More than 'just a hammer': critical techniques in electroacoustic practice

Technology is often directly implicated in the huge changes in the way we think
about music—a combination of increased sophistication and greater accessibility afford a greater number of people an increased range of possibilities (Chadabe, 2004; Emmerson,2001; Waters, 2000; Wishart, 1996[1985]). The fact of its availability, however, is taken for granted and consideration is seldom given to how the technological milieu came to take its form. The dominant discourses on technology have in common that technological change is assumed to be autonomous with regard to social or cultural factors. The philosopher Andrew Feenberg argues that this is not the case, and that there is an emerging micro-politics of resistance that takes the form of re-appropriating engagements with technology that can in turn affect the direction of future technological change.
Whilst technological changes exert substantive effects on the scope and nature of
sonic arts practice, as Chadabe noted, appropriations and misuses by electroacoustic
musicians have exerted substantive effects on the technological environment. Furthermore, I will argue that a critical awareness of this reciprocal relationship with technology can be seen to emerge in recent electroacoustic musical ideas and practices, like glitch or circuit bending, which are partly defined by a manner of engaging with technologies. The same critical concerns are made more explicit and developed in two sets of work I will concentrate on, Agostino Di Scipio’s Audible Ecosystemic Interface and John Bowers’ and Phil Archer’s work on “infra-instruments”, where the activity of composition has changed from the production of works to the construction of technologised musical environments in which music happens, and that emphasise music as a situated and interactive occasion rather than something that lends itself necessarily to repeatability and mediated reproduction.