Sound at AMS/SEM/SMT 2012
This week brings us #musicon12, the megaconference of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Society for Music Theory (SMT). This will be the third joint conference of these societies, after Oakland in 1990 and Toronto in 2000. These roughly decennial gatherings of the three principal scholarly societies of music scholarship provide increased opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversations and amazing live performances. A fact augmented even more by the selection of New Orleans, a city known for its music, for this year’s meeting.
The conference takes place in the Sheraton and Astor Crowne Plaza hotels from this Wednesday, October 31st through Sunday, November 4th. It will be preceded by two events. The first, occurring Monday, October 29th and Tuesday, October 30th, at Tulane University’s Rogers Memorial Chapel, is Ecomusicologies2012, a pre-conference organized by the AMS Ecocriticism Study Group and the SEM Ecomusicology Special Interest Group. The second, all day Wednesday, October 31st, is the Preconference Symposium on Crisis and Creativity, held at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life at Tulane University.
The disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory have focused on sound for centuries. They are the disciplines that Michael Bull argues Sound Studies “goes beyond” in the upcoming anthology Sound Studies. While such a description could lead to the categorization of these disciplines as theoretically or methodologically antiquated, #musicon12 is too large and significant for Sound Studies to ignore, with over 600 individual presentations that all deal with sound or music somehow. The first eleven papers, in chronological order, should give some idea of the overall scope:
• Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”
• Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”
• Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”
• Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”
• Kim Carter Muñoz (University of Washington), “‘¡Todos somos huastecos! ‘We are all Huastecan!’: Performance of the Democratization of Son Huasteco at El Festival de la huasteca (The Festival of the Huasteca)”
• Raquel Paraíso (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Festival Son Raíz: Building Community and Signifying Identity and Culture Ownership across Mexican Regions”
• Ian Middleton (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “Identity, Peace, and Learning at Rural Music Festivals in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast”
• Brenda M. Romero (University of Colorado, Boulder), “‘El Carnaval de Río Sucio No Es Festival’ / ‘The Carnival of Río Sucio is Not a Festival’”
• Michael O’Toole (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing Publics in a ‘Turkish Art Music’ Ensemble in Berlin”
• Suzanne Wint (University of Chicago), “Rehearsing the Social: Becoming a Performer in Kampala’s Classical Music Scene”
• Gregory Weinstein (University of Chicago), “Recording Rehearsing: The Hidden ‘Process of the Classical Studio Session’”
But for the sake of argument, if Sound Studies is something more than simply the application of long-standing disciplinary approaches to sonic works and events, if, as Jonathan Sterne proposed this year in his introduction to The Sound Studies Reader, “the difference between sound studies and… other fields is that they don’t require engagement with alternative epistemologies, methods, or approaches” (4), then we are inclined to pay attention to that work that reaches beyond the limits of conventional music scholarship, namely the sort which strives for some sort of critical self-reflection or interdisciplinary ambition.
Lost Bayou Ramblers. Borrowed from phillipleroyer on Flickr.
This is not an easy task given the vast number of papers and performances at such a large conference and the scarcity of information found in brief titles and abstracts. We can assume that every presentation challenges these conventions to some extent, but for the sake of this preview, here are a few items that venture beyond the traditional limits of music scholarship. You can find the full #musicon12 program here.
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Featured Image: Mardi Gras 2005, By Robert Garcia, The City Project
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Bill Bahng Boyer is an adjunct professor of music, writing and rhetoric at Dartmouth College. He is also a doctoral candidate in music at New York University, completing a dissertation on public listening in the New York City subway system.
Jump to MONDAY, October 29
Jump to TUESDAY, October 30
Jump to WEDNESDAY, October 31
Jump to THURSDAY, November 1
Jump to FRIDAY, November 2
Jump to SATURDAY, November 3
Jump to SUNDAY, November 4
New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, 2005, Borrowed From Robert Garcia, The City Project
Ecomusicologies2012
All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University
5-6pm Soundwalk
Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Environmental Listening and the Tulane Soundscape” (meeting place outside the entrance of the Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University)
7-9pm Paper Jam
Chair: Aaron S. Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Joe Browning (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) (virtual presentation), “Crane Calls and Shakuhachi Sounds: Interconnections, Disjunctures and New Directions in the Tsuru no Sugomori Pieces”
Travis Stimeling (Millikin University) (virtual presentation), “Music, Television Advertising, and the Green Positioning of the Global Energy Industry in the United States”
Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska (Northwestern University) (virtual presentation), “Theorizing the Musical Landscapes of John Luther Adams”
Andrew Mark (York University) (virtual presentation), “Consciousness, Solidarity, and Musicking: Ecoethnographic Justice”
Leah G. Weinberg (University of Michigan), “Orchestrating Nature: Music, Manipulation, and 1950s America in Disney’s True- Life Adventure Films”
Settimio Fiorenzo Palermo (Middlesex University), “Sounds Heard: the Environmental Ethics & Aesthetics of Hugh Davies’s Music”
Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “Negotiating Nature & Music Through Technology: Ecological Reflections in the Works of Maggi Payne & Laurie Spiegel”
The Canal Street Line. Borrowed from Hmeriomx on Flickr.
