HMVB00716U Musikvidenskab: Musikvidenskabeligt emne med performance og produktion: WEIRD PLATFORM MUSIC

Is music on the internet degenerate, or simply not music at all? Is it inhuman? Is it merely content? Have our brains been fried by the endless scroll and expanse of music on platforms like TikTok, Spotify, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp?

As of yet brain-fried or not, in this course we will attempt to approach the heated pan: the platform, and its musical aesthetics. As platform capitalists continuously seek to control and define the value of music (or even define music itself!), where does that leave the music-maker creatively, communally, and politically?

In this course we will explore the production, consumption, and governance of weird platform music, the ambiguous “weird” humbly designating the fringe, the cute, the emo, the unsettling, the degenerate, the posing-as-inhuman. We will investigate the aesthetics, production techniques and cultural implications surrounding platform music genres like vaporwave, hyperpop and sigilkore, their aftershocks in popular music, and discuss the questionable division between music and content in this age of big tech and AI.

This is a two-part course where theory and practice are equally measured. In the theory section we will explore an interlocking of cultural studies and musicology, situating music performance and production in the present conjuncture. We will analyze critical texts anchored to the music itself and discuss labor, cultural hegemony, and the romance of community within the sphere of increasingly enshittified platforms.

In the practice section we will look at production and improvisation techniques in DAWs and in the performance space. We will venture through areas between short- and long-form music both epic and chill, zany and cute and fucked up, all in all weird, the whole of which serves to inform the students’ own creative projects. Weaving abstraction with hands-on practical work, we will navigate the continuously blurred divisions between the processes of writing, performing, improvising, producing, mixing, or even mastering and distributing.

By the conclusion of this course students will be able to navigate a plethora of musical expressions and methods, identify platform capitalist governance of music, and applicate an exploratory fusion of theory and practice in their own work as conscious and experimental music-makers.