Monday 4 February 2019 // 15:00-16:00 // 2nd Floor (The Portal), Fjordgata 1, 7010 Trondheim // The Portal, Department of Musicology (ZEB building), Sem Sælands vei 2, 0371 Oslo

Tami Gadir
Tami Gadir

Abstract

This presentation takes the overarching theme of the seminar series—Women in Music Technology—as a point of departure for conceptual forays into music, technology, and human and non-human material bodies. Beginning with the basic question of how it is that we might understand such concepts—music, technologies, bodies—it will pose several provocations based on empirical and theoretical work on mainly (though not exclusively) Western/European/Anglo-American contemporary musical cultures, with a focus on music technology and gender. The focus of these provocations will range from the agency of music and technical objects to the pervasive, polarizing ideologies of technologies’ effects on music; from the gender-unequal labour of electronic music hardware on factory floors to harassment and violence of women and LGBTQI people on DJ-driven dance floors; from the fantasies of binary gender musical features to the realities of misogyny in online tech forums and networks. In addressing these problems, the discussion will confront the commonplace preconceptions that decades of tech industry marketing have fed into scholarly, media, and popular imaginations. Overall, the talk will illustrate how gender as a case study for exploring music, technologies, and bodies can contribute to some of the bigger concerns in music studies—namely, the ethics of (and our scholarly engagement with) musical participation.

Bio

Tami Gadir is commencing a new role as Lecturer in Music Industry at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia. Gadir has completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Oslo and holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh supervised by Simon Frith. Gadir’s research addresses the various mechanisms that promote or hinder participation in musical cultures, through the sounds, technologies, and cultures of contemporary, electronically-produced dance music. Such themes will feature in a forthcoming book with Bloomsbury Academic press, based on eight years of participant observation and interviews with DJs, producers, and clubbers in international electronic dance music communities. The book provides an expressly critical feminist-intersectional, anti-capitalist appraisal of dance music cultures as a counterpoint to the dominant utopian, celebratory interpretations of underground scenes by scholars, media, and fans. Gadir is a co-founding committee member of GeMus: Gender and Music Network and an active DJ.

Live Stream Recording of the Event


A talk hosted at the Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim and live streamed through the MCT Portal to the University of Oslo (UiO) and also through YouTube. The audience combines two physical sites (from Oslo and Trondheim) plus online viewers from all over the world.

Video Credits

Speaker: Tami Gadir

Presenter (Trondheim): Anna Xambó

Presenter (Oslo): Mari Lesteberg

Production (Trondheim): Karolina Jawad

Production (Oslo): Mari Lesteberg

Streaming, Audio, Video (Trondheim): Eigil Aandahl, Sepehr Haghighi Jørgen Nygård Varpe, Shreejay Shrestha

Audio, Video (Oslo): Espen Wik, Elias Andersen

Audio processing: Sepehr Haghighi

Intro Video: Karolina Jawad

Seminar Series Curation: Anna Xambó

Acknowledgments: Robin Støckert, Daniel Formo, Anders Tveit, Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Supported by: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), University of Oslo (UiO)

In collaboration with: Master in Music, Communication and Technology (MCT)