Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 39
Abstracts
Panel 3: Film, Games and Gear
Timmy
14:10 – 14:25
#Studiocats
Gear Ornamentation, Sentience, and the “Humble
Assistant” in Gear Cultures
Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates / The Australian National
University, City University of New York
Drawn from extensive research published in Gear:
Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (2025, The
MIT Press), this paper considers the phenomena of
the recording studio cat, commonly found online
under the #studiocats hashtag. From the cover of
Wendy Carlos’s seminal Switched on Bach, to the
Studio Pet of the Month! column in US professional
audio magazine Tape Op, the studio cat has
become a mainstay feature of the professional and
home recording workplace. Dozens of Reddit and
Gearspace forum threads feature images of cats
draped across professional audio equipment,
sometimes in “operator” poses, sometimes asleep,
and sometimes “hard at work” in a recording
session. This paper considers the #studiocats
phenomena
as
part
of
broader
gear
organizational norms in gear cultures; how are
cats
situated
with
professional
audio
technologies and why? Additionally, the paper
considers the ways in which studio cats come
to stand in for human agency, particularly
where they are depicted alone with gear and
without a human companion. Why are so
many images of #studiocats circulated online,
what are the diverse arenas in which
#studiocats appear, and how do #studiocats
bring sentience to inanimate gear?
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