the song “becoming real” via its performances and
recordings.
Thomas Conner: We discuss human performers versus virtual ones, and of the path
from one to the other. Technology has increased the ability to evolve in that direc-
tion and the speed with which those genes can be sequenced. But what is the middle
state: the person’s purgatory, or the computer’s cocoon, depending on your poetic per-
spective? Is the performer a cyborg during the journey? I like Paul Sanden’s analysis
of virtual pop stars as “sounding cyborgs” and his explanation of how audiences fill in
the mediatized blanks. To quote Sanden, “when physical boundaries of human music
performers are surpassed by technological means … they construct a virtual perform-
ing ‘You’—a performing persona—in order to complete the line of communication.”13
That somewhat bears out in my professional experience. I’ve been a pop music
journalist for the last twenty years, and I’ve witnessed the live concert performance
paradigm take on vastly increased technological dependence and direction—a virtual
and often literal saddling of the human performer with more mediatization. Today’s
Madonna is a Borg queen, virtually incomplete until she’s fitted into her cyber suit. Her
movement through the physical space is largely determined by the preprogrammed
lighting cues. Her adlibs are inserted into assigned pauses within the preprogrammed
script. She catches her breath after a highly physical dance move while a prerecorded
voice “assists” her continued vocalizing. All the while, much of the crowd is watching
the image of her “performing you” on screen more than they’re watching her actual
body on stage. We attend concerts based on the ideal of the previous physical perfor-
mance model, but we experience them more and more as a virtual presentation—come
for the flesh, stay for the bits—and in my own studies of virtual performers I’ve claimed
that the switch from a human stage performer to a digital one, such as Hatsune Miku or
2.0Pac [Chapter 8], isn’t as jarring as we might expect because we’re already well con-
ditioned for the virtual performance experience. (At least until Miku sprouts an extra
head, or virtual Madonna flies.)
In addition, since fans usually encounter the mediatized presentation well before the
live performance, if at all, are we thus now open to or even expecting more mediatiza-
tion in those live performances? I’m eager to read how Auslander and Inglis identify
the tipping point from real Beatles to virtual Beatles, as I suspect it could apply to most
of the stage-shunning studio artists I adore (from heyday Steely Dan to eighties XTC
and countless more recent “bedroom” acts). I  use the word “artist” there instead of
“performer,” because as someone who (and this is a crime for a rock scribe to confess)
prefers records to concerts (a fan’s own fantasy of control, no doubt), I have undoubt-
edly more experience with my favorite musicians only as mediatized sounds and
images than as live performers. So do they begin as virtual until I see them in the flesh?
Phil, does “a performer who exists only in a mediated form” imply an absolute—that
there is no biological base and thus no cyborg transition—or can it mean, from a fan’s
624   Authors’ Blog

perspective, that the human performer’s mediated form is simply the only presentation
the fan has yet encountered?
Philip Auslander: I agree that we encounter musicians in both virtual and corporeal
forms and that our initial experience is often with the virtual version. I also agree that
the difference between the two versions is perhaps not as significant as has often been
suggested, for precisely the reasons you mention.
The case of the Beatles interests me precisely because they had to move fully into
the virtual realm in order to continue as performers since performing in the corporeal
realm (the material world?) had become untenable for them. If they were to perform
at all outside the studio, it could only be in virtual form. Whereas the norm may be
that the virtual and corporeal versions of artists complement one another, the virtual
Beatles explicitly became surrogates for the “originals” who were no longer available.
I’m not sure there was a middle state for them.
By the way, and on a completely different subject, some of what you say about
Madonna strikes me as being true for performers in many instances. Stage and film
actors, for example, also have to hit their marks and fit what they’re doing to the other
things going on around them, things that are themselves much less able to behave spon-
taneously than the actors are. I’m not sure that this is so much a mark of the transition
to virtuality as it is simply in the nature of performing in any context that also involves
nonhuman elements.
Paul Carr: Does anyone have any final thoughts regarding “universal” principles in
music and virtually? Are there any? Or as suggested earlier, do our perceptions of the
real and the virtual change as we experience music and artists through time?
Benjamin O’Brien: One issue near and dear to me is how I  understand music,
which, in turn, aids my definition of the virtual. How meaning is encoded and decoded
into music, however, is all relative to the “event” of one’s listening. In computer music
for example, various digital signal processing techniques can be coded and abstracted
in a “symbolic” reality, which can be used to create a very “real” experience—create
sound. Yet, our understanding of the computer microprocessor [Chapter  20] is, to
most people, quite limited; most have an “imagined” understanding of the mechan-
ics that create this reality. So how can we proceed in understanding, let alone defin-
ing, music? An equally entertaining thought is to consider music as being all sounds
known and all sounds not yet known. Since we can identify sound as being musical
only retroactively, it is inaccurate to impose any general values on elements within
the musical set. Thus the event of listening to a music composition updates our status
of the musical set. So we are forced to define music as a set that contains unknown,
or imagined—or “virtual”—sounds. This theory, of course, feeds into how we define
“virtual music.”
I claim Plato’s theory Musica Universalis as a virtual music. In accepting the theory,
we believe celestial bodies are capable of producing an imagined music based on sym-
bolic proportions. This music may or may not be audible to us, but nevertheless may
exist. We cannot hear it at present, but who is to say we will not in the future? Thus
virtual music rests somewhere between our symbolic and imagined realities.
 Authors’ Blog   625

Frank Millward: Listening to Noise and Silence14 by Salome Voegelin is an inter-

esting book. In it she questions how we listen to sound compared to how we listen
to music: sound-music. Perhaps the traditional segmentation of these ways of think-
ing about all sound is being conflated along with the notion that the traditional idea
of the “composer” is now one who is being forced to relinquish control in a world
where technologies offer all the options to experience “a fantasy of control.” This sup-
ports the idea of listening as “a practice of hearing, inventing, imagining and know-
ing”; the listener as “virtual” composer, hearing as a creative act, fits with the idea
that the world is now full of people on their own making sounds for a single person
to hear—the iPod soundscape—which resonates with what Philip Auslander earlier
described as “that virtual space which functions as a stage for controlling music, its
performances and its performers, just as it also functions as a platform in which con-
trol is diminished.”
Adam Trainer: I think there’s real merit in locating the virtual in the intersection of
our symbolic and imagined realities. My chapter [22] addresses nostalgia, specifically
the nostalgia for childhood, or for an era that many of the artists whose work I discuss
locate specifically within their childhood. Their memories of this time (from which
many of them draw creative inspiration), although once lived, have now become part
of their imagined reality; it is now no longer tangible, and thus occupies a space in the
virtual. Similarly, many of these artists use the aesthetic signifiers of a particular era in
order not necessarily to recreate it but to interact with it and comment upon it through
play. Their aestheticization of a specific musical approach taps into the imagined reality
of a particular era, and brings with it the cultural baggage of that time or text. This for
me is the legacy of the virtual, and it goes a long way toward describing information as
a very specific and powerful form of cultural currency in a post-Internet era. By access-
ing the personal or affective and connecting it to texts and source material that brings
its own symbolic language, the virtual provides a platform for both artists and audi-
ences to interpret this material freely, and to rewrite it in a manner that is personalized
but that also speaks to collective experience.
Sheila Whiteley: I also wonder whether, as synthaesthesia is so closely woven into
musical experiences, this also contributes to imagined realities.
Adam Trainer: I’m sure synthaesthesia has a lot to do with how we experience and
make meaning from music, and I definitely agree that it helps to create or frame imag-
ined realities, and therefore contributes to the worlds that virtual musics construct.
Even the idea that a particular piece of music can trigger another sensory experience or
a particular memory feeds into the synaesthetic properties of music and their ability to
transport us into the experiential or the imagined, and therefore the virtual. My chapter
addresses the visual language that has found its way into the world of specific emerging
musics such as hypnagogic pop and vaporwave, and I think that part of the allure of
these musics as aesthetic systems is the visual language that has been used, either by the
musicians themselves or by others interpreting the music, to frame or comment on it.
In the case of hypnagogic pop, this visual language is often a melange of recycled vin-
tage (1980s and 1990s) TV commercials, Saturday morning cartoons, advertisements
626   Authors’ Blog

for obsolete technology, vector graphics, etc. In the case of vaporwave it’s corporate
videos and animations of idealized architecture—dream homes and shopping malls.
Simon Reynolds’s article on hypnagogic pop and the landscape of Southern California15
also has a lot to say about the location of a specific musical aesthetic within a virtual
landscape, or a landscape of the mind, not so much the real Southern California but
one that populates collective consciousness and popular memory. I think in this way
we can see the virtual as a space where memory (individual and collective) allows us to
make connections between texts, and whereby many of the links we make are based on
sensory or mnemonic experience, and perhaps also instinctual associations.
Paul Carr: Thanks all—fascinating observations. In order to finish this virtual
chapter off, I  would be interested in any final thoughts anyone has regarding “uni-
versals”:  Taking everything we have discussed, are there any principles that have to
be there in order to consider music to be “virtual”? I must admit that until recently
I would have suggested a factor like the juxtaposition of time, but the breadth of these
discussions has made me question this. Off the top of my head, I  can only think of
one: the relationship of a “part” to a greater “whole”—although I realize this is a very
vague concept. Can anyone suggest any better ones?
Sheila Whiteley: Thinking about trompe l’oeil and all those mirrors at Versailles, is
virtual space an illusion in its relationship of a “part” to a greater “whole”?
Benjamin O’Brien: The tromp l’oeil comment brings up some interesting concerns
regarding virtuality. If we stay in the analog realm of visual art, two main themes
emerge:  the deception of the eye and the deception of the narrative. The former, of
course, is the tromp l’oeil effect found in works by Salvador Dali (see Slave Market with
the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire) or Vik Muniz (see Marat/Sebastiao)—among many
others—where individual viewers independently “flicker” between the dimensionali-
ties of a subject. The latter theme is the viewer’s construction of narratives as seen
in works by Robert Rauschenberg (see Odalisk). However, in both cases the viewer is
tasked to entertain virtual processes in order to “enjoy” the work, but there is no way to
quantify this validation. In addition, one’s knowing is always tested by return revisita-
tions. It is difficult to speak to the work’s truths, if we cannot reify one’s “getting” of it;
it is a virtual understanding, susceptible to redefinition.
I believe music—particularly twentieth-century electronic music—tests the listener
to identify the “real” subjects of sound as well as trace some narrative. Again, the simi-
lar thematic problems found in art return. Understanding these themes in a music
composition gives meaning to the materials used for construction. Following this logic,
understanding the virtual domain of the work gives meaning to its real realities. So
we’re left with an uroboros of sorts: the virtual realm is founded on the principles of the
real, while providing truths to said reality. I prefer to think in terms of dimensional tan-
gencies. Another perspective may be akin to symbiotic organisms, where their coex-
istence illuminates truths regarding each entity that are otherwise not apparent à la
“negative space.”
Francesco D’Amato: It seems to me that most of those who mentioned the topic of
virtual performers are referring mainly to “famous” stars. But one of the characteristics
 Authors’ Blog   627

of the virtual space, if we use this term for the Web, is the huge amount of amateurs,
aspiring professionals, and “prosumers” who participate as music makers in this space
(I won’t deal here with the differences among such definitions). Since my chapter [30] is
about participatory culture and crowdfunding, I would like to throw in a few consider-
ations from my perspective, on virtual performers and their relationship with backers.
First, it is important to point out that musicians using crowdfunding platforms to pres-
ent their projects can range from the unknown musician to internationally established
artists. What I can say, based on my interviews with both musicians and backers, is
that producer-consumer interaction is what allows musicians to be perceived as “real,”
and this concreteness is what is appreciated and ultimately rewarded. The display of
personal qualities (for example, through videos, pictures, narration) and the readiness
to reply to every post and question are among the most important things in fostering
participation and donation.
From one perspective, musicians appreciate crowdfunding because it allows increased
control over their own work and career, disassociating the artist from many traditional
middlemen of the industry. Alternatively, this freedom also results in potential difficul-
ties of managing constant and personalized interactions with numerous microfunders.
Moreover, their identity (especially if we talk of almost unknown musicians) doesn’t
generate just in the fruition of the contents through which they present themselves and
their projects, but also in the conversation among those who participate in funding and
word-of-mouth of the project and campaign, that is, among the many microproducers,
micro talent scouts, and microreviewers acting as new intermediaries. So, in this case
too, we can maybe talk of the ambivalence of virtuality, as a potential for increased con-
trol and risk of losing some of it, as a space for autonomy and detachment, but also for
participation and permeability. Basically as a space where participation reconfigures
mediation, and how both producer and consumer can perceive distance and proximity
and—maybe—to give meaning to virtual and real.
Adam Trainer: Francesco, your comments raise a really interesting question for me,
and that is the relationship between virtuality and authenticity. I  think you’re argu-
ing that in the online realm, artists who embrace interaction with their audience are
often able to build a sense of authenticity around themselves because of the capacity for
direct engagement with their work. This point makes a lot of sense.
I think the development of certain (and obviously very select) musical styles online
places these musics in an interesting relationship with authenticity. My research has
dealt with particular forms (hypnagogic pop, chillwave, vaporwave) that activate irony
through a complex network of aesthetic and symbolic cues, and I  wonder whether
some artists who operate solely (or mostly) through the virtual realm are actually aim-
ing for inauthenticity. It’s easy for an artist to retain a sense of anonymity when they are
operating outside of the corporeal/tangible; for example, they don’t perform live and
often don’t even attach a personality or human presence to their music. It doesn’t make
their music any less engaging or relevant, and I wonder whether a sense of inauthentic-
ity actually offers their music greater cultural capital in this circumstance. I think that
Francesco’s notion of the virtual as a space for autonomy and detachment is the key
628   Authors’ Blog

here, as well as permeability; removing physicality allows texts and audiences that oper-
ate in the virtual realm to exist outside of traditional spatial and temporal relationships,
as well as many of the traditional social relationships that formulate around music.
Francesco D’Amato: Thank you Adam. Yes, definitely my comment regarded the
relationship between musicians and audiences in the virtual space, especially the build-
ing and perception of authenticity and the meaning and value it assumes in crowdfund-
ing practices. I’m very interested in the musical styles you are talking about, since I don’t
know them, and I’d like to ask you if this specific aim for inauthenticity as a distinc-
tive cultural value can be traced back to any previous styles in popular music history.
I intended permeability as the “other side” of autonomy and detachment that makes the
ambivalence of virtuality, insofar as performers in the online realm are directly exposed
to increasing requests for interaction and collaboration with audiences, opening spaces
for their participation/performativity (at least when musicians explicitly need audience
assistance, like in crowdfunding). This ambivalence is reflected in some musicians’ atti-
tudes about crowdfunding: some of them are happy to be able to connect directly with
audiences and ask their participation (in order to overcome traditional industry media-
tions) but still want to keep clear distinctions with them and limit their participation in
the project, to preserve artistic autonomy.
Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso: This is a suitable place for me to join the conversation. In
my research on independent micro labels in Finland [Chapter 26], I found out that
the intangibility of virtual music culture is perceived as somehow inauthentic. The
micro labels consider physical recordings as authentic “works of art,” while imple-
menting virtual space for more intense communication and networking with audi-
ences as well as other labels and artists. It might be an overstatement to say that they
see virtual distribution of music as a threat to their culture of production, although
with being immersed in the virtual music culture via numerous websites, the attitude
of these labels (often run by record collectors) toward the value of digital music is
quite conservative. Interestingly, even crowdfunding is considered a threat to the
autonomy of a label, by some of the labels. This is in fact in line with what Adam
and Francesco wrote above. The virtual realm is an option for artists seeking to find
alternatives to the more traditional cultures of production of the micro and other
record labels.
Connecting this to the conversation on the universal meaning of virtual music,
I  doubt that there is any. What it means for these small producers is different from
what it means to artists, composers, audiences, backers, net labels, or corporate music
industries. But to say something more concrete, briefly commenting on the earlier con-
versation by Phil and Paul and others, I agree with Manuel Castells, according to whom
“all reality is virtually perceived.”16 To me the question is not then what is real and what
is virtual, but to what extent the experience is virtual, or the degree of the mediation, to
be more precise. This degree of mediation has deepened due to the Internet, allowing
us to mediate more and more information. Back to the micro labels: their ideal virtual
music culture is one with a tense communication, but where, despite all the streaming,
the physical record is still the master.
 Authors’ Blog   629

Adam Trainer: It’s interesting to hear you speak about the conservative nature of
these labels, Juho. In a culture where so many of our experiences with music have
shifted online, away from the physical, the attitude of valuing the physicality of music
is often perceived as antiquated and obsolete. But there’s obviously a lot to be said about
the physical forms that music can and does take in an otherwise digitized culture. I’m
wondering whether the majority of these labels favor vinyl as a medium; or does it
extend to other physical forms like CD or even cassette? It is interesting to note that
vinyl has had a resurgence in popularity in particular niche music scenes since, and
arguably as a result of, the digitization of music?
Francesco, in answer to your question about the source of irony for these emerging
musical forms, my research has traced a link, albeit a somewhat tangential one, between
chillwave, which is influenced variously by 1980s electronic music, and an earlier musi-
cal trend, that of electroclash, which activated irony through a somewhat nihilistic and
aesthetically pointed agenda. In this instance, authenticity is achieved through a know-
ing inauthenticity, a celebration of trash culture through a self-aware rejection of it
politically. Alternately, chillwave and other forms of what I’ve labeled post-ironic music
are more apolitical. I believe that they’re actually searching for a sense of affective and
personalized engagement with trash culture, or culture with seemingly low status in
terms of cultural capital. For chillwave it’s yacht rock and bubblegum pop. For hypna-
gogic pop it’s the music of 1980s and 1990s capitalist culture, music from commercials
and Saturday morning cartoons. For vaporwave it’s music from corporate documen-
tary and shopping-mall muzak. These forms of music seek out the inauthentic and try
to locate them as a site of aesthetic possibility and malleability. A lot of this achieved by
activating the visual cues that have come to represent these forms, so in many ways this
music works only through the confluence of audio and visual, which when dislocated
from our understandings of live music culture becomes an inherently virtual experi-
ence itself.
Paul Carr: (Due to word length limitations and publisher deadlines, the discussion
was closed on August 8, 2013.) However, these debates and discussions are not finite,
and it is anticipated that in the future more insights will be gained from the continu-
ing history of the virtual and its relationship to music. It is hoped that readers will feel
compelled to continue this debate by contributing to the blog at https://musicvirtuality.
wordpress.com.

Notes
1. Fleetwood Mac. Rumours.
2. The Beatles. “All You Need Is Love.”
3. The Beatles. “Hey Jude.”
4. Torino (1991).
5. Lady Gaga. Born This Way.
6. For example, see https://realworldrecords.com/remixed/group/84776/peter-gabriel-
shock- the- monkey-remix-competition/.
630   Authors’ Blog

7. Radiohead. In Rainbows.
8. See the companion website for examples of the compositions we are working on.
9. Borgo (2006).
10. The Monkees. “I’m a Believer.”
11. Various artists, Shrek.
12. Priest (2001), 290.
13. Sanden (2012), 45–68.
14. Voegelin (2010), 22.
15. See https://www.frieze.com/issue/article/music4/.
16. Castells ([1996], 2010), 404.

References
Book, Articles, and Websites
Borgo, David. 2006. Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age. New York: Continuum.
Castells, Manuel. [1996] 2010. The Information Age. Economy, Society, and Culture. Vol. I: The
Rise of the Network Society. Chichester: Wiley.
Priest, Stephen. 2001. Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings. London: Routledge.
Sanden, Paul. 2012. “Virtual Liveness and Sounding Cyborgs: John Oswald’s ‘Vane’.” Popular
Music 31(1): 45–68.
Torino, Thomas. 1991. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic
Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology 43(2). Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Voegelin, Salome. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence:  Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art.
New York: Continuum.

