People
Marilou Polymeropoulou, St Peter's College
Marilou is a classically trained musician and (ethno)musicologist.
She earned a BA in Music Studies and an MA in Music, Culture, and Communication
at the University of Athens, Greece, and an MA in Material and Visual Culture
at University College London.
Marilou is a DPhil candidate at St. Peter's College under the supervision of Dr Martin Stokes (St. John's College). Her research project is funded by the State Scholarships Foundation in Greece and her interest is electronic music-making with repurposed media with a focal interest on chip music and circuit bending. Using cross-disciplinary methodologies from the fields of ethnomusicology, sociology of music and aesthetics, she is working with Internet communities of engineering musicians, who repurpose cheap electronics and retro gaming consoles such as Texas Instruments' Speak ‘N Spell, Bontempi synths, Nintendo GameBoy, and Commodore 64 among others in order to use them as music instruments.
The aim of her project is to understand contemporary music-making in electronic music with the aid of new repurposed media, reflecting the post-WWII cultures of the soldering musicians in music and the crackers in communications, and furthermore influenced by hacker culture. The listening practices, aesthetic criteria, dialectics between play and technology, digital and natural social, hacking and creativity, are few of the key issues that this research project addresses to.
Other research interests that Marilou is involved with are ice music, music in cyberspace, and materiality of music. She is also engaged in music journalism writing articles for British and Greek magazines.
Publications list:
"The Materiality of Inter-Balkan Identity: YARTZ case study" at Border Crossings '08 proceedings
"Sound and Music in Cyberspace: exploring material technoculture", Sound and Music Computing '08 proceedings.
Book reviews "The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music" and "Listening through the Noise", Current musicology (to be published)
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