New! by Debruyne Francois
Ever since the genre’s inception, questions of “legitimacy” and “authenticity” have been at the c... more Ever since the genre’s inception, questions of “legitimacy” and “authenticity” have been at the center of hip-hop narratives and analyses. For a long time, journalists and academics considered the genre as an “authentic” expression of marginalized, urban populations, which supposedly gained legitimacy when it escaped the ghettos and smuggled its way into major cultural institutions. However, the dynamics that structure hip-hop music and account for its recognition are much more complex. By shedding light on a new wave of hip-hop studies research based on original and diverse research fields, this issue of Volume! considers how such issues of legitimacy and authenticity have influenced the way this music has been practiced and received by a variety of agents, within different spatial and historical contexts, in France as well as in the rest of the world.
Books by Debruyne Francois
This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works ... more This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies draws together a wide range of both leading and emerging scholars to offer a critical survey of STS applications to music studies, considering topics ranging from classical music instrument-making to the ethos of DIY in punk music. The book's four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology. Raising crucial methodological and epistemological questions about the study of music, this book will be relevant to scholars studying the interactions between music, culture, and technology from many disciplinary perspectives. Antoine Hennion is Professor at Mines ParisTech, and the former Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation. He has written extensively on the sociology of music, media, and cultural industries. Christophe Levaux is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium. His research focuses on approaches to 20th-century American music and Actor-Network Theory.
Papers by Debruyne Francois
For a long time, philosophers and social theorists have discussed how things remain the same (fro... more For a long time, philosophers and social theorists have discussed how things remain the same (from Plato to Bourdieu) and how they are always different (from Heraclitus to Deleuze). In this chapter, I would like to consider the question of whether two things can be simultaneously the same and different. Say two people download a song, in MP3 format, from a website on the internet; do they end up with the same recording on their respective devices, or are these different files? Short answer: yes. 1 My interest for this broad questioning, well beyond the scope of sound studies, relates to a research project that I conducted a few years ago on electronic music in China (Zimmermann 2006, 2015). A former student at the Music Conservatory in Geneva, Switzerland, I was originally trained in electroacoustic music, with courses including sound engineering, computer programming, history of audio techniques, algorithmic composition, and more. During my studies, teachers and students from our school relied on the perspective of physics of sound and applied science. I remember that while music itself, as art, was often difficult to seize in concrete terms, we didn't learn or discuss anything particularly mysterious about the production of sound. On the contrary, the theoretical frameworks to which we were initiated made concrete sense, and their application was clear. Consequently, when I later decided to focus on the practices of Chinese electronic musicians as part of my PhD thesis in sinology at the University of Geneva, I felt that I had a solid technical grasp. The musicians in Beijing were playing vinyl records, editing audio files, or relying on 1 This introductory paragraph is shamelessly inspired by Jonathan Sterne's paper title "Media or Instruments? Yes" (2007).
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New! by Debruyne Francois
Books by Debruyne Francois
Papers by Debruyne Francois