Virtual Music

Shara Rambarran is Senior Lecturer in Music, Business and Media at the University of Brighton, UK. She is the musicologist for Spotify’s award winning music podcast, Decode, co-runs the Art of Record Production conferences, and is an editor on the Journal on the Art of Record Production. Shara is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, and Diva: Feminism and Fierceness from Pop to Hip-Hop (Bloomsbury, 2023). Shara is the author of Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2021).

• List of Figures Introduction: The Future of Music has Arrived 1. “Blame it on the Machines”: Historical Placings of Digital Virtual Music.2. “Technology gives you everything immediately…”: A Brief Critical Discussion on the Digital Virtual.3. “We are Musical Makers”: The Experimental and Digital Virtual Trademarks of Genre and Style.4. “Give Life Back to Music”: Remixing Music.5. “The Game has Changed”: Video Game Music.6. “Living in a Fantasy”: Performers and Identity.7. “Showroom Dummies”: Live and Simulated Performers, Performances, and Audiences.8. “Take Control”: Creators, Fans, and the Internet.9. “Digital Witness”: Online Communities, Networking, and Virality. Conclusion: Rewind or After the Future?AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Shara Rambarran has been developing an insightful criticism and analysis of digital music over many years, and it is exciting to read this collection of her ideas and arguments. She investigates the meaning of digital virtual music, its manifestation in remixes, video games and experimental transformations of material, and discusses its effect on artistic identity, creators and fans. This book is warmly recommended as a stimulating account of the ways in which music has been shaped by virtuality and digital technology.