Nick Prior
Biographic Data
| ID | 117388 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nick Prior |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nick |
| FAMILY NAME | Prior |
| SIGNATURE | PRIOR N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5893-5111 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 166 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Introduction to Special Issue: Home, Work, and Music - Toward a Domestic Turn in Popular Music Studies
In this introduction to this special issue we make the case for a domestic turn in popular music studies, a programmatic invitation for a direct and sustained pivot to the home in all its variable forms and leaky complexity. We point to the lack of concerted treatment of the home in popular music studies while identifying its centrality to debates about creative labor, the changing nature of (live) music, and gendered inequalities in musical prac…
Cultural Sociology’s Vistas: A Response to Thorpe’s Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations
Cultural sociology rarely takes the long view, often being content with the comforts of presentist empirical cases. Thorpe’s wide-ranging scan of British representations of Italy from the 15th Century is a noble exception. In this review, I engage with some of Thorpe’s arguments and explain why they are important for cultural sociology. I identity three key contributions, in particular. First, the search for historical patterns and patterning; se…
STS confronts the Vocaloid
In recent years, a number of interlocking theoretical tendencies in science and technology studies have mustered around the idea that societies and cultures are part of a complex web of enrollments, networks, and human-nonhuman conjunctions enacted across a fluid domain of materialities. Drawn to non-totalizing ways of thinking, these tendencies embrace opportunities to reveal the heterogeneous, contingent, and emergent nature of sociotechnical r…
(Dis)locating Democratization: Music Technologies in Practice
This article examines the concept of democratization and explains why it has been applied in unhelpful ways to the study of music. We focus on three examples to illustrate the real-world complexities involved in the adoption of new technologies that are often seen as democratic by dint of their widespread use. We argue for a close-reading of the participatory practices of socially-located actors with music-making devices – one that asks detailed …
New amateurs revisited
The figure of the amateur is central to both scholarly debates and cultural commentary that aims to understand how networked digital technologies have transformed the quantity and quality of cultural production. This chapter focuses on one domain where these debates play out most acutely: popular music. It interposes the figure of the “new amateur” as a motif for the transformation of ordinary capabilities among a widening segment of technologica…
On Vocal Assemblages: From Edison to Miku
For all its hermeneutic density the voice is a profoundly malleable object. By drawing our attention away from the ‘grain’ of the voice to networks of vocality, this article explores how modern mediations of the voice––from the microphone to auto-tune––illustrate its co-evolution with a history of non-human circuits and exchanges. The voice is categorized as an assemblage in the sense suggested by Deleuzian theoretical currents and actor network …
The art of space in the space of art: Edinburgh and its Gallery, 1780-1860
No abstract
It's A Social Thing, Not a Nature Thing: Popular Music Practices in Reykjavík, Iceland
Over the last three decades, Iceland's reputation has been increasingly tied to the prominence of its popular music. Associated with an effervescent independent scene and the global successes of the band Sigur Rós and the singer Björk, the country has been positioned as one of the world's most vibrant cultural hotspots. With particular reference to Reykjavík, the paper aims to show how the city's spatial configuration favours the development of d…
The plural iPod: A study of technology in action
Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives
Sociology and our sociological imaginations are having to confront new digital landscapes spanning mediated social relationships, practices and social structures. This volume assesses the substantive
Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily influential figure in the sociology of music. For over three decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and theoretical interventions in the field of study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in particular, has been profound, his ideas directly informing our understandings of how musical preferences reflect and reproduce inequalities between social class…
Musiques populaires en régime numérique: Acteurs, équipements, styles et pratiques
Cet article se penche sur l'évolution des technologies numériques et leur influence sur la production musicale, à quatre niveaux : celui des acteurs, des équipements, des styles et enfin des pratiques. Il établit un parallèle entre l'essor des modes de production numérique, les récents changements survenus dans les méthodes de composition musicale, et l'évolution des usages quotidiens du studio numérique. L'image du « nouvel amateur » s'intègre à…
Speed, Rhythm, and Time-Space: Museums and Cities
