Technology and What it Means for DJ Culture
Fin Desmond
301025737
In my thesis I aim to investigate how the production and development of DJ equipment including turntables, mixers, music format etc, have evolved and influenced the electronic music scene in terms of culture, credibility and sociality. A major concern in the DJ industry these days is that with the rise of digital technology, certain elements of traditional DJ skill & culture are slowly dying, and with these elements so is the integrity the scene. Some example of areas where people are concerned are; the replacement of vinyl records with CDs, functions on DJ equipment which take away the skill of
DJing, the development of computer software which allows people to DJ using computers with the aid of digital functions not present in the analog world. However with these advances in music technology, many argue that it is healthy for making progress. I want to look into the reasons why people are for and against these changes, what these changes are, what they mean, and what the outcome may be for future generations of DJs and audiences.
INTRO:
Technology is always evolving. Things are invented and produced only to be surpassed by successive products with more advanced technology. Music is no exception. With the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877 (Shapiro, 2000) electronic music made its first appearance and has come a long way since then. First it was vinyl records, then came magnetic tape housed in cassettes in the 50s, in the 80s compact discs were the latest and best, today there are numerous digital formats such as mp3, that are becoming the standard medium for music. Along with these developments, go all the devices used to produce, record, project, and enhance music.
HISTORY OF FIRST DJS
The first DJs started out playing records on turntables, mixing one song into the next with the help of a mixer. A mixer is a device which allows a DJ to hear sound from one source on headphones, while the sound from another source can be played out loud through speakers and lets the DJ “mix” between the two audio sources. There are many ways of mixing songs together, and the capabilities of the mixer determine how a DJ can achieve this. Mixers have developed a great deal, and now have many functions that allow DJs to manipulate songs.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD DJ:
There are an infinite number of things a DJ can do with his tunes with the technology available today. However, many argue that if a DJ is any good all he needs are the basics; two decks and a mixer, no added aids to make them sound better. A quality DJ can keep the dance floor packed by selecting the right tunes and mixing them well.
DEVELOPMENT1 – CDJs:
One of the first big developments of DJ equipment since Technics made the SP-10 turntable, was the invention of the CD turntable (CDJ). A CDJ is a device DJs can use to play CD’s as if they were records on a turntable. The possibilities this provided had many impacts on the DJ scene and became and still is the cause for much controversy. CDJs created new and exciting possibilities, but one cannot ignore their negative effects as well. On the plus, DJs could now carry a lot more music, not having to lug around a crate of records would have been a relief to many. They could pick from a much larger and diverse range of songs to play, giving more possibilities to DJ sets and performances. Buying songs became a lot cheaper as CDs are much more affordable than vinyl, and with the internet people were able to download songs for a fraction of the price. However with this new freedom there are many debateable issues.
DEV2 – MIXERS
DEV3 – DJ SOFTWARE (serato etc)
DEV4 – VJing
DEV5 – PRODUCTION SOFTWARE
DEV6 – PRESENT/FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES
The technology available today gives anybody who can afford it, the ability to be a DJ. This can be seen as positive as more people are embracing the culture, and the more people embrace it the more it can develop and head in new directions. However there is an integrity that must be maintained and a tradition that must be respected.
So where do you draw the line? When does a DJ stop being a DJ, where does technology take over? There are many factors and opinions to take into consideration. Personally, and from a DJs point of view, I feel a DJ should be in control at all times to be considered a true DJ. Once a device starts to do things that a DJ should do himself, an element is taken away and the DJ becomes less impressive. There is the point that these devices let the DJ focus less on the basics such as beat matching and cueing, and therefore allow them to show their skills in more complex ways and put on a better show. But to me the basics are essential and appreciated, and when a DJ can pull off amazing mixes or perform stunning tricks, as well as doing everything else behind the scenes, that is much more exciting.
One must also think from the audiences point of view. The aim of a DJ is to please the crowd, and new technology provides the opportunity to do this in new and exciting ways.
Bibliography
Shapiro, Peter “Modulations - A History of Electronic Music” Caipirinha Productions, Inc., 2000.
Belle-Fortune, Brian. "All Crews - Journeys Through Jungle/Drum & Bass Culture" 2004.
Broughton, Frank & Bill Brewster. "How to DJ Properly" 2002.
Prochak, Tim "How to Remix" 2001.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Powerpoint
I'm not sure how to provide a link for my powerpoint presentation, so I've placed it in the hand in folder.
