The next event of the series will be presented by writer and composer Robert Barry who will be discussing his new book The Music of the Future.
Charles Fourier imagined a whole society structured by music. Hector Berlioz wrote science fiction. Hugo Gernsback looked forward to telematic operas. John Cage imagined an infinite sound palette. But where are today’s musical futurists? The Music of the Future is not a book of predictions or speculations about how to save the music business or the bleeding edge of technologies. Rather, it is more like a history of failures, mapping 200 years of attempts by composers, performers and critics to imagine a future for music. Encompassing utopian dream cities, temporal dislocations and projects for the emancipation of all sounds, The Music of the Future is finally a sort of call to arms for everyone engaged in music: to fail again, fail better
Robert Barry is a regular contributor to Frieze, The Wire, Art Review, and Fact, he is also visual arts editor at The Quietus and digital culture editor at Review 31. His music has been featured in films and published, in the form of prose scores, by BCNVT of Stockholm, Sweden.
About Sound Salon
Artists have been working with the internet for decades but until recently, archives and critical writing have focused on visual cultures. This series aims to fuel critical discussion, new vocabulary and analysis in sound and music, supporting communities and practitioners in these fields to understand how the internet - and new technology more broadly - is shaping the field.
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.
