1

Meeder
Michael Meeder
Solis MHL 668
Paper #2, Revised
November 23, 2009

Points of Entry:
The Hermeneutic Arc and the Art of Remix

“Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new.

Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new
creator building on the works of those who came before.” JUDGE ALEX
KOZINSKI / Palmsout.net Remix Sunday

Introduction

Exploiting and exploring the Internet as a medium to connect

with musical sources and cultures has fascinated me since its early

days (ca. 1995), but recently my endeavor has been simplified and

articulated for me by social networking web sites and music web logs.

The Internet has become a nexus of places and spaces (termed

“virtuality” below) where music occurs. Discounting

ethnomusicological inquiry into online music cultures and music-

making would be a mistake, as “[v]irtuality is only as real as any other

cultural production; it has only the meaning with which people imbue

it” (Cooley 2008: 91). If also, “we believe that music must be

understood as part of culture” as Nettl states, and “we believe that we

must study all the world’s music,” then the Worldwide web’s music

must be included (Nettl in Rice 2008: 44). I am talking about music

enabled by the web and Internet, and musics able to be studied via the

web as well.
 2
Meeder
I believe Cooley is being a bit too general on the interaction

between ethnomusicology and online places of cultural production,

therefore I want to delve a little deeper and provide some pathways for

future fieldwork, while simultaneously discussing my observations

concerning artistic process and points of entry –entry to being in-the-

world (also the artistic world), and figuratively as certain music creates

points of entry in the listener.

As a teenager, I was active on various local music web sites –

online spaces that fostered the growth and social relations of our ska

music subculture. I helped produce sites for this content. With the

advent of so-called Web 2.0 frameworks and technologies (circa 2004,

when the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference occurred), sites that

encourage content creation (web logs, MySpace) and “sharing

communities” like Flickr have abounded, enabling cultures connected

through notions of collectivity and imagined communities, who are

altering the musical process, making it more streamline. Digital music

becomes aligns itself with process, opening up potential for future

explorations of any crafted piece.

Music-focused web logs are updated regularly (the content being

mostly new to the public and kept new through breakout remixes),

some multiple times a day, revolving around content able to be played

and/or downloaded directly from the web site. The preponderance of

dance music web logs gave rise to the term “blog house” (ca. 2007)
 3
Meeder
and spawned the so-called “nu rave” movement.

My thesis is that the remix is the sound of the hermeneutic arc,

and this arc connects self with other, insider with outsider. When a

remix of any particular song comes up on my iPod, my thinking brain

thinks, “this is the sound of the hermeneutic arc.” Remixed tracks are

“deep fun,” to interact with in many ways: definitely music

(re)creation. They form the soundtrack to any dance party, although

the dance genre is only one of many taking part in and benefitting

from this tool of cross-genre discourse. The process of remixing allows

prosumers1 (as well as ethnomusicological fieldworkers) to blur

boundaries between producer (insider) with the consumer (outsider).

The outsider appropriates musical sounds and imparts his musicality in

a hermeneutic arc of 1) understanding 2) explanation and 3)

appropriation (Wiercinski 2008). I have noticed many DJs going

through this process to gain entry to the professional and industry

levels of music. Once a creative individual makes a remix and web

sites feature it (this is quite nerdy at one level), that person is then

gaining ground on becoming an insider. In that moment, that

individual is between insider and outsider, he has fallen into a gap that

Rice describes as “no place” and there completes the gap between not

1
“Economists see the prosumer (producer–consumer) as having
greater independence from the mainstream economy. It can also be
thought of as converse to the consumer with a passive role, denoting
an active role as the individual gets more involved in the process.”
Wikipedia 2009.
 4
Meeder
knowing and knowing, through appropriation. The hermeneutic arc is

the remix that, like data files arcing in the sky, are received and

remixed by the Other, who thereby merges his/her/their otherness with

the data.

Remixing is a process of appropriation that can further a culture

through a re-envisioning of the self and Other, or of self through the

Other, of Other through the self, in the form of digital and digitized

music: a continuum, a communion, music as process. Opposing the

object-orientation of the pop release, online music blogs proliferate the

re-imaginings of individual and collective remixers, bent on making a

niche for themselves in the world of music, even gaining notoriety and

quickly using this as a means by which to launch their own artistic

careers in the ever-changing industry of do-it-yourself’ers. The idea of

the remix challenges the notion of ownership, and “music as object”.