Presentation
-My reading was the “Great sideshow of the situationist international”, written by Edward Ball in 1987. I couldn’t find any information on Mr Ball, so im going to start with a brief history of the Situationist International, then I’ll go into more depth about what they did and how their work has impacted society today.
-The Situationist International was formed in July of 1957.
- It was made up of members from different European avant-garde groups, who had met at a conference in Italy and decided to join up to form the S.I.
-They were situated in Paris and lasted 15 years before breaking up in 1972.
-The SI was a group of artists, politicians and academics who had the common goal to bring about social and political change. They had pretty extremist views on capitalism and the state of the social conditions at the time, and they were strongly influenced by the philosophies of Marxism. The SI developed a strong critique of the industrial culture of capitalism in the west and socialism in the east, and long before postmodernism had and come into existence, defined and practiced much of what postmodernism stands for today. They saw everyday social life as being dominated by capitalism, and although capatalism had been attacked before by socialist oppositions, they felt that new ideoligies, criticisms and new forms of rebellion were required to bring about change.
Ball describes the history behind one of the main ideologies of the SI in quite a long drawn out way, so I’ll try to simplify it a little so you can get a view of how and why the SI operated. It is a criticism of capitalism economies that they use the idea of reification as a huge operation to commodifiy social life. Reification is the idea of treating an abstraction as a real life, concrete thing or object. Another definition Ball describes is that
“Socail life is shattered into an ensemble of hermetic points for the purpose of organizing a higher untity, that is, the analytical arrangement of experience that capitalism requires for its smoothest operation.”
-The SI played with reification to create a revolution of consumption, to create a misrecognition commodities by changing their meaning. They did this through detournement. This is art of taking elements of well known media and changing it so that it holds a new meaning, one opposing that of the original message. By doing so they influenced art, literature, cinema and even product development and marketing stratagies of consumerism. They showed people how to recycle what was the official norm to empower them with new meanings, to create new products out of the commodity economy. This is the idea of detournement.
-One example of how they practiced their ideas, was an attack on literature, where artist Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, who was the sort of head of the SI, made a book where all of its content was of pirated elements, the print ran in all directions, there were many sentences left unexplained as they broke off suddenly or had text superimposed over them. The cover was also made of sandpaper so that it would damage other books it lay next to. The purpose is to take the book, a well known corporate medium, and give it a new meaning and purpose. So Detournment recycles something with a specific but completely different and oppositional meaning.
Ball finishes quite nicely by saying
“Detournement has become axiomatic to profit making, and like surrealism, a mass phenomenon. The cult of the displaced object has developed the contours of an industry in design, in clothing, in architecture, even food- in short, in every marketplace of postwar capitalism. Everything that was once made now reappears as a fragment in the hands of the pasticheur. What could not be converted into cash flow used to be expendable, but this problem has been solved: thanks to detournement, everything may stay in the stream of the economy, even the expendable.”
-The Situationist International was formed in July of 1957.
- It was made up of members from different European avant-garde groups, who had met at a conference in Italy and decided to join up to form the S.I.
-They were situated in Paris and lasted 15 years before breaking up in 1972.
-The SI was a group of artists, politicians and academics who had the common goal to bring about social and political change. They had pretty extremist views on capitalism and the state of the social conditions at the time, and they were strongly influenced by the philosophies of Marxism. The SI developed a strong critique of the industrial culture of capitalism in the west and socialism in the east, and long before postmodernism had and come into existence, defined and practiced much of what postmodernism stands for today. They saw everyday social life as being dominated by capitalism, and although capatalism had been attacked before by socialist oppositions, they felt that new ideoligies, criticisms and new forms of rebellion were required to bring about change.
Ball describes the history behind one of the main ideologies of the SI in quite a long drawn out way, so I’ll try to simplify it a little so you can get a view of how and why the SI operated. It is a criticism of capitalism economies that they use the idea of reification as a huge operation to commodifiy social life. Reification is the idea of treating an abstraction as a real life, concrete thing or object. Another definition Ball describes is that
“Socail life is shattered into an ensemble of hermetic points for the purpose of organizing a higher untity, that is, the analytical arrangement of experience that capitalism requires for its smoothest operation.”
-The SI played with reification to create a revolution of consumption, to create a misrecognition commodities by changing their meaning. They did this through detournement. This is art of taking elements of well known media and changing it so that it holds a new meaning, one opposing that of the original message. By doing so they influenced art, literature, cinema and even product development and marketing stratagies of consumerism. They showed people how to recycle what was the official norm to empower them with new meanings, to create new products out of the commodity economy. This is the idea of detournement.
