Listening from within a digital music archive: music histories, metadata and sensibilities in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation's music archive

The objective of this thesis is to investigate the music archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) and explore how its constitutive elements facilitate different versions of the history of recorded music. An important aim of the study is to examine the ways in which DR's music archive steer and construct its metadata as historical records.
For opening up the archive and dissect its politics, the study employs a multi-method framework. A main goal of the thesis is to underline a need for embracing the experiences of music streaming and of music archival searching as well as embracing the infrastructural opacity of coding and information architecture as valid starting points for music historiographies in a digital(ized) world.
In terms of theory, this is a study that connects media theory, aesthetics and cultural theory with music history. An underlying aim of the thesis is to explore and debate what can count as an outset for doing music historiographies. The thesis explores the concept of the archive and claims that it is a medial construction necessitating an infrastructural logic, which, the thesis argues, only makes sense via a careful taxonomy of metadata.

The project examines DR's digital music archive in order to assess how archival strategies and digital design can influence the history of recorded music.