| dc.description.abstract | Technological mediation has been imperative to popular music's production throughout its history. In addition to their impact upon the means of producing popular music, new developments in technology have always had an immediate impact upon its aesthetics as well. This thesis, then, attempts to elucidate how the digitalization of technology in particular has affected the aesthetics of popular music, both in terms of those qualities that are unique to the digital medium, and in terms of that medium's revitalization of preexisting musical tools and techniques. Furthermore, it examines how the aesthetic potential of digital mediation has been explored in the production of popular music, and how mediation in general, and digital mediation in particular, might generate unique musical meaning. In this regard, it presents analyses of how digital delay and reverb were exploited in Kate Bush's "Get Out of My House" from 1982; how digital silence is, in tandem with analog noise, used to aesthetic ends in Portishead's "Strangers" from 1994; how the renewed cut-and-paste tool is utilized and (glitchily) exposed in DJ Food's `Break" from 2000; and how Isosine's mash-up "Psychosocial Baby" from 2011 represents a uniquely digital form of musical recycling. The title of the thesis, "Music in Bits and Bits of Music," reflects the notion that the digitalization of technology (which has turned music into binary digits, or "bits") has first facilitated and then encouraged music makers to think about music as comprised of isolated fragments that can, in this nondestructive and editable digital environment, be easily shuffled within or between mixes. And as the music makers' fascination with the aesthetic potential of the endlessly convertible music in bits has grown, the listener too has learned to appreciate these mixes consisting of spatiotemporally disjunctive bits of music. | |