Interpretive practice in laptop music performance

Candidate: Michelle Irving
Type: Master of Arts (MA), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: April 6, 2006
Senior Supervisor: Kenneth Newby
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

Laptop music performance has proliferated as a new form of practice over the past decade, resulting in new approaches and challenges to musical norms. This paper describes issues in Laptop music performance, and discusses institutional research approaches in relation to a qualitative study of the "minimal" electronic music community. The research aims to understand the social and technological dimensions of Laptop music performance through a synthesis of methodological frameworks found in Technology Studies; Andrew Feenberg's "Instrumentalization Theory"; Trevor Pinch and Weibe Bijker's "Social Construction of Technology" (SCOT); Flyvbjerg's "Phronetic Research". These perspectives are combined with an auto ethnographic component and will show how the DIY "minimal" community of practice interprets Laptop music performance through a play on the logic of the computer revealing an emerging paradigm of music based on recording technology. The research examines Robert Henke's Monodeck as an example of the instantiation of interpretations in the "minimal" context.