Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 43
Abstracts
Panel 5: Meme Culture
AI
15:45 – 16:00
Paw-Some Synths
Memetic Gesture, Experimental Sound Play, and the
Cats at the Synthesizer Interface of Audiovisual Meme
Culture
Kate Galloway / Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Scrolling my TikToks, Reels, and posts I encounter
a marmalade cat dramatically pawing the air,
pantomiming and performing an intricate
Theremin solo, a tuxedo cat pawing synth pad in
an EDM remix, and a throwback reshare of
“Keyboard Kitty Creates Spooky Vibes” where a
black cat stands on an electric piano and creates
some “spooky music” by depressing cluster chords
with their paws. Each video juxtaposes cats and
electronic instruments, conflating the gesture and
movement of active, curious cats with the playful
timbral manipulation of sound that characterizes
experimental electronic music. Certain genres, like
electronic music, receive sustained memetic
treatment as user-creators play with and circulate
sounds, images, and ideas commonly associated
with electronic music as a broad and varied music
genre. Like the memetic treatment of the “jazz
cat,” resulting from their audiovisual framing the
cats of electronic music memetics give off an air of
reserved coolness, have a detailed encyclopedic
generic knowledge, exhibit discerning taste, and
they play with sonic possibilities. These are not
just cat memes that happen to feature
electronic music instruments and genre
references, rather they are short-form
audiovisual
internet
objects
that
are
intentionally exploring ideas of musicality,
vocality,
gesture,
performance
through
timbre, practices of remix, internet interfaces,
and stagings of the nonhuman. Drawing on
examples from my corpus of cats performing
and playing with the instruments and sonic
markers of electronic music and histories of
cats
and
technological
experimentation
(Sterne 2012), I offer an exploration of the
concerns and discomforts, the interfaces and
instrumentality, and the affordances and
choreographies around the ways in which we
treat
animals
for
human
use
across
audiovisual internet culture (Galloway 2022;
Maddox 2022). I use musical cats to illuminate
debates about instrumentality within sonic
cultural phenomena of the internet and human
conceptions of musicality and listening.
41
