The Online Program of events for the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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From TikTok to Snapchat to Instagram Reels, digital platforms invite users to become creators, accelerating the recycling, repurposing, and circulation of musical material in new and exciting ways. On these platforms a sound sample becomes a unit of cultural information, a meme, with the potential for generating endless chains of reference which can forge new relationships between users, sounds, and the (moving) image. Inscription in the age of social media ultimately visualize new musical ontologies, challenging canonical paradigms of authorship, creativity, and genre. And yet, the techniques at the foundations of meme culture have historical precedent in musical techniques such as centonization, variation, musical borrowing, and sampling, inviting us to reconsider it within a continuity of practices.
Keynote speaker Braxton Shelley will present a case study focusing on the remediation of Black gospel online to explore how social-media users play with the materiality of musical sound working within the antiphonal affordances of digital infrastructures. Following his presentation, three respondents will prompt discussion around musical inscription and visualization in the age of social media, asking questions such as: In what way do these new technologies re-envision the relationship between the moving image, sound, and its perceived source? How do new digital media challenge musicological concepts traditionally associated with the score such as “work” and “authorship”? In the post-canonical world of TikTok, where is the work, or what does the work become? What is new and what is old about the musical techniques associated with memetic practices? What is the role of human actors and algorithms in determining how digital inscriptions defer, recall, and alter the meaning of musical information? What kind of notion of history are these new musical inscriptions engendering?
