Who decides what counts as music, and what does the apparatus fail to see?
Professor Mykaell Riley, one of the founder members of Steel Pulse, initiator and co-curator of Beyond the Bassline at the British Library, and music director of the BBC's Boarders, delivers his inaugural professorial lecture at the Regent Street Cinema.
About this event
For decades the systems that record, measure, archive and fund music in Britain were not built to see the music he comes from. Not out of malice. Out of calibration.
In this lecture, he follows one method through forty years of practice: the research that got a police form withdrawn, the exhibition that changed how the national library catalogues Black British music, the report that named twenty-nine Black British genres, and the drama series that put sixty-three students' names in the credits. Together they open a new field, Black Music Meta Science, and point to something larger: Cultural Meta Science, the study of how cultural knowledge is produced, kept, counted and, now, generated by machines that copy the sound and cut the thread.
For musicians, curators, researchers, students, policymakers, and anyone who has ever wondered why the record does not match the room.
Location
Regent Street Cinema
