Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies

A critical examination of the twenty-first century fetishization of professional audio technologies, and how it led to a new social formation: gear cultures.

Gear: mixing consoles, outboard effects processors, microphones. These are professional studio recording-related technological objects—the tools of the recording industry—yet their omnipresence in the broader music industries and prosumer markets transcends the entrenched pro audio engineer guild. In Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies, authors Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett ask: How does gear become gear? Why is it fetishized? And how is it even relevant in the predominantly digital twenty-first-century music technology landscape?

This multisited, multicountry, multiplatform, and multiscalar study focuses on gear in the present day. The authors trace the life of gear from its underlying materialities, components, and interfaces to its manufacturing processes, its staging in sites including trade shows and message fora, and its reception through (gear) canons, heritage, and obdurance. This book implements a meticulous multimode methodology drawing upon more than twenty-five firsthand long-form interviews with audio industry professionals—including gear designers, users, and publishers—as well as new findings drawn from multisited fieldwork, online discourse analysis, and visual ethnography.

Gear examines the present-day prevalence of gear and the existence of its surrounding passionate, competitive, and sometimes bizarre gear cultures.

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