Recording Technologies and Music in Japanese Pop-Culture

Jeudi 26 novembre 2015, 14h-15h, Salle des Thèses du Nouveau Patio (20a rue René Descartes - 67000 Strasbourg)

Attention : conférence annulée et reportée à une date ultérieure

Fuminori Akiba
'Graduate School of Information Science', Université de Nagoya (Japon)
Recording Technologies and Music in Japanese Pop-Culture

La conférence

The famous Japanese composer Prof. Masahiro Miwa commented that the music [recorded music] played there [as a commodity] finished its life at least 100 years ago. However, when we take the changes in recording technologies into consideration, we can find another implication in Miwa’s remarks. In this presentation, I look at these changes and attempt to make it clear that recorded music is still worth listening to. In order to depict the changes in the recording technology and their results, I introduce the idea of “referential value 0” proposed by Tomita 2014. Using this idea, I suggest that recorded music in recent Japanese popular culture has the tendency toward referential value 0. Then I show that the idea of referential value 0 can be applied not only to rhythm but also to voices and sounds, and point out the consequences of this standardization: complex chord progressions, an excess of editing, and an excess of synchronization in live performances. In the final section, I take up the critical remarks of Miwa again and draw their implication, and show another possibility of recorded music in Japanese popular culture.

Biographie

Fuminori Akiba received his doctor’s degree in aesthetics and art history from Kyoto University. Since 2003 he has been working as Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Information Science at Nagoya University, Japan. His research field is aesthetics and philosophy of art. Recent publications include: Atarashii Bigaku wo Tsukuru [A New Type of Aesthetics] (2011); “Comparison of Tactile Score with Some Prescriptions in Artworks: From the Point of Media Transformation” (Mathematics for Industry, Vol.14, 2015); “Can Aesthetics Treat Hybridity in Pop Culture? In Case of Aesthetics of MOMOCLO” (International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol.18, 2015).