The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Technology [research group]
—
RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that music technology is never neutral. Technologies participate in forming musical intentions, determining which actions become available, shaping the kinds of relations that can be heard or enacted, and influencing how musical activity is documented, circulated, evaluated, and remembered. Whether explicitly designed or tacitly inherited, every instrument, interface, protocol, platform, file format, and technical workflow contains assumptions about bodies, skills, time, attention, authorship, control, and value.
A technological practice may, for example, treat an interface as a transparent channel between intention and sound, or regard it as an active participant that redirects thought and action. It may locate agency in the performer, distribute it across code and sensors, delegate decisions to an algorithm, or question whether human and machine contributions can be cleanly separated. It may understand data as an objective representation of musical activity, as a selective construction, as a resource to be extracted, or as a contested record shaped by classification and exclusion.
The residency therefore approaches music technology as an intellectual, artistic, and social practice in which concepts of instrumentality, mediation, agency, intelligence, automation, liveness, fidelity, embodiment, participation, and innovation are not merely presupposed or applied, but actively produced, negotiated, and contested. Philosophy is approached as immanent to technological activity: as a means of rendering assumptions legible, clarifying the concepts enacted through design and use, and examining the historical, economic, institutional, environmental, and political conditions through which technologies acquire meaning and consequence.
This approach does not imply that every technological artwork must illustrate a philosophical thesis, or that embodied and practical knowledge must be translated into conventional academic argument before it can be taken seriously. The programme instead asks what forms of thought become possible through designing, coding, building, performing, recording, repairing, and listening. A new instrument may model a relation between gesture and control; an algorithm may test the limits of intention; a recording process may reorganize distinctions between presence and absence; a networked performance may make latency into a social and aesthetic condition; a repair practice may disclose histories concealed by narratives of novelty.
Music technology can therefore be understood simultaneously as an object of philosophical examination and as a practice capable of producing philosophical insight. The programme asks how systems make concepts perceptible, how artistic uses expose contradictions within designed functions, and how listening may disclose forms of agency or dependence that remain hidden in ordinary operation. The central question is not simply, “What does this technology enable?” It is also: “What does it assume, organize, exclude, and make thinkable?”
Such inquiry requires attention to both visible devices and less visible infrastructures. Technical possibilities depend upon standards, supply chains, energy systems, patents, operating systems, platforms, data centres, educational models, labour conditions, maintenance practices, and cultures of expertise. To examine the philosophy of music technology is also to ask who can access a system, who builds and repairs it, whose knowledge is recognized, which resources it consumes, what forms of dependency it establishes, and what happens when support ends.
Musical technologies are often narrated through sequences of inventions, breakthroughs, and replacements. Such accounts can obscure continuity, collective labour, appropriation, repair, and the survival of supposedly obsolete practices. The New Lexicon asks how innovation is defined, by whom, and for whose benefit. It considers whether technological progress should be measured by increased speed, complexity, automation, fidelity, convenience, participation, sustainability, or by criteria not yet adequately named.
The programme treats this expanded field not as a reason to dissolve the specificity of music technology, but as a means of describing that specificity more adequately. Music technology remains a situated practice of designing relations among sound, action, matter, information, and attention. The field must be capable of addressing acoustic instruments and digital systems, scores and code, studios and platforms, performance bodies and data infrastructures, individual invention and collective maintenance, artistic autonomy and social consequence.
DATES
MENTORS
PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC TECHNOLOGY
APPLICATION
APPLICATION FORM AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The New Lexicon program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io