My interests in the area of auditive culture stem from my research into related subjects. I am currently conducting a research project (2007-2010) on hip hop culture and – as a part of this – on the ways hip hop deejays use sound as material in their production. With respect to this use of sound, a number of questions arise concerning the aesthetics of sampling: on why and how samples are chosen, on the changes implied by sampling, and on the significance of sounds historically and geographically – whether samples of music (in a traditional sense) or more or less documentary sound effects. The latter features prominently in the production of hip hop music, and I am interested in the relation between the aesthetic production of soundscapes in hip hop and the equally prominent localisation – e.g. references to artists’ home turf – within hip hop culture.
My interest in the use of sound as a material for aesthetic production furthermore concerns the relationship between different types of practises in the constitution of specific music cultures. Here, too, my current focus is on hip hop culture, in so far as I am studying the genre’s (or genre culture’s) constitution across, for instance, material, social, discursive and geographical relations, and especially the possibility for analyzing these relations as integrated moments of the same musical practises. The question of different ontological moments of practise is however pertinent to the description of audio culture(s) as well, not least if the significance of specific sounds is taken to be determined by specific contexts of use. From this follows a series of questions concerning the ascription of significance to sound qua non-auditive aspects of practise, and furthermore of how the idea of auditive culture(s) relate to other types of culture – e.g. material or visual culture. I approach these questions by studying the use of sound as material in certain musical and generically demarcated practises. An important assumption is, however, that the mediation of sound through other types of materiality or qua the establishment of discourses on sound plays an important role in disseminating and stabilizing the practises of auditive culture(s), and I attempt to conceptualise this based on actor-network theory.
Mads Krogh holds a PhD in Musicology and is currently a postdoc at the Section for Musicology at the Department of Aesthetic Studies at Aarhus University, working on the project “Hip Hop Culture as Musical Practise – Analyses and Discussions”. The project is financed by The Danish Research Council for the Humanities along with the Faculty of Humanities at Aarhus University.
Prior to the current project I have worked with theories on genre in popular music, applying discourse theory and cultural sociology, and studying in particular the constitution of a discourse on hip hop in Danish media. I have also quite recently contributed and coedited a book on hip hop culture in Scandinavia in a perspective of globalization and localization.
Beside research on popular music I take interest in the theoretical grounding of the increasingly widespread understanding of music as culture and practise. I have recently had a chance to deal with this subject in educating high school [gymnasie] teachers on the philosophy of science with regard to developments in musicology.
