Abstract
In claiming that metadata possess the power to put historical awareness into the act of listening, this article examines digital music use as an aesthetic situation driven by potentialities of becoming. Working from a theoretical foundation amalgamating digital music archives and metadata as environments the article discusses Georgina Born’s notion of musical assemblages alongside the concept of virtuality, and by letting these meet the article argues for a musical assemblage built from sensibilities of becoming rather than layers of mediation. The inner workings of digital music use constitute an ecology in which recorded music history moves and reconnects, and this makes the historicity of recorded music be fluid, thus turning listening into a historicised action. In exemplifying this, the article discusses some of the strategic programming of metadata on the digital music platform Diskoteket, and through an analysis of sampled music, the prospects of recorded music’s historicity are shown as affective capacities.
Highlights
In claiming that metadata possess the power to put historical awareness into the act of listening, this article examines digital music use as an aesthetic situation driven by potentialities of becoming
The inner workings of digital music use constitute an ecology in which recorded music history moves and reconnects, and this makes the historicity of recorded music be fluid, turning listening into a historicised action
I discuss metadata as an element that puts interpretive meaning into the actual listening situations of digital music use, and I do so by conducting an analysis of the structuring of metadata on Diskoteket, which is the digital music platform constructed on top of the digital music archive of the Danish Broadcast Corporation (DR).[2]
Summary
In claiming that metadata possess the power to put historical awareness into the act of listening, this article examines digital music use as an aesthetic situation driven by potentialities of becoming. Believing that digital music use fruitfully can be read as a resonant ecology, I argue for the user-listener’s experiences as continual amalgamations of musical sound and information that release new imaginaries of listening.[5] Through an analysis of some of Diskoteket’s assemblatic qualities, I consider how this platform aesthetically makes sense of music as data and in what ways metadata here create a becoming of listening that opens towards dynamic historicised contexts.
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