Niel Scobie
Niel Scobie,
Carleton University, Ottawa, CA
Niel Scobie is in his first year of the 2-year Masters of Arts in Music and Culture program at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He attended Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies. Before commencing his post-secondary education, Scobie enjoyed a successful 20-year career in the music business as recording engineer, producer and DJ playing clubs and opening for acts like the Black Eyed Peas, The Roots and George Clinton. He also collaborated on recordings that in 2003 and 2005 were nominated for Canada’s Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year. During his time at VIU, Scobie received the CanWest Global Communications Scholarship and the Gerry Schroh Memorial Award for academic excellence. In 2013 he received a prestigious Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant. Scobie would like to teach Media Studies at the post-secondary level, specializing in the study of technological and ethnomusicalogical influences on hip-hop history.
Talk Title: On the Fly: How DJs Spun Technology and the Digital Revolution Took Flight
This paper contends that without the appropriation of the then-emergent digital technologies of the 1980s (i.e. digital samplers and drum machines) by experimenting DJs, the musical sub-genres of hip-hop and house music would not have surfaced within New York and Chicago respectively and entered mainstream popular music culture. The world’s ability to create new musical forms using current digital technologies has increased in the last 30 years largely by using the software and hardware, in ways not illustrated in their manuals. Musicians adopt digital technologies and combine them in order to test their boundaries, which gives way to reformatting and collage – furthering the convergence of disciplines and methods.
The power of musical data is not always in its sound, but also in the data itself – a realization which introduces a staggering number of possibilities for forward-thinking DJs who are making the process of mixing music a genre unto itself. DJs who willingly adapt to new technologies like Serato and Ableton, who appropriate those technologies beyond the manual and who apply their own talents in mixing and editing, will drive musical media forward spawning both new genres and new audience participation within those genres.