Ecomusicologies2012 (cont.)
All events at Rogers Memorial Chapel, Tulane University
8:30-10:30am Panel: Beyond Metaphor
Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair
Marc Perlman (Brown University), “Instrument Builders As Environmental Activists: A Tale of Two Tonewoods”
Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “Small is Beautiful: Guitar Making, Sustainability and Community Building in Britain and Africa”
Jeff Todd Titon (Brown University), “Why Thoreau?”
Jennifer C. Post (New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, Wellington), “Beyond Birds: (Ethno)musicologists, Environmental Scientists & the Evolution of Soundscape Ecology”
11am-1pm Panel: 20th & 21st-century Composers
Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Chair
Eric Drott (University of Texas at Austin), “The Peasant’s Voice and the Tourist’s Gaze: Listening to Landscape in Luc Ferrari’sPetite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps”
You Nakai (New York University), “An Electronic Ecology: The Natures of David Tudor’s Electronic Music”
Jacob A. Cohen (The Graduate Center, CUNY), “Carl Ruggles, Walt Whitman, and the Gendered Place of Men and Mountains”
Joseph Finkel (Arizona State University), “Searching for a Sonic Ecology: John Luther Adams’s Dark Waves”
2-3:30pm, Panel: Contemporary Issues
Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), Chair
Melissa J. de Graaf (University of Miami), “‘The Music of Nature Makes Me Dream and Sleep’: Intersections of Nature, Gender, and Ultramodernism”
Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University), “Agency and Aural Rights: Negotiating the Soundscape, 1948 to the Present”
Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), “Emergent Soundscapes: Uses of Nature and Technology in Two Electroacoustic Compositions”
4-6pm, Panel: Ethnographic Approaches
William Bares (University of North Carolina, Asheville), Chair
Dan Bendrups (Queensland Conservatorium Resarch Centre, Griffith University), “Mapping Outdoor Music Festival Engagement with Ecological and Environmental Issues in Australia”
Robin Ryan (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University), “Eucalyptus as Musical Resource: Some Ecological Considerations”
Michael Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), “Birdsong, Popular Music, &Predicting Rain in Northeastern Brazil”
Charlotte D’Evelyn (University of Hawaii), “Sounds of the Grasslands: An Ecomusicological Crisis of Romanticism, Loss, & Inheritance in Inner Mongolia, China”
6:30-8pm, Panel: Canadian Perspectives
Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Chair
Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding the Environmental Past and Present: Repurposing and Representing Soundscape in Contemporary Canadian Compositions”
Erin Scheffer (University of Toronto), “The Mis-imagined Native: Musically Constructing Nativeness in 1940s Canadian Radio and Film Docudramas”
Jeremy Strachan (University of Toronto), “Sounding Empire: Coloniality and Environment in Canadian Art Music”
8-9pm, Reception & Concert
James Harley (University of Guelph), computer, and Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), amplified flutes, “Birding,” an eco-improvisational performance by ~spin~
Borrowed from mattbyrne on Flickr.
SEM Pre-conference Symposium, Crisis and Creativity
All events at Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life, Tulane University
9:00-10:30am, Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans
Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), Chair
Nick Spitzer, Professor of Anthropology (Tulane University), Holly Hobbs, Director of the NOLA Hip-Hop Archive (Tulane University), Bennie Pete, leader of Hot 8 Brass Band
10:45-12:15pm New Realities: Haitian Performing Arts and the Built Environment
Joyce Jackson (Louisiana State University), Chair
Gage Averill, Dean of Arts (University of British Columbia)
Michael Largey, Professor of Ethnomusicology (Michigan State University)
Jean Montes, Director of Orchestral Studies (Loyola University New Orleans)
1:15-2:45pm, Environmental Crises in South Louisiana: Scientific, Sociological, and Ethnomusicological Perspectives
Mark DeWitt (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Chair
Tommy Michot, Research Scientist (UL Lafayette), and member of Les Frères Michot
Robert Gramling, Professor of Sociology (UL Lafayette)
Mark DeWitt, Professor of Music (UL Lafayette)
3:00-5:00pm, Field Trip by Bus to Musician’s Village, New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity (Upper Ninth Ward), House of Dance and Feathers (Lower Ninth Ward)
Milterngerger House. Borrowed from DavidPaulOhmer on Flickr.
