Book Launch: Examining Secrets and Revelation in Music and Audio Technology Cultures (Cambridge University Press)

Abstract:

 Dirty little secrets. Secret weapons. Trade secrets. Secret ingredients. The secrets of recording success. Phrases so ubiquitous in music and audio technology culture that, in the 21st Century, they serve as powerful mechanisms in both the production and consumption of music and audio technologies and skillsets (Bates and Bennett, 2025). Whilst notions of secrecy have pervaded electronics discourse and practice since the mid nineteenth-century (Marvin, 1988), secrets and concomitant revelatory discourses have since proliferated to the point of defining 21st Century music and audio cultures. Secrets and revelatory discourse serves to historicize, imagine and commodify skillsets whilst amplifying technological fetishization. Such discourse is rife in–and cuts across–several music and audio technology milieux, yet rarely is it interrogated.

Grounded in historical and psychology scholarship, this paper examines secrets and revelatory discourse as part of a continuum of the protection of tacit knowledge. With examples drawn from extensive qualitative data, including from manufacturer publications, trade shows, online fora, industry associations, retail, textbooks, scholarship and education–and with focus on purveyors and receptors of secrets and revelatory discourse–this paper elucidates the mechanism of secret holders, secrets, revelation and listeners as being intrinsic to music and audio technology cultures. The following questions are considered: In what ways are historicised recording and technological skillsets distilled into commodified secrets? How do secrets uphold fetishisation in audio and music technology cultures? How do secrets work to maintain historical boundaries of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ participants in these cultures? This paper addresses secrets as technological and praxial problems in the audio and music technology industries and related pedagogy that, in conjunction with more direct factors (Gaston-Bird, 2019; Brookes et al, 2021), compound exclusion for marginalised participants. What can recordists, pedagogues, and scholars do to address–and ultimately, dismantle–secrets discourses to promote more inclusive music and audio technology cultures?    

Bio:

Samantha Bennett is Professor of Music at the Australian National University, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). Her research focuses on music technologies and praxes, sound recording, and the analysis of technological and production aesthetics in recorded popular music. She is the author, co-author, and co-editor of six books, including Modern Records, Maverick Methods (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Secrets and Revelation in Music and Audio Technology Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (co-authored with A/Prof Eliot Bates, The MIT Press, 2025). She is currently working on a large-scale, international project on the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument. Her co-edited collection with Dr Paul Harkins, The Fairlight CMI: History, Technology, Identity, is forthcoming from Routledge.