Audio Material
Beatles, the. 1967. “All You Need is Love.” Parlophone, R5620. 7-inch single recording.
Originally released in 1967.
Beatles, the. 1968. “Hey Jude.” Apple Records, 2276. 7-inch single recording. Originally
released in 1968.
Fleetwood Mac 1977. Rumours, Warner Bros. Records, K56344. LP recording. Originally
released in 1977.
Lady Gaga. 2011. Born This Way. Streamline Records, 602527252766.
Monkees, the. 1966. “I’m a Believer.” Flashback Records, AFS-9119. 7-inch single recording.
Originally released in 1966.
Radiohead. 2007. In Rainbows. XL Recordings, XLCD 324. CD recording. Originally released
in 2007.
Various artists. 2011. Shrek—Music from the Motion Picture. Dreamwords Records,
0044-50305-02. CD recording. Originally released in 2001.
 Glossary

Edited by Shara Rambarran

As we reach the end of the Handbook, the issues surrounding music and virtuality
continue to thrive and stimulate debate. At the time of writing, there have been fur-
ther developments concerning many of the issues discussed in this handbook, and
new ones have also formed in the field of music and virtuality. Although space pre-
cludes a detailed discussion of the exciting (and disruptive) growth of these digital
technologies, we would nevertheless highlight recent developments, such as major
and independent recording artists who are continuing to offer their fans the oppor-
tunity to download free music or to remix tracks online (e.g., the Weeknd, Public
Enemy); use of the Freemium (business) model as an alternative way for musicians to
be discovered (started by the likes of the Artic Monkeys in 2004); unsigned musicians
who have gained chart success through Internet video exposure and virality such as
YouTube (e.g., Passenger); the growth of crowdfunding online platforms where fans
can financially support a proposed (musical) product and interact with the artist/cre-
ator (e.g., Patreon); the prospects of alternative MP3 playback devices (e.g., Google
Glass, PhoneBloks, iWatch); the vinyl revival to combat current methods of MP3 con-
sumption and distribution (e.g., the annual Record Store Day event); the growth of
music apps (Vevo, Amazon Cloud Player, Shazam, Mondia Mix, etc.); the possibility
of virtual musicians and instruments recreating classic tunes or creating new sounds
(e.g., Zenph’s RePerformance, Will.I.Am’s and Yuri Suzuki’s Pyramidi, Mi.Mu gloves);
the rise of the laptop (and tablet) DJ and its use of MIDI controllers and software such
as Ableton, Maschine, and Native Instruments (with the likes of Monolake, Daedelus,
Jeremy Ellis, Flying Lotus); the resurgence of performing in virtual worlds (e.g., Oculus
Rift); and the growing presence of virtual performers (e.g., Hatsune Miku supporting
Lady Gaga on her ArtRave tour; the virtual performance of the late Michael Jackson at
the 2014 Billboard Music Awards). There is also the rapid impact that streaming is hav-
ing on the musician, industry, and consumer—for instance, the emergence of Dr Dre’s
Beats Music (Apple’s first streaming service) and Jay Z’s takeover of TIDAL; permitting
stream sales to be eligible in the UK Charts (the first UK number one to include such
sales were Universal’s Ariana Grande’s single “Problem” in 2014, and Sam Smith’s album
In the Lonely Hour in 2015); the consideration of stream sales to be included in the BPI
Chart awards (e.g., Universal’s Jessie J’s 2011 hit “Price Tag”); and confirmation that
632   Glossary

Spotify’s streaming service is gaining more profit than the sales of MP3s, thus becom-
ing a popular form of music consumption (Titcomb 2015, Toppa 2015).
Although these developments are yet to be fully explored, the embedded concepts
and analytical framing draw on key terms and, as such, carry a familiar terminology.
At the same time, it is recognized that the definitions offered are part of an active and
dynamic vocabulary and therefore involve critical engagement according to context.
What the Glossary offers is a guide to the specialized terms and concepts that are fre-
quently mentioned in the Handbook and that can be applied to future developments in
music and virtuality. A sincere thank-you goes to the contributors who offered defini-
tions to the terms used in their chapters.

Coda

I would like to use this opportunity to thank my co-editor, Sheila, for her support, kind-
ness, dedication, and belief in Music and Virtuality, and in me.

ABC mode: a term used by players of the Lord of the Rings Online videogame to denote
a mode of music creation based on the triggering of precomposed sound files. The
sound is generated by depressing individual keys on a computer keyboard in real time.
Actuality vs. reality: in the context of virtuality, actuality can be observed as the
“actual” surroundings, situations, or facts. This concept can be enhanced or
sensed as “real” through virtuality, without the limitations that may be restricted
in reality. Reality, then, is considered to be of an experienced nature, in which
the “real” has existed or still occurs in real time or in life/object form. This con-
cept is explored further by the philosopher Brian Massumi, who, building on the
work of Gilles Deleuze, considers (2002) the corporeal in relation to the virtual to
examine how our reactions to the virtual are real, even when what produces these
reactions is not actual. This understanding allows philosophy to have a political
“activist” function, in that it can suggest real consequences of the virtual arts for
our society.
AIFF: Audio Interchange File Format. Developed in 1988 by Apple, AIFFs are uncom-
pressed audio file formats.
Algorave: real-time electronic dance music created from algorithmic processes. See
also: Algorithm, Rave.
Algorithm: the sequential system of rules and procedures that achieve a desired prod-
uct. See also: Algorave, DSP (digital signal processing): .
Ambiance: a therapeutic soundscape listening application or “app” for digital mobile
devices. Designed by Matt Coneybeare of Urban Apps in 2008, Ambiance allows
listeners to listen to, and mix together, hundreds of sounds, ranging from natural
environments to industrial sounds and electronic tones.
 Glossary   633

Ambient music: a term coined by English producer and musician Brian Eno to describe
a gentle tonal music that enhances its listening space.
Anime: Japanese animation that encompasses a plethora of genres and themes, and is
aimed at a variety of audiences.
AO (animation override): a script that overrides the default animations of avatars for
walking, running, standing, sitting, and other basic movements.
ArtistShare: the first crowdfunding website to support creation of music. Founded by
Brian Camelio in 2001, this U.S.-based site hosts primarily jazz artists but also sup-
ports comedy, pop, and other styles.
Artistic agent: the virtual, or imagined, representation of the musical group, with
which the audience is familiar through musical products and media releases. The
mixture of musical components, such as instrumental mixes, playing styles, and lyri-
cal nuances is also attributed to the agential artist.
Asynchronous: describes tools enabling communication and collaboration over a
period of time through a “different time, different place” mode (think multiple time
zones and places). These tools allow people to connect at each person’s own conve-
nience and schedule.
Attachments: objects that are worn by the avatar, such as clothing, body parts (e.g.,
skin and hair), and musical instruments or other props.
Audio mixing console: an electronic device used to combine or mix audio signals, and
in some cases also to change its level, timbre, and frequency response (equalization).
Audio signal: representation of sound through electric signals.
Authorial mediation: establishment of the author’s identity through secondary sources,
such as press releases, interviews, compact discs, song lyrics, or music videos.
Auto-tune: a pitch-correcting software program developed by Antares Audio Technologies,
which measures and “bends” pitch to the nearest correct semitone. Nowadays, spoken
word and everyday sounds can also be auto-tuned to produce melody.
Avatar (AV/avie): from the Sanskrit avatâra, which means the descent or incarnation of a deity.
On the Internet, it is a digital body that represents a human participant (e.g., as in Second
Life). Avatars are typically humanoid, but may take a variety on nonhumanlike forms.
Backers: a crowdfunding term for funders, used on Kickstarter.
BIA Media Access Pro Database: a repository of information on radio and other media
disseminated by BIA/Kelsey, including information on music use analyzed by genre.
Believers: a crowdfunding term for funders, used on Sellaband.
Binaural tone/beats: auditory processing phenomena (literally, virtual tones) that
occur when two tones of slightly different frequencies are sounded simultaneously.
A virtual third “beating” tone or pulsation is a perceptual gestalt by-product of hear-
ing these two differently pitched tones. For example, if a tone of 440 Hz is heard
alongside a tone of 430 Hz, a resulting binaural tone of 10 Hz is perceived.
Biophilia: term introduced by the biologist E. O. Wilson to describe the innate human
affinity for nature and other forms of life.
Blog: truncated from “web log,” a blog is a website consisting of diarylike entries known
as “posts.”
634   Glossary

Bots: pseudo-avatars, which look and talk like avatars. They are pre-programmed with
a number of stock responses, but there is no real person behind them.
Bounce: the process of compiling individual recordings in a multitrack into a cohesive,
mono or stereo mix in a digital audio workstation.
Californian Ideology: a mid-1990s theory developed by Richard Barbrook and Andy
Cameron (1995) that anticipated debates concerning virtual reality, with particular
respect to questions of empowerment and disempowerment of the citizen during the
“digital age.”
CD-ROM: compact disc read-only memory. A compact disc used as a multimedia car-
rier format in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Chillwave: a postmillennial style of pop music that fuses electronic instrumentation
with a 1980s commercial pop and soft-rock influence to create a dreamlike aesthetic.
Circuit of culture: a model in cultural analysis, rooted in the British cultural studies
tradition, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between five moments where mean-
ing is circulated: production, representation, regulation, consumption, and identity.
Cloud: a metaphor for the Internet. The cloud also refers to the way of storing informa-
tion in a digital format in a network, such as the Internet, which can be accessed from
a number of locations with various network technologies (laptop, smartphone, etc.).
CMC: computer-mediated communication. A  communication function that allow
social interaction and networking on the Internet.
Compact disc: a digital audio and data storage format.
Composer: a person who creates music, whether by musical notation or oral tradi-
tion, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic
material.
Compression: audio compression narrowing a sound signal’s dynamic range by attenu-
ating loud parts and amplifying quiet sounds. This process is achieved by using a
compressor.
Crash: the event when a computer device, an operating system, or a software applica-
tion ceases to respond and function properly, causing interruption of its operation.
Crowdfunding: the pooled effort of a group of individuals who network online to sup-
port a project, organization, individual, or cause. Also known as fan funding, crowd
financing, crowd equity, or crowd sourcing.
Corporate system: a turn of phrase coming from Deleuze’s short but suggestive 1990
essay “Postscript on Societies of Control,” which gestures to the resonances between
corporations, everyday life, and circulation of power.
Cultural manager: a manager that controls both cultural resources and products (tan-
gible or intangible) of a creator (i.e., the artist or executant).
Cutismo: a young Japanese girl or woman innocently displaying cuteness. This is typi-
cally observed in Japanese animation.
Cyberlibertarian: a person, according to Patrick Burkart (2010), who promotes “a
communicative rationality in the everyday activities of cyberspace.” The beliefs of
Cyberliberties include “the right to communicate,” “access to the ‘networked public
 Glossary   635

sphere’,” and “the preservation of open-information architectures, public-domain

works, and ‘free culture’ ” (7–8).
Cyborg (cybernetic organism): a life form or organism composed of organic and
bionic material.
Database: the formal and experiential features of new media sites and services that rely
on processes of interaction through data search and retrieval.
DAW (digital audio workstation): an electronic system and software application (such
as Pro Tools or Logic) designed solely or primarily for recording, editing, and play-
ing back digital audio.
De-essing: a common form of dynamics processing used in sound production to elimi-
nate sibilant “s,” “t,” “sh,” and “z” sounds from vocal performances.
Delay: a sound effect in music involving repetition of a sound signal followed by a
decaying repeat or number of repeats, similar to an echo.
DI (direct injection): an instrument signal plugged into a mixing console directly,
bypassing a microphone.
Digitization: the process of turning analog or physical media into digital goods. For
example, the shift from CDs to digital music files is a form of digitization for the
music commodity (just as the shift from records to CDs was an earlier moment of
digitization).
Disintermediation: the decline of intermediaries in the record industries such as labels,
shops, and distributors.
Distro: a mail-order distributor of small labels and fanzines, often a record shop or
a label.
Distroid: a style of dark electronic music influenced by EDM, which focuses on the
sonic and visual aesthetics of high-definition digital media culture.
DIY: do-it-yourself.
Download: to obtain a file (such as an MP3) from another source on the Internet.
DSP (digital signal processing): modification of a digital signal via mathematical and
algorithmic processes. DSP modification is dependent on the domain representation
of a digital signal, such as discrete time or discrete frequency. See also: Algorithm.
DRM (digital rights management): a technological solution to prevent illegal copying
of CDs or MP3s.
E-commerce: electronic commerce on the Internet.
EDM (electronic dance music): a genre in popular music that is best understood as
predominantly digitally created. The dance orientation of this music is such that
1970s disco is typically understood as its forerunner rather than more avant-garde
traditions of musics that sought to incorporate electronic elements.
Envelope: the shape of a level of signal or sound over time.
EQ (equalization): in sound recording, the process of adjusting the balance among dif-
ferent frequency bands. EQ devices boost or cut the energy level of individual bands.
Ex ante crowdfunding: financial support to achieve a mutually desired result (i.e.,
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign).
636   Glossary

Ex post facto crowdfunding: financial support offered for a completed product (i.e.,
Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign).
Facebook: a social networking service formed in 2004. Users can post photographs,
stories, messages, join clubs, and find friends online. Nowadays, it is common to use
a music hub where major and independent labels, signed and unsigned musicians
can post their music, videos, news, and network with fans.
Fanzine: a amateur magazine made by (music) fans.
Field recording: an audio recording produced outside a recording studio with portable
recording equipment. Field recordings are often of nature soundscapes, or of musi-
cians in their local context.
Filter: a tool that enhances or reduces selected audio frequencies of waveforms.
Freesound.org: an online repository of Creative Commons licensed audio samples
(such as nature field recordings, sound effects, and musical instrument sounds).
Furry: humanoid avatars with animal heads and body parts.
Gapless playback: uninterrupted playback between the end of one audio file and the
beginning of the next.
Gatekeeper: a person whose role is to filter creative content through use of a set crite-
rion (commercial potential, creative content, level of innovation, etc.).
Glitch: a genre of music that incorporates the sounds of mechanical failure, such as
crackles, pops, hisses, buzzes, and the general melee of sounds produced by techno-
logical equipment.
Google: a multinational corporation and digital platform specializing in Internet-related
services and products (e.g., search, cloud computing, software, and communications
technologies). The term google is also used as a verb to indicate searching for infor-
mation on the Internet via a web browser.
Griefer: a gamer (such as an avatar) who disrupts the normal flow of social activity
through socially unacceptable behavior, hacking, or boycotting social or cultural
events.
Haptic: the sense of touch, or forms of nonverbal communication involving touch.
Common examples involving technology include smartphones or tablets that have
touch screens, computers that have trackpads, and television or other monitor dis-
plays that can be manipulated through direct touch. Haptic technologies allow novel
interactions with computer interfaces (such as swiping through a booklet of pho-
tos, tilting a device during gameplay, pinching and zooming to enlarge or reduce
documents, etc.).
Hauntology: a term coined by Jacques Derrida (Spectres of Marx, 1994). Hauntology
indicates the ghostly presence of apparently abandoned or disregarded ideas and
concepts in contemporary life and thought. The term was adopted by music critics
(e.g., Simon Reynolds) in the 2000s to describe a branch of electronica that refer-
ences obscure, outmoded, or ephemeral music.
Hemispherical speakers: a multidirectional speaker array constructed into one hem-
ispherical object. Each speaker may project a single sound in multiple directions,
 Glossary   637

thus simulating acoustic properties akin to analog instruments, or several sounds in

specific directions. See also: Laptop Ensemble, Laptop Orchestra.
Hocket interchange: a technique in which instruments or voices quickly trade playing
or singing a melodic line between them. The effect is that one voice is silent while
another sounds, but the complete melodic fragment is audible as it is sounded in the
differing lines.
Hologram: from holos “whole” and gramma “message,” a three-dimensional image
formed by splitting a light beam, creating an interference, and illuminating the pat-
tern. The idea and the name are attributed to Dennis Gabor in the 1940s.
Hypermediacy: the combination/incorporation of multiple media at once. The “win-
dowed style” of webpages, multimedia programs, or the cluttered visual space of a CNN
television news screen that superimposes stock prices, weather updates, and other news
alerts over the newscasters are all examples of hypermediacy. See also: Remediation.
Hyperreality: a term used by cultural theorists (e.g., Jean Baudrillard), artists,
and others to denote a form of experience in which the real and virtual become
indistinguishable.
Hypnagogic pop: a form of psychedelic drone music that emerged in the late 2000s,
often characterized by its misremembrance and psychic mutation of preexisting cul-
tural texts from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Icecast: nonproprietary, free software for streaming media, particularly audio, over the
Internet.
Identity: a term used to describe who someone is. This includes understandings of
personality, ideology, and past behaviors, an individual’s motivations, and expecta-
tions for future behavior.
Impression: an overall mental representation of an individual. This includes all aspects
of an identity.
Indexi-local: an online space that interweaves with local regions both narratively and
administratively. Like a book’s index, local regions appear within indexi-local spaces
as metadata that organize the circulation of information.
Indie: the diminutive of independent and independence. In the context of music, it
refers to music produced on record labels that circulate outside, or independently of,
the major recording industry.
ISP (Internet service provider): the service or company that provides the Internet and
its related services to the user.
iPad: a tablet computer that runs Apple’s iOS operating system. Many laptop musicians
use the iPad as a controller for performance, owing to its compactness and Wi-Fi
accessibility. See also: Laptop Ensemble, Laptop Orchestra.
Karaoke (lit. “empty orchestra”): a form of entertainment where participants take
turns singing along to popular songs (without vocal tracks), while lyrics are shown
on screen, usually accompanied by a video.
Kickstarter: a crowdfunding platform founded in 2009 for creative artists, and host
site to Amanda Palmer’s successful million-dollar campaign. It funds not only music
638   Glossary

projects but also films, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, and other
inventions and projects.
Lag: time delay in online communication generated by the back-and-forth signal trans-
mission along the emission and reception processes through the Internet.
Laptop Ensemble: a chamber-size group of performers on more than one
microprocessor-based instrument who emphasize the sound of both the individual
performers and the entire collective. See also: Laptop Orchestra.
Laptop Orchestra: a large group of performers on more than one microprocessor-
based instrument who emphasize the totality of sound created by all the performers.
See also: Laptop Ensemble.
Linden dollar: Second Life currency, named for the company that created Second Life,
Linden Lab. Linden dollars (L$) are traded on the LindeX exchange, a variable-rate
market. The exchange rate typically stays around L$250 = US$1.
Live coding: the practice of creating music in real time via textually based
programmatic means.
Live music: real-time musical performances. Live music can also refer to karaoke per-
formances and DJs playing commercially produced recordings in real time.
Live streaming: also known as live video streaming. To circulate and receive live visual/
audio broadcasts on the Internet. The most recent trend in streaming live are apps
(such as Periscope and Meerkat) that enable the user to video-capture moments of
themselves or events, and instantly share over live feeds to interested parties (e.g.,
friends, families, fans). It is also considered as a live visual equivalent to miniblogs
and social networking services such as Twitter, where fans and followers can leave
comments and emoticons. Refer to Glancy (2015), Issac and Goel (2015), and Pullen
(2015) for more information. See also: Streaming.
Local: an ambiguous term that connotes geographic locations that are more specific
than national identifiers.
Long tail: according to Chris Anderson (2004), an increase in supply of and demand
for niche products in the marketplace due to the specialized or larger selections pro-
vided by online shops.
Low-pass filter: a filter that allows low-frequency signals to pass and attenuates other
signals with frequencies higher than the filter’s cutoff frequency.
Mashup: usually associated with an unauthorized hybrid song featuring two or more
component parts of two or more songs. Nowadays, this concept can be applied to
manipulating various digital data sources (e.g., animation, film, images, video per-
formances) into one file, product, or piece of work.
Mecha: a genre in anime and science fiction. The genre is composed of fighting and
powerful machines or robots.
Mediated interaction: an interaction created by passing information through a sec-
ondary source.
Mediators: the media that relay information regarding the artist.
Metadata: the information produced about information that facilitates its cataloguing
on the one hand, and searchability on the other.
 Glossary   639

Metaverse: a term used alternately for a virtual world, such as Second Life, or in refer-
ence to all virtualized networked space, including the Internet.
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface): an industry standard allowing digital
music devices to communicate with each other.
Mindfulness: a quality of attention focused on immediate experience in the present.
The concept has ancient roots in Buddhist thought and has been applied as a thera-
peutic tool in Western psychology.
Mix stem: a subgroup compiled from individual instrument and/or vocal recordings
from an original multitrack recording.
MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games): virtual computer games played by
multiple (or virtual) users. Games include Second Life, World of Warcraft, Adventure
Rock, Lego Universe, and the Sims On-line. Other games such as Halo can also be
played by people interacting with each other via the Internet and game device (such
as Nintendo’s Wii and X-Box).
MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game): a graphic application
where a large number of users connected from different places around the world
through the Internet interact online with one another in real time within a virtual
platform, assuming various roles.
Mon: a Japanese symbol of a family or company crest, and a warrior form of identity (as
observed in Japanese culture).
MP3 (Motion Picture Experts Format Group I, Layer 3, also known as the ISO-MPEG
Audio Layer-3 or MPEG1): a digital (audio) file format developed by the German
Frauenhofer Institute.
Multitrack: a recording session or device containing the individual component instru-
ment and vocal recordings that make up a complete sound recording.
Musique concrète: a term coined by French radio engineer and composer Pierre
Schaeffer in the early 1940s to describe a form of electroacoustic music that is made
from electronic sounds and field recordings.
Musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”): a term coined by French composer Erik
Satie in 1917 to describe a repetitive music that furnishes a space by functioning as
background sound.
Musicking: in his book of the same title (1998), Christopher Small argues for introduc-
ing a new word to the English dictionary, musicking (from the verb to music), mean-
ing any activity involving or related to music performance.
Music scene: an emergent social entity that concentrates on a particular musical prac-
tice and takes on unique expressive forms depending on its notoriety and locality.
Typically, the community integrates creative use of technologies, material cultures,
and social codes. Sociologists Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (2004) parti-
tion the notion of a music scene into three intersecting levels: local, translocal, and
virtual. See also: Network.
MUVE (multiuser virtual environment): similar to MMOGs, but not focused on game
playing. Users can congregate and communicate in a virtual environment setting
(such as Second Life).
640   Glossary

MySpace: a social networking service used for music dissemination. Founded in 2003
and the most visited social networking site until 2008, when it was overtaken in pop-
ularity by Facebook.
Neoliberal: a wide-ranging term that gestures to the encroachment of market forces and
corporate capitalism within everyday life. Characteristics of capitalism in the neo-
liberal era include deregulation of markets, flexible accumulation, global extension
of corporations, and privileging of individual will as central to society (Fisher 2009).
Net label: a label producing music recordings only in digital format and distributing
them only on the Internet.
Network: the abstract idea that elements connect in various manners to form an
identifiable collective. These elements may be motivated, neutral, or combative to
the notion of the network, which can lead to its longevity or disintegration. See
also: Music Scene, OSC, UDP, TCP.
On-demand: music streamed from a website on demand instead of downloading
music files.
OSC (Open Sound Control): developed by Adrian Freed and Matt Wright at the Center
for New Music and Audio Technologies, University of California, Berkeley, OSC is
a protocol for computers and other control devices to communicate and network in
real time for the purposes of audio and visual processing. See also: Network, UDP.
Open source software: software packages that are available to users online, free of
charge.
Orientalism: a theory associated with Edward Said (1979) and used in areas of criti-
cal thought associated with cultural studies. Orientalism denotes tendencies toward
generic and homogenizing expressions of an Eastern “otherness” by Western artists
and writers.
Overload: the situation when a device or program is forced to perform more activity
or operations than it is capable of managing, which provokes a crash (see: Crash).
P2P: “peer to peer” network featuring computer systems linked via the Internet. This
allows files to be shared between “peers” without the need for a server.
Panning: a process whereby a sound source is placed at a chosen point in the stereo
sound field, left or right. Mixing consoles and DAWs feature panning controls, nor-
mally in the form of a button or knob.
Paratextual products: the additional rewards and incentives provided in return for
a crowdfunded pledge. These objects and experiences are paratextual in the sense
that they are “outside the text,” in this case, outside the primary object that is being
funded.
Parcel: an area of virtual land on Second Life that is at least 16 square meters. Each
parcel may be assigned a separate audio stream.
Participants: a crowdfunding term for funders, on the ArtistShare website.
Participatory cultures: a term to describe interactive Internet behavior in its Web 2.0
phase (e.g., uploading YouTube videos, and users commenting on them).
Patron: in crowdfunding, a patron is a person/fan who wishes to financially support an
artist’s/creator’s work. Also, a crowdfunding term for funders, on Patreon.
 Glossary   641

Patreon: a crowdfunding online platform for artworks (founded in 2013).

