Shh! Examining Secrets and Revelatory Discourse in Music and Audio Technology Culture
 

The secrets of recording success. Trade secrets. Secret weapons. Dirty little secrets. Phrases so ubiquitous in music and audio technology culture that, in the 21st Century, they serve as powerful mechanisms in the production and consumption of music and audio technologies and skillsets. Whilst notions of secrecy have pervaded electronics discourse and practice since the mid nineteenth-century, secrets and concomitant revelatory discourses are intrinsic to the point of defining 21st Century music and audio technology culture. Secrets and revelatory discourse serve to historicize, imagine, mythologize and commodify skillsets whilst amplifying technological fetishization. Such discourse is rife in–and cuts across–several music and audio technology milieux, yet so rarely is it interrogated.

Grounded in historical context and psychology scholarship, this paper examines secrets and revelatory discourse as part of a continuum of the protection of tacit knowledge. Packed with examples and qualitative data drawn from technology manufacturer publications, trade shows, online fora, industry associations, retail, textbooks, scholarship and education, as well as large-scale ethnographic work, this paper focuses on both the purveyors and receptors of secrets and revelatory discourse. Results elucidate the mechanism of secret holders, secrets, revelation and listeners as constitutive of music and audio technology culture.

This paper is a preliminary draft of a forthcoming keynote at Borderline Sonorities - International Conference on Sonorities Research at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil.

Bio

Samantha Bennett is Professor of Music at the Australian National University. She has authored two monographs, co-edited two collections and published numerous articles and chapters on the technological, sound recording and production aesthetics of recorded popular music. Her latest book, Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technology (co-authored with A/Prof Eliot Bates, CUNY) is forthcoming from The MIT Press.

Members of the public or those unable to attend in person may join via Zoom here.
Meeting ID: 864 9883 0235 Password: 116497