Martin Scherzinger

Media Theorist, Musicologist, and Composer

African Math

African Math, released by New Focus Recordings African musicians have long adapted European instruments (accordions, guitars, keyboards) to great musical effect. In the spirit of this tradition, we too adapt classically European instruments by treating them as if they were African instruments. … (read more)

Publications

I work on sound, music, media and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on music of Europe, Africa, and America, as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in geographically-remote regions. The research includes the examination of links between political economy and digital sound technologies, poetics of copyright law in diverse sociotechnical environments, relations between aesthetics and censorship, sensory limits of … (read more)

Podcasts

  • Interview with SABC News for Nelson Mandela's Centennial
  • Data and Society talk on post-truth and new realities
  • Interview with NPR on copyright of a sound fragment
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Books

Music in Contemporary Philosophy (Routledge). This book examines the functional place of music in contemporary European philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries. The chapters explore the musical dimensions of lesser known figures as well as well-known philosophical figures in relation ... (read more)

Musical Compositions

African musicians have long adapted European instruments (accordions, guitars, keyboards) to great musical effect. In the spirit of this tradition, these compositions indigenize classically European instruments by treating them as if they were African instruments. Piano, violin and cello are made to imitate the tactile patterns found on a bow from the Kalahari, or the sticking on a Ugandan xylophone, the fractal harmonies of a Shona mbira, and so on. But instead of adding exotic timbres or percussive textures, these works take a different … (read more)

Teaching

Here is a sample of the courses I have taught int he past (NYU/Harvard/Princeton), and those I plan to teach in the near future.

Past Courses:
  • Introduction to Media, Culture and Communication
  • Sound Studies
  • Sounds In and Out of Africa

    • Present and Future Courses:
  • Rhythm and Repetition
  • Software, Labor, Affect
  • Media and Music
  • Music, Networks, and Law
    • (more information)

    Articles

    Recent work includes a study on remuneration practices for streaming media; the dialectics of software; the property concept--its discontents and contents; harmonic patterning and recursion; cultural … (read more)

    Book Chapters

    • In Divisible Mobility: Music in an Age of Cloud Computing - on the political economy of music production, with reference to digital infrastructure
    • Temporalities - on the temporal antinomies of the colonial period
    • Enforced Deterritorialization - argues that our century has become more Boulezian than Deleuzian


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    Articles

    • Musical Property: Widening or Withering?–on the property concept; its discontents and contents
    • Fractal Harmonies of Southern Africa–on harmonic patterning and recursion
    • The Subtraction of the World: Waste or Resource?–on cultural modes of reason underwriting global political economy
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