Musimorphoses project gives ear to music listening in the digital age

The Musimorphoses project set out to study the “digital turn,” or the move from an analog culture to digital culture. Special emphasis was placed on the way in which digital media is changing our relationship with musical entertainment as well as the social experience of music at large. Objectives included establishing a chronological timeline of the digital turn, gaining a better understanding of the burgeoning digital native culture and its ramifications, and successfully demonstrating the hypothesis that digital technology (especially social networks) are a lever of transformation affecting musical taste, legal frameworks for the consumption of music and political ideals of democracy.

Asking the tough questions about today’s music industry

The group’s coordinator, Philippe Le Guern (Centre Atlantique de Philosophie), will be chairing an international symposium entitled, “Musimorphoses: on the future of music listening in the digital era” on 11-13 November at Telecom Paris Tech. The symposium, bringing together a scientific committee representing universities from seven countries, will hone in on and flesh out some of the more recent and technologically involved phenomena observed by the study; these include business models and legislative responses in the age of piracy, a discussion on the paradoxical tendency of algorithms to both expand and box in listeners’ exposure to new musical genres, as well as the legal grey area created by stream ripping, or the illegal creation of a permanent copy of from streaming music content.

Musimorphoses creates buzz with timely research

Launched in 2013 by partner institutions CAPHI Centre Atlantique de Philosophie, CRAL Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage, and LINA Laboratoire d’Informatique de Nantes Atlantique employing a team specialising in such varied fields as sociology, ethnomusicology, esthetics, and anthropology in tandem with partner institutions Musimorphoses was carried out and funded by ANR under its “Changing societies: Emerging and evolving cultures and cultural phenomena” programme and benefits from a grant worth €296 K. The project has hit on some of the great issues of our time, piquing the interest of academics the world over and large-scale players in the music industry. The French telecommunications company Orange, with wide-spanning operations in Africa, shared its vision of music services over digital mobile networks in southern countries during a workshop in May.

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