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Technology, Creativity and Pop Music Production: The Case of Cantopop

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This chapter illustrates ethnography as a research method by looking into the local music genre Cantopop from Hong Kong, an ex-British colony. In-depth interviews with twenty local musicians of different generations reveal music digitisation's impact on the local music scene, unravelling how different creative actors embraced the analog-digital transition creatively in the past two decades, while the genre continues to thrive despite fierce market competitions from abroad.

Keywords: creative actors ; creative process ; digitization ; digitization, local music production, Hong Kong pop music, creative process, ethnography, creative actors, music producer ; ethnography ; Hong Kong pop music ; local music production ; music producer

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References

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     [Google Scholar]
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  3. Burgess, Richard James (2014), The History of Music Production, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  4. Burkart, Patrick (2014), ‘Music in the cloud and the digital sublime’, Popular Music and Society, 37:4, pp. 393–407.
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  5. Chen, Kuan-Hsing (2010), Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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  10. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1997), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Perrenial.
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  11. Erni, John N. (2007), ‘Gender and everyday evasions: Moving with Cantopop’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 8:1, pp. 86–108.
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  12. Feng, Yingqian 馮應謙 (Fung, A.) (ed.) (2009), Gechao xiyun: xianggang yueyu liuxing qu de fazhan 歌語歌潮・汐韻： 香港粤語流行曲的發展 (‘The tides of melodies and rhymes: The development of Hong Kong's Cantopop’), Hong Kong: Sub-Culture Publishing.
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  15. Fung, Anthony and Chik, Alice (2020), ‘Cantopop is always hybrid: A conversation with Serina Ha’, in A. Fung and A. Chik (eds), Made in Hong Kong: Studies in Popular Music, New York: Routledge, pp. 205–13.
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  16. Fung, Anthony Y. H. (2014), ‘The iTunization of pop: Mobile music and youth social networks’, Perfect Beat, 15:1, pp. 23–43.
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  18. Hargreaves, David J. (2012), ‘Musical imagination: Perception and production, beauty and creativity’, Psychology of Music, 40:5, pp. 539–57.
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  19. Ho, Wai-Chung (2000), ‘The political meaning of Hong Kong popular music’, Popular Music, 19:3, pp. 341–53.
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  20. Ho, Wai-Chung (2003), ‘Between globalization and localization: A study of Hong Kong popular music’, Popular Music, 22:2, pp.143–57.
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  21. Huang, Zhihua 黃志華 (2003a), Yueyu geci chuangzuo tan 粵語歌詞創作談 (‘On the creation of Cantonese lyrics’), Hong Kong: Joint Publishing.
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  24. Huang Zhihua 黃志華 , Zhu Yaowei 朱耀偉, and Liang Weishi 梁偉詩 (2010), Cijia youdao: xianggang shiliu ciren fangtan lu 詞家有道─香港十六詞人訪談錄 (‘Lyricist has its way: 16 Hong Kong lyricists’ interview notes’), Hong Kong: Infolink Publishing.
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  31. McIntyre, Phillip (2008), ‘Creativity and cultural production: A study of contemporary western popular music songwriting’, 669Creativity Research Journal, 20:1, pp. 40–52.
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  32. O’ Grady, Pat (2021), ‘“An essential tool for creativity”: Technologies, spaces and discourse within pop music production’, Media International Australia, 186:1, pp. 136–48, 1329878X2110401, https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x211040127
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  35. Regev, Motti (2013), Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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  36. Strachan, Robert (2017), Sonic Technologies: Popular Music, Digital Culture and the Creative Process, London: Bloomsbury.
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  40. Whiteley, Sheila and Rambarran, Shara (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, New York: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  41. Witzleben, J. Lawrence (1999), ‘Cantopop and Mandapop in pre-postcolonial Hong Kong: Identity negotiation in the performances of Anita Mui Yim-Fong’, Popular Music, 18:2, pp. 241–58.
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     [Google Scholar]
  43. Yang, Hon-Lun (2021), ‘Cosmopolitanism and sound alignments: Cantonese cover songs from Hong Kong films of the 1960s’, in M. K. Bourdaghs , P. Iovene and K. R. Mason (eds), Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia's Cold Wars, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 153–69.
     [Google Scholar]

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