Incidental Music: Locating Musicality in Social Media Content
Social media has provided numerous opportunities to recontextualise content as music. Instagram accounts such as ScoreFollower and charlescornellstudio exemplify ways in which transcription can locate musicality in otherwise non-musical contexts, including speech, animal sounds and mechanical noise. They present these transcriptions through two different methods: using staff notation, or accompanying the source material with another instrumental layer, such as harmonising the content with a sequence of piano chords.
This paper examines the capacity of these two epistemologies to extrapolate and represent musical detail by analysing the transcriptions in terms of accuracy and musicality. Drawing on existing literature on social media interactivity and cultural phenomena, it considers how these methods situate their source material and the aesthetic and cultural implications of each approach.
Dr Chris Gendall
Chris Gendall’s works have graced the programmes of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, NZTrio, Mark Menzies and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, Saar Berger, and the New Zealand String Quartet. He studied composition at Victoria University of Wellington before completing a doctoral degree at Cornell University with Roberto Sierra and Steven Stucky. He has participated in a number of festivals and conferences including the Wellesley Composers’ Conference, the Aspen Music Festival, the Royaumont Voix nouvelles Composition Course, and the Aldeburgh Festival – bringing him in contact with such figures as Magnus Lindberg, Brian Ferneyhough, Mario Davidovsky, Oliver Knussen, and Anders Hillborg.
Chris was a 2018 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago, and resident composer with Orchestra Wellington and at the New Zealand School of Music. He won the 2008 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for his work Wax Lyrical, and his debut portrait album Tones was released on the Rattle label in 2019. He teaches composition at the University of Auckland.
University of Auckland