Electronic and Computer Music Contexts #1
[Continuing from the first blog]
“The Social Construction of the Early Electronic Music Synthesizer” in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century.
We have been asked to read and analyse the given texts and try to capture the key points that Pinch & Trocco are trying to make in this article. It’s obviously a great example of Pinch’s Social Constructivism- music technology developing through culture. It describes the early history of the Moog Synthesizer and compares it with the early history of Bulcha’s synthesizer- the very different approaches they both took towards the synthesizer as a musician’s tool and its role in culture.
It introduces us to ‘interpretative flexibility’ which occures when an artifact is being developed and multiple groups or audiences desire something different from it. It also introduces the term ‘closure’, when ‘interpretative and design flexibility collapse’ and gains traction with the vast majority of the audience and stabilizes. There are two types of ‘closure mechanisms’:
1) Rhetorical closure: When social groups see the problem as being solved, the need for alternative designs diminishes. This is often the result of advertising.
2) Redefinition of the problem: A design standing in the focus of conflicts can be stabilized by inventing a new problem, which is solved by this very design. [1]
Closure is not permanent and can open ‘interpretative flexibility’ when new groups or social norms demand different things from the technology.
Pinch and Trocco believe that music is a socio-cultural product and thus can use technological advances to explain deeper socio-cultural ideas of the period when it was created. The obvious example being how Bulcha’s synthesizer was an explorative tool that did not want to fall into the diatonic scale and how its audience, market and creators were from the West Coast of America. During this time the flower power movement existed, drugs were being consumed on a greater scale and were considered far more liberal than Moog and the East Coast.
The Moog Synthesizer coupled with the keyboard controller immediately placed it in the sound world of the Diatonic West. From the same technology we see how different cultures demanded different outcomes, this is the interpretative flexibility.
In my opinion I think that the main point Trocco and Finch tried to make is that we as a society predict and dictate what and how technology is developed or used for. The more commercial development of the synthesizer did indeed become the main closure of the technology- but over time that closure opened up again when the synthesizer became just like every other instrument. The Moog synthesizer lost what characteristics it had and when Yamaha and other companies swooped in and made huge amounts of money from the Synthesizer- musicians and producers were more interested in Bulcha’s instruments- loving them for their individual faults and sounds. The unpredictability about them re-opened the interpretative flexibility.
The Moog Synthesizer is a great metaphor for our current music industry. Technology helps develop new ideas, one will succeed- become the norm and stabilize. We could refer to this as ‘popular’ music but eventually other niche markets and sounds continue to grow and will always keep their individuality and appeal.
“The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts”
In this paper Pinch and Bijker discuss the need for a social-constructivist approach towards the study of technology and science. They believe that Technology and Science can benefit from one another with a Social Constructivism view. The Sociology of Science focuses on the actual content of scientific ideas, theories and experiments and they believe that extending it to the Hard Sciences allow us to understand the process of construction in a variety of contexts and locations which shows that Scientific Knowledge is socially constructed and there is nothing ‘epistemologically special about the nature of scientific knowledge.’
Pinch and Bijker explain that sociologists studying the Hard Sciences should not look for scientific ‘truths’ and ‘faleshood’ but instead should treat them all equally as socially constructed and that ‘explanations for the genesis, acceptance and rejection of knowledge claims are sought in the domain of the Social World rather than in the Natural World.’
They believe that this social-constructivist view of the sciences have wide applications including Science History, the philosophy of science and science policy. A main point that I like is ‘Science knowledge as a social construction implies that there is nothing epistemologically special about the nature of scientific knowledge: it is merely one in a whole series of knowledge cultures (including, for instance, knowledge systems pertaining to ‘primitive’ tribes.)
They discuss the relationship between Science and Technology as no longer uni-directional- that in the past over-idealized distinctions that science is about discovery of truth whereas technology is about the application of truth are wrong. They believe Science and Technology are socially constructed cultures and that they both bring whatever cultural resources are appropriate. They also criticise a trend that innovation researchers tend to focus on successful technologies and that they view technology as a ‘black box’ with a linear model. They believe there should be a sociological explanation of both successful and failed artifacts and criticise historians of technology as they often rely on the manifest success of the artifact as evidence that there is no further explanatory work to be done.
They also describe the EPOR and SCOT approaches that have been combined to analyse these artifacts;
EPOR: ‘the interpretive flexibility of scientific findings that shifts the focus for the explanation of scientific developments from the natural world to the social world, the description of social mechanisms that limit interpretative flexibility and thus allow scientific controversies, and the relation of “closure mechanisms” to the wider social-cultural milieu.’ [2]
SCOT: the development process of a technological artifact is described as an alternation of variation and selection resulting in a “multidirectional” model; if a multidimensional model is adopted, it is possible to ask why some of the variants “die,” whereas others survive. [2]
This development process has a multidirectional form, which shows how one social group might have one particular problem with one particular solution- in comparison to a different social group. This allows us to view how that content of the artifact develops into something new and culturally created through chains of multiple problems and solutions.