Table of Contents

List of Figures Introduction: The Future of Music has Arrived 1. “Blame it on the Machines”: Historical Placings of Digital Virtual Music. 2. “Technology gives you everything immediately…”: A Brief Critical Discussion on the Digital Virtual. 3. “We are Musical Makers”: The Experimental and Digital Virtual Trademarks of Genre and Style. 4. “Give Life Back to Music”: Remixing Music. 5. “The Game has Changed”: Video Game Music. 6. “Living in a Fantasy”: Performers and Identity. 7. “Showroom Dummies”: Live and Simulated Performers, Performances, and Audiences. 8. “Take Control”: Creators, Fans, and the Internet. 9. “Digital Witness”: Online Communities, Networking, and Virality. Conclusion: Rewind or After the Future? Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

A survey of key areas related to digital music and the internet with a focus on how technology impacts the relationship between music and its listeners

About the Author

Shara Rambarran is Assistant Professor of Music at Bader International Study Centre, UK (Queen’s University, Canada). Her research interests include musicology, remixology, digital technology, music industry, education, and law. She co-runs the Art of Record Production conferences, and is an editor on the Journal on the Art of Record Production and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016).

Reviews

Shara Rambarran has been developing an insightful criticism and analysis of digital music over many years, and it is exciting to read this collection of her ideas and arguments. She investigates the meaning of digital virtual music, its manifestation in remixes, video games and experimental transformations of material, and discusses its effect on artistic identity, creators and fans. This book is warmly recommended as a stimulating account of the ways in which music has been shaped by virtuality and digital technology.
*Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, UK, and editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology*

In a concise, accessible, and yet critical and interdisciplinary approach, Shara Rambarran offers an essential inquiry into the historical, theoretical, technological, cultural, aesthetical and ethical aspects of music in the virtual age. This book is essential to anyone interested in the relationships between music, technology and other media.
*Serge Lacasse, Professor, Université Laval, Canada*

That wild, divisive moment—when folk and jazz ‘went electric’—finds a worthy remix (and one equally explosive, equally epochal) in this vital study. Here, and traced deftly by Rambarran from its prehistories to its global present, music ‘went virtual,’ upending old paradigms of art, authenticity and authorship. Virtual Music surveys, brilliantly, how tomorrow comes today.
*Benjamin Halligan, Director of the Doctoral College, University of Wolverhampton, UK*