Digital Music Cultures

Course goals

After completion of the course, the student:

• has insight about the various ways in which music plays a role in the digital era;
• is able to set up and carry out their own investigations into digital music practices;
• is able develop their own theories or critically assess and revise or amend existing ones;
• has learned to apply these theories to self-chosen case studies.

Content

Although visual culture has raised much academic interest, new media and digital culture would not exist without sound. Digitalization transforms music: the development of digital instruments and sampling techniques has changed the sound and composition of music definitively. Digital sound and music are also omnipresent in the soundscape of our daily lives: headphones and portable stereos, for instance, give a personalised soundtrack to each day, ringtones and background music add sound to the public sphere, and cloud-based streaming services profess the availability of any music, anywhere, anytime.
 
The first half of this course will consist of a series of seminars, centring on occurrences of music in the digital age. For each seminar we will read and discuss literature representative of the debates surrounding each topic. Discussions will be led by groups of students after a short introductory lecture outlining the issues at stake. The second half of the course consists of each individual student focusing on an extensive academic paper, first through gathering literature and sending in an abstract, followed by a peer-feedback session, before finally submitting their finished paper.

The ability to read music notation is not required.


 

Additional information

This course is mandatory for students of the RMA Musicology programme and open to students from other RMA programmes. Entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by the International Office and the programme coordinator. You do not need to contact the programme coordinator by yourself.

Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final, and may still be modified until the third Wednesday in September.

Career orientation:
Training in written and oral presentation of research; peer review.