Pledgers: a crowdfunding term for funders, on PledgeMusic.
PledgeMusic: the first crowdfunding website to support creation of music (founded
in 2009).
Praxis: the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practiced, embodied,
or realized. Praxis may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, real-
izing, or practicing ideas.
Prim: a single digital object. Attachments are typically built from multiple prims.
Produsage: a merging of the words “production” and “usage,” popularized by Axel
Bruns (2008, 2009). Produsage refers to the type of user-led content creation that
takes place in a variety of online environments. The concept blurs the boundaries
between passive consumption and active production.
Prosumer: in the 1980s, futurologist Alvin Toffler (1980) contracted the words “pro-
ducer” and “consumer” to coin the concept of “prosumer.” Prosumers were seen to
be common consumers who would each become active to help personally improve
or design the goods and services of the marketplace, transforming it and their roles
as consumers.
Publishing: in a publishing contract, the artist, composer, or song writer assigns a part
of his or her copyright to a work to a publisher, who then receives a proportional part
from the copyright revenues of the work.
Rave: a large party or festival that features electronic dance music. See: Algorave.
Record producer: an individual working within the music industry whose job is to over-
see and manage the recording (that is, “production”) of an artist’s music. A producer
has many roles, among them gathering ideas for the project, selecting songs and/or
musicians, coaching the artist and musicians in the studio, controlling the recording
sessions, and supervising the entire process through mixing and mastering.
Region: commonly referred to as “sims,” regions are sections of land 65,536 square
meters in size that may be purchased by residents on Second Life. Regions may be
further divided into parcels.
Remediation: a process of mediation that refers to technological and experiential fea-
tures of new media. In terms of technology, it involves the incorporation and refash-
ioning of old media by new ones (e.g., embedded video in a webpage). In terms of
experience, it also pertains to the heightened intensity of one’s experience of new
media, as well as a spread of experiences across a number of media technologies: two
logics defined by (see Bolter and Grusin 1999) as the immediacy and hypermediacy
of new media.
Remix: an interpretation of an existing sound recording. A  remix may take many
forms. Extended remixes are longer versions of the original. Remixes may also con-
tain added or subtracted parts.
Reverb: short for “reverberation,” perception of the persistence of a sound after the
original sound is produced.
ReverbNation: a cloud-based service targeted at independent music producers, support-
ing collaboration, promotion, dissemination, and concert booking. Founded in 2006.
642   Glossary

Rez: to make a digital object visible.

Rhizomatic: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the terms rhizome and rhizomatic
to describe theory and research that allow multiple, nonhierarchical entry and exit
points in data representation and interpretation. A rhizome works with planar and
trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and lin-
ear connections.
Roland TR-808: an early, analog drum programming machine made by Roland
between 1980 and 1984.
Royalty: a copyright payment or artist’s share of record sales.
Sellaband: a crowdfunding platform for creative artists (founded in 2006).
Semblance: the aesthetic production and capture of the virtual that opens up questions
of the experiential potentiality of artistic events (see Massumi 2011).
sc-tweets: SuperCollider compositions whose source code is at most 140 characters
long, the length of a “tweet.” See: Twitter.
Shōjo: an anime term for a leading character, a pre-teenage girl.
SHOUTcast: proprietary software for streaming media, particularly audio, over
the Internet. Belgian-based Radionomy purchased SHOUTcast in January 2014
from AOL.
Silicon Valley: a nickname for the South Bay portion of the San Francisco Bay, Silicon
Valley occupies roughly the Santa Clara Valley. Coined in 1971, the term became
widely known with the introduction of the IBM PC and related microprocessor
hardware in the 1980s.
Sim: a reference to parcels or regions of land in virtual worlds. It can also refer to the
physical server on which information regarding virtual space is stored.
Simulcast: simultaneous broadcast of events occurring across locations or media. See
also: Network.
Songkick: a website that provides personalized news about live music events, including
the feature to “bid” to have one’s favorite bands play in the city of one’s choice.
Soundscape: a term coined by Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schafer in the
late 1960s to describe the acoustic environment of a place.
Super soldier: a term to describe someone with many skills (warrior, assassin, killer,
soldier, ninja, action hero, and so on). The term is usually associated with anime and
science fiction.
Streaming: to have instant access to media and music in real time without the need for
downloading files. This is achieved by transferring data through a remote server that
are constantly received by and presented to an end user, while being delivered by a
steady and continuous stream.
Tagging: a keyword assigned to a piece of metadata allowing it to be found through
online browsing.
TAZ (temporary autonomous zone): a geographic area that passes outside of civic or
state control and so becomes freed of norms of behavior and propriety. This proc-
ess is usually achieved in contravention of laws, and so the zone typically lasts only
for a finite period of time. The idea of the TAZ is applied to spontaneous protests,
 Glossary   643

protest occupations, riots, squatted buildings, and dance events that are not licensed
or sanctioned by the state.
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol): an Internet protocol suite that provides a reli-
able, ordered delivery of a stream of eight-bit binary data, known as octets, between
computer programs connected to a local network. See also: Network.
Technological nature: a concept developed by psychologist Peter H.  Kahn (2011),
through his studies with digital picture windows and robotic pets, to describe elec-
tronic and digital technologies that mediate, augment, or simulate the natural world.
Tessitura: the vocal range of a singer where the voice presents the best-sounding tex-
ture or tone quality and color.
Therapeutic listening: using music or sound as an aid to relaxation, concentration, or
meditation.
Torrent: a file that connects downloaders and uploaders in BitTorrent or a correspond-
ing P2P network.
Translocal: one-third of Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson’s tripartite definition
of the music scene. The translocal level focuses on the interaction of members of
disparate local music scenes. See also: Music scene.
Twitter: an online social networking service that enables registered users to read and
post 140-character “tweets.” See also: sc-tweets.
Tumblr: an online social networking website that allows users to upload multimedia
content in the form of a microblog. Posted content is typically reduced to several
sentences, images, or website links. Users can follow public blogs or make their blogs
private. See also: sc-tweets.
Upload: to place a file on the Internet to allow users to view or download it.
UDP (User Datagram Protocol): an Internet protocol suite that allows computer appli-
cations to send messages, known as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol
(IP) network without prior communication. See also: Network, OSC.
Vaporwave: a musical-visual aesthetic characterized by its recreation and appropria-
tion of retro-futurist renderings of global capitalism and technological obsolescence.
Viewer: the local application that is stored on a user’s personal computer and provides
the interface for interacting within the virtual world.
Vinyl recording: a record format in which the audio signal is carved as a groove on a
vinyl plate.
Virtual: a term that gestures to liminal experiences that are “real, but not concrete” (see
Shields 2003), or sites of potentiality. It is also considered as a simulation of a physi-
cal reality effected through technological means.
Virtual authorship: generation of a psychologically real authorial voice from mediated
materials.
Vocaloid (Vocalo abbrev.): a series of voice synthesizer software developed by Yamaha
since 2003. Using prerecorded voice packages, the software allows users to produce
a vocal track by inputting lyrics and melody. The term can also refer to music cre-
ated or enhanced with the software (vocaloid music) or fan-creator cultures focused
around it (vocaloid cultures).
644   Glossary

Wii: a video game console released by Nintendo in 2006. See also: Wii Remote.
Wii Remote: a handheld controller that detects three-dimensional movement.
Although its intended use is in conjunction with the Wii video game console, artists
and musicians have repurposed the Wii Remote for various artistic practices, includ-
ing works for laptop ensemble and laptop orchestra. See also: Wii, Laptop Ensemble,
Laptop Orchestra.
YouSendIt: an Internet “cloud storage” service that allowed users to send, receive, digi-
tally sign, and synchronize files that were too large for email. Renamed Hightail in
2013, the service can now also be used via desktop client or mobile devices, or from
within business application plugins.
YouTube: a video-sharing website on which users can upload, view, and share a wide
variety of content, including TV clips, music videos, amateur content such as video
blogging, and short original or educational material.

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 Index

Figures and notes are indicated by f and n following the page number.

Aaker, Jennifer L., 286, 299, 300 “The Alchemical Theatre” (Artaud), 161n5

Abba, 530, 531 Alexander, Christopher, 474n27
Abbate, Carolyn, 206 Alive 2007 (Daft Punk), 289
ABC-​TV, 39 Allen, Harry, 66, 77n2
Abebe, Nitsuh, 601 All Hope Is Gone (Slipknot), 270
Abele, John, 243 “All Is Full of Love” (Bjork), 117
Abercrombie, Nicholas, 113 All Saints (group), 361, 369, 373n6
Absolutely Free (Zappa), 87 All Songs Considered “Live in Concert”
Absolute Music, 82, 92n4 (NPR), 182
Acid Pro, 278, 280n23 All This Time (Sting), 483
Acorn, 514, 522 “All Together Now” (Beatles), 41
Acoustic ecology, 457, 471 “All You Need Is Love” (Beatles), 38, 41, 43,
Actualization, 18, 131, 142, 515–​516, 519, 524 44, 47, 616, 629n2
Adam (Ambiance user), 464–​465, 464f “Alone Again (Naturally)” (O’Sullivan), 66
Adorno, Theodor, 542, 560 Al Qadiri, Fatima, 423
Adventure Rock (virtual computer Alvin and the Chipmunks, 2, 113, 132–​134,
game), 161n17 136, 140
Advisory Circle (Jon Brooks), 394, 395. See The Alvin Show (television show), 132
also Brooks, Jon Amadeus (film), 60
Aesthetics, 98, 160, 199, 343, 410, 479, 542, 543 Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan
“Afro-​Left” (Leftfield), 546–​547 (cartoon), 134
“Afro Ride” (Leftfield), 546 Amazon, 28, 346, 500, 524, 601
Agrawal, Ajay, 588, 589, 610n19 Ambiance (app), 8, 449–​450, 455–​456, 459–​
Aguilera, Christina, 279n5 466, 460f, 468–​472
Ahonen, Laura, 282, 284 Ambient music, 238, 410, 456, 460–​463
“Ai, Texas” (Yamashita), 122 American Idol, 351, 485
Aiko (study participant), 119–​121, 123 American Muzak Company. See Muzak
Aja (Steely Dan), 306 Ami (performer), 203–​205, 208
AKB48 (group), 37, 107, 115–​117, 122 Amnesty International, 186
Akimoto, Yasushi, 125n8 Ampex, 306
Akira (anime), 105 Amplification, 587, 588, 590
Akon, 485 Amuro, Namie, 117
Aladdin (film), 63n22 Anderson, Chris, 495, 500
Albarn, Damon, 5, 99, 112, 125n3, 138, 139, 148–​ Anderson, J. R., 284
149, 151, 155, 159, 160, 162nn20–​21, 162n32 Anderson, John, 302n3
Albini, Steve, 325 Andrecheck, Philippe, 516, 517
648   Index

Andrejevic, Mark, 491n4 Asch, S. E., 284

Ang, Ien, 113
“angel” (Lopatin), 331, 412
Angelo (designer), 585–​586
Animations, 5, 13, 52–​54, 57–​62, 134, 140, 167,
179, 193–​196, 203, 212–​213, 216, 223, 421,
486, 626
Anime, 99, 105, 108–​109, 152, 421
Anthology series (Beatles), 23
Anthropomorphic, 129–​130, 222, 223
Antze, Paul, 60
AOM (Avatar Orchestra Metaverse), 192, 193,
202, 203, 383, 387, 389n10
Aoyagi, Hiroshi, 114, 120, 125n4
App-​based albums, 450, 478–​479, 482,
485–​490
Apple, 13, 38, 506
Apple Boutique, 44
App Store, 485, 491n7
Arboretum, 515
Arcade Fire, 517, 522
Arcades (Milton), 81
Archey, Karen, 413
The Archies, 63n22, 112, 133–​134
The Archie Show (television show), 133
Arena Rock, 50n4
Aria (Cage), 350
Ariel, Yaron, 244
Arnopp, Jason, 271, 272, 279nn10–​11
Around the World with the Chipmunks
(album), 132
Artaud, Antonin, 161n5
Arthur, Charles, 484
Artisteconnect, 562
Artist-​Fan Interactivity, 553, 593
Artistic autonomy, 451, 496, 499, 503, 628
Artistic identity, 2, 229–​230, 282–​284, 288–​
289, 298–​301, 615–​616
Artists, 229, 269, 276, 287, 343, 420, 422,
450, 478, 483, 496, 559, 586, 590. See
alsospecific artists
ArtistShare, 553, 562, 588, 589, 593, 596, 596f,
597–​600, 606, 609n15
“The Art of Asking” (Palmer), 601–​602
Art of Record Production, 356
The Art of the Remix, 312
ARTPOP (Lady Gaga), 477–​478, 482, 486,
490–​491
Aschinger, Wieland, 55, 60
Ashby, William, 386
Asher, Jane, 44
Ashurst, Will, 563
Asian Youth Orchestra, 340
Assmann, Jan, 397, 412
Association for the Study of the Art of Record
Production (ASARP), 373n3
Asuka (study participant), 119, 120, 122
Ator, Mike, 323, 324f
Attali, Jacques, 249, 261
Attenborough, David, 486
Atwood, Brett, 484
AU (Frank Millward), 251–​260. See also
Millward, Frank
Aucouturier, Jean-​Julien, 224n5
Audette-​Longo, Michael, 9, 451, 514
Audiences, 5, 6, 12, 35–​37, 40–​46, 48–​49, 90,
98, 113, 115, 117, 120, 123–​124, 167–​168,
171, 174, 182, 186, 189, 192, 195–​199, 201,
211–​218, 220–​222, 241, 285–​287, 299, 301,
366, 382, 422, 557, 559, 566, 616, 628. See
also Fans
Audio Two, 75
Augustine, 613
Auslander, Philip, 4, 5, 12, 13, 35, 70, 73, 77n11,
77n15, 111–​113, 171, 197, 199–​200, 207n17,
258, 260, 480, 491n3, 614–​625
Authenticity, 37, 59, 99, 101, 109, 123, 186, 187,
192, 198, 214, 218, 299, 301, 392, 452, 531,
547, 627, 629
Authorial mediation, 2, 7, 229, 282–​286, 289,
298, 301, 616–​617
Authorship, 6, 7, 130, 227–​230, 259, 269,
276–​278, 328, 360, 551, 557–​558, 568–​569,
606–​607
Autonomy, 277, 430, 450, 451, 499, 502, 504,
627–​628
Avatar (film), 150
“Avatar” (Foolish Frost), 183
Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. See AOM
Avatars, 5, 6, 102, 106, 108–​109, 150, 153, 167,
168, 171, 173–​174, 176–​187, 189, 191–​194,
196, 198, 200–​203, 205, 210, 213, 218,
221, 223
Axelrod, Mitchell, 39
Ayers, Michael D., 432, 502
 Index   649

Azenha, Gustavo S., 594, 608n3 Bauer, Martin W., 118

Azerrad, Michael, 413, 523, 524 Bayard, Pierre, 32n12
Azuma, Hiroki, 113 Bayley, Amanda, 77n12
Baym, Nancy K., 235, 433, 586
Babcock, Joseph, 105 BBC, 43–​44
“Baby” (Bieber), 7, 266, 270–​274 BBC Radiophonic Workshop, 394, 401
“Baby” (Kneale), 400 The Beach: Music from the Motion Picture
Backing tracks, 85, 188, 198–​199, 253, 368, 621 Soundtrack, 373n6
Bagdasarian, Ross, 2, 132, 133 Beach Boys, 106, 306
Baker, LaVern, 51n4 Beadle, Jeremy, 356
Baker, Mary Anne, 473n21 The Beagles (cartoon), 134
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 20, 279n21 Beard, David, 89
Bakula, David, 501, 503 Beastie Boys, 29
Baldini, Chiara, 538 Beast in Swamp (soundscape), 252
Ballard, J. G., 404, 529 Beastles, 29
Balsamo, Anne, 153, 431 Beasts (series), 394, 400
Baltin, Steve, 149 Beatlemania, 45, 48
Bambi (film), 62n2 The Beatles, 4, 11–​13, 21–​26, 29, 32nn7–​9,
The Banana Splits (cartoon), 134 35–​50, 50n2, 50–​51n4, 105, 306, 530, 538,
Bananaz (documentary film), 149 614–​617, 619, 623, 624, 629nn2–​3
Bandcamp, 333, 370, 420, 434, 442 The Beatles (ABC-​TV series), 12, 23,
Bandhood, 332, 429, 434–​436, 438, 442–​443 38–​41, 134
Bands, 11, 17, 229, 239, 242, 266, 269, 315, The Beatles at Shea Stadium, 35, 36
324, 333, 435, 439, 440, 566, 577. See also The Beatles at the Budokan, Tokyo, 36
specific bands The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, 36
Bandstocks, 597 The Beatles Live at the BBC, 36
Bangalter, Thomas, 7, 229, 282, 287–​288, The Beatles Live! At the Star-​Club in
300, 301 Hamburg, Germany, 36
Bannister, John, 609n9 The Beatles: Rock Band (video game), 12,
Bannister, Matthew, 302n4, 442, 524 36, 37, 50
Barbera, Joseph, 52, 60, 62 Beauty and the Beast (film), 63n22
Barbrook, Richard, 543, 544 BEBETUNE$ (Ferraro), 423
Barcode Girlfriend, 117 Beck (performer), 235
Barenaked Ladies, 180 Becker, Howard, 573
Barenboim, Daniel, 340 Beckett, Andy, 400, 403
Barkham, Patrick, 473n22, 548n9 Beckles Willson, Rachel, 340
Barnum & Bailey, 316 The Bee Gees, 530, 531
Barrett, James, 417 Beer, David, 184, 186, 419
Barry, Jeff, 134 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 86, 350, 622
Bartetzki, Andre, 385 “Beginner” (AKB48), 117
Barthes, Roland, 99, 103, 104, 154, 159, 228, Be Here Now (Oasis), 28
269, 280n22, 545 Bélanger, Pierre C., 516, 517
Bartlett, Marie, 519 Belbury Poly, 300, 330, 392, 393, 395, 396, 399
Bates, Eliot, 371 The Belbury Tales, 330, 392–​393, 396, 398–​401,
Bates, Mason, 350 404, 405
Bateson, Gregory, 386 Bell, Helen, 180f
Battle Royale (film), 152, 161n9 Benayoun, Maurice, 352, 353n37
Baudrillard, Jean, 99, 150, 157–​159, 161n18, 469 Bencina, Ross, 385
650   Index

Bendapudi, Neeli, 565 Blakey, Art, 73

Bend Sinister, 519–​520 Blashill, Pat, 282, 288
Benetton Effect, 340 Blazer, Jonathan, 316
Benjamin, Walter, 70, 71, 248, 533, 537, 542 Blogs, 9, 185, 198, 218, 228, 242, 347, 360, 363,
Bennet, S., 32n11 368–​369, 416, 418–​419, 435, 444, 451, 452,
Bennett, Andy, 1, 160n1, 378, 495, 497, 498, 495, 500, 517–​520, 523, 595, 600–​601,
500, 503, 516, 573 606, 613–​630
Bennett, Lucy, 609n7 Blok, Sergey, 302n3
Bennett, Samantha, 8, 328–​329, 355, 367, 371 Blood on Satan’s Claw (Tigon), 400
Benton, Stephen, 142 Bloom app (Eno), 485
Berendt, Joachim-​Ernst, 243 Bluebrain, 485
Berger, Allen L., 559 The Blue Danube (Strauss II), 52, 55, 56,
Berkowitz, Joe, 598, 600, 601, 609n11 58, 62n12
Berland, Jody, 515, 520 “Blue Jay Way” (Harrison), 46
Berlin Philharmonic, 336, 344 Blue Lines (Massive Attack), 25
Bernays, Ueli, 155 Blue Meanies, 40
Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), 484 Blue Unit Circus, 310
Best, Steven, 184 Blur (band), 17, 31n4, 125n3, 138, 149
The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life BODYGUARD (Ferraro), 423
(Zappa), 15, 86 Boehm, Carola, 522
“Better (When You’re Older)” (States), 321 Boellstorff, 206, 208
Beverly Hills 90210 (television series), 410 Boethius, 81, 84, 92n3
Bey, Hakim, 547n4 Bogdanovic, Danijela, 8, 332–​333, 428
BIA Media Access Pro, 193 Bogue, Ronald, 70, 71
Bieber, Justin, 7, 228, 229, 266, 271–​275, 279n13 “Bogus Pomp” (Zappa), 84
Biel, Alexander L., 286 Bolan, Marc, 539
Bifo (Berardi, Franco), 544 Bolter, Jay David, 479, 480, 491n1, 516, 523
Bill Haley and the Comets, 51n4 The Bomb Squad (production team), 603
Binaural tones, 460, 462 Bonham, John, 17, 31n4
Biophilia (Björk), 485–​489, 492n9, 610n22 Bonnema, Justin, 319
Birds, 4, 11, 21, 22, 463, 465, 471, 617 Bono, 185
Birdsong, Edwin, 290 Bonzo Dog Doo-​Dah Band, 46
Birringer, Johannes, 73–​74 Boon, Marcus, 245
Bischoff, John, 379 Booth, Graham, 389n5
Bishop, Paula J., 608n1 Booth, Paul, 235, 242
Bishop, Scott R., 473n25 Bootleg Beatles, 40
Biswell, Andrew, 31n5 Borges, Jorge Luis, 28
BitTorrent, 363 Borgo, David, 7, 250–​251, 253, 259, 261, 262,
Björk, 9, 117, 450, 478, 485, 488, 489, 492n9, 618, 619, 630n9
606–​607, 610n22 Born This Way (Lady Gaga), 617, 629n5
Black, Daniel, 112, 113 Bourdieu, Pierre, 339, 432
The Black Album (Jay Z), 12, 23 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 276, 278
Black Eyed Peas, 37, 50n1, 614 Bowers, John, 208
Black Out Festival, 579 Bowie, David, 17, 31n3, 171, 483, 484, 581
Black Sabbath, 271 Boxer, Steve, 36
Blackston, Max, 286 Boyce, Barry, 473n24
Blackwood, Algernon, 394 boyd, danah, 332, 430, 432, 434, 436, 437, 440
 Index   651

Boym, Svetlana, 405, 406–​407 Bull, Michael, 120, 473n19

Boyz II Men, 271 Bundick, Chaz, 418
Brackett, David, 83 Bunraku (shadow puppet theater), 5, 97, 98
Bradby, Barbara, 302n4 Burgess, Anthony, 4, 11, 17, 18, 31n1, 529
Brahms, 350 Burgess, Jean, 338
Braids (band), 522 Burgess, Richard, 558
Braun, Virginia, 119 Burgin, Victor, 398
Breakbeats, 14, 65, 67–​73, 75, 76 Burkart, Patrick, 478–​479, 496, 498, 500–​503,
Bregman, Albert S., 286 505, 506
Brett, Thomas, 8, 449–​450, 455 Burnett, Will, 420, 421–​422
Breuner, Kevin, 316 Burns, Christopher, 380
Bricken, William, 144 Burns, Louise, 520
Bride Collection, 117 Burrell-​Davis, Derek, 44
“The Bridge” (MC Shan), 75 Burrows, David, 473n26
Briggs, Robert, 235 Burton, Brian, 4, 12, 23, 268. See also
Bright, Danny, 333n3 Danger Mouse
British Phonographic Industry (BPI), 507n8 Buskirk, Eliot Van, 160
Britpop, 23 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids
Britton, Thomas, 609n9 (cartoon), 134
Broadway the Hard Way (Zappa), 93n19 Butler, Judith, 621
Brock, Napoleon Murphy, 86 Butler, Mark J., 67–​68, 205, 208n27, 289
Brodax, Al, 38–​40 “By George! It’s The David Frost Theme,” 42
Bromseth, Janne, 480 Bylin, Kyle, 595
Brookmeyer, Bob, 599 Byrne, David, 24
Brooks, Jon, 394, 397, 404, 407n5. See also
Advisory Circle (Jon Brooks) Cable, Daniel, 559
Brophy, Philip, 56, 63n13, 63n22 Cáceres, Juan-​Pablo, 385
Brøvig-​Hanssen, Ragnhild, 7, 228–​229, 266, Cage, 17, 31n3. See also Palko, Chris
269, 278n2, 279n19 Cage, John, 85, 91, 238, 239, 243–​245, 350, 449,
Brown, Amanda, 410, 424n2, 424n4 455–​457, 471, 474n28, 615
Brown, Arthur, 538 Calbreath-​Frasieur, Aaron, 130, 137
Brown, Chris, 379 Calibro 35, 553, 577
Brown, James, 73, 621 The Californian Ideology (Barbrook &
Brown, Lee, 72 Cameron), 544
Browne, Cass, 151, 152, 161n9, 162n29 Calloway, Sway, 413
Browne, Jackson, 320 Camelio, Brian, 596, 609n14
Browne, Sarah, 597 Cameron, Andy, 543, 544
“Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” (Zappa), 87, 88 Cameron, David, 548n9
Brueggergosman, Measha, 350 Campag Velocet, 31n5
Bruno, Antony, 482, 485 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 516
Bruns, Axel, 260, 369, 433 Canadian Radio-​Television
Brusila, Johannes, 505 Telecommunications Commission
Bryson, Norman, 135 (CRTC), 525
Buckingham, David, 121 Canetti, Elias, 597
Bufano, Peter, 316 Cano, Rubén López, 422
The Buggles, 530 A Canterbury Tale (Powell &
Bukvic, Ivica Ico, 380, 389n5 Pressburger), 397
652   Index

Canticle No. 3 (Harrison), 350 Central Office of Information, 403–​404

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (Chang), 77n6 Centro Sperimentale di Cinema, 580
Canzon Septimi Toni No. 2 (Gabrieli), 350 Cerrone, 288
Capitol Records, 41 Chafe, Chris, 385
Capturing Sound (Katz), 356 Champ, Joseph G., 114
Cardin, Pierre, 40 Chan, Ben, 342, 343, 346, 352n8, 352nn20–​21
The Caretaker, 394 Chanan, Michael, 249, 479, 597, 609n9
Carles (blogger), 416, 418 Chang, Jeff, 77n6
Carlos, Wendy, 453, 458, 539 The Changes (television series), 394, 403
Carnegie Hall, 335, 336, 347–​350 Characterization, 4, 13, 52, 58, 59, 61, 160, 524
Carnegie Mellon University, 388 Charles, Don, 134
“Carnival of Light” (Beatles), 23 Charles, Ray, 172, 174
Carot, Alexander, 250 Chávez-​Aguayo, Marco Antonio, 6, 168, 210,
Carpentier, Nico, 113 211, 570n2
Carr, Nicholas, 28–​29, 327, 338, 518 Chen, Xiao-​Ping, 559
Carr, Paul, 2, 5, 9, 12, 14, 15, 81, 613–​616, Cheng, William, 168, 192, 198, 199
618–​624, 626, 629 Chernoff, John M., 70, 76
Carr, Wilfred, 211 Cheshire, Tom, 30, 381
Carson, Jan, 46 Chicago Symphony, 344
Casal, Sari, 499, 501 Chikamatsu, Monzaemon, 102
Casale, Gerald, 135 “Childhood’s End” (Keenan), 409
Cascone, Kim, 378 “Children” (Miles), 537
Cassell, Justine, 300 Children of the Stones (television series), 394,
Cassella, Milena, 590n1 400, 401
Castells, Manuel, 506, 508n11, 628, 630n16 Childs, T. Mike, 133, 134
Castle in the Sky (Miyazaki), 105, 158–​159, Chin, Bertha, 609n7
161n15, 162nn27–​28 Chion, Michel, 111, 125n1, 481
Castleton, Gavin, 28 The Chipmunks. See Alvin and the
Catalini, Christian, 588 Chipmunks
The Cattanooga Cats (cartoon), 134 “The Chipmunk Song,” 132
Catts, Oron, 74 Chivers, Paul (Ramjac), 25
Cavallaro, Dani, 162n30 Christian, Aymar Jean, 348
CAVE, 98 Chua, David, 473n19
Cavern Beatles, 40 Chuck D, 603
Cavicchi, 237 Chuck Person, 413. See also Lopatin, Daniel
CBC Music, 515–​519, 522, 523, 525–​526 Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 (Lopatin), 420
CBC Radio 3, 9, 452, 515–​526 Churchill, Winston, 402
CBS, 41, 50n2, 508n10 Chushingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers
ccMixter, 355, 357, 369, 372n2 (play), 98, 103
CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Circle (group), 496
Music and Acoustics), 385 Civil, Alan, 23
CD-​Key (Gracenote), 485 “Civil Defence Is Common Sense” (Other
Celebrities, 38, 138, 148, 149, 159, 222, 237, Channels), 405
282–​285 Civilization Phaze III (Zappa), 87, 93n14
Center for Computer Research in Music and Clapton, Eric, 23, 44
Acoustics (CCRMA), 385 Clark, Spencer, 409, 410, 415
Center for New Music and Audio Clarke, Alan, 405
Technologies (CNMAT), 379, 388n3 Clarke, Victoria, 119
 Index   653

Classic Albums (Nine Inch Nails), 367 Commodification, 450, 478–​482, 484,

Classical music, 6, 168, 191, 193, 328, 339–​340, 487–​490, 496, 503, 505
344, 348, 350–​351 The Complete Ed Sullivan Shows, 36
ClassicalTV.com, 344 The Composer’s Voice (Cone), 286–​287
Clawson, Mary Ann, 302n4 Compression, 28, 365, 372, 416
Claxton, Zak, 187 The Comprovisers, 257–​258
Clayton, Adam, 185 Computer mediated communication (CMC), 153
Clayton, Emma, 143 Computer music, 241, 260, 379, 381, 384–​385,
Clayton, Martin, 67 538, 624
Clear Skies (album), 420, 421 Concert in the Garden (Schneider), 599
A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 4, 11, 17, 18, Concerts, 36, 48, 129–​130, 138, 142, 171, 174–​
31n3, 31n5 175, 181, 185–​187, 191, 197–​198, 202–​203,
Cloud, Cam, 162n25 211–​223, 274, 381, 385, 577, 580, 623
Clover, Joshua, 548, 601 Condry, Ian, 113, 120, 124, 161n13
Clover, Momoiro, 116 Cone, Edward T., 286–​287
CMC (computer mediated Coneybeare, Matt, 459–​461, 472n13
communication), 153 Conger, Cristen, 309
CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio ConnecteD (Sony), 485
Technologies), 379, 388n3 Connell, John, 378
Coachella, 19 Connell, Robert, 441
Cobol Pongide project (Fabrizio), 553, 576, Conner, 59, 160, 227
578–​579, 581–​585f, 585–​586, 588, 591n6 Conried, Hans, 13, 58, 61
Cobussen, Marcel, 91 Cont, Arshia, 368
Cochran, Kelly, 367 Cook, David, 485
Co-​creation, 333, 444, 568–​570. See also Cook, Nicholas, 6, 81, 167, 191, 205
Collaboration Cook, Norman, 357
Cogan, Brian, 108 Cook, Perry, 380
Cogan, Gina, 108 Cope, David, 355–​356
Cohen, Sara, 514 Cope, Julian, 410
“Cola Bottle Baby” (Birdsong), 290 Corbett, Sara, 224n5
Cole, Natalie, 24, 72–​73, 112, 307 Cornershop, 22, 23
Cole, Nat King, 24, 72–​73, 112, 307 Cornish, Audie, 288, 300
Cole, Neil, 546 Cosentino, Bethany, 410
Coleman, E. Gabriela, 429, 434 Cosh, Andy, 559
Coleman, James S., 432 “Cosmogeny” (Björk), 486
Collaboration, 5–​7, 14, 24, 65–​80, 102, 112, 221, Costello, Elvis, 83
227, 228, 234–​235, 237–​239, 241, 243–​245, Counterculture, 45, 451, 495, 498–​499, 503,
258, 312, 349, 369, 440, 486, 568, 628 506, 530
Collins, Karen, 481 The Country Bears (film), 137
Collins, Nick, 117, 142, 384, 386 Courrier, Kevin, 92n9
Collins, Steve, 433, 500 Cox, Christopher, 238, 472n2
The Colors (cyberband), 6, 8, 227–​228, Cramner, Thomas, 18, 19
233–​246 Creative Commons, 459
“The Colors Interactive Comeback Show,” 242 Creative process, 6, 85, 89, 102, 114, 227, 237,
Colors Tribute Band, 240f 356, 552, 561–​562, 564, 588, 595–​596, 605,
The Colors Tribute Website, 242–​245 607, 618
Columbia Broadcasting System, 50n2 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act,
Colvin, C. Randall, 299 381, 389n6
654   Index

Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 81 Daddy-​O, 75

Croft, John, 202 Daft Beatles, 29
Crosby, Bing, 37 Daft Punk, 2, 7, 9, 29, 117, 229, 230, 282–​283,
Cross, Christopher, 417 287–​303
Crouse, Richard, 132 Dahlman, Ian, 505
Crowdfunder, 562 The Daily Telegraph, 41
Crowdfunding, 9, 496, 504–​505, 551–​554, 558–​ Dali, Salvador, 626
570, 573–​577, 585–​590, 593, 595–​596, 598, D’Amato, Francesco, 9, 504, 552, 553, 573, 575,
600–​601, 604–​607, 627–​628 581, 586, 587, 589, 591n8, 626–​628
Crowds and Power (Canetti), 597 Damian, Raeleen V., 235
CRTC (Canadian Radio-​Television Dance music, 115, 329, 331, 369, 381, 419,
Telecommunications Commission), 525 423, 545. See also EDM (electronic
Cruger, Roberta, 269 dance music)
Crumsho, Michael, 417 Dance Music: Culture and the Politics of Sound
Cryin Shames, 28 (Gilbert & Pearson), 369
Crypton Future Media, 101, 107, 108, 112, Dancers, 68, 70, 381, 534, 537, 542, 545
115, 116 D’Andrea, Anthony, 533, 538
“The Cuban Love Song,” 306 Danger Mouse, 4, 12, 23, 24, 154, 268, 275,
Cultural Capital Project, 505 279n8, 357. See also Burton, Brian
Cultural memory, 330, 397–​399, 401, 406, 415 “The Dangerous Kitchen” (Zappa), 88
Culture Danielsen, Anne, 68–​70, 74, 76,
corporate, 413 77n10, 278n1
counterculture, 45, 451, 495, 498–​499, 503, Dannenberg, Roger, 329, 377
506, 530 Dante, Ron, 134
cultural democratization, 211, 221 Dark Night of the Soul (Sparklehorse &
cultural intermediation, 557, 559, 561, 569, 590 Danger Mouse), 24
engaged, 497, 498, 502 Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd), 162n26
Japanese, 97, 101–​147 Das, Ranjana, 113
participatory cultures, 9, 337, 338, 433, 441, Davidson, Roei, 610n23
551–​552, 554, 573, 605–​606, 627 Davies, Hunter, 35, 44, 49
rave culture, 381, 531–​533, 538, 544 Davies, Stephen, 87
subcultures, 130, 418, 452, 498, 526, 531, Davis, Johnny, 160
547, 595 Davis, John Siebert, 491n2
trash, 629 Davis, Todd F., 48
virtual, 30, 506 Dawn of the Dead (film), 161n6
vocaloid cultures, 5, 98, 106, 112, 124 DAWs (digital audio workstation), 250, 251,
Culture jamming, 414, 423 255–​256, 260, 268, 308, 356, 358, 362,
Cunningham, Mark, 357 619, 620
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button “Deadbeat Summer” (Palomo), 417
(film), 141 Deadmau5, 302n7
Cutler, Chris, 497, 505, 507n4 Dead of Night (BBC series), 400
Cyberlibertarians, 496, 504–​506 “Death Cab for Cutie” (Bonzo Dog Doo-​Dah
Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture Band), 46
(Ayers), 432 Death Magnetic (Metallica), 28
Cyborgs, 105, 116, 117, 150, 153, 160, 300, 431, 623 Debord, Guy, 184, 422
Cydia store, 491n7 de Campo, Alberto, 384
Czaplicka, John, 412 De Ferranti, Hugh, 106
 Index   655

de Homem-​Christo, Guy-​Manuel, 7, 229, 282, Doctor Who (television series), 400

287–​288, 300, 301 Doffman, Mark, 67
De La Soul, 66, 139, 156, 158, 161n19, Doggett, Peter, 48, 49
162n23, 162n29 Doherty, Kathy, 437–​438
Deleuze, Gilles, 31n6, 508n11, 515, 525, 544, 548n4 Donath, Judith, 432
Delwiche, Aaron, 610n21 Donelan, James E., 81
Demers, Joanna, 77n5, 456, 457 Doomwatch (television series), 400
Democratization, 211, 221, 328, 365, 367, 496, 505 The Doors, 50n2, 538
Demon Days (Gorillaz), 99, 138–​140, 154 Dowell, Andrew, 485
DeNora, Tia, 120, 285 Dowlding, William J., 42
Derbyshire, Delia, 394 Doyle, Denise, 200
Derrida, Jacques, 20, 279n16, 330, 394, 395, 411 Doyle, JD, 323, 325
de Saussure, Ferdinand, 83 Dragon, Pen, 181, 187–​188
Destiny’s Child, 271, 279n5 Draper, Paul, 6, 7, 228, 248, 618–​619. See also
Dethklok, 98–​99, 131, 138, 139–​140 UK (Paul Draper)
Deutsche Grammophon, 191 Dreams, 155–​159, 340, 392, 409, 421, 547
Devo (group), 135 Drechsler, Clara, 410
The Devotchkas, 31n5 Dredge, Stuart, 477, 488, 490, 505,
de Waard, Andrew, 505 508n13, 509n26
deWinter, Jennifer, 189n4 Dresden Dolls, 600
Diamond, Neil, 622 Drinkwater, Tom, 179, 180–​181, 180f
Dibbell, Julian, 480 “Drive My Car” (Beatles), 21
DiCola, Peter, 14, 74 Droit, Roger-​Pol, 21
Die Fledermaus (opera), 57 Druckenbrod, Andrew, 377
Die Toten Hosen, 17, 31n3 Drummond, Bill, 12, 27
“Digging in the Dirt,” 360 Drummond, Norrie, 47
The Digital Audio Workstation, 620 Drums, 36, 39, 72, 273, 308, 313, 315, 361–​362,
Digital commodification, 450, 488, 489 423, 439, 540, 544
Digital Domain (company), 141 D-​16 Group, 373n12
Dillon, Steven C., 356 Dub 5, 257
Dines, Mike, 5, 97, 99, 101, 131 Dubber, Andrew, 594, 604, 606, 607, 608n4
Dion, Celine, 28 Duchamp, Marcel, 91, 243
Disc & Music Echo, 42 Ducktails, 410
Disco, 411, 452, 453, 529–​531, 539, 540 Duckworth, William, 241, 355–​356
Discogs, 497 Duerden, Nick, 149
Discovery (Daft Punk), 230, 282, 288, 291, Du Gay, Paul, 114, 558, 560, 564
296, 300 Dumbo (film), 62n2
DIS Magazine, 423 Duncombe, Stephen, 498
Disney, Walt, 13, 15n1, 52, 53, 56–​58, 60, 61 Dunning, George, 12, 40
Disney Foundation, 63n22 Duran Duran (group), 184, 192
Distroid, 8, 331, 409, 411, 413, 415, 417, 419, “Durango 95” (Ramones), 31n3
421, 423 Durant, Alan, 367
DJ Abilities, 73 Durkheim, Emile, 431
DJ Goa Gil, 538 Dvorak, Antonin, 350
Djum Djum, 546–​547 Dye, Charles, 312
Dobrian, Christopher, 355 Dyer, Richard, 340
Doctorow, Cory, 491 Dylan, Bob, 22, 600
656   Index

