Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies

Launched in October 2010, "Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies" (MusDig) is a five-year research programme based in the Faculty of Music at Oxford University which examines the wide-ranging changes to music and musical practices afforded by digitization and digital media. The programme is directed by Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford, who is the Principal Investigator (PI). It is supported by funding (1,708,000 Euros) from the European Research Council's Advanced Investigator Grants scheme. The programme has two primary and overarching objectives: (1) To carry out an ambitious comparative programme of ethnographic studies of music and digitization in six countries in both the developed and the developing world: Argentina, Canada, Cuba, India, Kenya, and the United Kingdom; (2) to develop a new interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework for contemporary music studies, with reference to this empirical research as well as to the anthropology and sociology of music, musicology and media theory. It also has a third, supplementary objective to be pursued by the PI: (3) To bring this combined research into dialogue with anthropological, social and cultural theory, with the aim of ‘musicalising' contemporary social theory. Members of the ERC Music and Digitisation Research Group: Prof. Georgina Born (Director: UK, Canada and India studies, and overview) Dr. Geoff Baker (Music, RHUL: research associate, Argentina study) Dr. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (post-doctoral research associate, Montreal and Cuba studies) Dr. Aditi Deo (post-doctoral research associate, India study) Dr. Andrew Eisenberg (post-doctoral research associate, Kenya study) Patrick Valiquet (doctoral research associate, Canada study)