While a large portion of the Cornell student body prepared for Chiddy Bang's sold-out concert on West Campus, another group of students gathered in Tjaden Hall March 12 to hear a panel of music experts discuss the histories, cultures and social nuances of new developments in dance music.

The discussion was organized by the student organization Fanclub Collective, which brought panelists Wayne Marshall, Matt Miller, Neema Nazeem, Al Shipley, Gavin Mueller and Chicago-based blogger Dave Quam to campus.

"I really think that a room full of art kids and music geeks is actually the ideal audience for these kinds of talks," said Mueller, who completed his master's thesis on Detroit ghettotech. He discussed how the Internet has obscured the "local ecologies" that influence the emergence of regional music, such as local radio stations, television shows, record stores, and even strip clubs and raves.

Marshall, an ethnomusicologist and Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also emphasized artist localities beyond the Internet. "These things don't actually exist on the Internet; they exist in actual places," he said. Marshall focuses his research on what he calls "Brave New World Music" by investigating how new technologies shape music and "enable a whole new world of producers and participants to share what they're doing with the rest of the world."

Nazeem, founder of the Chicago juke/footwork label Ghettophiles, spoke about the difficulties Chicago musicians face in a corporate record label culture where artists receive few royalties, and sometimes no credit at all, for their work. "We're not just dealing with money, we're dealing with history," said Nazeem.

Shipley, a freelance writer for the Boston City Paper and author of the upcoming book "Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music," spoke about "finding the limits of the Internet," which has brought a lot of underground music to the foreground but has not effectively documented Baltimore club music. Little information about Odell's, an influential Baltimore music venue and the subject of much of Shipley's research, can be found online, he said.

Miller wrote his Ph.D. dissertation about the history of bounce, a New Orleans-based style of rap and dance music that emerged in the early 1990s. "Particular places seem to have persistent and unique forms of music-making that have resisted some of the gloom-and-doom predictions of the rise of the globalized media culture," explained Miller, who cited New Orleans rap culture as one such form of music.

"Last semester Fanclub took a step away from the group's previously rock-centric approach to put together a challenging series of free-improvisation and noise artists," said Fanclub president Jason Yonover '12. "The spring 2011 series features artists specializing in a wide array of dance music styles instead."

The event took place with the help of assistant professor of music Kevin Ernste, the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center, Timothy Murray and the Society for the Humanities, and the Rose Goldsen Lecture Series.

Michelle Spektor '12 is a student writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.