Eagleton, Terry, 532 Environmental music and sounds, 193, 449,

Easley, David, 574
“Easy Meat” (Zappa), 85
Eazy-​E, 129
eBay, 30
Eberhardt, Isabelle, 532
Ecco the Dolphin (game), 413
Echo and the Bunnymen, 17, 31n3
Eckstein, Lars, 158
Eco, Umberto, 114, 122, 413–​414
Ecstasy of Communication (Baudrillard), 158
Ederveen, Regina, 341, 352nn9–​10
Edgar, Robert, 547n3
The Edge (musician), 185
Edison, Thomas, 306
EDM (electronic dance music), 67, 261, 282,
289, 452–​453, 457, 460, 529–​547, 629
The Ed Sullivan Show, 41, 42, 50n2
Effects processing, 361, 364, 365, 368, 372
808s and Heartbreak (West), 363
808 State, 533, 534
Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau (A Little Bit
Horrorshow), 31n3
Eisenberg, Evan, 236, 238–​239, 479
Ektro Records, 451, 495–​507
Elastica, 161n2
Electric Eden (Young), 401
Electronic dance music. See EDM
Elkind, Rachel, 458
Elliot, John, 410
Elliott, Mark Alan, 238
Ellison, Nicole B., 440, 586
“El Mañana” (Gorillaz), 159
Elpa, 578
Elvis Presley in Concert, 37
Elysium (film), 150
Emeralds (group), 410
Emerick, Geoff, 28, 29
EMI, 23, 24, 507n7, 508n10
Emigh, John, 186–​187
“Emotion” (Daft Punk), 295–​296, 297f
“Emotions” (Troutman), 424n3
Emperor Waltz, 63n16
The End, 144n3
“END OF LIFE ENTERTAINMENT
SCENARIO #1” (Lopatin), 424n3
Eno, Brian, 238, 261, 455–​458, 471, 472n4,
474n28, 483, 485
455, 456. See also Soundscapes
Environments (Teibel), 449, 455, 457, 458,
458f, 472n9
Epstein, Brian, 38, 40, 41–​42, 45
Equinoxe (Jarre), 453n1, 548n10
Erica W., 465–​466
Eric B, 77n2
Eril, Astrid, 397
Esession, 312
Estrada, Roy, 86
e Strano (Draper/​Millward), 228, 255–​256
Estus, Deon, 316
Étude aux chemins de fer (Railroad Study)
(Schaeffer), 456
Eurosonic festival, 577
Evanescence (album), 599
Evans, Gil, 599
Eve (Gabriel), 360
Everett, Walter, 44
Everyday Robots (Albarn), 162n32
“Everything the Beatles Never Did”
(Ramjac), 25
Evil Dead (film), 161n8
The Evil of Everything (Public Enemy), 603
Evolution Control Committee, 275
“The Exorcism” (BBC), 400
“Eyes Which Are Swelling” (Other
Channels), 405
Eynon, R., 32n11
Eyre, Richard, 401
Fabrizio, 553, 576, 578–​583, 585, 588, 591n6
Facebook, 30, 202, 220, 221, 223, 328, 333, 344,
347, 369, 370, 382, 434, 436, 440, 442, 451,
500, 505, 518, 579, 580, 582, 594
Fairchild, Charles, 6, 227, 233, 236
Fairclough-​Isaacs, Kirsty, 547n3
Faithfull, Marianne, 44
Falk, Gerhard, 275
Fall Out Boy, 478, 485
Falsani, Cathleen, 271, 272, 274
Fan communities, 328, 355, 360, 367, 370, 554
Fandom, 235, 237, 242, 243, 553, 579
Fans, 2, 8, 38–​41, 98, 107, 112, 129, 153–​154,
227–​228, 234–​239, 242, 273, 277, 299, 333,
432, 437–​440, 478, 502, 564–​568, 573, 579,
595, 597–​598, 601, 604–​606, 623–​624
 Index   657

Fantano, Anthony, 422 Forde, Eamon, 27

Fantasia (film), 62n2 Foreigner, 417
Fantasy, 105, 130, 149, 150, 218, 401, 458, 461, “Forged Iron Tapestry” (Satie), 456
531, 545, 566, 597, 616–​618 Forman, Milos, 60
Farmelo, Allen, 77n10 Foster, Cheryl, 474n27
Far Side Virtual (Ferraro), 331, 415–​416, 420 Foucault, Michel, 228, 269, 276, 398,
Fattal, David, 142 544, 548n4
Fauteux, Brian, 505 4’33 (Cage), 449, 455, 456
Fazer (record label), 508n10 Four Lions (Morris), 597
Federico (Honeybird & the Birdies Fournier, Susan, 286
performer), 576–​578, 581, 582 “4th Time Around” (Dylan), 22
Feed a Smile, 186 Fowler, Bruce, 86
“Feel Good Inc.” (Gorillaz), 99, 139, 154–​160 France, David, 347–​348
Feld, Steven, 67, 77n9, 470, 472n8 Frank, Ze, 235–​236
Fergie, 50n1 Franzen, Benjamin, 73
Ferrara, Lawrence, 92n6 Franz Ferdinand (band), 428
Ferraro, James, 331, 409, 410–​411, 415, 416, 423 Franz Josef I (emperor), 57–​59
Field, John, 554, 573, 590 Freak Out! (Zappa), 89
Fields, Don, 134 Frederickson, John, 105
Fiery Furnaces, 12, 26, 32n10 “Free as a Bird” (Beatles), 29, 32n9
52nd Street (Joel), 249 Free Culture, 261
Filmation Associates, 133, 134 Freed, Adrian, 379, 388n3
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (film), 130 Freed, Alan, 51n4
Finch, Christopher, 137 Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright
Finnish Underground, 451, 498 Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity
“Fire, Damp and Air” (Other Channels), 405 (McLeod), 77n5
First Symposium on Laptop Ensembles and Freedom Sessions (McLachlan), 483
Orchestras. See SLEO The Freelance Hellraiser, 268, 279n5
Fisher, John Andrew, 467, 470, 473n23 Free Music, 261
Fisher, Mark, 394, 395, 406, 411, 526, 547 Frees, Paul, 39
Fisk, Josiah, 87 The freesound project, 459, 459f,
Fiske, John, 114 460–​461, 472n13
Fitzgerald, Brian, 367 Freud, Sigmund, 144n2, 403
Flash Player, 361, 367, 368 Frewer, Matt, 135
Fleetwood Mac, 412 Friedman, Vanessa, 414
Fleischer, Rasmus, 505 Fringeli, Christoph, 532, 548n7
Flexi LYN492, 43 Frischmann, Justine, 161n2
The Flintstones, 63n22 Frith, Simon, 280n24, 283–​285, 287, 299,
FLO: Federation of Laptop Orchestras 302nn4–​5, 498–​499, 502, 504
(Dannenberg), 329, 377, 378, 387 From the Factory Floor (Harding), 357
Floral Shoppe (Macintosh Plus), 422 Frontani, Michael R., 41, 42
Fluxus, 261 Frost, David, 42
Focus Group, 393, 394 Frost on Sunday (television program), 42, 44
Folds, Ben, 320, 604 Frozo (Ambiance user), 427n13
Fonal Records, 497 Fujita, Saki, 112, 115, 120, 125n3, 125n5
Fonarow, Wendy, 523 Fukuyama, Francis, 395
The Fool, 44 Full Contact, 497
Ford, Mary, 307 Fuller, Matthew, 515, 519
658   Index

FundaVlog, 570n1 G.I. Joe (cartoon), 136

Funder, David C., 285, 299, 300 Gibb, Rory, 331, 415
“Funky Drummer” (Brown), 73 Gibson, Chris, 378
Furgason, Aaron, 236 Gibson, Michael, 2
Gibson, William, 2, 69, 77n13, 117,
Gabriel, Peter, 360, 367, 371, 483, 618 144n1, 473n19
Gabrieli, Giovanni, 350 Giddens, Anthony, 610n20
Gabrielli, Enrico, 553, 577 Gilbert, Jeremy, 369, 370, 419
Gaforio, Francino, 81, 613 Gill, Alexandra, 516, 521
Gagen, Justin, 6, 168, 191, 203, 207n13, Gillen, Marilyn A., 484
207n15, 208n26 Gimpel, Jakob, 13, 53, 55–​58, 60, 62n9, 62n10
Gaiman, Neil, 161n6, 162n28 Gimpel, Peter, 55, 56
Gaisberg, Fred, 206 “Girl” (Beatles), 21
Galassi, Fabrizio, 579 Girls Blood, 420
Galbraith, Patrick W., 125n4 Girls’ Generation/​So Nyeo Shi Dae, 17
Galil, Leor, 422 Girls on Top, 268, 278n5
Galuszka, Patryk, 500, 503, 509n21 “Give Me Five” (Akimoto), 122, 125n8
Gamble, Sarah, 150 Gladwell, David, 400
Garafalo, Reebee, 479 Glitch Lich, 386–​387, 389
Garageband, 328, 362, 367, 373n7, 415 Gloag, Kenneth, 89
Garber, Jan, 90 Globalia, 86, 92n10
Garibaldi, David, 68 Glynn, Stephen, 47
Garratt, Sheryl, 161n2 Godard, Jean-​Luc, 47
Gary G-​Wiz, 603 Godrich, Nigel, 363
Gaskell, George, 118 Goehr, Lydia, 84–​85, 87
Gatekeeper, 423 Goffman, Erving, 621
Gauntlett, 153 Go Fish (Pulse Two remix-​remix), 255
Gay, Leslie, 346 Goggly Gogol, 17, 31n5
Gearslutz, 363, 370 Go Home Productions, 268, 279n5
Geesin, Beverly, 184, 186 “Going, Going” (Larkin), 400
Gender, 3, 8, 107, 109, 115, 153, 182, 284, Gold, Amy, 134
332–​333, 337, 397, 428–​435, 437, 441, Goldfarb, Avi, 588
444, 480 Goldie, 544
Gender identity, 108, 429, 621 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 503, 505, 506
“The Geography” (Belbury Poly), 330, Golemis, 609n12
392–​394, 396, 406 The Good, the Bad, and the Queen
George, Nelson, 77n4, 77n6, 77n15 (Albarn), 162n32
“Georgia on My Mind,” 172–​173 Goodie, Steve, 316
Gere, Charlie, 608n2 Goodwin, Andrew, 278, 280n24, 356, 441
Gershwin, George, 172 Google, 2, 131, 327–​328, 333, 333n2, 335–​339,
Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner), 92n4 347, 349–​351, 505–​506, 509n28
Ghani, Dahlan Abdul, 53, 54, 57, 61, 62n3 Google Hangouts, 383
Ghost Box, 330–​331, 393–​399, 401, Gordon, Steve, 563
404–​407 Gore, Al, 244
Ghostbusters (film), 410 Gorillaz, 2, 5, 14, 37, 50n1, 98–​99, 112, 113,
Ghost in the Shell (anime), 105 125n3, 130, 131, 134, 138–​140, 144n6,
“Ghost Town” (Specials), 162n23 149–​151, 302n7
 Index   659

Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre (Morton), 14, 148 Haahti, Hannu, 497

Gorillaz.com, 153–​154 Haan, Marco A., 420
Gosling, Samuel D., 285, 302n4 “Hackney Council Are a Bunch of Cunts”
Gosling, Tim, 498 (Kektex), 533
Grace (artist), 537 Haikara, 496
Graham, Don, 56 Häkkinen, Perttu, 497, 508n18
Grammy Awards, 50n1 Halberstam, Judith, 153
Grand Theft Orchestra, 600 Haley, Bill, 51n4
Granovetter, Mark, 431 Hall, Dennis, 417
Grant, Kieran, 288, 299, 300 Hall, Susan Grove, 457
Gray, Jonathan, 236, 237, 481 Hall, Terry, 162n23
Gray, Michael, 537 Hall and Oates, 417
Gray, Paul, 279n12 Halligan, Benjamin, 9, 10, 10n1, 452, 453, 529,
Green, Hughie, 402, 403 538, 547n3
Green, Joshua, 338 Halo (virtual computer game), 161n17
Greenberg, Ann, 484 Hamasaki, Ayumi, 117
Green Book, 483 Hamilton, Andy, 239
Greene, Ernest, 418 “The Hand That Feeds” (Nine Inch Nails),
“Green Grass Grows” (Belbury 328, 364–​365, 366f, 368–​370
Tales), 401 Hanh, Thich Nhat, 473n24
Greenwood, Johnny, 363 Hanna, William, 52, 60, 62
Gresham-​Lancaster, Scot, 379 Hanna-​Barbera Cartoons, 63n22, 134, 137
The Grey Album (Danger Mouse), 23, 154, Hansen, Mark B. N., 515
268, 275, 279n8, 357 Hanslick, Eduard, 81
Griffin-​Bacal Advertising, 136 Hanson, Beck, 12, 26
Grigely, Joseph, 84–​85 Happy Mondays, 532
Grimshaw, Mark, 2 “The Happy Wanderer,” 46
Grobelny, Joseph, 356 Haraway, Donna, 431
Groove, 5, 14, 24, 65–​74, 76, 230, 257, 290–​291, “A Hard Day’s Night” (Beatles), 40
294, 296, 539 A Hard Day’s Night (Beatles), 39, 40, 45, 46
Groovie Goolies (cartoon), 134 Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, 293
Groovology, 67, 68 “Harder Than You Think” (Public
Grusin, Richard, 479, 480, 491n1, 516, 523 Enemy), 605
The Guardian, 36 Harding, Phil, 357
Guetta, David, 117 “Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I)”
Guinness Book of World Records, 138 (Charles), 174
Guitar Hero, 308 Hardy, Phil, 607
Gunderson, Philip, 373n4 Harker, Alex, 380
Gunkel, David J., 228, 276 Harkins, Paul, 269, 278nn1–​2, 278n4, 279n19
Guns N’ Roses, 29 Harmönia Records, 497, 508n18
Gunther, Curt, 40 Harmonix Music Systems, 36
Gurevich, Michael, 389n5 Harold, Christine, 423
Gurney, Edmund, 119 Harper, Adam, 420–​423
“Guru guru Curtain” (Akimoto), 122, 125n8 Harrington, Lee C., 236
Guthrie, Woody, 188 Harris, John, 160
GYBO (Get Your Bootleg On), 268, 279n6 Harrison, Andrew, 287–​288
“Gyoto Monks Tantric Choir,” 473n17 Harrison, George, 23, 35, 39, 43, 46, 47, 49
660   Index

Harrison, Lou, 350 High Windows (Larkin), 407n2

Harrison, Pattie, 44 “Hihache” (Lafayette Afro Rock Band), 75
Hartman, Keri, 574, 589 Hikaru, Utada, 117
Harvey, Trevor S., 6, 167, 169n1, 171, 189n5, 383 Hip hop, 5, 14, 65, 66, 69–​7 1, 75–​76, 113, 149,
Hasbro, 136 154, 517
Hauntology, 330, 395, 398, 406, 411 producers, 14, 65, 73–​75
Hauschildt, Steve, 410 Hip Hop America (George), 77n6
Hawk, Dayve, 416 Hipster Runoff (Carles), 416
Hawkins, Stan, 156–​157 Hirsch, Paul, 558
Hayes, Isaac, 25 The Hive, 520
Headcandy (Eno), 483 Hobbs, Russell, 99
Heartthrob (Tegan & Sara Quin), 520 Hodgkinson, James A., 497
“The Heat Death of the Universe” Hodkinson, Paul, 431, 440
(Zolene), 404 Holding, Dennis H., 473n21
Heaven Seventeen, 4, 11, 17–​18 Hollings, Ken, 404
Hegel, Georg, 82, 89 Holograms, 97–​99, 124, 129, 135–​136, 139,
Heidegger, Martin, 91 143, 617
Heider, Don, 167–​168, 179 Holograms (Skeleton), 420
Heima-​Tirkkonen, Tuula, 499 Home (album), 420, 421
Helft, Miguel, 485 “Home” (Schneider), 599, 605
Hello Waveforms (Orbit), 369 Homer, Matthew, 371
Helmi Levyt, 497 Home Studio Producer, 257
HeLO (Huddersfield Experimental Laptop Honeybird & the Birdies, 553, 576–​577, 579,
Orchestra), 380 580, 582–​583, 582f, 585–​586, 591n6
Help! (Beatles), 40, 45, 46 Honeydrippers, 5, 14, 75
Helsper, E. J., 32n11 Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, 339
Henderson, Jenifer Jacobs, 610n21 Hong Kong Philharmonic, 336
Hendrix, Jimi, 60, 307, 617 Hopkin, Mary, 42
Hennessy, Peter, 406 Horkheimer, Max, 560
Henson, Jim, 63n22, 137 Horne, Howard, 498–​499, 502, 504
Herd, Judith Ann, 106 Horton, Donald, 283
Here Comes Everyone (Shirky), 241 Houdyshell, Don Ray, 167, 175, 175f, 179
Here Come the Beagles (album), 134 House, Julian, 330, 393, 394, 397
Hernandez, Diane, 285 Housemartins, 357
Hernandez, Patrick, 288 Howard, Adina, 278n5
Herstand, Ari, 508n14 Howard-​Spink, Sam, 279n7
Hesmondhalgh, David, 124, 523, 526 How Are Things? A Philosophical Experiment
Hess, Mickey, 189 (Droit), 21
Hewlett, Jamie, 138, 139, 149, 151, 160, “How Do You Know (You’re in Love?)”
161n6, 162n28 (States), 320, 323, 324f
Hewlett-​Packard Labs, 141 Howe, Jeff, 337, 574
“Hey Jude” (Beatles), 38, 42, 44, 47, 616, 629n3 “How High the Moon” (Paul), 307
Hey! Say! JUMP! (group), 122 How Music Works (Byrne), 24
“Hey Ya” (OutKast), 25 “How to Play the Waltz in Six Easy Lessons”
Hibbett, Ryan, 524 (Strauss), 52
Hichibe, Nobushige, 113 How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
High School Musical (film), 101 (Bayard), 32n12
 Index   661

Hsu, Wendy, 108 IndieCo, 507n5

The Hub (cyberband), 241, 329, 379, 385, 387 Indrisek, Scott, 299
Hugill, Andrew, 357, 433 “Inferno” (Doctor Who serial), 400
Human After All (Daft Punk), 230, 289–​290, “Information is Not Knowledge”
292, 293f, 295, 296 (Globalia), 92n10
Human Human Be-​In, 50n3 Inglis, Ian, 4, 5, 12, 13, 35, 40, 614–​615, 623
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (Liszt), 55 Ingraham, Cole, 389n19
“Hung Up” (Madonna), 139 Inoura, Yoshinobu, 103, 104
Hurd, Michael, 608n1 In Rainbows (Radiohead), 362, 618, 630n7
Hutcheon, Linda, 229, 276, 277 Insane Clown Posse, 302n7
Hypercompression, 28 Instrumentation, 86, 271, 284, 285, 312, 324
Hypermediacy, 479–​481, 490, 523 Intellectual property (IP), 6, 115, 134, 219, 234,
Hyperreality, 150–​151, 158, 159 243, 558, 562, 568–​570
Hypnagogic pop, 331, 409–​422, 625–​627, 629 Interactive (Prince), 483
Interactivity, 9, 242, 428, 450, 480–​482, 487,
“I Ain’t Got No Heart” (Zappa), 89 489–​490, 554, 595, 599, 604–​606
“I Am the Walrus” (Beatles), 46 International Federation of the Phonographic
Identity, 8, 99, 136, 151–​153, 159–​160, 167, 179, Industry, 559, 561
189, 202, 229, 230, 258, 275, 283, 287–​288, International Workshop for Computer Music
298–​299, 332–​333, 429–​431, 433, 440, and Audio Technology (WOCMAT),
441, 444, 480, 552, 558, 566, 567, 570, 595, 385, 389n14
616, 621 Internet Club, 420–​422
Idols, 111, 114–​116, 119, 123, 239 Internet Symphony Eroica (Tan), 327–​328, 336,
Idoru (Gibson), 2, 117, 144n1 343, 350
I Drove All Night (Dion), 28 Interstella 5555 (Daft Punk/​Takenouchi), 288
“I Feel Love” (Summer), 534 “In the Game” (States), 320
IFPI Finland, 507n5, 507nn7–​8, 508n12 “In the Heat of the Night” (Jones), 172
Ihde, Don, 466 Intimacy, 24, 43, 44, 47, 197, 222, 299, 546, 605
“I’ll Give You (What You Want)” (States), 321 “Invader, Invader” (Pamyu), 117
“The Illinois Enema Bandit” (Zappa), 93n20 Invisible fans, 333, 439
Illusion, 2, 5, 11, 23, 37, 39, 42, 56, 58, 61, 72, ION, 484–​485
97, 101–​107, 109, 131, 133, 135, 141, 185, 187, IP. See Intellectual property
283, 315, 370, 461, 469, 626 Irony, 18, 29, 107, 277–​278, 300, 331, 409, 412,
Il Polpo (remix), 257 414, 416–​417, 422, 424, 627, 629
Ilsar, Alon, 6, 227, 233, 234 Isaacs, Jeremy, 402
“I’m a Believer” (Monkees), 622, 630n10 Isaak, Chris, 28
Imberty, Michel, 91 Iser, Wolfgang, 113
Immediacy, 29, 423, 452, 479–​481, 490, 523 Ishak, Sidin Bin Ahmad, 53, 54, 57, 61, 62n3
“Immigrant (Fish out of Water)” (States), 321 Ishiguro, Hiroshi, 130
Impeach, 76 Ishii, Hiroshi, 142
“Impeach the President” (Honeydrippers), Isosine (Steven Nguyen), 7, 266, 270–​271,
5, 14, 75 273, 274
The Impossibles (cartoon), 134 Italia Wave, 577
Indaba Music, 355, 357, 369, 372n1 Ito, Joi, 142
Independent micro labels, 451, 495–​506, 628 Ito, Mizuko, 121
Indie bands and music, 30, 442, 452, 515, 517, iTunes, 23, 30, 32n8, 202, 214, 328, 344, 362,
523, 526 368, 369, 485, 502, 517, 603
662   Index

