Presentation

MusiMid had its origin in 2001, during the XIII Encontro Nacional da Anppom (National Association of Research and Post-graduation in Music), in Belo Horizonte, when the GT Music and Media were gathered for the first time. From 2003, the Group started to meet on a weekly basis for the exhibition and discussions of private research projects, studies of specific themes and workshops, besides listening sessions. Apart from these internal activities, MusiMid has been promoting several academic and artistic activities, mainly, the Meetings of Music and Media.

Nowadays, the Center of Studies in Music and Media (MusiMid) gathers a multidisciplinary team that includes, besides students, musicians and musicologists, specialists whose interest is turned to music and their implications with the Medias. Understood as a system of meanings, the musical language exerts an important role in the construction of the signs of daily life. In this sense, the MusiMed researches will have, as a perspective, the study of several situations in which the musical language, in their varied modalities and manifestations, in the communicative process, interacts in the formation of artistic and cultural texts.

Among other aspects, it is intended to analyze how the musical signs constitute systems and processes, in relation to the time-space axle, how they act in the social field, having the medias as reference (television, radio disc, etc.); how they are produced, transmitted, stored; what kind of effects can generate in their interpreters and receptors. At this point, we can highlight important references such as the musicological ones but, also, culture and media, human sciences, in general, informatics, acoustics (organology, psychoacoustic) and areas related to the study of voice (phonoaudiology, phoniatry, phonetics).

Linked to the Department of Music of the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP) since May 2007, MusiMid has already received the visit of renowned theorists, artists, and independent researchers known internationally, from Brazil and from abroad. MusiMid keeps contact with researchers from the main centers of research, in the country and abroad, aiming at providing ample and interdisciplinary dialogue, in the several areas in which the musical language takes part actively in the communicative process and, as consequence, in the socio-cultural and historical production, in the areas of communication (CISC, Intercom, ALAIC), Semiotics (ABS, IASS, CEO) and Music (Anppom, ABET, ICMS, IASPM).

Music and Media: a new area of knowledge

Even not constituting a universal language, music is present in the immense majority of cultures. It’s about the music that is composed to be played in ritual situations, it’s about the so-called pure music (or absolute music), destined to the concert rooms; music has always played an important part in several societies.

In European traditional culture, mainly as from the end of the 19th century, the modalities of musical language started to unfold into other variants, constituting specific languages. This is due to the devices that enabled the capturing, fixation, amplifying and transmission of the sound from a distance. In fact, the record and the radio would provide such changes that would transform the 20th century into a unique moment, in all times: for the first time in history, it was possible to store the sound in time and space. That’s the moment when we see the coming up, successively, of the popular urban songs, the rock, the “jingles”, the radio, the film and the soap opera soundtracks; also, the overture themes of radio programs, soap operas and films.

This new sound landscape starts to compose, little by little, the soundtrack of people’s lives, in practically every routine situation. Otherwise said, music that passes through the Medias builds the culture of a routine life; reciprocally, the musical practices of daily life also select the musical elements that set the repertoires as cultural memory (on a medium term basis and on the long run). Thus, it’s possible to conclude that music is information; and, as such, music is (also) culture.

It’s important to emphasize that a whole century of mediatized music has generated a very vast repertoire which is not yet fully organized. Part of it is sparse and another segment is recluse in places sometimes out of reach, such as certain private or rare collections.

On the other hand, the phonofixation (recording) in the record potentialized the commercial character of the musical signs, specially the song. From powerful pivot at the center of the economic power to the defeat of the system, almost one century after the emerging of the “majors”, music itself doesn’t stand itself on “touchable” and “visible” material supports, at the moment of entering the telematic world.

The 20th century emerges with the growing of hybrid forms in artistic languages and expressive forms which are more and more complex in terms of thinking, originated from a digital culture. Nevertheless, it seems that the legacy of the analogical-technological world hasn’t been successfully assimilated theoretically and culturally. The researches at MusiMid have, inside their own concerns, studied the presence, function, and the participation of music in this universe.

Themes studied:

- performance: the body of the musician and its several mediations, throughout history. The role of technology in the processes of poetical communication;

- the conception of musical instrument and its interpolation with the diverse existing or obsolete sound medias ( microphone, amplification, high-fidelity);

- the variations in the Standards of listening and taste, provided by the introduction of different sound medias (the different stages of technological evolution and perceptive habits);

- sound landscape: the transformation suffered by the acoustic ambience, in a certain social-historical-cultural context and its consequences concerning the formation of new aesthetics standards;

- the multiple interfaces of musical language with other artistic languages and other medias;

- music in the media as an element of cultural and musical memory, as well as the capacity of the memory to favor or generate certain standards of musical aesthetics;

- the possible genre crossings (fusion, cross over, hybridism, mixings among others);

- the relations between artistic creation, audience, cultural and educational politics and the creation of standards of aesthetics taste;

- the songs of the medias before the contemporary world: matters of identity and affective bond; gender; the constitution of stable values in the age of the ephemeral;

- music and its crucial role as a privileged element in the mega entertainment industry.

Forms of action:

The objective of the group is to develop research projects, offer courses and workshops, in several levels (university, specialization, post-graduation or independent courses). Since MusiMid formally came into business, in 2003, it has been promoting internal activities, several lectures and meetings. Among the guests that have already taken part in the MusiMid activities, there are notorious studious, such as Jean-Yves-Bosseur, François Delalande, Gilberto Mendes, Anselmo Guerra, Silvia Berg, Christian Marcadet, Susana González-Aktories, Silvia Zambrini, Susana Sardo, Achille Picchi, Juan Pablo González, Mauricio Berú, Sergio Casoy.

MusiMid also promotes regular meetings with the research subgroups, besides lectures and scientific meetings. The Meetings of Music and Media have a special highlight. Those meetings have emerged from the need to implement interdisciplinary studies, involving music, media and their circumstances. The first Meeting happened in 2005, under the theme “The multiple voices of the city”; the second dealt with the interfaces between music and the verbal languages: “Verbalization, musicality: themes, plots and transits” (2006); the third meeting was about the inter-relations between music and all forms of imagistic representation, including itself: “The images of music” (2007). These scientific meetings counted with the collaboration of SESC Santos.

The fourth meeting “Brazil of the Gilbertos: Gilberto Freyre, João Gilberto, Gilberto Gil and Gilberto Mendes” (2008) and the fifth meeting “Aesthetics of the sound” (2009) were held at the School of Communications and Arts in São Paulo. Both were turned to the debate about the relations that music establishes with other areas of knowledge and their inevitable interpolations with history, culture and politics. With the exception of first meeting, all the others have the texts that were selected and presented in the event edited into a CDROM. The first meeting is registered, in audio, in its unabridged form, on the interface “Biblioteca” (n.t.: Library), at this page.