Postdigital Sound

From its point of conception, there has been a critical interest in connecting postdigital thinking with sound. This initially concerned the possibility of there being a ‘postdigital music’, which over time has broadened to consider the postdigital conditions of the music industry, and how some of the central assumptions of postdigital thinking are demonstrated through contemporary rituals around accessing music. This has been accompanied by work that has sought to understand what ‘listening’ means from a postdigital standpoint. Meanwhile, as postdigital thinking has gained momentum within educational inquiry, so researchers have interrogated how sound influences teaching and learning, and the settings where these activities are performed. This has recently overlapped with work around ‘postdigital soundscapes’, including how digital technologies are implicated in shaping our sonic environments. At a more fundamental level, the resources and rituals associated with sound provide a way of revealing the postdigital conditions of our world.