iTunes Genius, 28 Jones, Stanleigh H., 105

iTunes Music Festival, 182
Iwabuchi, Koichi, 124
I Walked with a Zombie (film), 161n8
“I Wanna Grow Old with You” (Sandler), 180
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” (Beatles), 40, 41
Iyer, Vijay, 77n9, 77n14
Izhaki, Rohey, 358–​359
Jabberjaw (cartoon), 134
Jackson, Lizzie, 153
Jackson, Louise H., 5, 97, 99, 101, 130–​131
Jackson, Michael, 1–​2, 271, 491n5
Jackson E. (Ambiance user), 463–​464, 463f
The Jackson Five (cartoon), 134
JackTrip, 385, 387, 389n18
Jagger, Mick, 22, 44
James, Elmore, 172
James, Jamie, 92n3
James, M. R., 394, 396, 399, 400
Jam House, 433
Janssen, Dan, 134
Japandroids, 517, 522
Japanese culture
popular music, 105–​107, 109
virtual idols and pop stars, 111–​147
vocaloids, 97, 101–​110
Jarre, Jean-​Michel, 453, 539, 548n10
Jarvenpaa, Sirkka L., 357, 358, 369
Jauss, Hans R., 113
Jay Z, 12, 23, 485, 487
Jellyfish, 320
Jenkins, Chaz, 344, 352n23
Jenkins, Henry, 130, 235, 433, 562, 575,
595, 610n21
Jenkins, Ron, 104
Jesters of Destiny, 496
Joel, Billy, 249
Johann Mouse (film), 2, 4, 13, 52–​62, 62n8
John Cage Quotes (Cage), 245
John Cage Sayings (Cage), 243
Johnson, Jeremy, 269
Johnson, Ollie, 15n1, 62n2
Johnson, Richard, 114
John-​Steiner, Vera, 237–​238
Jones, Bethan, 609n7
Jones, Quincy, 172
Jones, Steve, 500
Jordà, Sergi, 6, 227, 242
Jordan, Ken, 161n5
Jordison, Joey, 272, 274
Josie and the Pussycats (cartoon), 63n22, 134
Josie and the Pussycats: From the Hanna-​
Barbera TV Show (album), 134
Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space
(cartoon), 134
Journal on the Art of Record Production, 373n3
“The Journey Home” (Schneider), 605
“The Journeyman’s Tale” (Young), 399–​400
Juilliard Quartet, 348
Juilliard School, 346, 347
Jump (Bowie), 483, 484
“Jump They Say” (Bowie), 484
“Junjou U-​19” (Akimoto), 122, 125n8
Jupp, Jim, 330, 331, 393–​394, 397, 398, 401,
407n1, 407nn3–​4
Just-​in-​Time Library (Rohrhuber), 384
Kahn, 470
Kaho (study participant), 119, 120, 123
Kaiser-​Walzer (Strauss II), 13, 57–​61
Kaitajärvi-​Tiekso, Juho, 9, 450–​451, 495,
507n5, 571n3
Kallio-​Tamminen, Tarja, 499
Kant, Immanuel, 81–​83, 89, 279n9, 613, 614
Kaplan, Ann E., 441, 443, 444
Kappel, Tim, 595, 597, 598
Kaptanis, Arthur, 480
Karaoke, 120, 143
Karlin, Jason G., 125n4
Karlsruhe University of Music, 382
Karr, Rick, 325
Kassabian, Anahid, 119, 333n1, 338, 352n5,
459, 469
Katz, Bob, 358, 359
Katz, Elihu, 113
Katz, Mark, 75, 356
Kawatake, Toshio, 103, 104
Keenan, David, 331, 409–​411, 415, 502, 503,
505, 507n6, 509n22
Keenan, Trish, 392
“Keep Warm, Keep Well” (Other
Channels), 405
 Index   663

Keil, Charles, 67, 77n9, 121 Kretova, Alexandra, 497

Keisha, 29 Kretschmer, Martin, 559
Keita (study participant), 119–​120, 123 Kristeva, Julia, 277, 279n21
Keizer, Gregg, 484 Kruse, Holly, 514, 523, 524, 526
Kektex, 533 Kurkela, Vesa, 505
Kellner, Douglas, 184 Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, 117
Kelly, Kevin, 586, 591n7
Kelp Records, 514, 515 Lacasse, Serge, 358, 360, 367–​368, 372
Kelts, Roland, 108, 115 Laclau, Ernesto, 507n1
Kemmis, Stephen, 211 Lady Gaga, 9, 107, 171, 450, 477–​478, 485,
Kemp, Peter, 63n17 490–​491, 629n5
Kenmochi, H., 101 “The Lady in Red” (DeBurgh), 424n3
Kepler, Johannes, 81, 84, 613 Lafayette Afro Rock Band, 75
Kerr, Roy, 268 Lai, Rainice, 352n8
Kervin, L., 32n11 Lambek, Michael, 60
Kickstarter, 29, 509n22, 553, 562, 576, 580, 593, Lamborghini Crystal, 411
596–​598, 596f, 600–​602, 607, 609n14 Lampe, Cliff, 586
Kiki’s Delivery Service (Miyazaki), 161n15 Laneige, 336
Kill Ugly Radio, 86, 92n11 Lang, Karl, 357, 358, 369
Kim, Andy, 134 Langberg, Mike, 484
The King and I (film), 101 Langhamer, Claire, 397
King Features, 38–​40 Lang Lang, 2, 191, 201, 202, 207n2, 328, 336,
The Kinks, 155, 162n21 339, 340, 350
Kinos-​Goodin, Jesse, 520 Language, 41, 44, 70, 81–​83, 91, 115, 221, 348,
Kirchin, Basil, 394 422–​424, 435, 487, 576, 619–​620
Kirk, J., 308 Lanier, Jaron, 500, 501, 503, 505, 508n20,
Kirkpatrick, David, 189n4 509n24, 509n28, 607
Kirmayer, Laurence, 60 Lanin, Lester, 90
Kirshner, Don, 133, 134 Lanza, Joseph, 472n3
Kiss, 279n11, 302n7 La Passione (film), 577
K-​Klass DJ, 540f Laptop ensembles, 329, 377–​388
Kleinberg, Jon, 574 Laptop musicians, 329, 377, 378
KLF, 27 Laputa: Castle in the Sky. SeeCastle in the Sky
Klisys, Darius, 342, 352n17 (Miyazaki)
Kneale, Nigel, 394, 396, 400 Larkin, Philip, 400
Knopper, Steve, 607 Laserdisc Visions, 420
Ko Sugiyama, 352n8 Laske, Otto, 260
Koerber, Little Johnny, 599 Last.fm, 346, 419, 434
Kolawole, Emi, 116 Latour, Bruno, 260
Kollock, Peter, 244, 480 La Traviata, 255–​256
K-​On, 117 LA Vampires, 424n4
Kong Studios, 99 Lawrence, Grant, 517, 520, 525
Korova Milk Bar, 31n3 Lawton, Kevin, 552, 574–​575, 588
Koskinen, Jani, 497 Layo & Bushwacka!, 533, 535f, 537
Kot, Greg, 607 LCD Soundsystem, 32n13
Kraftwerk, 117, 135, 302n7, 530, 531 League of Automatic Music Composers, 379
Kray twins, 31n5 Le Blanc, Steven, 144
664   Index

Led Zeppelin, 271 Lipsitz, George, 412

Lee, Joanna, 352n1, 352n11 Listening experience, 19, 111, 518, 530
Lee, Steve S., 505, 523, 526 Listening to Noise and Silence (Voegelin), 625
Lee, Tim, 336, 352n3 Lister, Martin, 593, 595
Lee, Vernon, 119 Liszt, Franz, 55
Leeds, Gary, 44 A Little Bit Horrorshow (Ein kleines bisschen
Leeds Sinfonia, 193 Horrorschau), 31n3
Leftfield, 546–​547 The Little Mermaid (film), 63n22
Leftism (Leftfield), 547 Littleton, Karen, 244
Lego Universe (virtual computer live.code.festival, 382, 389
game), 161n17 Live Group Computer Performance
Lehtisalo, Jussi, 451, 496, 497, 499, 501–​ (LiGroCoP), 382, 389n9
502, 504, 508n9, 508n19, 508nn15–​16, Liveness, 2, 5, 6, 37, 85–​86, 112, 130, 168, 186,
509n23, 509n25 188, 193, 196–​197, 199–​202, 205–​206, 384,
Leichtung, Ric, 418 615, 617
“Lembrança” (Schneider), 599 Live performances, 18, 35, 37–​43, 48, 85–​88,
Lennon, John, 1–​2, 21, 22, 32n9, 35, 39, 41, 150, 160, 167, 171, 177, 181–​182, 185–​193,
43, 45–​47 197–​201, 206, 213–​215, 257, 283, 284,
Lennon, Julian, 320 366, 433, 436, 438, 439, 442, 444, 546,
Lentini, Luigi, 143–​144 576, 578–​579, 618–​619, 621–​623. See also
Leonard, Marion, 302n4 Concerts
Leone, Robert P., 565 Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, 191
Lessig, Lawrence, 241, 337–​338, 343, 569 Livingstone, Sonia, 113, 121, 125n2
Lester, Paul, 151 Living Theater, 538
Lethbridge, T. C., 402 Lizard, Alice, 348
Let it Be (Beatles), 12, 38, 45–​49 Lloyd, Christian, 4, 10–​12, 17
Let It Be … Naked (Beatles), 23 Locality, 137, 378, 383, 386, 388, 428, 515–​516,
Let’s All Sing with the Chipmunks (album), 132 520, 523, 525
Letters of Note (Disney), 56 Locke, Ralph, 606
Lévy, Pierre, 515, 519 Loewen, Laura J., 473n20
Lewis, C. S., 394, 396 Logan’s Run (film), 135
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 60 Logic (Apple), 373n7
Lewisohn, Mark, 42, 44 LogicPro, 370
Leyshon, Andrew, 371 Loke, Jaime, 167
Licklider, Joseph, 480 London Paralympics, 605
Liebes, Tamar, 113 London Symphony Orchestra, 336, 343,
Life magazine, 84 345, 349
Life on Mars (Bowie), 581 London Weekend Television (LWT), 42
Lilith K. (Ambiance user), 461–​462, 462f Longhurst, Brian, 8, 113
Lin, Nan, 432 “The Long Tail” (Anderson), 500
Lind, Antti, 497 Loops, 66, 230, 289–​296, 366, 421, 461,
Linden Research, 192 542–​543, 545
Lindfors, Jukka, 498 Lopatin, Daniel, 331, 410, 412–​414, 420, 422,
Lindsay-​Hogg, Michael, 43, 44, 47, 48 424n3. See also Chuck Person (Lopatin)
Lindvall, Helienne, 501, 505, 508n14, Lopez-​Lezcano, Fernando, 385
509n29, 601 Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), 192,
Lion King (film), 63n22 198, 199
 Index   665

“Losing My Edge” (LCD Soundsystem), 32n13 Mao Zedong, 73

Louisiana State University, 377, 388n1 Marat/​Sebastiao (Muniz), 626
Lovecraft, H. P., 387, 394 Maria Teresa (Produzioni dal Basso), 590
Lovell, Dominic, 273 Marillion, 609n12
“Love Lockdown” (West), 328, 363–​364, 364f, Markie, Biz, 66
368, 370 Mark Vidler, 268
“Lover” (Paul), 307 Marl, Marley, 14, 66, 73, 75, 76, 77n2
Love Records, 508n10 Marom, Dan, 552, 574–​575, 588
“Love Story [vs Finally]” (Layo & Martin, Brett A. S., 285
Bushwacka!), 533, 534, 535f, 537 Martin, George, 42, 43
“Love to Love You Baby” (Summer), 534 Martin, Peter J., 284
LSO Live, 344 Martin, Robert, 86
Luckerson, Victor, 487, 508n14 Martinkauppi, Janne, 497
“Lucky Cha Cha Cha” (MiniMoni), 117 Marx, Christy, 136
Ludacris, 273 Marx, Karl, 532
Lull, James, 566 Marx, Leonard “Chico,” 56, 62–​63n13
Lumbleau, Eric, 503, 506 Marx, W. David, 114, 115
Lumpy Gravy (Zappa), 87, 93n14 Marx Brothers, 62–​63n13
Lunt, Peter, 113 Masculinity, 332, 428–​444
Lüthy, Marco, 224n5 Maseo, 159, 161n19
Luvaas, Brent, 416–​417 Mashup Cultures (Navas), 356
Lynch, David, 24 Mashup Manifesto (Isosine), 270
Lynne, Jeff, 32n9 Mashups, 7, 12, 18, 20, 23, 228–​229, 266,
Lyrics, 21, 22, 27, 39, 41, 87, 88–​89, 119–​123, 268–​271, 273–​278, 337, 345, 349, 351,
197, 234, 242–​244, 271, 273–​274, 276, 284, 356–​357, 620
291–​292, 295, 301, 306, 322, 412, 435, 442–​ Masnick, Mike, 604
443, 486, 602–​603, 616, 622 Massey, Anna, 404
Lysloff, René, 346 Massive Attack, 25
Mass Observation, 397
Macan, Edward, 531 Massolution, 558, 565
MacArthur Foundation, 380 Massumi, Brian, 5, 31n6, 508n11
Macdonald, Ian, 21, 22, 28, 32n7 Masters, Tim, 609n12
MacDorman, Karl F., 99n1, 130 Materiality, 5, 12, 15, 18–​25, 29, 41, 66, 84, 137,
Machen, Arthur, 393, 394 235, 251, 253–​254, 259, 262, 277, 323, 325,
Mach Go Go Go (Speed Racer), 152 387, 410, 412, 420, 484, 485, 560–​561, 564,
Macintosh Plus, 420, 422 599, 618, 625–​626
Macro samples, 266, 268–​269, 278n4 Maton, K., 32n11
Macross Plus, 117 The Matrix (film), 150
Madonna, 37, 50n1, 139, 144n6, 171, 279n5 Matrix Metals, 410
Magical Mystery Tour (Beatles), 12, 38, 45–​49 Mattin, 548n11
“Magical Mystery Tour” (Beatles), 45 Maxinquaye (Tricky), 25
Magna Carta … Holy Grail (Jay Z), 487 Max/​MSP, 385, 389
“Make Love” (Daft Punk), 296, 298f McCarthy, Alison, 261
Mali music project (Albarn), 162n32 McCarthy, Helen, 162n30
Mandelson, Andrew L., 436 McCartney, Paul, 22, 39, 43–​45, 47, 49, 307
The Man-​Machine (album), 135 McCourt, Tom, 478–​479, 482
Manovich, Lev, 413, 491n4, 515, 518, 521 McCracken, Celeste A., 285
666   Index

McCullaugh, Jim, 477, 483 Michelsen, Morten, 507n3

McCullough, Karl-​Erik, 300 Michielse, Maarten, 357, 358
McCurry, Justin, 115 Miconi, Andrea, 586, 587, 589, 590, 591n8
McEwan, Ian, 401 Micro labels, 451, 495–​506, 628
McGowan, Chris, 483 Micro samples, 278n4
McGrath, Pat, 316 Midgette, Ann, 353n34
McGuire, Mark, 410 Miell, Dorothy, 244
McHugh, Gene, 413 Mike Ator Club Remix, 324f
McKellar, Peter, 411 Miku, Hatsune, 2, 5, 8, 9, 98–​99, 111–​147
McKenzie, Jon, 135 Miles, Barry, 92n9
McKinney, Chad, 386–​387, 389n19 Miles, Robert, 537
McKinney, Curtis, 386–​387, 389n19 Milk Daddy, 75
McLachlan, Sarah, 483 Miller, Claire Cain, 485
McLean, R., 236 Miller, Kiri, 342, 345
McLeod, Kembrew, 14, 74, 77n5, 266, 279n19, Miller, Paul D. (DJ Spooky), 161n5, 412
373n4, 500 Miller, T., 532
McLuhan, Marshall, 258 Miller, Vincent, 554, 594, 597, 607, 610n20
McNeill, David, 300 Milli Vanilli, 197, 207n17
McQuail, Dennis, 566 Millward, Frank, 6, 7, 228, 248, 618, 619, 625.
McRobbie, Angela, 302n4 See also AU (Frank Millward)
MC Shan, 75 Milner, Greg, 28
MediaFire, 420, 422 Milton, Daveth, 538
Mediation, 1, 5, 15, 85, 112–​113, 120, 186, 200, Milton, John, 81
287, 289, 298, 300–​301, 479, 480, 486, 615, Minaj, Nicki, 117
617, 628. See also Authorial mediation Mind Models (Reynolds), 250
Mediatization, 6, 85, 201, 623 Mind The Gap, 252
Meek, Joe, 28 Minegishi, Minami, 115
Memories, 25, 31, 331, 392, 397, 403, 406, 409–​ MiniMoni (group), 117
410, 412, 414, 424, 468, 471, 621, 625–​626 Ministry, 29
Memory Cassette, 416 The Minutemen, 413
Memory in Culture (Eril), 397 Misselhorn, Catrin, 130
Memory Tapes project, 416 Mitchell, Jared, 480
Memory Vague DVD-​R (Lopatin), 412, 413 Mitchell, Tony, 507n4
Mendelssohn, Felix, 82, 619 Mitsui, Toru, 120
The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 81 Mitsula (group), 144n5
Merge, 517 Mixcloud, 393
Messinger, Paul R., 167, 179 Mix It Like a Record (Dye), 312
Metadata, 452, 482, 515, 516, 521–​523, 525–​526 Mix Masters: Platinum Engineers
Metallica, 28 Reveal Their Secrets for Success
Metal music, 139, 151 (Droney), 312
Metalocalypse (television series), 139, 140 Mix stems, 328, 357–​360, 362–​364,
Metro-​Goldwyn-​Mayer, 52 367–​369, 372
Metsola, Mirko, 497 Miyazaki, Hayao, 158, 161n15,
Mewton, Conrad, 563 162nn27–​28, 162n30
Meyer, Leonard B., 83 MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online
MGM, 2, 4, 13, 52, 60, 306 role-​playing games), 210
Michaels, George, 316 Moats, David, 597
 Index   667

Modern Records, Maverick Methods MSPaint, 415

(Bennett), 371 Mtume, 77n15
“Mogadon Coffee Morning” (Other Muddy Waters, 172
Channels), 405 Muikku, Jari, 500, 508n10, 508n14
Mollick, Ethan, 564 Mull, Martin, 83
Moloko, 31n5 Mullen, Larry, Jr., 185
Monarchy, 302n7 Mulligan, Mark, 508n14
Monique (Honeybird & the Birdies Multitrack recording, 71, 206, 306–​308, 358,
performer), 576, 577–​578, 581, 582–​583 359, 365, 368, 621
The Monkees, 622, 630n10 Mũniz, Albert M., Jr., 568
The Monkees (television show), 133 Muniz, Vik, 626
Monkey (Albarn), 162n32 Munster, Anna, 521
“Montana” (Zappa), 86 The Muppets, 98, 113, 130, 137, 140
Montecchio, Nicola, 368 The Muppet Show, 137
Montgomery, Wes, 73 Musical Chameleons (Michielse), 357
Moon, Keith, 44 “Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital
Moondog Coronation Ball, 51n4 Reproduction,” 68
“Moon River” (Fabrizio), 581 Music for Airports (Eno), 457
Moon Wiring Club, 394 Music industry, 148, 150, 157–​160, 236–​237,
Moore, F. Allan, 86, 356 432–​433, 450, 477–​478, 482–​487, 500–​
Moore, Gordon, 141, 145n7 501, 504, 554, 560, 563–​564, 594, 596,
Moorefield, Virgil, 88 598, 600
Moran, Joe, 402 “Music Industry, from CDs, Long Form VHS
Mordant Music, 394 and Laserdiscs to CD-​I and Video CDS”
Morgan, Cameron, 316 (seminar), 483
Mori, Masahiro, 59, 99n1, 125n8, 130, 141, 144n2 Musicking, 14, 65, 68, 249, 254, 259–​261, 335,
Morie, Jacquelyn, 192 337, 346, 618
Morley, David, 113 Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and
Morley, Paul, 135 Listening (Small), 77n1, 249
Moroder, Giorgio, 453, 530, 531, 534, 539 Musion (company), 142
Morreall, John, 279n9 Musion Eyeliner, 37
Morris, Chris, 597 Muzak, 456, 471, 472n3, 474n28
Morris, Jeremy, 8, 450, 477, 484, 485, 522 Myers, Scott, 316
Morrison, Chris, 139 My Fair Lady (film), 101
Morrison, Jim, 538 My Oracle Lives Uptown (Orbit), 369
Morse, Tal, 125n2 MySpace, 29, 202, 332, 333, 369, 370, 428, 433–​
Morton, Roger, 14, 148 445, 500, 594, 620
Moss, Stephen, 473n22 Myst (computer game), 483
Most of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear on No Mystery Disc (Zappa), 93n12
Stamp (Public Enemy), 603 My World 2.0 (Bieber), 270
Mothers of Invention, 84
“Motion and Feeling through Music” Nadeau, Nils, 278n1
(Keil), 67 Nakamori, Akio, 125n4
Motorik, 453 Nakamura, Lisa, 444, 480
Mouffe, Chantal, 507n1 Napier, Susan J., 152
Mowitt, John, 70, 76 Napster, 25, 278n3
Mozart, 60, 193, 341, 342, 350 “Narayani Falls” (Clear Skies), 420
668   Index

