Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies

Eliot Bates, Samantha Bennett | 2025 | ISBN: 0262551853 | English | 400 pages | True PDF | 8 MB
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?