PLATFORM: Transformations of production technology in the online environment

• Kjus, Yngvar; Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild & Wang, Solveig Margrethe (2022). Encountering new technology: A study of how female creators explore DAWs.
• Kjus, Yngvar; Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild & Wang, Solveig Margrethe (2022). Getting onto the platforms of music production: How women negotiate the creative opportunities of digital audio workstations. Show summary

  The topic of this paper is the encounter with new technology and the exploration of its potential in creative work. More specifically, it looks at experiences with digital audio workstations (DAWs), such as Ableton and Logic, which during a few decades have been established as almost indispensable software for composing songs, shaping sounds and refining expressions, among other things. We ask what characterizes the early and potentially formative encounters with DAWs, probing how beginners relate to opportunities and obstacles for their creative ambitions. Our study focuses on female creators, who often are underrepresented in music production. The study will shed light on the conditions of, and the potential barriers for, women to take part in contemporary music production, thereby also illuminating the pathway for others who begin to use DAW platforms in their music making. There exists considerable research on the development of new music technology and on the creative processes of production, including how the use of DAWs entail innovations in musical expression (e.g. Bennett and Bates 2018, Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016, Kjus 2018, Zagorski-Thomas 2012). There are few studies, however, on how creators encounter technology which is new to them. This can be seen as an explorative sense-making process that music makers go through when they discover the tools and techniques they want to use. Insights from research on perceptual processes can contribute to our understanding of how individuals chart possibilities and limitations in their environment, over time developing awareness of nuances and variations in the musical affordances of tools and technologies (e.g. Clarke 2005). We are interested in how beginners explore the architecture of DAW programs and how they develop competency in the use of different functionalities and effects. Moreover, we are interested in the significance of DAWs for creative processes, whether they are used to continuate existing workflows or to develop musical materials, effects and structures in new ways. We are thereby interested in how the use of DAWs stimulates (or obstructs) different kinds of creativity, and will thereby lean on literature on creative processes (e.g. McIntyre 2011, Csikszentmihalyi 1996). One aspect of creativity is the ability to identify problems as well as solutions, which for music makers involves various issues regarding the construction and articulation of sounding expressions. One of the things we explore is the extent to which the problems/solutions of music making is being entwined with the problems/solutions of using DAWs. The primary method of the study is qualitative interviews with female musicians, probing various aspects of their experience with using DAWs with specific attention to their accounts of creative gratification as well as to technology-induced frustrations. Our informants (n=11) are recruited from DAW introduction courses, where we also carried out field observation and interviews with experienced instructors as part of our ambition to identify patterns in the appropriation and utilization of DAWs.

• Kjus, Yngvar (2021). Comparing the platforms of cultural production: Music, film, game. Show summary

  A key development in the creative industries is the spread of large digital services and tools in numerous countries. Such utilities and technologies are often presented and perceived as platforms that are able to accommodate countless users and uses. Their emergence has been highly visible in the area of distribution, with the proliferation of online services such as YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, the operations and growing dominance of which has triggered much research (for an overview, see Hesmondhalgh 2020, Spilker 2018, Van Dijck et al. 2018). The 2000s and 2010s have also seen pervasive developments in production tech¬nology, including digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Logic Pro and Live as well as more recent entrants such as AudioTool and BandLab, but their establishment as platforms of music making in the online environment remains comparatively under-researched. This is also the case for neighboring sectors, such as computer games, which leads Foxman (2019: 9) to conclude that “platform tools remain seriously understudied.” To understand how different production platforms develop–and what sets them apart–can be a powerful inroad to understand how cultural content is produced and then channeled into different distribution platforms. The development of products and services that thrive on the internet is a process of platformization, which has been defined as the “penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life” (Poell et al. 2019). It is the hypothesis of the current abstract that the developers of production technology, as well as their various user groups, are all involved in a platformization process which are having profound but also distinctive cultural, social, and economic ramifications for different creative industry sectors.

• Kjus, Yngvar (2021). Collective musicking on DAW platforms? Show summary

  This talk will present key aims of the project “Platformization of music production: Developer and user perspectives on transformations of production technology in the online environment”. The project focuses on digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Logic Pro and BandLab and the ways in which these networked clusters of music technologies are reshaping the foundations of creative audio work, including composition, performance, and collaboration. This presentation will discuss the extent to which the response (ranging from comprehensive employment to rejection) to technological advances is conditioned by collectives, whether they are informal genre communities or more formalized institutions of art and education. Music making entails various forms of collaboration, and the project will examine how online production resources stimulate or challenge them. It aims to carry out in-depth case studies of genres with specific social characteristics, including rock/pop (with bands involved in long-term projects) and rap/hip-hop (where artists engage in projects more flexibly with other artists and producers). The benefits of this approach will be compared with the insights that might be found by examining how contemporary production platforms are introduced and taught at music education institutions (including the Norwegian Academy of Music), unpacking how the platforms are incorporated into courses on computer music and laptop musicianship, as well as more traditional courses on composition and performance. The talk will discuss how these approaches might shed light on the routes and milieus, informal and formal, through which a new generation of music makers is brought to these new platforms.

• Kjus, Yngvar (2021). Transformations in the creative roles and modes of music production. Show summary

  This talk will present key aims and issues of the project “Platformization of music production: Developer and user perspectives on transformations of production technology in the online environment”. The project focuses on digital audio workstations (DAWs) such as Logic Pro and BandLab and the ways in which these networked clusters of music technologies are reshaping the foundations of creative audio work, including composition, performance, and collaboration. One of the project’s key questions is: To what extent is platformization involved with transforming creative roles and modes of music production? The hypothesis is that new platforms influence key professions in the value chain of music. The central roles of composer, performer, and producer are already reflected in the protection afforded by copyright law and the associated right of remuneration, but DAWs represent a growing range of functionality, including algorithmic automatization and networked cooperation, that challenges these established roles.

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