Recent Experimental Electronic Music Practices in Iran:

An Ethnographic and Sound-Based Investigation

 

• PhD submitted in August 2019 to Queen’s University Belfast – Sonic Arts Research Centre

 

The aim of this interdisciplinary (Sonic Arts and Anthropology) and practice-led (thesis plus portfolio) project was to identify and locate an experimental electronic music ‘scene’ in Iran within a web of historical-social-political-religious-economic-technological agencies. Drawing from the growing traditions of digital ethnography and artistic research, this project documented and analysed the processes, aesthetics, and practices that shaped the ‘scene’, while exploring and feeding back to those through sound-based practice. In setting ethnographic study and artistic practice in action within a mutually-interpenetrating loop, this work suggests a context for further anthropological and/or (ethno-)musicological inquiry that incorporates (collaborative) music- and/or art-making as a beneficial and rigorous research methodology.    

 

Digital ethnography—online fieldwork, field-recording, and more than 40 one-to-one interviews—as well as individual and collaborative composition, installations, and collaborative performances were the main strategies applied to investigate the subject matter. The outcome was, therefore, presented in the form of a portfolio of original works along with a thesis that was produced to contextualise the project’s concurrently theoretical and practical engagement with and investigation of the case at hand. These two were mutually supportive and intertwined, in that the former consisted both of practice which formed part of the ‘object of study’ of the ethnographic work and practice which formed part of the ‘method of study’, taking the form of both critique and collaboration/provocation/intervention. The text was simultaneously a piece of ethnographic fieldwork, an autobiographical reflection, and practice-led commentary, which positioned the author’s work within the wider network of practice of experimental electronic music in Iran. There was therefore a congruity between the technology used to make the work, that used to disseminate it, that which ‘constructed’ the ‘community’ of practice, and that which enabled study of the ‘scene’. To date no scholarly work has been done on the subject matter in any shape or form.