Cultures of Home Computer Music: Technology, Networks and Products in the 1980s between the Cold War and Globalization

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Within the field of Digital Humanities, the project aims at research in the history of digitality. Its goal is to provide fundamentals of a cultural history of home computers in music during the era of 8- and 16-bit platforms in the 1980s. Based on an overview of hardware and software from the early days of home computers, the project focuses on the musical practices that formed around these points of crystallization. Following Bruno Latour, the project understands technology as an agent that is brought to action within various different networks. Thus, the project’s interest lies in a cultural history of technology as both a mirror of society and a cultural agent. It applies a twofold methodology, (1) to learn more about musical actions that the technical artifacts triggered within different networks (using methods from Historical Musicology, Cultural Studies, and Social History), and (2) to explore the creative possibilities that the technology provided (using a systematic methodology). Digital technology is used differently in different contexts. The project explores how different cultural environments with their diverse sociocultural and aesthetic prerequisites generated different actions. Examples for such prerequisites range from attributions to professional or hobby use to “levels” of culture that were often perceived as distinct during the 1980s, but also to political and social embeddings. Given the time frame between the Cold War and the beginning of Globalization, three of the latter will be focused as “the West,” “the East,” and “Asia.” The first part of the project focuses on the question how computer technology gave rise to different musical practices, to which extent these practices were interconnected, and to which extent they possibly correlated in larger cultural trends. Closely related to this, the second, smaller part of the project is devoted to an active investigation of the technological artifacts through their use in composition or sound design. Combined with an accompanying documentation and annotation, these experiments highlight the systematic potential of the technology by abstracting it from the zeitgeist of the 1980s. These two complementary approaches shed light on both techniques that were used particularly often and their cultural backgrounds, and on technical possibilities that were not used during the 1980s. This results in a multi-perspective approach in which scholarly reflection and artistic experiments complement each other without being methodologically compromised. The “mixed methods” project thus employs a combination of musical-analytical, aesthetic, sociological, techno-historical, and compositional/experimental methods to contour outlines of a cultural history of home computers in the music of the 1980s and to understand the home computer as a musical instrument and global actor in the music history of that time.