This article assesses some potential approaches to museums and cities propelled by a theoretical preoccupation with modernity as a condition of speed. Here, one can extrapolate two variants in the writings and interventions of Marinetti, Simmel, Virilio, and writers in the postmodern tradition: (a) the museum is slow, it is a brake on modernity, it is modernity’s sedentary other and (b) the museum is fast, it is as quick as the city, reflecting m…
Critique and Renewal in the Sociology of Music: Bourdieu and Beyond
This paper reviews the status, position and legacy of Bourdieu in the sociology of music, the waxing and waning of his influence and the recent move away from Bourdieu towards something like a post-critical engagement with musical forms and practices. The idea is to show the reaction to and treatment of Bourdieu's ideas as a gauge of where we are in the sociology of culture, the various strands of influence that emanate from his work, and to asse…
Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern
It has been almost twenty years since Andrew Goodwin's classic essay, 'Sample and Hold', claimed that pop music had entered a new phase of digital reproduction. (1) If the digital sampler was postmodernism's musical engine, then hip hop was its recombinant form, and the erosion of divisions between original and copy the celebrated consequence. Popular music had become an engorged repository of itself, its history ransacked as source material for …
Ok Computer: Mobility, software and the laptop musician
In this article I address some images, categories and open-ended trajectories of the laptop in music production. The aim is to explore the laptop's increasing presence in the sites of music, from cyberspace to live venues, as well as the relationship between music and mobile computerized space. Implicit in the article is the claim that the laptop is a neglected device, but that close attention to its position in cultural networks and everyday set…
Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music
Bourdieu's cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music styl…
A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern
Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences,The Love of Art(1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the bookDistinction(Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perceptio…
Extended Reviews: Reconstructing a Sociology of the Arts: Art and Social Theory
A Different Field of Vision: Gentlemen and Players in Edinburgh, 1826-1851
Edinburgh, Romanticism and the National Gallery of Scotland
An explanation for the formation of the National Gallery of Scotland is proposed which affirms the priority of local conditions of cultural production. In the absence of a fecund tradition of art patronage in Scotland, the modernization of Edinburgh's art field in the early nineteenth century depended on the activities of civic elites. The Scottish model of art museum development resembled the later American model more than it did the earlier Fre…
Critique and Renewal in the Sociology of Music: Bourdieu and Beyond
This paper reviews the status, position and legacy of Bourdieu in the sociology of music, the waxing and waning of his influence and the recent move away from Bourdieu towards something like a post-critical engagement with musical forms and practices. The idea is to show the reaction to and treatment of Bourdieu's ideas as a gauge of where we are in the sociology of culture, the various strands of influence that emanate from his work, and to asse…
Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music
Bourdieu's cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music styl…
A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern
Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences,The Love of Art(1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the bookDistinction(Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perceptio…
Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily influential figure in the sociology of music. For over three decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and theoretical interventions in the field of study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in particular, has been profound, his ideas directly informing our understandings of how musical preferences reflect and reproduce inequalities between social class…
The plural iPod: A study of technology in action
Speed, Rhythm, and Time-Space: Museums and Cities
This article assesses some potential approaches to museums and cities propelled by a theoretical preoccupation with modernity as a condition of speed. Here, one can extrapolate two variants in the writings and interventions of Marinetti, Simmel, Virilio, and writers in the postmodern tradition: (a) the museum is slow, it is a brake on modernity, it is modernity’s sedentary other and (b) the museum is fast, it is as quick as the city, reflecting m…
Musiques populaires en régime numérique: Acteurs, équipements, styles et pratiques
Cet article se penche sur l'évolution des technologies numériques et leur influence sur la production musicale, à quatre niveaux : celui des acteurs, des équipements, des styles et enfin des pratiques. Il établit un parallèle entre l'essor des modes de production numérique, les récents changements survenus dans les méthodes de composition musicale, et l'évolution des usages quotidiens du studio numérique. L'image du « nouvel amateur » s'intègre à…
On Vocal Assemblages: From Edison to Miku
