4th Communication and Music Conference: “Mediated Music: Writing It, Listening to It, Playing It”

Auditorium – Building U, C/ del Perú, 52, 08018 Barcelona
There is a productive paradox at the heart of this conference: it has never been so easy to listen to music, and never has so much been written, edited, and played with it. Music, which seemed to have evaporated into the undifferentiated flow of streaming, stubbornly reappears materialized in other media (the book, the screen, the video game) that do not reproduce it, but rework it. This conference begins with this observation: contemporary music is better understood when viewed as mediated, that is, explained, remediated, and reactivated in formats other than the record or the concert.

The first strand addresses an editorial phenomenon that is difficult to ignore. In a context in which the decline of music criticism and the disappearance of the specialist press are being diagnosed, books about music are experiencing sustained growth: established collections coexist with independent publishers that have made essays, biographies, and musical memoirs a stable niche. This boom could represent a shift in the economy of cultural recommendation. It seems that the music book has inherited functions previously performed by periodical rock and pop criticism (canonization, genealogy, authority) at a time when the algorithm competes for these same roles.

The second strand moves the question into the audiovisual realm. We will discuss music that not only accompanies the image but constructs it. Through a conversation between a researcher specializing in music and video games and a working composer, we will attempt something that academic panels rarely achieve: confronting the concept with the craft, the theory of interactivity with the client brief, ubiquitous listening with the budget spreadsheet. And all of this under a new, shared pressure—AI-assisted composition—which simultaneously affects professional practice and the object of study.

At their core, both panels share the same question: who narrates music today, and with what tools?