Gear Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies

A critical examination of the twenty-first century fetishization of professional audio technologies, and how it led to a new social formation: gear cultures.


Gear: mixing consoles, outboard effects processors, microphones. These are professional studio recording-related technological objects—the tools of the recording industry—yet their omnipresence in the broader music industries and prosumer markets transcends the entrenched pro audio engineer guild. In Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies, authors Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett ask: How does gear become gear? Why is it fetishized? And how is it even relevant in the predominantly digital twenty-first century music technology landscape?

This multi-sited, multi-country, multi-platform, and multi-scalar study focuses on gear in the present day. The authors trace the life of gear from its underlying materialities, components, and interfaces through to its manufacturing processes, its staging in sites including trade shows and message fora, and its reception through (gear) canons, heritage, and obdurance. This book implements a meticulous multi-mode methodology drawing upon more than 25 first-hand long-form interviews with audio industry professionals—including gear designers, users, and publishers—as well as new findings drawn from multi-sited fieldwork, online discourse analysis, and visual ethnography.

Gear examines the present-day prevalence of gear and the existence of its surrounding passionate, competitive, and sometimes bizarre gear cultures.

Eliot Bates is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center. They have contributed, as performer, composer, and/or recordist/engineer, to more than 90 albums produced in the US, UK, Turkey and Italy, as well as several TV series and feature films.
Samantha Bennett is Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and Professor of Music at the Australian National University. She is the author of Modern Records, Maverick Methods, Peepshow, and coeditor of Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound.