Music in the digital age: commodity, community, communion

Abstract Digital systems are reshaping how we engage with music as a sounding dimension of cultural life that is capable being transformed into commodity. At the same time, increasingly through digital media each other and virtual others, attributes underpin our capacity to interact communicatively disregarded or overlooked within those media. Even before advent technologies reproduction, was susceptible assimilation economic acts exchange. What new in world way which modes engagement themselves absorbed an economy built on datafication shadows casual preferences. But more than just sounds culturally sanctioned musical. Music manifested behaviours, interactive behaviour. participatory well presentational, mode—involving collective, non-specialist, real-time music-making—has significant individual social consequences. Yet participation largely absent from world, potential costs remain be understood. Moreover, everyday, face-to-face communicative—conversational—interactions imbued patterns between interlocutors musical, they share features what happy describe “music”. These presently lacking designed subserve communicative functions, this paper will consider implications for interactions machines their successful incorporation voice–user interfaces would give rise.