Who
Makes Electronic Music...
by Hannah Bosma
Technology studies warn us to watch out for technological determinism. Technological
determinism is a way of thinking which is widespread, and one can perceive
it often in discourses about new technological developments in the arts.
Will the Internet or multimedia change the world or the arts? Maybe changes
will (and already did) occur in relation to these new technologies, but
these changes are not and will not be simple, unambiguous or uniform. Technological
practices are and will be social and cultural sites of contestation and
multiplicity, connected to existing social-cultural practices, patterns
and institutions. Gender patterns turn out to be very persistent, and often
take on new guises in new media. New technologies offer many different possibilities
for change, but also new possibilities for the survival of old structures.
It seems important to me that both tendencies are kept in mind. Both a critical
scrutinity of old and new techno-social-cultural practices and a hopeful
exploration of possibilities for positive change are needed. Thus, it is
important to not only speculate about the future but also to study the past
and the present. In discussions about art and technology, much attention
is paid to the newest and hottest technological developments; but the consequences
of older, very common and very important technologies like sound recording
and sound amplification still deserve much more critical and analytical
attention. In the above discussion above the status of the (female) vocalist
and the (male) composer in tape-music, I have tried to give a glimpse of
an analytical strategy which looks for conservative as well as progressive
tendencies and in which there is room for critical as well as hopeful observations.
More about the status of female voices in electrovocal music can be read
in my paper 'Authorship and female voices in electrovocal music', in which
a theoretical background and several compositions are more extensively discussed
and which will be published in the Proceedings of the International Computer
Music Conference 1996.