prompt 3.1 ~ discourse

Music and Material Culture

Keywords: Sticky, material culture, repurpose, NFC, poetic observation

For Prompt 3 we were tasked to choose a reading and enter a discourse with it through making. We had the option to challenge the reading, exemplify it, deconstruct it or engage with it in any form that started a dialogue with it. For my reading, I chose “Music and Material Culture” by Will Straw.

Straw, W. (2012). Music and material culture. The Cultural Study of Music, 249–258. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203149454-29

During this prompt, whilst in New York, I picked up a book called “Do | Design - Why Beauty is the Key to Everything” by Alan Moore. In one of the chapters, it talks about having a deeper consideration for what you want to create. In my interpretation, it got me thinking that even though it is important to have technical skills and a plan for what to do in the moment, what is more important is having a mission and vision of the world you want to create. By taking a top-down perspective and understanding why you want to do what you want to do, not only will the work feel more meaningful, this perspective will filter down to your day-to-day decisions.

For this prompt, my thesis and ever further considering the life I want to live, I am realizing what I crave and what motivates me is connection. Although at the moment I can’t articulate fully what I mean by this, I see this desire as an underlying motivation in my work and what I strive for as a person.

I was initially told about this reading by a former professor of mine at UCLA, Thomas Hodson, months prior to starting the program. When I finally read it, I immediately resonated with the topic. Coming in, my interest was music, but it wasn’t until reading this that I began to understand music from a material culture viewpoint. By positioning music within the sphere of material culture, it felt that I had found a topic and a field of study that aligned with my interest.

After reading the paper a few times, and mind-mapping the core concepts, a key point that emerged was music’s ability to be ‘sticky’. Although music in some ways is intangible and nebulous, it also has the ability to stick to things such as band merch, dinner parties and CDs. My idea then was to exemplify this point and think about what new forms or settings can music stick to.

Alongside, “Music and Material Culture”, I augmented my understanding of this space with the preceding 3 readings, “Physical Interaction in a dematerialized world”, “Token-Based Access to Digital Information” and “Metronome Music Time Capsule: rematerializing music consumption and exchange”. All three of these readings gave me a better understanding of the space I was operating in and new ways that people are already experimenting with music’s stickiness.

We received this prompt only a few days before we had a break for reading week. I was set to travel to New York but before leaving I wanted to play around with potential forms that this new music object could take shape in.

I really enjoyed the last prompt and my explorations with paper and bookmaking. Through my making practice and reading “Publishing as Practice” for the last prompt, I got the initial idea for what I wanted to do for this prompt. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, in the essay “The New Art of Making Books” the author Ulises Carrión posits that a book is more than just the words on the paper but should be considered in its totality; form, shape, color etc. From my understanding, what Carrión was pointing to was that books in themselves, through the care and craft of an artist and designer, can be the object of desire. This notion got me thinking about music and we could reconfigure and reconsider how we looked at its form.

Dare I say “The New Art of Making Music”, for this prompt I wanted to experiment with the idea of music’s stickiness and what new forms that music can take shape in. The question that I was wondering was if music could be presented in a different form, would that help increase its value, experience and artistry?