Forty years of building the instruments Black British music was never measured with. Professor Mykaell Riley names a new field.
Calibrated to Miss Us
Black Music Meta Science and the Instruments of Cultural Knowledge
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 University of Westminster.
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 In this lecture he follows one method through forty years of practice: the research that got a police form withdrawn, the exhibition that changed how the national library catalogues Black British music, the report that named twenty-nine Black British genres, and the drama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.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and a drinks reception. Free, registration required.
"If the instruments of measurement are calibrated to miss you, building your own instruments is the most radical act of scholarship available."
Abstract
For decades British musicology analysed sound-system culture with the tools of score notation, found no score, and concluded the music was simple. That was instrument error, and there is a science built to catch it. Metascience turns research on itself and asks whether its methods, measures and incentives can see what they claim to study. It has never looked at Black British music. This lecture does.
I will follow one method through forty years of practice, from Steel Pulse to the Black Music Research Unit, and through the projects that tested it: Bass Culture and the withdrawal of Form 696, Beyond the Bassline at the British Library, the twenty-nine Black British genres named in Black Music Means Business, and sixty-three student credits on the BBC's Boarders. Each reruns one operation: attach the maker to the work, and make the attachment hard to remove. Together they open a new field, Cultural Meta Science: the study of how cultural knowledge is produced, validated, archived, and now generated by machines that copy the sound and cut the thread.
About the speaker
Mykaell Riley
Mykaell Riley is Professor of Black Music at the University of Westminster and Director of the Black Music Research Unit, which he founded in 2012. One of the founder members of Steel Pulse, he formed the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra, Britain's first Black pop string section, and has contributed as writer and producer to three UK number ones. He led the AHRC-funded Bass Culture project, whose Grime Report brought about the withdrawal of the Metropolitan Police's Form 696 and whose 2018 exhibition and documentary became a REF2021 impact case study, and initiated and co-curated Beyond the Bassline at the British Library, winner of two Museums + Heritage Awards in 2025. He is Music Director on the BBC's Boarders and a Fellow of the RSA.
