‘Gear’ Book Launch with Professor Samantha Bennett

Join Professor Bronwyn Parry for the launch of Professor Samantha Bennett’s latest book, ‘Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies’.

Gear is a critical examination of the twenty-first century fetishization of professional audio technologies, and how it led to a new social formation: gear cultures. Co-authored with Associate Professor Eliot Bates (CUNY), Gear is published in the Technology & Engineering Series of The MIT Press.

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.

“A smart and adventurous journey into the material and cultural forces that shape music today by two of the field’s most insightful critics, Gear is a must-read for tinkerers and theorists alike."

—— Professor Kyle Devine, University of Winnipeg; author of Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music.