This Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Minority Post-Doctoral Research and Training Fellowship is a comparative examination of the cultural and economic impacts and implications of recent innovations in computer technologies on youths and young adults in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil) and New York City. Using a combination of ethnographic, historical, and discursive approaches to examine differences between Brazilian and American perceptions and uses of digital sampling and computer networking technologies in music making practices, the researcher will explore how differences in culture and access to computers inform the ways technologies are viewed and appropriated, and how technologies and music participate in the rearticulation of cultural boundaries. A better understanding of the complexities of cross-cultural differences in access to and use of computer technologies is essential for the development of more appropriate discussions, initiatives, and policies aimed at minimizing the role of technologies as agents of social exclusion. Music technologies provide a particularly apt vehicle for developing a more nuanced understanding of the cultural impacts and implications of globalizing technologies. Music is both formative and indicative of cultural and political identity among youths and young adults, the groups most engaged with computer and computer-networking technologies. Music also plays a primary role in shaping perceptions of other cultures, serving as a means to both reproduce and transcend cultural boundaries and prejudices. With recent innovations in computer and computer networking technologies, music has become one of the most salient, mobile, and widely circulated forms of cultural exchange, thus, reinforcing its role as a prime mediator of cross-cultural perceptions. Recent innovations in computer and computer-networking technologies have profoundly altered the way music is produced in several ways: (1) It is possible to cheaply produce professional-quality music with home computers; (2) Computer-based digital sampling technologies have blurred the conventional lines between musical production and consumption, allowing composers to appropriate and re-contextualize any existing sound source (both foreign and domestic); (3) Internet technologies have allowed for the development of transnational computer music technology fora through which geographically-dispersed communities exchange technical knowledge and circulate music and software for music production. Together, the relative ease and lower costs of music production, the increased accessibility of and use of preexisting sounds in music production, and the increased role of transnational communication and exchange in mediating the use of technology have fostered the emergence of subcultures oriented around novel musical forms that synthesize disparate cultural elements. Included among these, are culturally hybrid musics that employ digital sampling technologies to synthesize North American and European urban dance music with traditional Brazilian musical elements. This study argues that musicians in Salvador and New York City view themselves as participating in a cosmopolitan technoculture forged around computer music technologies and culturally hybrid musics. Despite this shared participation in social processes, different cultural, linguistic, political, economic, and technological contexts yield disparate ways in which people symbolically and practically engage in this community and in the technologies and music around which it is oriented. Although Brazilian sampling practices can often bear similar meanings to those of North American artists, the uses of computer music technologies have distinct meanings that address, react to, and seek to transform local contexts. These contexts not only inform the meanings of samples and sampling, but the particular ways in which technological tools are used to manipulate sounds. This study argues that the different ways in which technologies and music are appropriated and re-contextualized, are indicative and formative of perceived cultural differences and changing relations between Brazilian and American youth. Extensive interviews will be conducted with computer music technology users to understand the different ways in which computer technologies are socialized and their role in mediating interviewees' relationships to music and other cultures.
