looking east

I will be writing my thesis for the master of advanced studies in Asian studies soon. And I have no clue what my thesis should be about. It is going to be about Asia, that much is clear. But everything else is still kind of open.

Basile Zimmermann, my advisor, has written a very interesting PhD Thesis last year about electronic music in China. It covers all kinds of sociological topics from a “technical” point of view. In his work, Basile places the devices used by Chinese musicians in the center of his interest and his thesis evolves around the people who are actually producing electronic music. That is, he follows a number of Chinese musicians through their daily lifes and he discusses the presence or absence of ‘Chinese culture’ in their music.

Basile is mainly interested in the fact that the Chinese electronic music is produced on Western technical objects. The Chinese therefore need to be capable of using these objects which also implies that they have a minimal knowledge of English in order to understand the instructions to use the objecs. I really enjoyed reading Basile’s thesis and I believe there is some great stuff in there to be explored. I especially like the approach of observing how Western inventions are used in China (or anywhere else outside the Western world) and the idea that the fact of using a Western instrument might have an impact on the “chineseness” of the final product.

Remark: Texts in bold have been added later as a reaction to an email exchange with Basile.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 11:31 am and is filed under asia, china, academic.