The Kids Want Noise - How Sonic Mediations Change the Aesthetics of Music

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to discuss how new tools for mediating sounds have developed and changed our aesthetic evaluation and framing of musical sounds. The possibility to create and reproduce sounds has had a great impact on the aesthetic development of music and is a topic that can be approached from many angles. This dissertation focuses on three different technological tools that have been important in shaping music from the 1980s onwards. The first examples discussed are the use of Roland´s early drum machines, the TR-808 and TR-909. Here, the focus is on the synthesised kick drum sound and how it enabled the production of base heavy club music. The second example discusses the praxis of sampling as it developed from the samplers in the early 1980s to present day DAW software. The focus is on how different ways of defining the status and cultural purpose of sound recording facilitated different aesthetic approaches to using such recordings in an artistic creative process. The third example analyses cases where artists themselves use digital and electronic tools to create new sound producing devices; not so much to develop and commodify new instruments, but as a focal point in the actual artistic expression.

In all three of the examples discussed, the focus is on how novel possibilities in mediating sounds become part of a renegotiation of existing aesthetic ideals in music. It is not so much the novelty of the different tools themselves that are important, but how the new possibilities these tools enable become interpreted as strengthening or diverging from established aesthetic concepts of music.