The Modular Journey: Uncovering analogue aesthetics in digital landscapes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws on a practice theory perspective to investigate instances of sound practice in a particular community of technology use by focusing on the community and product offerings in and around contemporary modular synthesisers and their growing popularity in the ‘Eurorack’ format in order to investigate the attraction and allure of analogue things in a digital age. This article identifies issues of authenticity, legitimacy and creativity as key drivers of the way we project our identities onto objects and the intimate technologies we own, and the search for meaningful technological encounters. In the realm of sound practice, the follow-up questions are similar: why when there is software and affordable digital alternatives, do some musicians swear by modular synthesis given the commitment this practice requires in terms of money, time, self-education and exploration (and for a lack of a better term) tinkering? With Eurorack as a case study, this article investigates the attraction and allure of analogue things in a digital age by investigating meaningful sound practice as emerging out of the discourses of online communities around the modular synth phenomenon.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".