2010/01/01 by Tara Rodgers · 99 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Active listening #Aesthetics #Art #Communication #Computer science #Electronic music #Gender and Technology in Education #History of Computing Technologies #Media studies #Music History and Culture #Music Technology and Sound Studies #Sociology #Visual arts
paper · doi:10.1215/9780822394150
openalex publication_date 2010/01/01 · openalex created_date 2022/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
I first made electronic music in the mid-1980s when I was about twelve years old, using an Apple IIe computer that my father brought home from work.I was absorbed in it for months, coaxing melodies out of programs I wrote in the basic language.As a self-taught musician who had played piano for years without formal lessons, for me the computer was simply a new means of working with sounds.As I had with the piano, I would figure it out mostly by trial and error.Today, I still play the piano, and I also compose with midi instruments, digital audio, and the programming language SuperCollider (Rodgers 2006; MacDonald 2007).I often attribute my facility with electronic music to my father's interests and support.He is a self-described audiophile and early adopter of computer technologies, and he shared with me his record collection, enthusiasm for home recording, and knowledge about hi-fi audio systems and computers.It came as a surprise, then, when recently I unearthed in a closet an old 78 that my mother recorded as an amateur pianist in high school.Mom cut a record?I asked a few more questions and found out that in the early decades of the twentieth century, my great-aunt was a pianist for silent films in Albany, New York, and my grandmother used a stenotype machine in her work as a secretary.In a small town in western New York, my other grandmother was a Morse telegrapher and teletypist at her job with an agriculture company in the 1940s.So while my father's audiophility was an obvious lineage for me to identify and claim, it turned out there were clear precedents for music and computing experience in generations of women before me in my family. 1 Even after I had conducted dozens of interviews for this collection and its online predecessor Pinknoises.com,I still defaulted to stereotypical assumptions about gender, audio, and computer technologies in my personal history.