Remixers have matured into a respectable group of artists, diversifying

the art of the remix as much as necessary, creating new genres of

music, and blurring boundaries of self and other, some actively seeking

to breakdown this perceived boundary, even to the listener. Girl Talk

(Greg Michael Gilles) performs with his laptop as an instrument, he is

surrounded by people who whisper and shout in alignment and

cohesive ecstasy. Gilles’ dialogic performance echoes part of his

philosophy: “We are all the same dude!” as Girl Talk exclaims at a

party during RiP: A Remix Manifesto (2009). The scene does not
 5
Meeder
translate well to paper.

Internet Ethnography and Online Music Communities

Research on the Internet as a qualitative place of inquiry has

been limited to text and textual relationships, their hallmark problems

being misinterpretation, disembodiment, isolation, fragmentation, and

mistrust (Markham 2005). For who is behind the words on the screen,

and what are their true intentions? Most of the ethnography talked

about representations of the self through text, because it’s easier to

judge qualitatively, and you can work it into your written research

findings. That was Internet pre-2000. Although cyberspace is largely

text, spaces are opening up in every direction asking for your content,

your music, videos, and photos. The web surely is finding new ways of

inspiring creativity and opening artistic work up to be viewed and

shared.

Where is the field? Where is the method?

Discussing “Virtual Fieldwork,” Cooley suggests: “fieldwork

should happen where music happens” (2008: 106). So where is music

happening? A lot of music is happening on the internet. What do I, or

Cooley, mean by “happening”? The interviews with Girl Talk featured

in the film RiP show him remixing tracks on his laptop, and they give

no power to the place in which he is working: his basement. Fieldwork

that documents the “cut and paste” (Lessig, 2004: 277) techniques of

laptop computer mixing would be interesting in terms of process, and

 6
Meeder
how that process of construction translates or permeates the future

life-expectancy and salience of the remix. RiP has invaluable

interviews with Girl Talk, who is open and candid – homologous with his

music’s message. This approach, of observation and interviews, is

weak when compared to the method of participant-observation.

Talking to insiders will take you in the direction of “an emic

understanding” but “not all the way there” (Rice 2008: 59).

The fieldwork method of participant-observation would be

instrumental towards any meaningful body of work on the art of the

remix. Also instrumental to The researcher would need to engage in

social networking with others in the field, spending time with the

people who feature, write about, enjoy, and make the music

themselves. As this is more of an open-ended community than a

closed one, “The hermeneutic gesture of genuine openness can play a

vital role in promoting the culture of friendship in a globalized and yet

profoundly divided and critically differentiated human society,

”(Wiercinski 2008). As most of the contemporary (“digital”) music

artists are omnipresent online, following their arc would be an easy

way to passively observe, although the researcher should want to

participate.

Tim Rice writes about wanting to “become a musician [italics his

own]” (2008: 49). Rice tells a story of how he came to play the gaida,

without his mentor Kostadin. What Rice says about not needing
 7
Meeder
pedagogy similarly applies to those wishing to learn the processes

involved in sample and track mixing. One could feasibly teach one’s

self much in the way of making a remix; you do not need a teacher or

an instructional video. Rice writes:

Culture and its traditions are also acquired by observing,

mimicking, and embodying shared practices (Bordieu 1977) and
by appropriating, understanding, and interpreting shared,
symbolic actions (Ricoeur 1981C) without the direct intervention
of parents, teachers, informants, and insiders. (2008: 49)

Online culture is very much self-taught, and this is what could enable

and serve as foundation towards future research negotiating the

pathway of becoming a musical voice in the community.

The Hermeneutic Arc

Tim Rice recounts the way he was able to learn the gaida by

abandoning binary methodology of etic/emic and simply “acted

musically” (2008: 51). Rice fell into the gap between Insider and

Outsider, “a theoretical ‘no place’that felt very exciting, if not exactly

like a utopia” allowed him to be “neither an insider nor an outsider,”

(51). Rice tackles the gap physically, “An act of appropriation that

transformed me” (51). The same process of transformation, via the

hermeneutic arc, is evident in the phenomena of remixing musical

tracks. With a basic knowledge of music software, anyone can do it

(remix): a little kinesthetic tinkering, and the remixer is transformed by

the act of appropriation. Like Rice says, this does not make you into

an insider (he wasn’t a Bulgarian himself), but it can. Rice recounts

 8
Meeder
hearing the welcoming phrase “You are a gaidar” as stated by an older

neighbor of Kostadin (52).

“The field is the metaphorical creation of the researcher” (Rice

2008: 48). Now allow me to define what I perceived to be the field,

when researching online music culture and how artists interact with

one another. If we follow the ethnomusicology framework that

“fieldwork should happen where music happens” (Syed 2008: 106),

then we must contextualize the field with regard to Web 2.0, MySpace,

and the many music blogs. This is indeed amateur hour, but the

amateurs are quickly becoming professionals, turning careers out of hit

singles debuted on MySpace, record labels from blogs, and a new class

of prosumers. So, these are the sites where fieldwork should begin,

where one is introduced to the musical content creators. This is just a

point of entry.

