Initial research

After much deliberation, I have decided to look into how society and culture influence technological innovation, and vice-versa.

 

After initial problems with my Athens account (which I don’t think had been authorized at the time of use), I managed to access the e-resources available at the BMU.

 

An initial search (keyword-“determinism”) yielded a great deal of results, but unfortunately most were centred on computer programming, even though I’d selected Arts and Design as a subject area. On refining my search by adding “cultural” and “music”, I discovered several eBooks and articles which touched on my chosen topic.

 

The first one which caught my eye was-

 

“Supporting musical composition by externalizing the composer’s mental space”

Shigeki Amitani, Koichi Hori | C&C ‘02: Proceedings of the 4th conference on Creativity & cognition ; ACM | 2002-10 |

I asked for the full printout, but was told to revise my request, or check for printed copies at Bournemouth’s library. A little bit 20^th Century that, isn’t it?

 

The next one I found was a conference paper,which was very closely linked to the themes of my study-

 

Title:	The Social and Cultural Shaping of Music Technology.
Source:	Latonero, Mark. Conference Papers — International Communication Association (2003-01-01)

 

I converted the text file to a PDF document, so I wouldn’t have the same problem as I did with the earlier document.

 

 

In the article, he argues that social and cultural factors shape new media technology.  His standpoint emphasises social and cultural factors that influence technological innovation, and shuns “technological determinism”.

 

I decided to look up technological determinism (!), which turns out to be the idea that technology is the key factor controlling how individuals and society change. (www.usm.maine.edu/com/concept2.htm)

 

Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture By Timothy Dean Taylor

 

MySearch found this on Google Books. You can’t copy and paste it into a Word doc though, so I added it as a bookmark.

 

Through perusing these documents, I’m starting to get a grip on the underlying theories involved with my theme. Determinism and reductionism (the theory that anything is merely the sum of it’s parts, I think) are often compared with holism, which presents relationships as “non-linear”, which means that artifacts can be more than the sum of their component parts. I’m inclined to go with the holistic view so far. For instance, emerging internet technologies are produced by many disparate elements in a very non-linear way. You just have to look at the “mashup” web applications that use data from many sources previously thought to be unrelated.

 

 

I’m interested in synthesizer technology, and one particular album (remember them?) fascinates me. It’s called “Switched on Bach”, and was the first album to utilise synthesisers in a classical context. It was recorded by Walter Carlos, who’s now called Wendy Carlos (but that’s another story..). I emailed Wendy to ask her opinion on my research topic. There’s been no reply as of yet.

 

To finish on a less technological note, I found a book in my local library called Future Shock (1970) Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-27737-5. It was written by a sociologist called Alvin Toffler. I’ve only just started it, but it seems very relevant to my research. I’ve also discovered that a documentary based on the book is available, narrated by Orson Welles.