Music & Technology is a new course offered through the Chiron Studies Department at Portland State. It is a 3-credit elective course open to all students (for undergraduate credit), and has been designed with Prof. Jil Freeman in the Communication Studies Department.

The course deals with the changes in music's compositional forms and subcultures in the last century due to technological advances and diffusion. We will consider this change from the point-of-view of the following players that necessarily coexist in this realm: artists, the entertainment industry, and consumers. We'll begin with radio, a traditional means of distributing and promoting a very small amount of music, and end with the internet, which has proved to be a radical way of promoting all recorded music.

Topics will include DJ culture, sampling, the role of radio in relation to music-making, copyright vs. copyleft, the impact of filesharing on both major record labels and independent musicians, technologies that spawned new musical forms and other related ideas.

Here are some links to
material we'll cover

For more information
contact the instructor

Information on registering
for Music & Technology