Dr. Kaley Lane Eaton, Associate Professor of the Music Department at the Cornish College of the Arts presents "Music and Technology: A History and Ethical Framework for Engagement."

Music is technology: both mediums have been intertwined for the entirety of human history. Electronic music of the 20th and 21st century originates from advancements in military and industrial technology, but the abuse, supremacy, exclusion and alienation embedded in its practice have been seldom discussed in the academy, and even proliferated by it. My experience as a female-identifying electroacoustic composer and producer has been a constant sine wave phasing between liberation and exclusion, empowerment and bias. My own stories reflect the dual nature of this medium: one that has at once liberated artists and stolen their intellectual property, and that has allowed pioneering women and people of color to test the limits of the machine and the human body while excluding us from the canon. Through memoir, historical study, anecdotes and data regarding pedagogical practices in this field, and a discussion of the state of the music industry today, I will explore these simultaneous threads of liberation and oppression. The continuation of human society, as it stands now in our 21st century, depends on a critical understanding of how body, mind, and spirit interact with the machines we create. As Bob Ostertag reflects, our duty as musicians is “not celebrating technology but questioning it and probing it, examining its problematic nature, illuminating or clarifying tensions between technology and the body... at the dawn of the third millennium.”