Deep Listen: Adam Harper on Post-Internet Sound

Musicologist and music critic Adam Harper presents a talk on post-internet sounds and how the internet - and new technology more broadly - is shaping music.

Recorded as part of Associate Artist Jennifer Walshe's Sound Salon series for Somerset House Studios - a programme of talks that aimed to fuel critical discussion, new vocabulary and analysis in sound and music, supporting communities and practitioners in these fields. 

Artists have been working with the internet for decades but until relatively recently, archives and critical writing have focused on visual cultures. Together with artist Holly Herndon, Jennifer launched the project Post-Internet Sound in 2015; a crowdsourced database of sound and music works, the site is open access and welcomes both academic and non-academic contributions, be it in the form of writing or a source of sound. Anyone can contribute via Google docs.

Dr Adam Harper is a musicologist and music critic specialising in historical and contemporary ideas surrounding 'progressive' music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and their technological platforms.

He has written about new electronic and acoustic music spanning popular, classical and experimental styles for Tempo, the Wire, The Fader and Resident Advisor, and has been invited to lecture on the subject internationally, including at New York University, the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes, the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music, the University of Nottingham and the University of East London, and at festivals such as Berlin's CTM and 3HD festivals, Unsound in Krakow, Rewire in The Hague, Rokolectiv in Bucharest, Robot in Bologna and All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead. He is the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books: 2011).