8:30-10:30am, The Beautiful, The Good, and The Story: Aesthetics and Narrative in Religious Music
Session 1-1 (SEM) A: Astor Ballroom 1
Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), Chair
Dorcinda Knauth (State University of New York, Dutchess), “Composing the Future by Listening to the Musical Past: Islamic Exegesis in Javanese Folksongs”
Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge), “The Pilgrimage to ‘El-Ghriba’ and the Musical Aesthetics of a Muslim-Jewish Past”
Abigail Wood (University of Haifa, Israel), “Sound, Aesthetics, and the Narration of Religious Space in Jerusalem’s Old City”
Jonathan Dueck (Duke University), “Musical Lives and Aesthetics in the Worship Wars”
12:30-1:30pm, SEM Sound Studies Special Interest Group Meeting
S: Oakley
3:30-5:00pm, On Bells, Bugs, and Disintegrating Tape: Listening for Metaphysics in Ambient Sound
Session 1-44 AMS/SEM S. Edgewood
Mitchell Morris (University of California, Los Angeles), Chair
Paul Chaikin (University of Southern California), “Clattering Bells as a Field of Experience and Cognition”
James Edwards (University of California, Los Angeles), “Nature and the Metaphysics of Voice in Edo Period Aesthetics”
Joanna Demers (University of Southern California), “The Ethics of Apocalypse”
4:00-5:30pm, Musically Meaningful Soundscapes
Session 1-52 SEM S: Maurepas
Tom Porcello (Vassar College), Chair
Alison Furlong (Ohio State University), “Sound, Space, and Social Practice in the Zionskirche”
Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Sounding and Composing the Harbour: Performing Landscape and Re-contextualizing the Soundscape of Place in the Harbour Symphony (St. John’s, Newfoundland)”
Jessamyn Doan (University of Pennsylvania), “‘Bringin’ Back the Roots’: Rearticulating a Creole Sound in Southern Louisiana”
5:30–6:30pm, SEM First-Time Attendees and New Members
Reception S: Sheraton Grand B
5:30–6:30pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG* and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Joint Business Meeting
S: Oak Alley
7:30–midnight, Zydeco Dance Lesson and Evening at Rock’n’Bowl
Organized by the SEM 2012 Local Arrangements Committee and the SEM Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section
Dance Lesson at Sheraton Grand E (no ticket required), 7:30–8:30 p.m.
Evening at Rock’n’Bowl. Bus Departs Sheraton: 8:45 p.m. Bus Departs Rock’n’Bowl for Sheraton: 12:00 midnight
8:00–11:00 AMS Music and Philosophy SG Session
A: Astor Ballroom III
8:00-11:00pm, Fantasy, Cinema, Sound, and Music
Session 1-58 AMS S: Oak Alley
Mark Brill (University of Texas at San Antonio)
James Deaville (Carleton University)
J. Drew Stephen (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Jamie Lynn Webster (Portland, Ore.)
8:00-11:00pm, Music and Nature: Relations, Awareness, Knowledge
Session 1-64 AMS S: Borgne
Sponsored by the AMS Ecocriticism SG
Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Chair
Kevin Dawe (University of Leeds), “RELATIONS—A Social and Environmental History of Small Guitar Workshops in England”
Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University), “AWARENESS—‘Hello, the Earth is Speaking’: Four Case Studies of Ecological Composition, Performance, and Listening”
David E. Cohen (Columbia University), “KNOWLEDGE—Nature, Culture, and the First Principle(s) of Music: Two Myths of Theoretical Revelation”
Borrowed from prayitno on Flickr.