Nash, Graham, 44 NMB48 (group), 122

Nassari, Paul, 241 “nobody here” (Lopatin), 424n3
National Association of Music Merchants Nogizaka46 (group), 122
(NAMM), 102 Noise, 12, 43, 107, 156, 220, 249, 260, 294, 315,
The National Mall (Bluebrain), 485 317, 364, 371, 386, 410–​411, 419, 459, 464,
National Record News, 41 466, 471, 530, 625
Nattiez, Jean-​Jacques, 91 Noise: The Political Economy of Music
Nature soundscapes, 455–​462, 465, 467, (Attali), 249
469–​471 Noodle, 99
Nausicao of the Valley of the Winds “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”
(Miyazaki), 161n15 (Beatles), 4, 11–​12, 21–​23
Navas, Eduardo, 356, 413 “Nothing is Real” (Beatles), 12
Neaverson, Bob, 41, 47, 48 Not Much Changes the Beat, 252
Negus, Keith, 498, 504, 561, 568 “Not Over Yet” (Grace), 537
Neon Indian (Palomo), 416, 417–​418 Nouvelle Vague, 491n8
“Neo Spa and Salon” (Home), 420 No World Order (Rundgren), 477, 483
“Neo Stargate,” 116 NRJT Music Festival, 50n1
Networking, 8, 371, 382–​383, 385, 387, 503, 574, “Nude” (Radiohead), 328, 362–​363, 362f, 368–​370
605, 628 “Numa Numa Guy” video, 353n36
Network Music Festival, 381–​382, 389n7 Nunziata, Susan, 483
Network Resources for Collaborative
Improvisation (NRCI), 380 Oakenfold, Paul, 357
Neuromancer (Gibson), 77n13 Oasis, 28
“Never Forget (9/​11/​02)” (States), 317 Obama, Barack, 596–​597
Newell, Phillip, 563 O’Brien, Benjamin, 8, 329–​330, 377, 389, 617,
Newitz, Analee, 108 624, 626
New Model Army, 437 O’Brien, Damien, 367
New Musical Express, 47 O’Brien, Rory, 211
Newsground, 353n36 Occhiogrosso, Peter, 90
New World Symphony, 340, 351 “Ocean Waves Against Rocks,” 472n15
New York Philharmonic, 336, 344 Odalisk (Rauschenberg), 626
The New York Times, 36–​37 ODB, 129
Nguyen, Steven. See Isosine ODEO (Oregon Electronic Devices
Niccals, Murdoc, 99 Orchestra, University of Oregon), 380
Nice, James, 532 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 20
Nice to Be Home (remix), 253 Ogle, 30
Nickelback, 183 Oglesby, Carl, 539
Nico Nico Douga, 109, 116, 125n6 O’Guinn, Thomas C., 568
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 82 “Oh, Is That So?,” 122
Nightcrawlers, 533, 534 Ohm Studio, 257
Night Dolls with Hairspray (Ferraro), 415 Ohshita, Hayato, 101
Nine Inch Nails, 235, 328, 355, 364–​365, 367, Oku, Shinobu, 120
368, 370, 372, 492n8 Oldham, Andrew Loog, 31n5
Nine Inch Nails Remixes, 257 Oliveiros, Pauline, 192
99Funding, 562 Oliver, P., 236
1984, 394 Oliver, Rowan, 4–​5, 14, 65–​76, 77n10
Nirvana, 279n5 On Air (Ferraro), 415
 Index   669

One Campaign, 186 Palko, Chris, 31n3. See also Cage

One Direction, 91–​92, 149 Palmer, Amanda, 553, 593, 595, 597–​598, 600–​
Oneohtrix Point Never, 410, 412 602, 602f, 604–​607, 609n9, 609n11, 610n22
One Plus One (documentary film), 47 Palomo, Alan, 417–​418
One-​T (group), 144n5 Pandora, 28, 485, 489
Ong, Walter, 262 Panganiban, Rik, 193
“Only Over You” (Fleetwood Mac), 412 Paola (Honeybird & the Birdies performer),
On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word 576, 578, 580, 582
(Frith & Goodwin), 280n24 Papacharissi, Zizi, 430, 436
Open Sound Control (OSC), 379, 385, “Paperback Writer” (Beatles), 38, 42–​44, 49
387–​388 Paper Bag Records, 515
Opera, 130, 137, 168, 210–​224 Parc Du Penfield, Brest, France, 19 March 1979
Ópera Joven, 211, 212, 220 (Zappa), 93n16
Opportunity Knocks (Green), 402 Pareles, John, 419
Orbit, 328 Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), 88,
Orbitmixer, 328, 360–​362, 361f, 368, 369 89, 616
Orchestras, 105, 327–​329, 335–​342, 344–​345, Park, Jane Chi Hyun, 108, 109
348–​351, 379–​380, 383, 388, 605 Parks, Lisa, 488
Ordanini, Andrea, 565, 567 Parks, Malcolm R., 430
O’Reilly, Daragh, 437–​438 Participatory cultures, 9, 337–​338, 433, 441,
O’Reilly, Tim, 409 551–​552, 554, 573, 605–​606, 627
Organicism, 89 Pascal, Blaise, 279n9
“Organism,” 89 Passion Pictures, 149, 162n29
Osamu, Tezuka, 161n12 Patel, Joseph, 413
Osbourne, Ozzy, 271 Patronage, 553, 562, 593, 598, 606–​607
OSC (Open Sound Control), 379, 385, 387–​388 A Pattern Language (Alexander), 474n27
OSCgroups, 385, 389n17 Patterson, Spencer, 282
OSCthulhu (McKinney & McKinney), Pattie, David, 8, 330–​331, 392, 411
387, 389n20 Paul, Les, 306, 307
Ostertag, Bob, 382 PB_​UP (Powerbooks_​Unplugged), 380, 385
O’Sullivan, Gilbert, 66 Pearson, Ewan, 369, 370, 419
Oswald, John, 278n4 Pearson, Tina, 192
Other Channels (Advisory Circle), 399, 404–​405 Peavey, J. C., 411
Our Band Could Be Your Life (Azerrad), 523 Penda’s Fen (Rudkin), 405–​406
Our World (television program), 43, 45 “Penny Lane” (Beatles), 40
OutKast, 25 Pepperland, 40, 41
Overdubs, 24, 252, 253, 259, 307, 308, 619 Percival, Lance, 39
Overnite Sensation (Zappa), 86 Peretti, Jonah, 414
The Owl Service (television series), 394 Performance. See also Live performances
The Owl’s Map (album), 396 personal, 217, 564
Oxygène (Jarre), 453n1, 548n10 public, 48, 288
real-​life, 196, 203, 205, 206
Pachal, Pete, 142 recorded, 74, 198, 344, 614
“Pacific State” (808 State), 533, 534, 537 simulcast performances, 329, 377, 383
“Packard Good” (Zappa), 85 single, 85, 87, 368
Palano, Lori, 236 styles, 181, 249
Palfy, Cora, 7, 9, 229, 230, 282, 615–​617 vocal, 12, 36, 197, 299, 314, 318, 363, 368
670   Index

Performance art, 142, 619 Poor, Nathaniel, 610n23

Performer (MOTU), 373n7 Pop Idol (television program), 148
Perfume (group), 117 Porter, Michael E., 558
Peterson, Richard A., 378, 495, 497, 498, 500, Portes, Alejandro, 432
505, 573 Power, 5–​7, 18, 59, 68, 70–​7 1, 89, 108, 114, 130,
Pet Sounds (Beach Boys), 306 140, 152–​153, 186, 215, 227, 237–​238, 244,
Phase One: Celebrity Take Down 299, 309, 400, 597–​598, 607
(Gorillaz), 149 Powerbooks_​Unplugged (PB_​UP). See
Phase spaces, 248, 251, 253, 255–​256, 618–​619 PB_​UP (Powerbooks_​Unplugged)
“Phase Three” (Albarn), 5, 99 Powers, Ann, 299
Phillips, Dom, 149, 161n2 Powys, John Cowper, 394
“Phonic Floor Tiles” (Satie), 456 Pranceatron, 136
Photoshop, 415 Pras, Amandine, 371
Piano Concerto No. 2 (Prokofiev), 350 Pratt, Andy C., 558
Picasso, Pablo, 205 Pratt, Steve, 518, 525
Piekut, Benjamin, 72–​73, 112, 113, 260 Presley, Elvis, 1–​2, 37, 50n2, 171, 307
Pijanowski, Bryan C., 473n23 “The Pretty Road” (Schneider), 605
Pillowfish, 179–​180, 184 Preve, Francis, 269
Pink, 485 Priest, Stephen, 86, 87, 630n12
Pink Floyd, 162n26, 530 Prima Donna (Wainwright), 609n17
Pinocchio (film), 62n2 Primus, 271, 576
Pirnia, Garin, 418 Prince, 307, 483
Pitt, Brad, 141 Princeton Laptop Orchestra. See PLOrk
Pixarni (Ferraro), 415 PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises, 420
Plastic Beach (Gorillaz), 160 Produzioni dal Basso, 576, 581, 590
“Plastic People” (Zappa), 87 Prögler, Joseph, 77n10
Plato, 84, 92n1, 383 Projection systems, 140, 141
Playground Music, 499 Project Now, 30
“Please Please Me” (Beatles), 41 Project-​object, 15
“Please Stay” (Cryin Shames), 28 The Project Studio Network podcast, 312
PledgeMusic, 596, 596f, 597, 604, 609n17 Prokofiev, Sergei, 350
PLOrk (Princeton Laptop Orchestra), 380, Propellerhead, 485
385, 386, 388 “Protect and Survive” (public information),
The Ploughman’s Lunch (Eyre), 401 404, 405
The Ploughman’s Lunch (McEwan), 401 Pro Tools (AVID), 373n7
Plugged In (Théberge), 357 Provision (company), 142
PMRC. See Parents Music Resource Center Prozzäk (group), 144n5
Pocahaunted and the Emeralds, 409–​410 Psychic Chasms (Palomo), 417
“The Poem of Hashish,” 533 “Psychosocial” (Slipknot), 7, 266, 270–​271,
Pohlmann, Ken C., 483 273–​274, 279n14
Poitras, Gilles, 152, 161n11, 161n14 “Psychosocial Baby” (Isosine), 266, 270, 271,
The Polar Express (film), 130 273, 275, 276, 278
Polish MegaTotal, 562 Public Enemy, 25, 553, 593, 603–​607, 609n13
Poltergeist (film), 162n29 Pulse Two (remix), 255
Polyphonic Spree, 17 “Purdy,” 369
Polyvinyl, 517 Pure Data, 385, 389n16
Ponce de Leon, Charles Leonard, 283 “Pure Shores” (All Saints), 361, 369, 373n4
 Index   671

“Push the Feeling on” (Nightcrawlers), 533, Record Industry in Numbers (IFPI), 507n8
536, 537 Red Wedge, 532
Putnam, Robert D., 432 Redzone, 6, 168, 203–​204, 204f
Pytlik, Mark, 488, 492 Reed, Lou, 138
Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling
Quatermass serials, 394 Culture (Navas), 356
Queen’s University of Belfast, 385, 388n1 Reitsamer, Rosa, 574
Question Time (BBC), 406, 407n6 Remixing, 2, 84, 228, 235, 242, 250, 253–​257,
Quimby, Fred, 52 261, 276, 312, 323, 328–​329, 343, 355–​357,
Quin, Tegan and Sara, 520 360, 362–​363, 370, 372, 471, 484, 486,
537, 618
Radio, 21, 37, 111, 115, 182, 188, 223, 308, 323, remix.nin.com, 357
437, 440, 452, 505, 516, 517 Renaud, Alain, 250
Radio 3. See CBC Radio 3 Rentfrow, Peter J., 285, 302n4
Radiohead, 235, 328, 355, 362–​363, 362f, 367–​ Repubblica website, 579
370, 372, 373n8, 508n17, 618, 630n7 Requiem for a Village (Gladwell), 400
Radliff, Kenneth, 207n6 Resnikoff, Paul, 500, 501, 508n14
Radway, Janice A., 113 Rettberg, Jill, 595, 609n6
Rafaeli, Sheizaf, 244 ReverbNation, 202, 594
The Raft, 154 “Revolution” (Beatles), 49
Rage Against the Machine, 576 Revolution in the Head (Macdonald), 32n7
Railroad Study/​Étude aux chemins de fer Revolution 9, 25–​26
(Schaeffer), 456 Revolver (Beatles), 23, 29
Railton, Diane, 441, 442 Reynolds, Roger, 250, 254
“Rain” (Beatles), 38, 42 Reynolds, Simon, 330, 394–​395, 406, 410, 414,
Rainforest (Feld), 472n8 415, 418, 423, 502, 503, 506, 532, 534, 537,
Rainie, Lee, 587 538, 545, 626
Rakim, 77n2 Reznor, Trent, 235, 355, 365, 368, 370
Ramachandran, Vandana, 588 Rhapsody Rabbit (film), 55
Rambarran, Shara, 5, 10, 14, 24, 32n14, 61, 99, Rheingold, Howard, 346, 480
148, 154, 279n8, 373n4 Rhetoric, 554, 597, 598
Ramirez, Ana, 347, 352n8, 353n27 Rhythm, 13, 14, 27, 53–​57, 61–​62, 67, 70, 72,
Ramjac (Paul Chivers), 25 74, 76, 156, 215, 276, 358, 393, 400, 540,
Ramones, 17, 31n3 546, 588
Random Access Memories (Daft Punk), 288, Richards, 44
302n1, 302nn7–​8 Richardson, John, 113, 138, 140, 145,
Rapp, Tobias, 534 149, 161n21
Rauschenberg, Robert, 626 Richard X, 268
Rautiainen, Tarja, 498, 499 Rietveld, Hillegonda C., 533, 538
Raves and rave culture, 381, 531–​533, 538, 544 Rihanna, 17, 31n4
Rayl, A. J. S., 40 The Ring (film), 162n29
“Ray of Gob,” 279n5 Ringling Brothers, 310, 316
RealSax.com, 312 Risk, 19, 215, 384, 451, 501, 504, 552, 560,
The Real World Begins, 91 566, 627
Rebelo, Pedro, 250 Ritual and Education (Ghost Box), 393
Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Roads, Curtis, 278n4
Technology (Bayley), 77n12 Robak, Tabor, 423
672   Index

Robins, K., 560 Saints & Sinners (All Saints), 373n6

Robinson, Jenefer, 82 Salo, Markku, 498
Robocop (film), 150 Sample, Ian, 142
“Robo Kiss” (W), 117 Sampling, 4, 14, 65–​80, 197, 267, 269, 356, 412,
Robots, 7, 99, 117, 135, 142, 150, 230, 282, 461, 614
288–​293, 295, 296, 298–​300, 576 Samsung Galaxy phone, 487
“The Robots,” 135 Sandbrook, Dominic, 400
Roc-​a-​Fella, 363 Sanden, Paul, 5, 6, 15, 85, 86, 113, 120, 200–​201,
Rock, James, 142 204, 207n4, 623, 630n13
Rock Band (video game), 18, 27 Sandercombe, W. Fraser, 42
Rockethub, 596, 596f Sanders, Ed, 349
Rocket Juice and the Moon (Albarn), 162n32 Sanders, Peter, 39
Rock music, 22, 28, 36, 43, 87, 90, 171, 194, 197, Sandler, Adam, 180
229, 269, 283, 439, 517, 522, 523, 604 Sandvoss, Cornel, 236
“Rockstar” (Nickelback), 183 San Francisco Symphony, 336
Rodman, Gilbert B., 500 Sänpäkkilä, Sami, 497, 501
Rogers, Jim, 607 Sargent, Carey, 586, 587
Rohrhuber, Julian, 380, 384 Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 86, 87, 622, 623
Roland TR-​808 Rhythm Composer, 363 Satie, Erik, 414, 449, 455, 456, 458,
“Rolling Girl,” 122, 124 472n2, 474n28
Rolling Stones, 31n5, 47, 50n2 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 279n21
“Rondo Alla Turca” (Mozart), 341 Sayaka (study participant), 119, 120, 122, 123
Rosenberg, Sean, 482 Schafer, 475
Ross, Will, 207n15 Schafer, R. Murray, 171, 449, 455, 457, 458, 471,
Roszak, Theodore, 498 472n5, 472n7, 474n28
Rothenberg, David, 465, 466 Schechner, Richard, 343
Rowell, Lewis, 92n2 Schiesel, Seth, 37
Roy Kerr, 268 Schiller, H., 560
Rubber Soul (Beatles), 11–​12, 21, 22, 32n7 Schloss, Joseph, 75
Rudkin, David, 405–​406 Schneider, Barry A., 285
Ruggiero, 566 Schneider, Maria, 553, 593, 599–​600, 600f,
Rumore, 578 604–​607
Rumours (Fleetwood Mac), 615, 629n1 Schober, Michael, 355
Rundgren, Todd, 477, 478, 483 Scholz, Trebor, 337, 338
Russell, Bertrand, 15, 82, 83, 89 Schön, Donald A., 211
Russo, Greg, 92n9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 82, 89, 279n9
Russo, Stephen A., 285 Schramm, Holger, 119
Rutherford, Mike, 134 Schröter, Jens, 135
Ruton Music, 497 Schubert, Franz, 609n9
Ruud Janssen, B., 261 Schutz, Alfred, 14, 74
Ryan, J., 538 Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth, 206
ryo, 125n6 Scooby Doo (cartoon), 63n22
RZA, 75 Scott, Derek B., 162, 269
Screenshots, 459–​461
Sadler, Eric “Vietnam,” 603, 609n9 Second Life, 5, 6, 153, 161nn16–​17, 167–​168,
St. Augustine, 81, 84, 92n2, 92n3 171–​224, 329, 383
St. John, Graham, 532 Sefton-​Green, Julian, 121
 Index   673

Selin, Tove, 499 Shrek (film), 130, 622, 630n11

Sellaband, 553, 588, 589, 593, 596, 596f, 598, Shuker, Roy, 502
603–​605, 604f, 610n19 Silent Music (Fiery Furnaces), 12, 26
Seppälä, Roope, 497 Silent Record (Fiery Furnaces), 26
Serazio, Michael, 269, 277, 278 Silverman, David, 118
Sercombe, Laurel, 42 Simmons, Gene, 279n11
Serenade in D minor (Dvorak), 350 Simpson, Ashlee, 197, 198, 207n17
Service, Tom, 353n32 Simpson, Dave, 139
Setoodeh, Ramin, 132 The Sims Online (virtual computer
The 17 project, 12 game), 161n17
Seventh (Beethoven), 86 Simulations, 1, 5, 13, 40, 42, 44, 46, 61, 99,
Seville, David, 132 104, 139, 141–​143, 150–​151, 421, 422, 449,
Sex Pistols, 31n5, 279n5 455, 469
Sexton, Jamie, 395, 396, 398–​399, 411 Simulcast performances, 329, 377, 383
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Sinfield, Alan, 418
(Beatles), 12, 17, 22, 36, 40, 41, 306 Sing Again with the Chipmunks (album), 132
Schaeffer, Pierre, 111, 125n1 Sinnreich, Aram, 351, 356
Shaham, Gil, 336, 350 SiriusXM, 516, 517
Shakespeare, William, 81 Sisario, Ben, 501, 505, 508nn13–​14
Shakur, Tupac, 108, 129 The Six Million Dollar Man, 291
The Shallows (Carr), 28–​29 The Skaters, 409, 410, 415
Shamen, 29 Skeleton, 420
Shane, Scott, 559 Sklower, Jedediah, 498
Shank, Barry, 189, 514, 523, 524, 526 Sky (television series), 394
Shannon, Claude, 386 Sky Blue (Schneider), 599
Shapiro, Peter, 547n2 Skype, 383, 580, 581
Sharp, Bobby, 174 Slade, Giles, 421
Sharp, Ken, 39 Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of
Shaull, Richard, 539 Voltaire (Dali), 626
Shaviro, Steven, 66, 69, 70, 75 Slaven, Neil, 84, 92n9
Shaw, Gillian, 518 Slayer, 271
Shazam, 30, 485 SLEO (First Symposium on Laptop
Shea, Richard, 361 Ensembles and Orchestras), 329, 377, 381
Sheeran, Ed, 91–​92 SlicethePie, 596, 597
Sheik Yerbouti (Zappa), 84 Slipknot, 7, 228, 229, 266, 271, 272–​273, 275,
Sheldon, Chris, 371 279nn10–​11, 302n7
Shelton, Robert, 90 Slub, 384
Shields, Rob, 4, 5, 11, 18, 60, 61, 516 Smale, Will, 598
Shiga, John, 268, 270, 279n7 Small, Brendon, 139
Shirky, Clay, 241, 244, 569 Small, Christopher, 65, 66, 68, 77n1, 77n8,
Shocklee, Hank, 603 77n16, 249
Shocklee, Keith, 603 Small Black, 416
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 193 Smalley, Susan L., 473n24
Shota (study participant), 119, 120–​121, 123 Small Fame (Bend Sinister), 519–​520
“Should Have Taken Acid with You” Smallwood, Scott, 380
(Palomo), 417 “Smells Like Teen Booty,” 278n5
A Show Case for SC Tweets (Bartetzki), 385 Smith, Alan, 46
674   Index

