This talk will be presented by Eliot Bates, Associate Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 

Eliot Bates is the director of the Ethnomusicology Program and Associate Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Across 20 years of publications they have analyzed many aspects of music’s materialities, ranging from recording studio practices in Turkey to studio architecture, from the vinyl record revival to instrument making, and, most recently, a novel kind of social formation—gear cultures. Their newest book, Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies, co-authored with Samantha Bennett, will be published by The MIT Press in early 2025. They are also hard at work completing a two-book series on modular synthesis gear cultures.

Abstract: With the adoption of networked communications (newsgroups, IRC, internet) came new ways of socializing about specific technologies, and new social formations that circulated between online and offline spaces.  While conventional music technology accounts frame matters around musical concerns, some of these new formations are less focused on musical outcomes than on the gear itself. This talk draws both on collaborative research conducted with Samantha Bennett (ANU) on recording studio gear cultures, and more recent solo ethnographic work conducted in seven countries on modular synthesis gear cultures. The gear cultures concept, a new contribution to social theory, aims to provide clarity on the links between the fetishization of gear, gas-fomo-hype consumerism cycles, sensuous gear interfaces, and hegemonic masculinities and their maintenance.