Anglia Ruskin University

Eclectic Method's music for the eyes

Professor Nicholas Cook talks on musical multimedia

Date: Tuesday 11 May 2010
Time: 17:00 - 18:15
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge, Helmore 252

Free entry - all welcome.

Screen media genres from Fantasia (1940) to the music video of half a century later extended the boundaries of music by bringing moving images within the purview of musical organisation: the visuals of rap videos, for example, are in essence just another set of musical parameters, bringing their own connotations into play within the semantic mix in precisely the same way as do more traditional musical parameters. But in the last two decades digital technology has taken such musicalisation of the visible to a new level, with the development of integrated software tools for the editing and manipulation of sounds and images. In this paper I illustrate these developments through the work of the UK-born but US-based remix trio Eclectic Method, focusing in particular on the interaction between their multimedia compositional procedures and the complex chains of reference that result, in particular, from their film mashups.

Professor Nicholas Cook is currently Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Darwin College. Previously, he was Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He has also taught at the University of Hong Kong, University of Sydney, and University of Southampton, where he served as Dean of Arts. He is a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.

The talk is organized by the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) Institute at Anglia Ruskin University and the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture (ArcDigital).


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