7:00–8:00am, SEM SIG for Voice Studies
S: Estherwood
7:00–8:30am, SMT Committee on the Status of Women
S: Roux Bistro Private
9:00-noon, The Ecomusicology Listening Room
Session 2-17 AMS/SEM S: Gallier
Co-Sponsored by the SEM Sound Studies Interest Group and the AMS Popular Music Study Group
Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Chair
Robert Fallon (Carnegie Mellon University), Ellen Waterman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Tyler Kinnear (University of British Columbia), Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Naomi Perley (CUNY), William Bares (Harvard University), Rachel Mundy (Columbia University), Jeremy Woodruff (University of Pittsburgh), Justin D. Burton (Rider University), Michael Austin (University of Texas at Dallas), Michael B. Silvers (University of California, Los Angeles), Miki Kaneda (Museum of Modern Art), Zeynep Bulut (Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry)
10:30-noon, Beyond Hearing: Soundscapes and Ideoscape in Early Nineteenth-Century America
Session 2-25 AMS/SEM A: Iberville
Deane Root (University of Pittsburgh), Chair
Sarah Gerk (University of Michigan), “Love, Loyalty, and Fear: American Reception of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies”
Bonnie Gordon (University of Virginia), “Mr. Jefferson’s Ears”
12:00–2:00pm, AMS/SMT Music and Philosophy SG/IG
S: Sheraton Grand A
12:30–1:30pm, SEM Medical Ethnomusicology SIG
A: Astor Grand A
12:30–1:30pm, SEM Section on the Status of Women
S: Bayside C
2:00-5:00pm, Embodiment and Gesture
Session 2-38 AMS/SMT S: Oak Alley
Arnie Cox (Oberlin College), Chair
Margaret Britton (University of Texas at Austin), “Four Gestural Types in Chopin’s Mazurka in C-sharp Minor, Op. 50, no. 3”
Drew Massey (Binghamton University), “Thomas Adès’s Glossary”
Meghan Goodchild (CIRMMT / McGill University), “Towards a PerceptuallyBased Theory of Orchestral Gestures”
Zachary Wallmark, Marco Iacoboni (University of California, Los Angeles), “Embodied Listening and Musical Empathy: Perspectives from Mirror Neuron Research”
4:00-5:30pm, SEM Charles Seeger Lecture
Session 2-49 SEM S: Sheraton Grand C
Portia Maultsby (Indiana University), “‘Everybody Wanna Sing my Blues . . . Nobody Wanna Live My Blues’: Deconstructing Narratives of Race, Culture and Power in African American Music Scholarship”
Cheryl L. Keyes (University of California, Los Angeles), Introduction
6:00pm, Sound Studies Special Interest Group Soundwalk
Meet in front of the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street
Matt Sakakeeny (Tulane University), organizer
8:00-11:00pm, Music and Video Games: History, Theory, Ethnography
Session 2-55 AMS S: Gallier
William Cheng (Harvard University), Moderator
Mark Katz (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Respondent
Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Musicological Contributions to Early Video Game Studies”
Roger Moseley (Cornell University), “Digital Analogies”
William Gibbons (Texas Christian University), “Framing Devices for Gaming Devices: Applying Film Music Theory to Video Games”
Elizabeth Medina-Gray (Yale University), “Modularity and Dynamic Play: Video Game Music and Its Avant-garde Antecedents”
Kiri Miller (Brown University), “Dance Central and the Listening Body”
Borrowed from squared2x on Flickr.
