Postdigital Musicking: How a Multimodal Shift Is Redefining Contemporary Music

The digital revolution has long since created a new normal – yet its influence on contemporary art music is only now becoming visible. The Postdigital Musicking project examines how digitality, technology critique, and new multimodal practices are transforming contemporary music creation, and what creative possibilities emerge as a result.

 What does “postdigital” mean – and why does it matter?

“Postdigital” describes a world in which digital devices and media are no longer considered something special. They are simply there: in our pockets, in our homes, in public spaces – firmly embedded, taken for granted, part of everyday life. Operating in the background of this new normal are hidden digital infrastructures, all the more powerful precisely because they remain unseen. They create a culture of communication that constantly interweaves different systems of meaning – language, sound, image, movement, gesture, space, objects. Inevitably, they also exert a profound influence on contemporary art. They shape, shift, and structure artistic practices, often – tellingly – beyond conscious awareness.

For contemporary music, this means that composers and performers today are no longer concerned “only” with sounds. Their creative impulse is increasingly directed at relationships – particularly those that digital devices and interfaces generate and reify day after day. As a result, the production, reception, and distribution of music is increasingly shaped by the interaction of different modes of communication, by collaborative processes, feedback loops, and new communities of practice. In this context, composer and media artist Wolfgang Heiniger speaks of the “multimodal” character of contemporary music. Yet how exactly these multimodal constellations function and what aesthetic phenomena emerge from them has barely been studied. This is precisely where the project comes in. (Engaging texts by Wolfgang Heiniger, as well as documentation of his works, can be found here: http://wolfgangheiniger.de/doku.php?id=works)

What the Project Investigates

The project team’s research is guided by three central questions: How is the digital revolution changing contemporary music from a postdigital perspective? How do today’s artists combine digital innovation with technology critique? And what new possibilities for action does this open up for composers, performers, and audiences?

To find answers, we engage not only theoretically and analytically with recent music history since 2000. Our team also explores musical creative possibilities under postdigital conditions through artistic research. In other words, we examine contemporary music as a social, material, and medial practice – as something that emerges through the interplay of people, things, spaces, and technologies.

Four Case Studies – Four Perspectives on Contemporary Music

The project examines developments in contemporary music since the year 2000 through four case studies:

1. Music Theatre and Human–Machine Constellations
   We investigate how European music theatre formats since 2000 have been shaped by interactions between humans and machines.
2. Hybrid Materialities and Spaces
   We analyze how digital and analog materialities intertwine, giving rise to new hybrid spaces between devices, bodies, and code.
3. Postdigital and Postmigrant Mobility
   We explore how musicians in global contexts develop new forms of cosmopolitan mobility and artistic identity.
4. Postdigital Subject Constellations
   We examine shifting forms of agency within a culture increasingly shaped by algorithmic logic, highlighting the resulting distributions of authorship, agency, and perception.

The Multimodal Lab: An Experimental Space for New Music Practice

Alongside the case studies, our artistic research team runs a Multimodal Lab. This is what we call the self-created experimental laboratory environments in which observed artistic practices can be restaged and systematically modified. Our experimental setups are designed to provide insights into the underlying logic of contemporary musical practice. In doing so, music becomes tangible and shapeable as an event generated through complex assemblages of human and non-human actants – very much in line with Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. (Introductory original text by Bruno Latour: ‘Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory’, a concise introduction to the core ideas of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), available as a PDF: https://www.uni-weimar.de/kunst-und-gestaltung/wiki/images/Latour-introduction-to-ant-theory.pdf)

Why This Project Matters – for Research and Practice

The project builds on Dirk Baecker’s concept of the “Next Society”: a world in which technology is no longer a tool, but a condition of social action. In this context, the autonomous subject loses its plausibility; instead, a relational form of agency emerges, one that emphasizes involvement and entanglement. Postdigital Musicking thus offers not only an analytical perspective on contemporary music, but also shows how music itself becomes a laboratory.

For artists, this opens up new possibilities for working with spaces, media, and bodies. For scholarship, it creates pathways to connect music history, ethnography, and artistic research. For institutions, it offers insights into what music education, outreach, and research might look like in a postdigital world.

More about the project: https://www.hkb.bfh.ch/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/2024-228-304-518/