Ricerca Artistica Musicale e Ricerca sulle Tecnologie della Musica

This chapter addresses the scope and impact of Artistic Research in Music (ARM) as a field of scholarly concerns and – more importantly – as a cultural practice of our times. More particularly, it focusses on the scant weight academic ARM genealogies acknowledge to developments usually associated with Music Technology Research (MTR) but not in the least aligned with simplistic and pervasive technocratic views nor absorbed into engineering matters entirely. Often counted as marginal, such experimental MTR practices should be deemed instead as expressive of a more acute awareness and competent insight into the hyper-technologized environments in which music is made and listened to, in late-modern and contemporary societies. Their role in ARM genealogy and their relevance to actual artistic research work, today, should be more fairly considered. The chapter threads fruitful paradigm shifts and problematic aspects of ARM together with past and present issues in practice-based music technology research, particularly as emerging in experimental music currents and various forms of sound art. Case studies are finally picked up from recent and not-so-recent music history, providing examples of different artistic research attitudes. Overall, a confluence or convergence of ARM and MTR perspectives is called for, which might be positively rehearsed also in connection with efforts in current “science and technology studies” (STS), particularly in consideration of today’s larger media ecology of live performance and other creative explorations of sound and music.