This event examined how music is entangled with technological innovation, and AI in particular, and how this is linked to the making and re-making of societal structures.

Thomas Irvine is a global historian of music with special interests in the British Empire, modern Germany, jazz, and Science and Technology Studies. He is currently a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London, the UK’s national research center for data science and artificial intelligence, where he leads the project “Jazz as Social Machine.” Irvine is a Non-Executive Director of the Southampton Web Science Institute. His monograph Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter 1770-1839 was published by University of Chicago Press in April 2020. This project was supported in 2015-2016 by a Mid-Career Fellowship of the British Academy. His co-edited book (with the historian Neil Gregor), Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor, was published in 2018 by Berghahn Books.

Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte and co-editor of The Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is author of three books: The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance, neoliberalism, & biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism (Zero, 2015), and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music (Lexington Books, 2010). Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in venues such as The Guardian, LARB, BELT Magazine, The New Inquiry, SoundingOut!, Hypatia, differences, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is currently working on three book projects: First, The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the fight for true independence. (Under contract with UNC Press). This is a book about the philosophy behind former modern rock radio station 97X FM/woxy.com. The station and its programming was driven by the idea that true independence is possible only when practiced with and for other people. The book argues that this idea of independence is what we need to fight the 21st century corporate mainstream, which is driven by the false idea that real independence is being left to fend for yourself. Second, Vibes, Moods and Feels: on the culture of speculative neoliberalism. This book is in many ways the follow-up to The Sonic Episteme. It argues that discourses of “vibez,” “mood,” “aesthetic,” and the like translate the calculative practices behind speculative (i.e., post-Gaussian) finance capitalism into the terms of popular culture. Third, a book on The B-52’s Cosmic Thing as a work of sonic speculative fiction. She loves dogs, gardening, running, and face-melting industrial techno.  You can listen to recordings of some of her lectures here. She is also a digital sound artist and musician, and also works as a member of citation:obsolete.

SAMMUS (Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo) is a rap artist and producer from Ithaca, NY with a PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Brown in the music department where she teaches courses on rap songwriting and feminist sound studies. Since 2010 SAMMUS has written, produced, and recorded three full-length albums (one of which has charted on Billboard), three EPs, a collaborative video-game themed concept album with the MC Mega Ran, a critically acclaimed beat tape, and countless one-off collaborations with artists from a variety of genres as well as video game developers, podcasters, and filmmakers. Her story as an artist at the intersections of academia and Afrofuturism has led to performances and speaking engagements at a range of conferences, conventions, festivals and campus events about her experiences as a hip hop artist, black feminist, Afrofuturist thinker, and artist/academic. Her live shows, characterized by her explosive energy and the inclusion of elements of cosplay, bring together a diverse array of activists, hip hop heads, punks, and self-identified nerds and geeks, among others. As noted by the Los Angeles Times, SAMMUS “has a gift for getting a message across.” Beyond her creative work, Enongo’s research interests include Black feminist sound studies, video game music and sound design, and hip hop studies and performance. Her doctoral research, which she completed in 2019, focuses on the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development and use of “community-studios”—recording studios that provide high-quality recording tools, professional sound engineering services, and audio training to communities that often lack financial or social access to these resources. She is currently thinking and writing about the market dynamics that shape life for rap artists who work within video game music scenes. Since joining the game studio Glow Up Games as the Director of Audio in 2019, she has also been working with a team of artists and engineers to develop a rap composition feature in a mobile-game for the HBO scripted series Insecure. In the summer of 2020 she became a member of theKEEPERS, a Hip Hop collective that is currently developing the most comprehensive digital archive to map the international contributions of womxn and girls across Hip Hop’s 50-year history.

The event was moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and the 370 Jay Project.