This project aims at studying the "digital turn", that is, the transition of a cultural realm defined by the presence of physically available media content to a world where digitized media, that is likely to deeply reconfigure our ways of being in the world. In order to analyze this "digital revolution", we will focus on artistic contexts, and, more specifically, on music in everyday life, and its socio-technical reconfiguration. We have chosen this relatively narrow subject to conduct our investigations for a series of reasons. Firstly, music consumption is a widely shared social experience in which technological innovation - Acetate to Mp3 - is a key element in the transformation. Second, illegal downloading and peer to peer file sharing have become major issues of public debate, legislation and intervention. Finally, our everyday experience of music is not limited to listening, but engages our identities, our conception of time, our emotions and attachments, our ways of understanding and articulating public and private space, etc., in short, it constitutes a very complete social experience.Furthermore, we are seeing since the early 2000s a turning point where the model of the music business goes through an almost uninterrupted market recession, while simultaneously, the digital music sales expand significantly. Indeed, digitization of content - what Fabien Granjon and Clément Combes have named the "digitamorphosis," succeeding Antoine Hennion’s "discomorphosis", drives a shift in the way amateurs relate to musical content. The rules of listening and interpretation are not immutable. An entire century of music recordings and experiments has already transformed what we expect from music, its creative processes, and the soundscapes and formats that make our everyday musical experience. However, these changes depend on discrete value alterations accumulating over time, and, among other things, on a standardization of traditional codes and more recent practices. In short, as digital schemes develop, the limits of what is acceptable are modified: listening, possessing, sharing or archiving are experiences that are evolving due to streaming technologies, the co-existence of multiple listening devices (personal computer, home stereos, portable music players), and the presence of musical content in social networks. Thus, digitization of music subverts the dominant paradigm of media and medium as a merged whole (tape, acetate, CD), suggesting then the possibility of a new paradigm: that of music as a service and not just a data. We could be going from a product-based society to a society of experience. In order to carry out this project in which cultural sociologists, ethnomusicologists and computer science specialists participate from three partner laboratories (Atlantic Centre of Philosophy at the University of Nantes, Nantes Computing Laboratory ; Arts and Language Research Center at EHESS), we will set three goals: first, to establish a chronological sequence of the "digital turn", bringing about simultaneously a reflective analysis on what it means to take a socio-historical approach on this type of transformation. Second, we seek to understand how the shift from an analog culture to a digital one, as well as the appearance of a “native-digital” generation, may transform our every day musical experience. Finally, we will consider the hypothesis of digital technology (and especially social networks) as a lever of transformation of the traditional paradigms that shape our present understanding of musical taste, legal frameworks for musical consumption and political ideals of democracy through the Internet.

SublimAE (“Sublime and Aesthetic Experiences”) is an interdisciplinary research project, involving philosophers, psychologists, social scientists and artists, and aiming at the development of a new cognitive account of experiences of the sublime and its close emotional relative, namely awe. The project should throw light on the relationship between the category of the sublime, aesthetic experiences, and self-awareness, by tightly integrating philosophical analysis and empirical hypothesizing and testing. The notion of the sublime has roots in ancient rhetoric, but it emerges in the 18th century as a central category of aesthetic experience, typically contrasted with the aesthetic experience of the beautiful. While the latter experience is mainly positive and pleasurable, the former experience is characterised by ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, the sublime involves an overwhelming vastness, or power, which disturbs and unsettles. On the other hand, the sublime poses a challenge, which is enlightening and elating. The overall experience of the sublime is also frequently associated with the feeling of the insignificance of human life, of our smallness compared to the grandeur we are confronted with. Our main philosophical hypothesis, which we construe as testable, is that the sublime gives rise to an aesthetic experience that, contrary to the experience of the beautiful, involves a diminished sense of the self. We intend to clarify this hypothesis by putting forward a notion of experiential immersion that we think is specific to sublimity experiences. The sublime overwhelms us in a way which blurs the boundary between oneself and the world. Sublimity experiences are immersive in the sense that the self tends to disappear from the subject’s experiential field while her attention is fully captured by the sublime entities or scenes. Since self-awareness is known to involve several levels of representation, the minimal self and the narrative self being two prominent examples, a crucial part of our enquiry will be to determine which levels are involved and in what ways. This will allow us to differentiate sublimity experiences from other experiences involving immersion or “ego-dissolution”, such as the oceanic feeling. SublimAE pursues three main lines of investigations, which all have both theoretical and empirical dimensions. First, we will create new experimental materials, starting from what has been defined as a core elicitor of sublimity experiences, namely vastness. The main challenge here is to go beyond classical experimental approaches to the sublime, which have often relied on impoverished visual materials, and introduce VR and music as two sources of more realistic sublime stimuli. Second, we will use the created (visual and/or auditory) stimuli to capture relevant differences between sublimity experiences and other, opposed or similar aesthetic experiences, such as prettiness or terrible beauty. Finally, we will test the impact of the experience of the sublime on self-awareness, and assess the hypothesis that this experience involves a diminished sense of the self, using embodiment, agentivity and episodicity tasks.