Web 2.0 enables process-oriented activity, such as uploading,

sharing, blogging, social networking, user-to-user interaction, and

multi-user collaboration in a never ending stream. The majority of

popular music blogs, like newspapers and magazines, are run by

multiple individuals, featuring content from multiple sources: local,

international, and self-promotion. This collective presence has

replaced the earlier environment on the web, which was more object-

oriented: the solitary “homepage,” the single-user account, the official

website of, and commercial routes of consumption. On the web, the

 9
Meeder
collective agents of creation have become the norm.

Collective processes of creation, feedback, alternation (you/me),

critique, inclusion and exclusion prove strength is in numbers. The

“field” is not a place, but a quilt of personalities (Others), and finding

yourself in that field means taking on the hermeneutic arc. The remix

is presently the most explicit means by which a pro-sumer (or

ethnomusicologist) can enter the field.

Insider/Outsider

I now seek to use the form of remix to narrate the process of

inter-dependence between insiders and outsiders. To a non-musician

(like myself), an insider can be considered someone knows how to

make music. If we consider the musician as the insider, we can see

that anyone remixing their unique work is the outsider, trying to get in.

The artists in fact need their listeners to create this type of discourse

about what the music is, what the track’s specific limits are, if limits

exist. What is techno? What are disco, nu-disco, rock, or music? What

do all these terms signify? Musical discourse is understood, explained,

and appropriated via remix.

The insider needs the outsider. By releasing (via cyberspace)

individual musical instrument tracks used in the recording of their

actual performance, the professional artist is seeking Otherness, which

the outsider can fold in, thereby translating the work across genres

and therefore audiences. Remixing is not just something DJs do,

 10
Meeder
although they often do it as well. Anyone, any rock band, any

individual(s) with the right technical and musical knowledge can

practice the remix; this process of culture does not need formal

pedagogy. As stated in the above, its learning is enhanced by the

“observe and mimic” route of technicality blended with making

whatever artistic choice one wishes, with audio software (Rice 2008:

49).

Remixes of rock groups have been a recent recurring meme, in

that they enable a band (dead form of popular art) to become twenty-

first century sounding. I could list dozens of contemporary rock chart

toppers and most of them would have their remixes and cross-genre

transplantation to thank. The relationships between the collective

underground and/or unknown remixers and the chart-topping pop stars

would probably see each other as the outsider, and themselves the

insider. Therefore, this binary can be seen as false. Nevertheless,

collectives of relationships in this way have helped create culture, as

the Klaxxons and remixes of the Klaxxons by Soulwax and many

others, helped define the “Nu Rave” style.

Who/Where am I in relation to the field?

As I write this, I am aware of being both an outsider and an

insider simultaneously, as this binary is relative. On the whole, though,

I am an outsider: I do not produce music remixes, I only know a

handful of prominent DJs and come off more as a fanboy, at my lowest

 11
Meeder
reading. To improve this status I could take various routes: promoting,

writing, producing, DJing, remixing. The remix, however, is the

ubiquitous and most poignant point of entry. The message is direct: I

am producing a synthesis with you; I am co-creating with your work.

Eventually, with masterful precision the statement can become: I can

improve this sound, or seek to alter it my way. Combining self with

other, the artist/remixer produces a new fusion of musical knowledge,

and the music grows legs. An artist’s status can easily be raised to

entire new levels, for instance, if a popular and well-known musical

group remixes the work of unknown, or of another genre, and vice

versa.

The Remix

Many artists welcome their work to be remixed, though not

always and not everyone. Certainly many mainstream artist’s could

not and will not allow their work to be touched in any way, and thus

remixers must tread over copyright laws, which is a contentious point

among those in this musical community. Listeners who appreciate this

type of artistic work might equivocally scoff at the notion of

“intellectual property,” much less respect it. The control over

“intellectual properties” is merely an obstruction to the layperson or

outsider adding to the discourse of certain “protected” Pop recording

artists. There can be only one Madonna, yet Madonna herself has been

putting out albums that are built on sounding like remixes because she
 12
Meeder
needs the outsider for new talent, reinforcing her updated message,

and diversifying her message across different discourses of music,

which adds to her ongoing discourses about age, sexuality, gender,

and status.

