introduction to eartifacts

eartifacts is a small, informal museum of musical artifacts; in particular, the museum is a museum of articles, each one of which informally analyzes a single song/track/composition. The focus is on “popular music” (in the broad sense of “anything that is neither folk music nor ‘classical’ music”). eartifacts is far from being the first literature to focus on popular music: there exists plenty of scholarly (and not scholarly) popular music literature out there in journals, magazines, websites, &c. However, eartifacts is considerably different in a number of ways.

eartifacts is not a source for music reviews per se

eartifacts makes no attempt to judge the (relative) merit of any works of art, much less assign something as silly as a numeric rating to works of art. Because of this, eartifacts is not a source for music reviews in the traditional sense.

eartifacts also attempts to avoid the use of wishy-washy and flowery language that is too glib to mean anything, instead focusing on precision of language. It also attempts to entertain concepts that are musically literate, rather than leaning on (often outright incorrect) stereotyping of musical styles and techniques. Because of these things, eartifacts is not a source for music reviews in the traditional sense.

eartifacts does direct a critical eye towards (musical) works of art, and does so in an article/essay format that gives a — in some sense — complete overview of the work in question. Because of this, eartifacts is a source for articles that resemble reviews (albeit vaguely) and can serve some of the same purposes.

eartifacts is not a source for scholarly, peer-reviewed literature

eartifacts articles are not academic in nature; no ties to academic institutions or other businesses are present, and eartifacts articles are not subject to peer review.

Rather than being academic, eartifacts articles are written from (and to) the perspective of a music listener who wants to casually take a critical look at the music that they hear (and hopefully learn from it).

eartifacts is not a gallery per se

There is a longstanding and venerable tradition on the Internet of “music blogs”. Music blogs are typically expected to act as a sort of continually updated gallery of music, where those that enjoy the musical tastes of the maintainer can browse the gallery for new music to listen to (especially since such music blogs often provide low-quality digital copies of the recordings themselves). In addition, each entry in the gallery (each entry typically being on the level of a single band/artist) is typically expected to give some sort of background information and/or description of the band/artist in question.

Rather than being a kind of gallery, eartifacts calls itself a “museum” because the focus is as much on a detailed examination of the content (and the history) of the subjects as it is on simply cataloguing the subjects. eartifacts has somewhat of an anthropological bent, but is largely focused on the “raw content”, so to speak, of the music itself. eartifacts also does not provide any of the audio that is the subject of its articles.

However, like a music blog, eartifacts as a whole can only ever hope to reflect a tiny sliver of the wide range of musical styles and tastes that exist in the world. Also like a music blog, eartifacts may possibly function well as a way of finding new music.