Unruly

There is no such thing as music. Or, rather: there is no such thing as music in the universal, self-evident sense the word implies. The idea that music is a singular human practice — a language we all speak — is itself a culturally specific belief, and a relatively recent Western one. Ethnomusicology has wrangled with this for over a century: indeed, one of the discipline's first moves was to pluralize the term, to insist on musics. Its more provocative assertion, though, was to ask whether the term makes any sense at all in parts of the world distant from the European concert tradition. Many of the world's sonic practices are not thought of as "music" by those who perform them, but instead something more deeply intertwined with ritual, labour, devotion, or speech.

And so, when we say music, we are not naming a universal. In a historical sense, we are naming a (mostly Western) tradition organized around a set of discrete pitches of equal temperament, harmony, the work-concept, the author, etc. The unruliness of "music", then, happens when these particularities begin to masquerade as generalities, especially within technical infrastructures. When a streaming platform categorizes a monsoon raga as "E minor," for example, or a dataset recognizes only key signature and tempo, Western music theory is being mobilized less to describe music than to define it, globally, in epistemologically problematic ways. Music, in this sense, becomes a marker not of what we hear, but of a longstanding process of infrastructural universalization.

To classify music is in a sense to draw borders around sound — to decide what belongs with what, and, by implication, what does not belong at all. "Genre" is in many respects the most familiar of these epistemic borders, and one of the most contested. Musicology, and ethnomusicology in particular, has long been uneasy with the category: the names of genres are rarely neutral indicators of musical content, but rather carefully curated labels, motivated by the corporate histories of marketing, taste, race, and geography. The World Music debate of the 1990s, in particular, showed how an entire planet's worth of (non-Western) musical difference came to be lumped together under a single label — a label that revealed much more about the industry doing the sorting than the musics being sorted.

One of the big questions for our moment is whether streaming and AI dissolve these anxieties or magnify them. The corporate promise is one of dissolution: platforms speak of a "borderless" ecosystem, of infinite micro-genres, of recommendation unshackled from physical spaces. The reality, though, is that classification has not disappeared but rather become hidden within platform infrastructures. Genre tags are today assigned at scale — sometimes by experts, increasingly by algorithms, and at least until recently, as one Spotify engineer admitted, simply humanly invented in the name of algorithmic efficiency. Classification, then, occurs when music's plural ontologies meet technical infrastructures' demand that everything be sortable.

Also: Platform. [listen here: link placeholder]

Intermediaries are ubiquitous and mercurial. Deriving from inter- (between or among) and medius (in the middle), but distinct from the declarative mediator (to intervene or reconcile between two sides), the intermediary inhabits ambiguity. Its digital origin story is in the junctures of the material — nodes, routers, switches, proxies, gateways. Here intermediaries are both situational and propulsive, industriously shuttling suitcases of digital information across notched networks; an enterprise prided as mercantile, not mercenary. From this inheritance comes the core identity crisis of the modern intermediary. It aspires to clerical neutrality to the point of invisibility, but it does so with endemic self-importance. In between, everything is politics.

As intermediaries scaffold to platforms, the stickiest and best-known become monstrous assemblages of information exchange, attention-hacking, vanity, and profiteering. In the policy world, intermediaries are flashpoints. They entice and frustrate, thwarting all but the most determined with their aspirational camouflage, magnificent inscrutability, colossal power and, just as readily, wafer-thin responsibility. "Nothing to see here," the machine throbs.

Authorship, sometimes correlated with "ownership," associates a creator or a group of creators with their creations. In the Western sense, authorship most often gestures towards the idea that an individual person (an "author") originates or creates an intellectual or creative work which is more often than not considered to be "original." The humanities, including studies of Western music, romanticize the notion of the single author, establishing that the individual authorship of original ideas is accompanied by a level of genius or mastery over the subject matter or art form. This sense of authorship, while frequently referenced, is only a singular point in a web of diverse social and cultural understandings of authorship.

Authorship is culturally and socially dependent, not unlike music. Beyond Western notions, authorship can be unknowable, unattributable, communal, collective, or unapplicable. Authorship does not always equate to ownership. Authors may choose to remain anonymous; they may make their work freely accessible. Authors may create derivative works, draw heavily on pre-existing works, or parody. Provenance — the lineage of custody of a product of someone's creativity — is often associated with authorship. Exchanges of intellectual property rights, works-for-hire, fair use, or Creative Commons may introduce novel complications to provenance. Yet even provenance can be falsified, debated, uncertain, or entirely unknown.

As music-making artificial intelligence advances, authorship and provenance become increasingly complicated. Such platforms blur and obfuscate lineages of authors and creators by presenting a curated front-end for users and a back-end black box within which answers to questions of authorship and provenance are housed but left invisible to users.