-One example of how they practiced their ideas, was an attack on literature, where artist Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, who was the sort of head of the SI, made a book where all of its content was of pirated elements, the print ran in all directions, there were many sentences left unexplained as they broke off suddenly or had text superimposed over them. The cover was also made of sandpaper so that it would damage other books it lay next to. The purpose is to take the book, a well known corporate medium, and give it a new meaning and purpose. So Detournment recycles something with a specific but completely different and oppositional meaning.
Ball finishes quite nicely by saying
“Detournement has become axiomatic to profit making, and like surrealism, a mass phenomenon. The cult of the displaced object has developed the contours of an industry in design, in clothing, in architecture, even food- in short, in every marketplace of postwar capitalism. Everything that was once made now reappears as a fragment in the hands of the pasticheur. What could not be converted into cash flow used to be expendable, but this problem has been solved: thanks to detournement, everything may stay in the stream of the economy, even the expendable.”
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Post Modernity- 18th March
Characteristics of Post-Modernism
-It is innovative and inventive
-it involves participation
-it communicates(through the sign)
-it depends on interpretation
-it considers want as well as need
-it relies on performance, play, chance, and choice
-the part may represent the whole
-it is a system of binary oppositions
-it focuses on the marginal
-it is web-orientated
Post modernism is not restricted by the norms of consistency.
Key dates
1956: Pop Culture and the House
1968: Innovation following the Apollo Moon landing
1968: Paris Student Uprising, which caused changes in university teaching and eventually in government. The messgae, autocracy not acceptable.
1969: Sottsass and the Olivetti Valentine typewriter
1972: Venturi Scott Brown, the iconography of the Duck and the Decorated Shed
1964,77: Roland Barthes and Semiotics
1989: End of the Cold War signaled by the destruction of the Berlin Wall
1959-75: Vietnam War. Jameson and the logic of Late Capitalism. Baudrillard and the Simulacrum
1984: Apple Macintosh
-It is innovative and inventive
-it involves participation
-it communicates(through the sign)
-it depends on interpretation
-it considers want as well as need
-it relies on performance, play, chance, and choice
-the part may represent the whole
-it is a system of binary oppositions
-it focuses on the marginal
-it is web-orientated
Post modernism is not restricted by the norms of consistency.
Key dates
1956: Pop Culture and the House
1968: Innovation following the Apollo Moon landing
1968: Paris Student Uprising, which caused changes in university teaching and eventually in government. The messgae, autocracy not acceptable.
1969: Sottsass and the Olivetti Valentine typewriter
1972: Venturi Scott Brown, the iconography of the Duck and the Decorated Shed
1964,77: Roland Barthes and Semiotics
1989: End of the Cold War signaled by the destruction of the Berlin Wall
1959-75: Vietnam War. Jameson and the logic of Late Capitalism. Baudrillard and the Simulacrum
1984: Apple Macintosh
Lecture 2 - Modernism - Designing a New World
Causes
-Aftermath of WWI/Russian Revolution
-Rejection of History
-was experimental to start.
Pre Modernism
-Baroque 1600-1700
- emotional, curvilinear, ornamental
-Industrialisation
-confusion of old styles and new styles, still decorative and ornamental "Dilema of Style"
-William Morris
-pioneer of modernism
-defended craftmansshio and materiallity rather than mass production
- "change society through design"
-Louis Sullivan
-Frank Loyd Wright
-The Deutsher Werkbund (German Workband)
-Peter Behrens
-Walter Gropius & Adolf Meyer
1918 - WWI begins, KEY POINT BEGINNING OF MODERNISM
-Searching for Utopia
-Russian Constructavism
-Italian Futurism
-Aftermath of WWI/Russian Revolution
-Rejection of History
-was experimental to start.
Pre Modernism
-Baroque 1600-1700
- emotional, curvilinear, ornamental
-Industrialisation
-confusion of old styles and new styles, still decorative and ornamental "Dilema of Style"
-William Morris
-pioneer of modernism
-defended craftmansshio and materiallity rather than mass production
- "change society through design"
-Louis Sullivan
-Frank Loyd Wright
-The Deutsher Werkbund (German Workband)
-Peter Behrens
-Walter Gropius & Adolf Meyer
1918 - WWI begins, KEY POINT BEGINNING OF MODERNISM
-Searching for Utopia
-Russian Constructavism
-Italian Futurism
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