Obstinate Echoes: How Technology is Shaping Today’s Musical Memory and Tomorrow’s Legacy
In an age of digital abundance, we are surrounded by musical echoes—streams, archives, samples, and fragments—yet the permanence of sound is more fragile than it appears. This keynote explores how technology acts not merely as a tool of musical preservation, but as an active force shaping what is remembered, what is forgotten, and how sonic legacies are constructed. Drawing on examples from electroacoustic music, endangered digital formats, and grassroots archiving, the talk argues that musical memory is not a passive residue of the past, but a dynamic field of selection, mediation, and care. From lost MySpace tracks to experimental works dependent on obsolete software, from playlist algorithms to urgent archives, we see how the infrastructures of memory determine the survival of sound. Technology can amplify or erase, democratize or distort—depending on how it is used. If today’s sounds are tomorrow’s heritage, then preservation is not neutral: it is ethical, curatorial, and political. The echo, then, is not just repetition—it is intention. In reflecting on these processes, we invites all—composers, scholars, artists, performers, curators—to ask not only what music we are creating, but what we are choosing to remember.
Biography
Isabel Pires is a composer and researcher, holding a PhD in “Esthétique, Sciences et Technologies des Arts – Spécialité Musique” from the University Paris VIII, where she also obtained a DEA (Diploma of Advanced Studies) in “Arts de la Scène et du Spectacle – Option Musique”. She is assistant Professor at the Music Sciences Department of FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she coordinates the Master’s degree course in Musical Arts. As a researcher and member of the executive board of CESEM – Centre for the Study of Sociology and Musical Aesthetics, she is responsible for LIM (Computer Music Lab). She is also a member of the associate laboratory IN2PAST (Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory), where she is integrating the coordinating committee of the Scientific Council. His research, centred on music after 1950, has recently focused on the preservation of the Portuguese musical heritage of the last 50 years; namely the recovery of the composers’ collections, the restoration and preservation of the various materials that compose it, including audio supports and the development of performance documentation strategies. In this context, she has also launched the CESEM’s project “Portuguese contemporary music composers and ensembles: collective heritage preservation”. As a specialist in acousmatic and experimental music, his work includes technologies and computational techniques for sound synthesis, sound projection into the listening space, as well as cognitive processes of auditory perception. Music analysis, composition and collaborative artistic practices are also part of his artistic, research and teaching activity. Isabel Pires has published a significant number of papers, and has been responsible for various international scientific events in the field of contemporary music, of which the International Conference Nova Contemporary Music Meeting is of particular note, from which has emerged the NOVA Contemporary Music Journal, which she has created. Her musical works, which include instrumental music, acousmatic music, and live electronics.
CESEM / IN2PAST – Nova University
isabelpires@fcsh.unl.pt