Maegan Byer is making a study of mix tapes -- or what she calls the audio cassette culture of the 1980s.
The communication/multimedia graduate student from Bay City recently received a $1,313 grant from
Saginaw Valley State University's Student Research and Creativity Institute to study the mix tape culture and how it influenced personal expression, popular culture, and music sharing in the era before CDs and mp3s. Byer hopes the end product of her research will be a publishable thesis.
The grant will help fund trips to research libraries in Chicago and other places that can help shed light on the cultural phenomenon of mix tapes and how people transformed them into a medium of self-expression.
In her research, Byers also will examine the role cassette tapes played in defining relationships and how they helped contribute to an underground music movement that allowed artists to independently record and distribute their own music without a formal record label. Another aspect of the research will focus on how mix tapes fostered a culture of music sharing and rebellion against the mainstream music industry -- long before file-sharing controversies surfaced.
"I think [the research] takes on a lot of different faces," she says.
Byers got the idea for the research project in a course she took about cultural studies of new media.
And even though she was too young to remember much, Byers still finds the 1980s fascinating.
"I've always been really into the 80s and the fashion," she says.
Writer: Jenny Cromie
Source: Saginaw Valley State University
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