7:00–8:30am, SMT Music and Disability IG
S: Salon 828
7:00–8:45am, AMS Committee on Women and Gender
S: Salon 825
8:30-10:30am, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, I: Music Tourism in the Aftermath of Rupture in New Orleans, Berlin, Bali
Session 3-2 SEM S: Bayside B
Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), Chair
Elizabeth Macy (University of California, Los Angeles), “Music and Cultural Tourism in Post-Disaster Economies”
Luis-Manuel Garcia (Tulane University), “Consuming Atmospheres and Social Worlds: ‘Techno-Tourismus’ and Post-Tourist Tourism in Berlin’s Electronic Dance Music Scenes”
Daniel Sharp (Tulane University), “Dithyrambalina: A Shantytown Sound Installation in Post-Katrina New Orleans”
SherriLynn Colby-Bottel (University of Virginia), “Authenticity Seekers: Music Post-Tourists and the Shifting Sound-Scapes of New Orleans”
8:30-10:30am, Online Musical Communities
Session 3-7 AMS/SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Marc Gidal (Ramapo College of New Jersey), Chair
Tara Browner (University of California, Los Angeles), “Bach Culture: Performers, Scholars, and Bachfreunde in the Twenty-First Century”
Olga Panteleeva (University of California, Berkeley), “Für Kenner und Liebhaber 2.0: Modes of Expertise in Online File-Sharing Communities”
Tom Artiss (University of Cambridge), “Solitary Socialities: Music Surf-Sharing in Nain, Labrador”
Charles Hiroshi Garrett (University of Michigan), “Joking Matters: Music, Humor, and the Digital Revolution”
9:00-10:30am, Language and the Senses
Session 3-10 AMS/SMT S: Edgewood
Donald Boomgaarden (Loyola University New Orleans), Chair
Charles Dill (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Le Cerf’s Epistemology of Music”
Amy M. Cimini (University of Pennsylvania), “René Descartes’ Unfinished Compendium of Music: Rethinking Music and the Politics of Sensation after the Thirty Years’ War
9:00-10:30am, Music and Gaming
Session 3-12 AMS A: Iberville
Kiri Miller (Brown University), Chair
Christopher Tonelli (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “The Chiptuning of the World”
Neil Lerner (Davidson College), “Investigating the Origins of Video Game Music Style, 1977–1983: The Early Cinema Hypothesis”
9:00-noon, Performing Music, Performing Disability
Session 3-19 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Bayside A
Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY), Chair
Michael Bakan (Florida State University), Michael Beckerman (New York University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Blake Howe (Louisiana State University), Stephanie Jensen-Moulton (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Bruce Quaglia (University of Utah)
9:00-noon, Sound, Language, and Mysticism from Vienna to L.A.
Session 3-22 AMS S:Borgne
Brian Kane (Yale University), Chair
Clara Latham (New York University), “The Impact of Sound and Voice on the Invention of Psychoanalysis”
Sherry Lee (University of Toronto), “‘Still, o schweige’: Music, Language, OpernKrise (Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand )”
Nicholas Attfield (Edinburgh University), “A Medieval Model for the 1920s: Anton Bruckner as Mystic”
J. Daniel Jenkins (University of South Carolina), “I Care If You Listen: Schoenberg’s ‘School of Criticism’ and the Role of the Amateur”
10:30-noon, Twentieth-Century Music and Advertising
Session 3-28 AMS A: Iberville
Jason Hanley (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), Chair
Paul Christiansen (University of Southern Maine), “‘It’s Morning Again in America’: How the Tuesday Team Revolutionized the Use of Music in Political Ads”
Jonathan Waxman (New York University), “I Went to the New York Philharmonic and Came Home with a Cadillac: The Alliance Between Business and the Arts in the Early Twentieth Century
12:00–2:00pm, SMT Committee on the Status of Women Brown Bag Open Lunch
S: Salon 828
12:30–1:30pm SEM Gender and Sexualities Taskforce
S: Bayside C
1:45-3:45pm, Acoustics and Experiences of the Limit
Session 3-39 SEM S: Maurepas
Louise Meintjes (Duke University), Chair
Louise Meintjes (Duke University), “Pushing at the Edge of the Social”
Jairo Moreno (University of Pennsylvania), “Signatures of the Audible”
Ana Maria Ochoa (Columbia University), “South American Acoustics: Amerindian Perspectivism and Non-Linear Musical Histories”
Gary Tomlinson (Yale University), “Singing at the Limit of the Human”
1:45-3:45pm, Emergent Forms of Music Tourism, II: Multimedia, Spectacles and Memorials
Session 3-43 SEM S: Grand Chenier
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)
Lynda Paul (Yale University), Chair
Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment (University of Georgia), “Elvis Presley and the Reanimation of Robert E. Lee”
Lynda Paul (Yale University), “Las Vegas and Virtual Tourism: Sonic Shaping of Simulated Worlds”
Michael Heller (Harvard University), “Deployments of Deadness at the Louis Armstrong House Museum”
Nicol Hammond (New York University), “‘The History Is in the Music’? Music, Museums, and the Politics of Presence in Post-Apartheid Cultural Tourism”
8:00-11:00pm, Music and Disability: Works in Progress Seminar
AMS/SMT S: Bayside A
Sponsored by the AMS Disability SG and SMT Disability IG
Michael Bakan (Florida State University), James Deaville (Carleton University), Stefan Honisch (University of British Columbia), Jeanette Jones (Boston University), Anabel Maler (University of Chicago), Julie Saiki (Stanford University), Joseph Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY)
9:00pm, KNOCKABOUT: wandering beats from across urban America.
Handsome Willy’s at 218 South Robertson St. No cover. 21+
5 DJs converge on Handsome Willy’s for KNOCKABOUT, a dance party featuring every genre you’ve ever loved and fly beats that you neva eva heard before.
DJ Yamin (NOLA): Hip-hop, funk, reggae, Afrobeat www.nolamix.com
DJ Super Squirrel (Boston): Dancehall, global mashup www.djsupersquirrel.com
The Attic Bat (L.A.): Hip-hop and dubstep www.derricomusic.com
LMGM (Chicago, Berlin): House and disco www.thelusisgarcia.com
Shilo Bourne (L.A.) UK bass
Roger Lewis. Borrowed from fantailmedia at Fiickr.
8:30-10:30am, Music and YouTube: Sound, Media, and Sociality
Session 4-5 SEM A: Astor Grand A
Sponsored by the Popular Music Section (PMSSEM)
Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), Chair
Fabian Holt (Roskilde University, Denmark), “Social Media Video and the Festivalization of Electronic Dance Music in Europe”
Monique M. Ingalls (University of Cambridge), “Worship on the Web: Building Online Religious Community through Christian Devotional Music Videos”
Patricia G. Lange (California College of the Arts), “In Synch with Lip-Synching: A Riff on Teen Sociality”
Trevor S. Harvey (University of Iowa), “Dulcimerica: Mediating a Musical Community through Video Podcasts”
8:30-10:30am, Musical Propertization in the Digital Age:
Session 4-7 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
From “Piracy” to Ontological Politics
Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), Chair
Andrew Eisenberg (University of Oxford), “M-Commerce and the (Re)making of the Music Industry in Kenya”
Aditi Deo (University of Oxford), “Folk Music in the Digital Realm: Public Commons or Cultural Property?”
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), “Pirates of the Caribbean: Music Circulation in Late Socialist Cuba”
Henry Stobart (Royal Holloway, University of London), “Shifting Properties: Ownership, Informality, and the Digital Music Video in Bolivia”
9:00-noon, The City is a Medium
Session 4-16 AMS/SEM/SMT S: Edgewood
Alexander Rehding (Harvard University), Chair
Veit Erlmann (University of Texas at Austin), Respondent
Benjamin Tausig (New York University), “The City is Burning: Informal Musical Commerce at Urban Protest Movements”
Tiffany Ng (University of California, Berkeley), “An Instrument of Urban Planning: Bells and the Sonic Remediation of Community Space in the Southeastern United States”
John Melillo (University of Arizona), “Phatic Emphatic: Listening to New York City in Downtown Poetry and Punk”
Peter McMurray (Harvard University), “Heterophony of a Metropolis: Rites of Passage and Contestation Turkish Berlin”
10:45-12:15pm, Feminist Approaches to Music and Sound Technologies: History, Theory, and Practice
Session 4-29 SEM A: Astor Ballroom 1
Sponsored by the Section on the Status of Women (SSW)
Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), Chair
Tara Rodgers (University of Maryland), “Feminist Approaches to Electronic Music and Sound Historiography”
Charity Marsh (University of Regina), “Reluctant Hip Hop Warriors”: Feminist Approaches to Hop Hop Community Projects”
10:45-12:15pm, Intersections of Ethnomusicology with Other Fields
Session 4-31 SEM S: Bayside B
Theresa Allison (University of California, San Francisco), Chair
Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson (Brigham Young University), “Has Ethnomusicology Met Its Calling? An Ethnomusicologist’s Response to Biomusicology”
Monique McGrath (University of Toronto), “What Does Ethnomusicology Have to Say to Music Therapy?”
Jeremy Day-O’Connell (Knox College), “‘Motherese’ and Universals of Musical Pitch
10:45-12:15pm, Sounds and Space in New Orleans
Session 4-35 SEM S: Maurepas
Marié Abe (Boston University), Chair
Danielle Adomaitis (Florida State University), “Sonic Fixtures and Drifting Buskers: Soundmarks of New Orleans and the Street Musicians Who Construct Them”
Zarah Ersoff (University of California, Los Angeles), “Treme’s Aural Verisimilitude”
Julie Raimondi (Tufts University), “Music, SEO Agency, and the Social Construction of Space in New Orleans
2:00–6:00pm, AMS Ecocriticism SG and SEM Ecomusicology SIG Outing:
Barataria Preserve Hike
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Evoking the Object: Physicality in the Digital Age of Music
In our current relationship with technology, we bring our bodies, but our minds rule–Linda Stone, “Conscious Computing”
I begin with an epigraph from Linda Stone, who coined the phrase ‘continuous partial attention’ to describe our mental state in the digital age. The passive cousin of multi-tasking, continuous partial attention is a reaction to our constantly connected lifestyles in which everything is happening right now and where value is increasingly equated with our ability to digest it all. Almost everything we do has the potential to be interrupted, be it by an email, a text or a tweet; often we will give only partial attention to any one thing in anticipation of the next thing that will require our attention. In this internal fight for mental attention, listening to music has been seriously impacted.
The digital era has seen more music releases than ever before. Unfortunately, the massive influx of quantity is by no means a measure of how we are engaging with said music. iPhones and similar devices, for which music players have become mere features, enable listening to become a thing of partial attention. From allowing the shuffle or random modes to choose music selections for you, or even streaming music algorithms to calculate things you might like, to listening while playing Angry Birds or reading your Twitter stream, less commitment is made to the act of listening, and as such only a portion of our working memory is committed to the experience. Without working memory actively processing musical information, it is less likely to be stored for the long term, particularly if other information is continuously vying for space and attention.
These days video games sell better than music. Despite being a digital product, games are able to instill memories (even of the music) into one’s consciousness, because the game interface allows our sensory memories to work together in an active manner with the medium. Iconic memory stores visual cues from the game, echoic memory takes the audible cues from the game and the haptic memory is engaged in controlling game play. There is only so much more which can be done while playing a video game. If something were to interrupt game play, the game would be paused to address the new information rather than giving it partial attention. This is quite different from music which plays a background role in so much of our lives even when we are actively putting music on we tend to only engage it with partial attention.
When I began thinking about turning Concrète Sound System into a record label, one of my main goals was to create works that could engage the audience in active musical experiences that could create long term memories. I felt that as important as the music would be, it would take something material to create these memories, a physical product more evocative of earlier moments in recording history than the CD, its most recent gasp. I wondered if, by creatively evoking the physical object, the listener could be engaged in an active manner that would enable the memory of music and its power to persist through the everyday waves of digital noise.
The first mass duplicated audio medium was the Gold Moulded Edison Cylinder at the turn of the twentieth century. Imagine two cylinder copies of one of these recording today, as musical objects. Each of them would have over a hundred years of physical history. From the wear of the cases to the condition of the wax based on the temperature in which they were stored, each of these cylinders would be unique musical objects, with completely different histories, despite having the same origin. It is reasonable to assume that if the cylinders were played today on the same playback device, despite the fact that the compositions and performances are exactly the same, the differences between the recordings would be audible.
Wax Cylinders in the Library of Congress preservation Lab, Image by Flickr User Photo Phiend
Even without a century of history, there would likely be audible differences between the cylinders. If one cylinder was the first copy made, and another the 150th –master cylinders of Gold Moulded Edison Cylinders could only produce 150 copies reliably–the physical wear in the process of reproduction would leave its own imprint, making each of those copies distinct musical objects. In the analog world, as the technology improved the differences between copies decreased substantially. Cassettes were manufactured in batches of ten to hundreds of thousands without audible differences. But even in circulations so high, over time each of those analog copies took on their own identity and collected their own memories.
The listener as an active agent contributed to the development of these unique musical objects. After a purchase, any number of variables played into the ritual of the first experience of the music. Was there a way to listen upon walking out of the store? Were there liner notes or lyric sheets inside? Would you read those prior to listening or as you listen? Where would you listen? Through headphones? The listening chair in front of the hi-fi stereo? Or on the boombox with some friends? All of these possibilities shaped memories as musical objects that defined the music consumption culture of the past.
For example, I bought the debut 2Pac album 2Pacalypse Now on cassette the day it was released. I loved the album so much I kept it in regular rotation in my Walkman for months until finally the tape popped. Rather than go out and buy a new copy I decided to perform a surgery. It was in a screwless reel case which meant I couldn’t just open it up to retrieve the ends of the tape trapped inside, but rather had to crack the reel case open and transplant the reels into a new body. So, my copy of the 2Pacalypse Now cassette is now inside of a clear reel holder with no visual markings. It also has a piece of tape that was used to splice it back together, which makes an audible warp when played back. I can pretty much be sure that there is no other copy of 2Pacalypse which sounds exactly like mine. While this probably detracts from the resale value of the cassette (not that I’d sell it), it is imbued with a personal history that is priceless.