For all its hermeneutic density the voice is a profoundly malleable object. By drawing our attention away from the ‘grain’ of the voice to networks of vocality, this article explores how modern mediations of the voice––from the microphone to auto-tune––illustrate its co-evolution with a history of non-human circuits and exchanges. The voice is categorized as an assemblage in the sense suggested by Deleuzian theoretical currents and actor network …
It's A Social Thing, Not a Nature Thing: Popular Music Practices in Reykjavík, Iceland
Over the last three decades, Iceland's reputation has been increasingly tied to the prominence of its popular music. Associated with an effervescent independent scene and the global successes of the band Sigur Rós and the singer Björk, the country has been positioned as one of the world's most vibrant cultural hotspots. With particular reference to Reykjavík, the paper aims to show how the city's spatial configuration favours the development of d…
(Dis)locating Democratization: Music Technologies in Practice
This article examines the concept of democratization and explains why it has been applied in unhelpful ways to the study of music. We focus on three examples to illustrate the real-world complexities involved in the adoption of new technologies that are often seen as democratic by dint of their widespread use. We argue for a close-reading of the participatory practices of socially-located actors with music-making devices – one that asks detailed …
The art of space in the space of art: Edinburgh and its Gallery, 1780-1860
No abstract
Extended Reviews: Reconstructing a Sociology of the Arts: Art and Social Theory
Edinburgh, Romanticism and the National Gallery of Scotland
An explanation for the formation of the National Gallery of Scotland is proposed which affirms the priority of local conditions of cultural production. In the absence of a fecund tradition of art patronage in Scotland, the modernization of Edinburgh's art field in the early nineteenth century depended on the activities of civic elites. The Scottish model of art museum development resembled the later American model more than it did the earlier Fre…
Edinburgh, Romanticism and the National Gallery of Scotland
An explanation for the formation of the National Gallery of Scotland is proposed which affirms the priority of local conditions of cultural production. In the absence of a fecund tradition of art patronage in Scotland, the modernization of Edinburgh's art field in the early nineteenth century depended on the activities of civic elites. The Scottish model of art museum development resembled the later American model more than it did the earlier Fre…
A Different Field of Vision: Gentlemen and Players in Edinburgh, 1826-1851
Extended Reviews: Reconstructing a Sociology of the Arts: Art and Social Theory
A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern
Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences,The Love of Art(1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the bookDistinction(Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perceptio…
Ok Computer: Mobility, software and the laptop musician
In this article I address some images, categories and open-ended trajectories of the laptop in music production. The aim is to explore the laptop's increasing presence in the sites of music, from cyberspace to live venues, as well as the relationship between music and mobile computerized space. Implicit in the article is the claim that the laptop is a neglected device, but that close attention to its position in cultural networks and everyday set…
Putting a Glitch in the Field: Bourdieu, Actor Network Theory and Contemporary Music
Bourdieu's cultural sociology has become increasingly attractive to sociologists of music looking to account for the complex interrelations between industry, institution and practice. There remains, however, a tendency in such work to reduce the complexity and scope of Bourdieu's ideas. This paper attempts to apply Bourdieu's field theory to music, but does so with a critical orientation. The focus of the paper is the fin de millénaire music styl…
Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern
It has been almost twenty years since Andrew Goodwin's classic essay, 'Sample and Hold', claimed that pop music had entered a new phase of digital reproduction. (1) If the digital sampler was postmodernism's musical engine, then hip hop was its recombinant form, and the erosion of divisions between original and copy the celebrated consequence. Popular music had become an engorged repository of itself, its history ransacked as source material for …
Speed, Rhythm, and Time-Space: Museums and Cities
This article assesses some potential approaches to museums and cities propelled by a theoretical preoccupation with modernity as a condition of speed. Here, one can extrapolate two variants in the writings and interventions of Marinetti, Simmel, Virilio, and writers in the postmodern tradition: (a) the museum is slow, it is a brake on modernity, it is modernity’s sedentary other and (b) the museum is fast, it is as quick as the city, reflecting m…
Critique and Renewal in the Sociology of Music: Bourdieu and Beyond
This paper reviews the status, position and legacy of Bourdieu in the sociology of music, the waxing and waning of his influence and the recent move away from Bourdieu towards something like a post-critical engagement with musical forms and practices. The idea is to show the reaction to and treatment of Bourdieu's ideas as a gauge of where we are in the sociology of culture, the various strands of influence that emanate from his work, and to asse…
Musiques populaires en régime numérique: Acteurs, équipements, styles et pratiques
Cet article se penche sur l'évolution des technologies numériques et leur influence sur la production musicale, à quatre niveaux : celui des acteurs, des équipements, des styles et enfin des pratiques. Il établit un parallèle entre l'essor des modes de production numérique, les récents changements survenus dans les méthodes de composition musicale, et l'évolution des usages quotidiens du studio numérique. L'image du « nouvel amateur » s'intègre à…
Digital Sociology: Critical Perspectives
Sociology and our sociological imaginations are having to confront new digital landscapes spanning mediated social relationships, practices and social structures. This volume assesses the substantive
Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been an extraordinarily influential figure in the sociology of music. For over three decades, his concepts have helped to generate both empirical and theoretical interventions in the field of study. His impact on the sociology of music taste, in particular, has been profound, his ideas directly informing our understandings of how musical preferences reflect and reproduce inequalities between social class…
The plural iPod: A study of technology in action
The art of space in the space of art: Edinburgh and its Gallery, 1780-1860
No abstract
It's A Social Thing, Not a Nature Thing: Popular Music Practices in Reykjavík, Iceland
Over the last three decades, Iceland's reputation has been increasingly tied to the prominence of its popular music. Associated with an effervescent independent scene and the global successes of the band Sigur Rós and the singer Björk, the country has been positioned as one of the world's most vibrant cultural hotspots. With particular reference to Reykjavík, the paper aims to show how the city's spatial configuration favours the development of d…
New amateurs revisited
The figure of the amateur is central to both scholarly debates and cultural commentary that aims to understand how networked digital technologies have transformed the quantity and quality of cultural production. This chapter focuses on one domain where these debates play out most acutely: popular music. It interposes the figure of the “new amateur” as a motif for the transformation of ordinary capabilities among a widening segment of technologica…
On Vocal Assemblages: From Edison to Miku
For all its hermeneutic density the voice is a profoundly malleable object. By drawing our attention away from the ‘grain’ of the voice to networks of vocality, this article explores how modern mediations of the voice––from the microphone to auto-tune––illustrate its co-evolution with a history of non-human circuits and exchanges. The voice is categorized as an assemblage in the sense suggested by Deleuzian theoretical currents and actor network …
STS confronts the Vocaloid
In recent years, a number of interlocking theoretical tendencies in science and technology studies have mustered around the idea that societies and cultures are part of a complex web of enrollments, networks, and human-nonhuman conjunctions enacted across a fluid domain of materialities. Drawn to non-totalizing ways of thinking, these tendencies embrace opportunities to reveal the heterogeneous, contingent, and emergent nature of sociotechnical r…
(Dis)locating Democratization: Music Technologies in Practice
This article examines the concept of democratization and explains why it has been applied in unhelpful ways to the study of music. We focus on three examples to illustrate the real-world complexities involved in the adoption of new technologies that are often seen as democratic by dint of their widespread use. We argue for a close-reading of the participatory practices of socially-located actors with music-making devices – one that asks detailed …
Cultural Sociology’s Vistas: A Response to Thorpe’s Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations
Cultural sociology rarely takes the long view, often being content with the comforts of presentist empirical cases. Thorpe’s wide-ranging scan of British representations of Italy from the 15th Century is a noble exception. In this review, I engage with some of Thorpe’s arguments and explain why they are important for cultural sociology. I identity three key contributions, in particular. First, the search for historical patterns and patterning; se…
Introduction to Special Issue: Home, Work, and Music - Toward a Domestic Turn in Popular Music Studies
In this introduction to this special issue we make the case for a domestic turn in popular music studies, a programmatic invitation for a direct and sustained pivot to the home in all its variable forms and leaky complexity. We point to the lack of concerted treatment of the home in popular music studies while identifying its centrality to debates about creative labor, the changing nature of (live) music, and gendered inequalities in musical prac…
Sociology (13 works) · Music History and Culture (12 works) · Art (10 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (9 works) · Visual arts (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (5 works) · Social science (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works)