Recently the website Palmsout.net featured remixes of Haydn’s

“Symphony in G-Major” and the Beatles “Day in the Life” on “Remix

Sunday.” The site also features a “good old fashioned remix contest”

(AC Slater 2009), whereby parts of the track are made available by the

band themselves for amateur and professional remix purposes, as

leading rock band Radiohead have done with tracks from In Rainbows.2

Similar to a hip-hop cipher, or battle between crews, the remix contest

gives rise to new talent, inspires lazybones “outsiders” to become

active insiders, and raises the dialogic roof.

Several remixes strung together to form the “extended mix”

shows their effective presence, the end product is not the remix. Once

a remix is produced an re-appropriated by a DJ who finds its

appropriate “point of entry” in his extended mix, the remixer gains

ground and exposure into ongoing discourses of that music, on the

web and into the ears of his listeners. I want to point out here that

remixes are chiefly built upon the premise that the remixer is vaguely

unknown and actually benefits from this status. For example, one

doesn’t hear remixes on the radio, or hear of Britney Spears doing her

2
See results of the remix winners at http://radioheadremix.com/
 13
Meeder
own remix of a Christina Aguilara song. However, this relationship is

mutually beneficial in the world of underground artists, with the

remixes at times being as good as or better than the original.3

Creative Aspects of Remixing

The remixer makes a series of artistic choices when producing a

remix. The amount of work needed to put together the remix can be

more than the effort of creating the original. An artist who creates

mash-ups (sandwiching multiple song samples together), Girl Talk, is

like a remixer on steroids. He can put as many as twenty-one songs

together in a three minute track. Lawrence Lessig (2008) asks Girl

Talk why creating remixes is “good”:

It’s good because it is, in essence, just free culture. Ideas impact
data, manipulated and treated and passed along. I think it’s just
great on a creative level that everyone is so involved with the
music that they like. . . . You don’t have to be a traditional
musician. You get a lot of raw ideas and stuff from people outside
of the box who haven’t taken guitar lessons their whole life. I just
think it’s great for music. (2008: 14)

And, Gillis believes, it is also great for the record industry as well:

“From a

financial perspective, this is how the music industry can thrive in the

future . . . this interactivity with the albums. Treat it more like a game

and less like a product.” Stated another way, Gillis is asking the

industry to take a process-oriented view of music like the remixing

3
Tiga admits on his podcast “My Name Is Tiga” that the Proxy’s remix
to his 2009 track “What You Need” is almost (and may be) better than
his original.
 14
Meeder
community has.

Conclusion

The remixer experiences a blurring of boundaries between

Insider/Outsider and Self/Other, in a process that Ricouer and Rice call

the hermeneutic arc. The remixer as ethnomusicologist could gain

understanding of self and Other through participant-observation

methodology, which is already inherent among economies and

communities of sharing. The remix closes the gap between insider

(musician) and outsider (creative Other). The overwhelming shift

towards process-oriented rather than object-oriented conceptions of

music and “intellectual property” have been fostered and reinforced by

online communities who value the merit of culturally building upon the

past. New spaces have emerged that encourage the non-musician to

become part of the creative process of fully expanding a track’s

creative and artistic and inter-personal limits through the art form of

the remix.
 15
Meeder

Works Cited

Cooley, Timothy J, Katharine Meizel, and Nasir Syed. 2008. “Virtual

Fieldwork:
Three Case Studies.” In Shadows in the Field. Barz, Gregory and
Timothy J. Cooley (eds). Oxford University Press: New York.

Kozinski, Judge Alex. 2009. “Remix Sunday: 135.” Palmsout Sounds.

Retrieved from
http://palmsout.net/2009/10/18/remix-sunday-135/

Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture. New York: Penguin Press.

—. 2008. Remix. New York: Penguin Press.

Markham, Annette N. 2005. “The Methods, politics, and ethics of

representation in
online ethnography.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative
Research. Denzin,
Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.). Sage Publications:
Thousand Oaks,
California.

Rice, Timothy. 2008. “Toward a mediation of field methods and field

experience in
ethnomusicology.” In Shadows in the Field. Barz, Gregory and
Timothy J.
Cooley (eds). Oxford University Press: New York.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto. 2009. Gaylor, Brett (Dir./Writer). Eye Steel

Film.

Slater, A.C. 2009. “B. Rich make me dance remix winners.” Palmsout
Sounds.
Retrieved from
http://palmsout.net/2009/09/16/b-rich-make-me-dance-remix-
winners/
 16
Meeder

Wiercinski, Andrzej. 2008. Hermeneutics and the Humanities:

International
Conference at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the
Humanities. Jagiellonian University, Kraków.

Wikipedia. 2009. “Prosumer.” Retrieved from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer