I’m a researcher of music and digital culture. I spend a lot of time thinking & writing about how people use & understand music online.
A colleague once described me as ‘relentlessly interpretative’. (I’m not sure it was a compliment, but there you go).
I work at the University of Bristol on a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, researching online popular music performance.
Online Hip Hop Music and Culture
Find out more at digitalflo.ws.
In production at Oxford University Press
Some fifty years after its birth in the Bronx, hip hop is one of the most significant cultural forms of the internet age. Now that the internet is enmeshed in our everyday lives, hip hop is predominantly encountered and experienced online, where it comprises a third of all streamed music. People are constantly making, commenting on, and sharing hip hop media on internet platforms—Drake memes, viral TikTok dances, AI-generated rappers—challenging hip hop’s conventional connections to place, authenticity, and community. This book provides an urgent study of the most recent chapter in the life of hip hop, one closely intertwined with the networked cultural flows of the internet.
With an innovative method encompassing music and cultural analysis, ethnography, and web data analysis, Digital Flows provides a cutting-edge account of the intersections between hip hop and the internet. For old school heads and Extremely Online memesters alike, for fans and creatives, for students and academics seeking to understand digital transformations of music, Digital Flows uncovers what happens when a cultural form born on the streets thrives on transformative technologies of global reach.
Published 2021
How Music Empowers argues that empowerment is the key to unlocking the long-standing mystery of how music moves us. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in embodied cognitive science, psychology, and cultural studies, the book provides a new way of understanding how music affects listeners. The argument develops from our latest conceptions of what it is to be human, investigating experiences of listening to popular music in everyday life. Through listening, individuals have the potential to redefine themselves, gain resilience, connect with other people, and make a difference in society.
Find out more at howmusicempowers.com or purchase directly from Routledge.
‘fascinating reading, effective both in dissecting the “magic” of music, and in conveying its power’ (Stefano Barone, Popular Music & Society)
‘intuitive and accessible […] Gamble’s weaving together of how individual listeners, musical communities, and genre conventions interact with each other marks an interesting intervention into sticky debates over the relationship between popular music and social change.’ (Olivia R. Lucas, Popular Music)
Some things I do
- Publish original research
- Speak at conferences
- Support music producers & engineers with DMGAudio
- Organise conferences
- Webmaster for the International Society for Metal Music Studies
- Webmaster for the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies Network
- Blah in the Fediverse
- Make music sometimes
- Walk my very good dog