Cassettes, in particular, played a significant role in the attachment of physical memories to music beyond the recordings they held. They gave birth to the mixtape. The taper community was born from personal tape recorders that allowed concert-goers to record performances they attended, and, prior to the rise of peer to peer sharing online, these communities were trading tapes internationally via regular postal mail. European jazz and rock concerts were finding their way back to the states and South Bronx hip-hop performances were traveling with the military in Asia. All of these instances required a physical commitment with which came memories that inherently became their own musical objects.
Needless to say the nature of musical exchange has changed with the rise of the digital age of music. This is not to say that memories as musical objects have gone away, but they are being taken for granted as the objects lose their physicality. I remember going to The Wiz on 96th Street with $10 to spend on music. I spent at least ten minutes trying to decide between Sid and B-Tonn and Arabian Prince. I ended up with Arabian Prince and have regretted it since I got home and listened that day, as I never found Sid and B-Tonn for sale again. Today I could download both in the time it took me to walk to the train station. After skimming through the first few songs of Arabian Prince I could decide it was not for me and drag drop it in the trash where the memory of it would disappear with the files. No matter how I felt about the music then, the memory of it is a permanent fixture in my mind because of the physical actions it took to listen.
The first release for Concrète Sound System, Schrödinger’s Cassette, tackled this issue head on by presenting the audience with its own paradox, an update of physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous Thought Experiment, where the ultimate fate of the cassette inside is left up to the individual. Schrödinger’s Cassette sought to take listeners out of digital modes of consumption by using an analog medium to evoke the physical. The cassette release trend has been growing over the last few years, almost in parallel to the rise of the digital music and speaking to the need to separate music from our digital lives and to a desire to work harder for it. At the minimum, listening to a cassette requires having a cassette player, and acquiring one these days takes commitment. Unlike digital media, listeners cannot instantly skip a song on a cassette or put a favorite on repeat. It takes physical manipulation of the medium to move through its songs and doing so is a time investment. All these limitations make the cassette a medium that is best for linear listening, from beginning to end (unless you physically cut, rearrange, and splice it yourself).
Schrödinger’s Cassette, Image Courtesy of The Wire
Schrödinger’s Cassette took the required commitment a step further by encasing the cassette itself in industrial grade concrete. This required the user to actively crack the concrete (or the french concrète meaning ‘real’, from which the label derives its name) in order to listen to the music. The paradox is that, depending on the listener’s method for cracking, harm could be done to the cassette that might render it ‘unlistenable’. Upon receiving one of these pieces, the listener holds in their hands a musical object which they must physically act upon in order to create an unrepeatable musical event. Schrödinger’s Cassette has a look, a sound (if shaken you can hear the cassette reels), a feel, a smell, and a taste as well (though I wouldn’t advise it). All of the senses can be actively focused on the object and, as such, the whole of one’s working memory is engaged in the discernment of the object’s musical contents.
The Wire breaks open Schrödinger’s Cassette courtesy of their Twitterstream
For many, Schrödinger’s Cassette was taken as a work of art and left uncracked. The Wire magazine successfully cracked one edition open, revealing a portion of the musical contents on their regular radio program. For those that decided not to crack it, digital versions were made available so that they could listen, though this option was only made available after the listener spent some time with their physical object. In this way, the music from the project, a compilation called Between the Cracks, was directly connected to physical memories spurred by a material presence.
Triggering active memory during the consumption of music through physical objects need not be this complex. Old medium such as vinyl and cassette releases inherently have the physical properties required without the concrete or much else. Perhaps for this reason they show new signs of life despite the rise of digital. No matter how much our reality is augmented by our digital lives, we still inhabit those bodies that we bring with us, and, as far as the memories those bodies carry with them go, physicality rules.
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Featured Image: Wax Cylinders in the Library of Congress, Image by Flickr User Photo Phiend
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Primus Luta is a husband and father of three. He is a writer and an artist exploring the intersection of technology and art, and their philosophical implications. He is a regular guest contributor to theCreate Digital Music website, and maintains his own AvantUrb site. Luta is a regular presenter for the Rhythm Incursions Podcast series with his monthly showRIPL. As an artist, he is a founding member of the live electronic music collectiveConcrète Sound System, which spun off into a record label for the exploratory realms of sound in 2012.
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