Smith, Kinagree, 177 soundsnap.com, 472nn10–​11

Smith, Marc A., 480 Sound technicians. See Sound engineers and
Smith, Mark, 244 technicians
Snoop Dog, 29 Soundtracks, 39, 62, 102, 392, 393, 398, 401,
Snow Patrol, 485 404, 577
Snow White (film), 62n2 SoundWIRE Research Group, 385
SNSs (social networking sites), 332–​333, 428, Sounes, Howard, 47
432, 434–​436, 438–​440, 586–​587, 598 Sparklehorse, 24
Sobel, R., 308 Specials, 25
Social capital, 120, 432, 440, 552–​554, 573–​575, The Specials (group), 162n23
581, 586–​590 Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt,
Social media, 228, 235, 242, 344, 356, 369–​370, the Work of Mourning, and the New
422, 451, 495, 500, 505, 524, 543, 579, International (Derrida), 20, 330, 394
580, 595 “Speed Freak Boogie” (Zappa), 87
The Social Network, 368 Spielberg, Steven, 63n22
Social networking, 8, 210, 220, 222, 234, 257, Spiral Tribe, 532, 538
261, 332–​333, 368, 428–​431, 433–​437, 439–​ “Spirit of Preservation” (Reynolds), 395
444, 485, 505, 514, 552–​554, 575, 577, 580, Spitz, Bob, 41
589, 593, 601 Spotify, 9, 30, 31, 214, 344, 434, 451, 489, 495,
Society for Electro-​Acoustic Music in the 501, 502, 505, 506, 508n14, 508n17, 509n29
United States (SEAMUS), 381 Spring, Katherine, 102
The Society of Control (Deleuze), 544 Springer, Claudia, 153, 431
Sociology, 3, 431 “Squib Cakes” (Tower of Power), 68
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 262 Srull, Thomas K., 285, 298, 300
Somach, Denny, 39 Stadio Comunale, Bologna, Italy, 30 August
“Something” (Beatles), 38 1973 (Zappa), 93n16
Song Hae Gyo, 336 Stahl, Matthew, 133–​134, 514
Songkick, 598 Staines, Paul, 548n8
Song Reader (Hanson), 12, 26 “Stand Up and Be Counted” (anthem), 402
Songza, 30 Stanford University, 329, 377, 385, 388n1
Sonic Seasonings (Carlos), 458 Stankievech, Charles, 473n19
Son of CageN, 254 Stanley, Bob, 534
Son of Dracula (Ferraro), 415 Stanyek, Jason, 72–​73, 112, 113, 260
Son of the Son of CageN, 254 Stark, Steven D., 43, 44–​45
Sontag, Susan, 104 Starr, Ringo, 36, 39, 43, 46
Sony, 507n7 Star Spangled Banner (Hendrix), 617
Sony BMG, 191, 206n1, 491n6 Star Trek (television series), 581
Soulwax, 268 Star Wars (film), 135
soundbible.com, 472n10 States, Ryan, 7, 230, 307f, 309–​325, 309f, 311f,
SoundCloud, 18, 26, 29, 333, 344, 369, 370, 382, 313–​314f, 316f, 321f, 323–​324f
424n1, 434, 442, 500, 563, 619, 620 Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property
Sound engineers and technicians, 133, 259, Law Affects Musical Creativity
339, 433, 576, 615 (Demers), 77n5
Sound quality, 268, 433, 439, 482 “Steam Machine” (Daft Punk), 290, 291f,
soundrangers.com, 472nn10–​11 294, 296
Soundscapes, 25, 331, 423, 450, 455, 457–​458, Steely Dan, 306
460–​461, 464–​471 Steinfield, Charles, 586

Stems, 251, 254, 255, 257, 259, 323, 355–​376, 379,
618–​619. See also Mix stems
Stereotypes, 272, 274, 275, 435
Stern, Daniel, 204
Sterne, Jonathan, 206, 249, 479, 488, 505, 594
Sterne, Luke, 17, 31n5
Stevens, Carolyn S., 106, 109, 114
Stever, Gayle S., 285, 286
“Stevie’s Spanking” (Zappa), 93n18
Sting, 478, 483
Stitcher, 30
Stock, Aitken and Waterman, 357
Stoessner, Jennifer, 137
Stone, Allucquére Rosanne, 431
The Stone Tape (Kneale), 394, 400
Strachan, Robert Craig, 495, 497–​500, 507n3,
507n5, 507n8
“Straighten Up and Fly Right” (Cole &
Cole), 24
Strange Sounds (Taylor), 360
Strange Town (States), 8, 230, 309f, 310–​316,
311f, 314f, 316f
Stratton, Jon, 160n1
Strauss, Johann, I (1804–​1849), 57
Strauss, Johann, II (1825–​1899), 13, 52–​62,
62n12, 63n17
Straw, Will, 378, 440, 481, 514, 521, 524, 526
“Strawberry Fields Forever” (Beatles), 40, 538
Strawberry Flower (group), 144n5
“A Stroke of Genius,” 279n5
The Strokes, 279n5
Stubblefield, Clyde, 73
Studio Ghibli, 105
Studio Killers (group), 144n5
Studio Pros, 312
Sturm, Fred, 599
Subcultures, 130, 418, 452, 498, 526, 531,
547, 595
Subsonica, 576
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” (Dylan), 600
Sudoh, Eiko, 341
Suedfeld, Peter, 473n20
“Suffragette City” (Bowie), 31n3
“Sugar, Sugar” (Barry & Kim), 134
Sullivan, Ed, 41, 50n2
Sullivan, Mark, 570n1
Summer, Donna, 534
Index   675
Summer of Love, 44, 50n3
Sun Araw, 410
Sunbow Productions, 136
Sundén, Jenny, 430, 435, 480
“Sundial” (Other Channels), 405
“Sunny Afternoon” (Kinks), 155
Sunsetcorp, 412
SuperCollider, 330, 384–​386, 389n11
SuperCollider Symposium (2010), 385, 389n13
“Super Delicate” (Hey! Say! JUMP!), 122
Super Metsä, 497
Supplementarity, 20
“Surfacing” (Slipnot), 271–​272
Surges, Greg, 380
Surowiecki, James, 597
Survivors (BBC series), 400, 403
Suster, Mark, 413
Sutton-​Smith, Brian, 187, 189
Svart, 497
Svenonius, I. F., 545–​546
Swamp Thing, 252, 256, 259
Swedien, Bruce, 306
Sweet, Yami, 120
“Swinscoe Episode 1 & 2” (Other
Channels), 405
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 336
Sympathy for the Devil (documentary
film), 47
Symphony No. 4 (Brahms), 350
Symphony No. 5 (Tchaikovsky), 350
Symposium on Laptop Ensembles and
Orchestras. See SLEO
Synclavier, 452
Syntonic Research, 457, 458f
Taboo, 50n1
Tagg, Philip, 92n4, 92n7, 92n8, 619
Taiki (study participant), 119–​123
Takafuji, Maki, 341, 352n15
Takashi (study participant), 119, 121–​123
Takemoto, Gidayu I, 102
Takenouchi, Kazuhisa, 288
Taku (study participant), 119
Talent Scout (Galassi), 579
Tan, Shzr Ee, 2, 8, 327–​328, 335
Tan Dun, 327–​328, 335, 336, 339, 342, 343, 345,
346, 349, 350, 352n2
676   Index

Tapscott, Don, 337, 569 T-​Ka (Sellaband), 590

Tateru Nino, 207n5 Todd Rundgren-​Interactive, 483
Taussig, Michael T., 186 Tom and Jerry: The Classic Collection
“Taxman,” 29 (cartoon), 62n6
Taylor, Charles, 279n18 Tommasini, Anthony, 353n33
Taylor, Corey, 271–​275, 279n17 Tommaso, 587
Taylor, Derek, 48, 49 “Tomorrow Comes Today” (Gorillaz), 149
Taylor, Robert, 480 “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Beatles), 28, 40
Taylor, Timothy L., 176, 360 Toop, David, 261
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 350 “Toot Toot Tootsie,” 46
“Technologic” (Daft Punk), 291, 295–​297f “Top Billin’ ” (Audio Two), 75
Technological determinism, 335, 337 Torino, Thomas, 629n4
Technological mediation, 199, 205. See also Torn Hawk (Wyatt), 422
Mediation Toro Y Moi, 416, 418
TED, 601, 610n18 Toto, 417
Teibel, Irving, 449, 455, 457, 458, 471, Tough, David, 2, 7–​8, 230, 306
472n9, 474n28 Tower of Power, 68
The Terminator (film), 150 Townhouse studios, 371
Terranova, Tiziana, 480 Trachtenberg, Jeffrey, 484
Texas A&M University, College Trainer, Adam, 8, 331–​332, 409, 502
Station, 388n1 Transcendetal Idealism, 81, 83
Thatcher, Margaret, 397 The Transformation of Intimacy
That Hideous Strength (Lewis), 394, 396 (Gidden), 610n20
Theater, 104, 105, 157, 601 Transformers (cartoon), 136
Theater is Evil (Palmer), 601 Treitler, Leo, 15, 82, 83
Théberge, Paul, 257, 269, 357, 367, 371 Trey Songz, 478
Them or Us (Zappa), 93n18 Tribute bands, 40, 86, 184, 239
“The17,” 27 Trichordist, 508n14
Thing-​Fish (Zappa), 84, 87, 93n13 Tricky, 25
“The Third Meaning” (Barthes), 99, 154 Trippett, David, 207n4
Thomas, Frank, 15n1, 62n2 The Tritsch Tratsch Polka, 56
Thomson, Matthew, 285 Troutman, Roger, 424n3
Thorley, Mark, 9, 551–​552, 557, 560, 564, 568, Truax, Barry, 457, 469, 472n6
588, 589, 599–​600, 609n15 Trueman, 388
Thornton, Curt, 142 Tubeway Army, 278n5
Thornton, Sarah, 37, 199 Tucker, Ken, 288
Thriller (Jackson), 491n5 Tudou.com, 339
Tibbett, Lawrence, 306 Tumblr, 385, 517
Tigon, 400 The Tuning of the World (Schafer),
Till, Rupert, 161n3 457, 472n7
Tilson Thomas, Michael, 327, 336, 337, 340, Tupac Shakur, 1–​2, 18–​19, 37, 98–​99
347, 349, 350 Turino, Thomas, 617
Timbre, 67, 73, 76, 155–​156, 204, 250, 536 Turkle, Sherry, 346, 431, 480
Tim DeLuxe, 533 Turner, Fred, 503
Time-​based processing, 368 “Turn Me On” (Guetta), 117
Timeless (Goldie), 544 Turtles, 66
The Time of Bells (Feld), 472n8 “The TV Trap” (Other Channels), 405
 Index   677

“12-​Bar Original,” 32n7 The Vancouver Soundscape (Schafer), 472n5

“Twelve Principles of Animation” (Disney), Vanderdonckt, Cheyanne, 500
13, 52, 57, 62n3 Vaporwave, 331, 409, 419–​423, 625–​627, 629
The 20 Things You Must Know About Music “Vaporwave Essentials,” 420, 421
Online (Dubber), 594 Vasudevan, Sandosh, 99n1
Twickenham Film Studios, 47 “Vatican Vibes” (Qadiri), 423
Twitter, 29, 222, 333, 344, 347, 382, 384, 434, Vbirds (group), 144n5
442, 517, 594, 601 Veal, Michael, 206, 413
 2D, 99 Vega, Suzanne, 191
2-​J, 138 Vektroid, 420
2 Many DJs, 268, 278n5 Venus Club, 543f
2Pac. See Tupac Shakur Verdi, Giuseppe, 87
200 Motels (Zappa), 84 Vernallis, Carol, 441
Veronica Mars (film), 609n7
UBS Verbier Orchestra, 340 Vickers, Earl, 28
Uchû senkan Yamato (Space Battleship “Video Killed the Radio Star”
Yamato), 152 (Buggles), 530
Udell, Gregory F., 559 Vidler, Mark, 268, 269
Uimonen, Heikki, 505 Vie, Stephanie, 189n4
UK (Paul Draper), 251–​260. See also A View from a Hill (James), 399
Draper, Paul Vimeo, 116, 344, 347, 369, 370
Ulmer, Gregory L., 423 Violin Concerto No. 5 (Mozart), 350
“Unchain My Heart” (Sharp), 174 Virginia Tech Linux Laptop Orchestra
“Under the River” (States), 320 (L2Ork), 380
UNESCO, 560 Virtual, defining, 18–​20
“Unforgettable” (Cole), 307 Virtual albums, 449, 478, 481–​482, 484,
“Unforgettable” (Cole & Cole), 72–​73 486–​490
“Unforgotten Town” (Belbury Tales), 401 Virtual experience, 52, 61, 62, 223, 469, 478,
United Artists, 40, 47 490, 629
Universal (record label), 507n7, 508n10 “Virtual Fruit Plaza” (Clear Skies), 420
“The Universal” (Blur), 31n4 Virtual idols and pop stars, 5, 97, 106–​107,
University of California, Berkeley, 379 111–​147, 620, 623
University of Colorado, Boulder, 388n1 Virtual Information Desk, 420
University of Huddersfield, 329, 377, 388 Virtual Liveness (Sanden), 5, 15, 85
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Laptop Virtual worlds, 2, 4–​6, 8, 13, 15, 52–​53, 60–​62,
Orchestra (MiLO), 380 140, 143, 153, 167–​168, 171, 176, 179, 182,
Unstoppables, 440, 442 186–​189, 193, 206, 211–​212, 219, 228–​229,
Ursell, Gillian, 564 620–​621
Users, 131, 210, 222–​223, 227, 242–​245, 361–​363, Vita da Spaziale (Fabrizio), 576
370, 372, 385–​386, 460–​461, 477, 480–​ Vocaloids, 5, 97–​99, 101–​110, 112, 115–​120, 123–​
489, 518–​519, 552, 554, 594–​597 124, 133, 141
Usher, 271 Vocaloid software, 97, 101, 102, 105, 116
U2, 184–​186, 185f Vocal performances, 12, 36, 197, 299, 314, 318,
363, 368
“Vagueness” (Russell), 82 Voegelin, Salome, 625, 630n14
Vai, Steve, 88, 93n15 Voices of the Rainforest (Feld), 472n8
Van Bree, Marc, 344 Vozick-​Levinson, S., 486
678   Index

W (group), 117 Wennekes, Emile, 191, 193, 200–​202

Wadhams, Wayne, 306 We’re the Banana Splits (album), 134
Wadsworth, Tony, 149 Wesch, Michael, 345
Wagner, Richard, 92n4 West, Kanye, 328, 355, 363–​364, 364f, 370
Wainwright, D., 236 Westbrook, Alonzo, 162n25
Wainwright, Rufus, 609n17 West-​Eastern Divan Orchestra, 340
Wakin, Daniel J., 601 Westerkamp, Hildegard, 457, 472n6
Wales, Jimmy, 243 Wham!, 316
Walker Brothers, 44 Wharton, Stephan, 415
Walser, Robert, 302n4 “What a Feeling” (Amuro), 117
Walt Disney Company, 136 “What Goes On” (Beatles), 21
Wang, Yuja, 2, 328, 339 Wheatley, Helen, 402–​403
Ward, Chris, 588 “When Irish Eyes are Smiling,” 46
Warehouse Medicines (Bates), 350 “When the Lie’s So Big” (Zappa), 93n19
The War Game (Watkins), 405 “When the Red Red Robin,” 46
Warner (record label), 507n7 The Whipped Cream Mixes (Evolution
Warner, Andrea, 520 Control Committee), 275
Warner, Daniel, 472n2 White, Edmund, 548n5
Warner, Timothy, 356 White, Michele, 480
Warner Bros., 63n13 White, Paul, 563
Warner/​Chappell Music, 373n8 White, Ray, 86
“A Warning to the Curious” (James, BBC The White Album (Danger Mouse), 12, 23
adaptation), 400 Whiteley, Sheila, 1, 13, 32n14, 52, 156, 161n2,
Washed Out (Greene), 416, 418 278n1, 302, 498, 499, 537–​538, 625, 626
Watkins, Peter, 405 White noise, 156, 294, 459, 464, 466, 471
Watson, Allan, 371 Who Framed Roger Rabbit (film), 63n22
Watson, Chris, 472n8 WhoSampled, 30
Watson, David, 285 “Wicked Game” (Isaak), 28
Watson, Paul, 441, 442 The Wicker Man, 399
“Wave temple” (Internet Club), 421 Wikipedia, 243, 244, 607
“We Are, The Colors” (The Colors), 227, Wikström, Patrik, 278n3, 433, 495, 500, 507n7,
234, 243 508n20, 509n27
Weather Report (Watson), 472n8 Wilhelm II (Kaiser), 57
“Webscapes” (Home), 420 Wilkerson, Carr, 385
The Wedding Singer, 180 Williams, Anthony, 337, 371, 569
“We Don’t Give a Damn About Our Williams, Justin A., 9, 553, 554, 593
Friends,” 278n5 Williams, Raymond, 111, 507n1
Wee, Thomas Tan Tsu, 286 Willis, Ike, 86
“The Weekend” (Gray), 537 Will Pop Eat Itself? (Beadle), 356
Weheliye, Alexander G., 74, 515 Wilson, Brent, 262
Weidman, Amanda, 107 Wilson, E. O., 467, 473n22
Weinstein, Deena, 435 Wilson, Ross, 9, 553, 554, 593
Weiss, Paul, 89 Winter Morning Walks (Schneider), 599
“Welcome to Zappa Wiki Jawaka” (Kill Ugly Winther, Daniel Kardefelt, 125n2
Radio), 92n11 The Wire (television series), 384
Wellman, Barry, 480, 587 Wired, 28, 30
Weltgeist (World Spirit), 92n5 “Witch Doctor,” 132

Witchfinder General (film), 401
Witek, Maria, 68
With Teeth (Nine Inch Nails), 364
Wohl, R. Richard, 283
Womack, Bobby, 138
Womack, Kenneth, 48
“A Woman Sobbing” (Dead of Night
series), 404
Wonder, Stevie, 307
“The Word,” 32n7
The Word, 28, 30
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (Benjamin), 248
“The World Is Mine” (ryo), 116, 124
“The World Is Not Enough,” 117
World of Forms, 92n1
World of Warcraft (virtual computer game),
161n17, 430
Worldscape Laptop Orchestra, 380
World Soundscape Project (Schafer), 449,
455, 457, 458, 472n5
World Spirit (Weltgeist), 92n5
“Wowie Zowie” (Zappa), 89
Wright, Matt, 379, 388n3
“Wrong-​side-​out Lovers,” 122
Wu-​Tang Clan, 75
“Wu-​Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit’ ”
(Wu-​Tang Clan), 75
Wyatt, Luke, 422
Wyer, Robert S., 285, 298, 300
Xenochrony, 15, 83–​85
The X-​Factor, 91–​92, 148
Xplora1 (Gabriel), 360, 483
XTC (band), 623
Xurbia Xendless, 373n8
The xx, 478
Yamaha Corporation, 101, 102, 115
Yamashita, Tomohisa, 122
Yano, Christine, 108, 114
Index   679
The Year of the Sex Olympics, 394
Yellow Book, 483
Yellow Submarine (Beatles), 12, 22, 38,
40, 45–​47
Yig, The Father of Serpents (McKinney), 386
Yochai, Benkler, 249, 574
Yorke, Thom, 363, 508n17
You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore
(Zappa), 86, 88
“You Da One” (Rihanna), 31n4
Youku.com, 339
“You Make Me Want to Be a Man” (video), 117
Young, Kerwin “Sleek,” 603
Young, Rob, 294, 399, 401
Young, Sherman, 433, 500
YouSendIt, 252
You Should Reproduce (Kickstarter), 576
“You Showed Me” (Turtles), 66
YouTube, 26, 109, 116, 137, 214, 218, 270, 308,
327–​328, 333, 333n2, 335–​352, 370, 403,
424n1, 434, 442, 489, 500, 501, 505,
508n13, 509n26, 563, 594, 620
Yo-​Yo Ma, 350
YSO (YouTube Symphony Orchestra), 2, 8,
327–​328, 335–​354
Y34RZ3Ro (Nine Inch Nails), 370
Yukoko, Okada, 412
Zaborowski, Rafal, 2, 5, 98, 111, 120, 125n7
Zak, Albin, 86, 302n4, 356, 357
Zappa, Frank, 2, 5, 14, 15, 81–​92, 93nn12–​13,
93n16, 93nn18–​20f, 614–​617, 619, 621
Zappa in New York (Zappa), 93n20
Zappa’s Universe (Zappa), 88
Zherbin, Dmitri, 497
Zhivkova, Stella, 108, 109
Zogbi Ramos, Manuel, 352n8
Zolene, Pamela, 404
zShare, 370
Zuur, Ionat, 74
Zwicky, Chuck, 318, 319