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

在数字人文学科领域，该项目旨在研究数字化的历史。它的目标是在20世纪80年代的8位和16位平台时代，提供家庭电脑音乐文化历史的基础知识。基于对早期家用电脑硬件和软件的概述，该项目侧重于围绕这些结晶点形成的音乐实践。在Bruno Latour之后，该项目将技术理解为在各种不同网络中采取行动的代理。因此，该项目的兴趣在于技术的文化史，既是社会的镜子，也是文化的代理人。它采用双重方法，(1)更多地了解技术工件在不同网络中触发的音乐动作（使用历史音乐学，文化研究和社会史的方法），(2)探索技术提供的创造性可能性（使用系统方法）。数字技术在不同的环境中使用不同。该项目探讨了不同的文化环境及其不同的社会文化和审美前提如何产生不同的行为。这些先决条件的例子包括从专业或爱好使用的归因到20世纪80年代经常被视为不同的文化“水平”，以及政治和社会嵌入。考虑到冷战和全球化开始之间的时间框架，后者中的三个将被集中为“西方”，“东方”和“亚洲”。该项目的第一部分关注的问题是计算机技术如何产生不同的音乐实践，这些实践在多大程度上是相互关联的，以及它们在多大程度上可能与更大的文化趋势相关。与此密切相关的是，项目的第二个较小部分致力于通过在构图或声音设计中的使用来积极调查技术人工制品。结合相应的文档和注释，这些实验通过从20世纪80年代的时代精神中抽象出来，突出了该技术的系统潜力。这两种互补的方法阐明了特别经常使用的两种技术及其文化背景，以及1980年代期间未使用的技术可能性。这导致了一种多视角的方法，其中学术反思和艺术实验相辅相成，而不会在方法论上妥协。因此，“混合方法”项目结合了音乐分析、美学、社会学、技术历史和作曲/实验方法，勾勒出20世纪80年代音乐中家用电脑的文化史轮廓，并将家用电脑理解为当时音乐史上的一种乐器和全球行动者。

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.