Edited by Georgina Born

UCL Press is delighted to announce the publication of a new open access book that may be of interest to ECREA list subscribers: Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology, edited by Georgina Born. 

Download it free: https://bit.ly/3cg48Ly

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media – A Planetary Anthropology shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to digital/media studies, science and technology studies, and music and sound studies.

Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers radical and lucid new theoretical frameworks for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the ‘digital’ assume clamouring audibility – while acting as a testing ground for innovations in the digital-cultural industries.

Through ethnographies of popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, as well as music platforms and music software, the book presents the first comparative portrait of music’s entanglement in digital media worldwide.

Music and Digital Media develops an inventive model for comparative anthropology responsive to decolonisation. It creates a framework for analysing the social and political in music of wider relevance to anthropological and social theory. And it shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of media theory.