ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a first step towards using Actor Network Theory (ANT) to analyze the core competencies of hip-hop beat production. It addresses the genre’s most foundational creative competencies and technologies, and analyses them as a network, that is, as a group of interrelated objects which engage in some type of back-and-forth exchange. The chapter outlines some of the crucial components of professional hip-hop beat-making using ANT terminology. It presents a case study for the creation of a song available on Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, Tidal, and Google Play. Fields that analyze music production require a more comprehensive record of most studio activities in order to promote more accurate investigations. Though music production studies tend to include professional perspectives far more conscientiously than other areas of musical study, their contributions nonetheless are often bracketed in quiet ways. Most available research on music production ignores the operational strategies recordists use and the ways these production competencies relate within a socio-technical network.
