Shaping Music: A Design Story of Audio Culture
Prasad Boradkar is Guest-Curator of Rewind Remix Replay: Design, Music & Everyday Experience and Associate Professor & Program Director of Industrial Design at Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University.
Rewind Remix Replay: Design, Music & Everyday Experience showcases the role that design plays in shaping our experience of music. The devices on which we listen to music, the instruments musicians play, the images of bands and concerts we regularly see and the environments where we buy and listen to music together constitute a material culture of music. To examine how today’s music culture has evolved, it is beneficial to understand the processes of design and manufacturing that have shaped music’s materiality. Most of the music we listen to today is mediated: it comes to us through radio waves, the Internet, compact discs, MP3 players, amplifiers, speakers, headphones and other devices that mediate sound. The processes and products of music mediation are often created and manipulated by design. Currently enjoying significant media attention, design has captured the imagination of businesses, cultural institutions and the public. Industrial designers, interaction designers and graphic designers who create artifacts for popular mass consumption have become trend-setters and cultural mediators. They have demonstrated that they can play a significant role in fashioning our material landscape and thereby influence patterns of day-to-day living. Posters of rock musicians on bedroom walls have transformed the lives of teenagers; products such as iPods have almost entirely altered how we buy music and where we listen to it; software programs like Napster and Limewire have generated new ways to store and share our tunes.
Rewind Remix Replay brings into focus the role of mediated music in everyday life, starting with one of the more important technological innovations—the long-playing 33 rpm microgroove vinyl record introduced in 1948, and leading to conceptual products such as Yamaha’s newest synthesizer, the Tenori-on, that might become mainstream in the future. These products and images contain the personal stories of our relationship to music, and collectively they illustrate music’s recent history. They are iconic examples of design experiments as well as unique demonstrations of engineering ingenuity. They have aided musicians in creating unique new sounds and have given fans and audiophiles access to musical genius. These material things are signifiers of a constantly evolving audio culture—a culture that is visible in the chronicles of their design journeys and narratives of their everyday use. The exhibition considers several themes: transformative technological breakthroughs, such as the vinyl record, transistor, Moog synthesizer, Walkman and MP3 player; the creative practices of users and musicians who modify existing equipment like turntables; the graphic packaging of music, from album art to music videos; the shift from music as a communal experience to an isolated private activity.
Rewind Remix Replay is structured around five key object categories produced after World War II that have played a key role in shaping the way music is produced and consumed: boomboxes, personal stereos, turntables, electric solid body guitars and synthesizers. Two of these, boomboxes and personal stereos, primarily function as playback devices for music consumption; two of them, electric solid body guitars and synthesizers are instruments of music production; and the turntable, which originally was designed as a device for listening to music, operates today as a musical instrument. Each of these objects lives in an ecosystem—a network—that includes a wide range of other objects. The ecosystem of personal portable stereos like the iPod, for example, signifies a network of relationships that includes the earbuds, iTunes software, iPod advertising, the Nike+iPod kit, etc. The network represents a snapshot of these objects at a given moment in time, but evolution is ongoing in response to technological changes, user behaviors, economic pressures, etc.
And while it is important to recognize the significance of artifacts in the creation of music culture, it is also critical to acknowledge that the meanings of these material goods are socially constructed. New technologies emerge and become a part of everyday life because people adopt them into their daily routines, often modifying them in the process. Music culture is as much a result of creative social practices as it is a result of technological innovations.
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