This dissertation addresses the convergence of ethics, labor, aesthetics, cultural citizenship, and the circulation of knowledge among experimental electronic instrument builders in New York City and Berlin. This loosely connected group of musician-inventors engages in what I call “DIY music technology” due to their shared do-it-yourself ethos and their use of emerging and repurposed technologies, which allow for new understandings of musical invention. My ethnography follows a constellation of self-described hackers, “makers,” sound and noise artists, circuit benders, avant-garde/experimental musicians, and underground rock bands through these two cities, exploring how they push the limits of what “music” and “instruments” can encompass, while forming local, transnational, and virtual networks based on shared interests in electronics tinkering and independent sound production. This fieldwork is supplemented with inquiries into the construction of “DIY” as a category of invention, labor, and citizenship, through which I trace the term’s creative and commercial tensions from the emergence of hobbyism as a form of productive leisure to the prevailing discourse of punk rock to its adoption by the recent Maker Movement. I argue that the cultivation of the self as a “productive” cultural citizen—which I liken to a state of “permanent prototyping”—is central to my interlocutors’ activities, through which sound, self, and instrument are continually remade. I build upon the idea of “technoaesthetics” (Masco 2006) to connect the inner workings of musical machines with the personal transformations of DIY music technologists as inventors fuse their aural imaginaries with industrial, biological, environmental, and sometimes even magical imagery. Integral to these personal transformations is a challenge to corporate approaches to musical instrument making and selling, though this stance is often strained when commercial success is achieved. Synthesizing interdisciplinary perspectives from ethno/musicology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, I demonstrate that DIY music technologists forge a distinctive sense of self and citizenship that critiques, yet remains a cornerstone of, artistic production and experience in a post-digital “Maker Age.”

L’étude fournit un panorama exhaustif de la facture du piano dans les provinces belges. Elle s’étend de 1761, année de la première référence écrite au piano, à 1851, date jalon marquée par l’industrialisation progressive des techniques et la standardisation des modèles. Entre ces deux dates, le dépouillement des almanachs permet de dénombrer plus d’une centaine de facteurs, majoritairement actifs à Bruxelles. Ils possèdent, suivant les registres des patentables, de petits ateliers. L’examen des instruments conservés montre que la production est de qualité. Elle relève à part entière de l’artisanat et est centrée sur les modèles domestiques – pianos carrés et pianos droits. En 1850, elle avoisine 1 750 instruments par an. Une cinquantaine de brevets d’invention liés au piano sont déposés. Ils témoignent, tout comme la participation croissante des facteurs aux expositions des produits de l’industrie, de la formidable énergie qui mobilise la facture du piano durant la période considérée. / Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished