Gear

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.Acknowledgments
Part I: Gear Cultures
1 Gear
2 Fetishization
Part II: Materializing Gear
3 Extractivism
4 Manufacturing
5 Interface
Part III: Staging Gear
6 Event
7 Print
8 Online
Part IV: Encountering Gear
9 Agency
10 Testing
11 Organization
Part V: Gear Attitudes
12 Secrets
13 Heritage
14 Obdurance
15 Conclusion
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index“An impressive and timely collection of fifteen chapters that apply the concept of gear to the study of media technologies.”
—H-Net Reviews

“After reading this book, you will also question why you own any of the recording equipment you have. Instead, you'll hope for a future where recordists purchase what they actually need, and that we'll all give up the search for some old metal box The Beatles once ran a signal through.”
—TapeOp Magazine“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.”
—Kyle Devine, University of Winnipeg; author of Decomposed

“This deep dive into the social and cultural meanings surrounding audio technologies reorients our thinking about gear as more than mere hardware that conveys sound. A fascinating read!”
—Susan Schmidt Horning, St. John’s University, New York; author of Chasing Sound

"Why do we fetishize high-end audio technology? Read Gear to find out. Prepare to be surprised, unsettled, even alarmed by this brilliant, fascinating, myth-busting book."
—Mark Katz, author of Music and Technology: A Very Short Introduction and Capturing Sound

“A powerful contribution to feminist sound studies that amplifies new voices and methods, Gear is a guide to the dismantling of ‘gear cultures’ and to envisioning more equitable sonic futures.”
—Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, aka SAMMUS, Producer and Professor of Music, Brown UniversityEliot Bates is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center. They have contributed as a performer, composer, and/or recordist/engineer to more than ninety albums produced in the US, UK, Turkey, and Italy, as well as several TV series and feature films.

Samantha Bennett is Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and Professor of Music at the Australian National University. She is the author of Modern Records, Maverick Methods and Peepshow and coeditor of Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound