Mediating Music: Materiality and Silence in Madonna's 'Don't Tell Me'

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2003

The properties and possibilities of music recordings remain surprisingly undertheorized despite recorded music's ubiquity in contemporary musical life and the increasing attention technologically mediated musics have received from researchers in a variety of disciplines. In this essay, I propose that by taking recordings seriously as cultural objects and abandoning assumptions about their "inauthenticity", we can gain new insights into the multiple roles music plays in social life. Three basic questions structure what follows:

This paper starts with some provocative thoughts and speculations that might be derived from common observation. However, the point of destination, vague and causing first resistance may lead to some insights that can confirm some truth provided through these provocative thoughts. Since the mid twentieth century, with the emergence of visual technologies (e.g.TV, computer), the aural has been seen as secondary to visual. However, the idea of how sounds have affected lifestyle, culture, observation, and experience of the world is still challenging. In fact, life is not only a visual experience, but still in an aural environment which conducts and manipulates livelihoods indirectly. Saturated with various kinds of sound, noise, and music, most acoustic environments are ignored and seem to be secondary to the visual world. Conscious consideration of this aural environment is not readily receivable. Indeed, more attention may be needed to the surrounding sound and music as they can be both constructive and deconstructive regarding culture, ethics, and community. Thus, literary authors as well as musicians can play influential roles in making people aware of the function of sound and music in an age of visual culture. The present study is an attempt to show the significance of the aural environment. In this study, we examine the power of sound through literary works. Indeed, literature is a medium that encourages speculation about the sounds, music and noise surrounding and manipulating us.

2007

Digital technologies are profoundly altering the way people produce, transmit, and consume music. Furthermore, technological developments are contributing to a seachange in the social organization of musical practices, challenging earlier paradigms of ownership, creativity, and human agency. This thesis will be divided into two interrelated points of inquiry: the first section will consider the effects of digital technology on the creative process and aesthetics of modern popular music, focusing on the practice of sampling in the production of hip-hop beats. The second section will address the effects of the same technology on consumer listening habits, affected most notably by the ever-increasing prevalence of MP3s and iv internet music downloading. I contend that the digitization of music is at the heart of significant changes in the way people consume, create, and relate to music in general.

2018

The relationship between new technologies and the dimension of listening takes at least two different directions, the first dealing with the role new technologies play in the "simple" reproduction and diffusion of music materials that cannot necessarily be categorized as technological music (for example, a Quartet by Brahms heard in Internet streaming); the second concerning the listening modes inescapably involved in the reception of a music product (whether belonging to the so-called "serious music" -i.e. classical music -or to pop music), which depend on the nature of the music itself (for example, an Acousmatic work or a live-performed techno piece). Starting from this basic distinction makes it possible to avoid any misunderstanding about the correct meaning to be attributed both to technology (instrumental function or production-realization function) and to listening (mediated or immediate).

2011

Dematerialization of artefacts and material objects is a relevant issue in consumer studies, especially when we consider the ongoing changes regarding the consumption of cultural goods. This article adopts a theory-of-practice approach to analyse the consequences of dematerialization on the practices of digital music consumption. From an empirical point of view, the article is based on data collected during research into the appropriation of digital music technologies and based on 25 in-depth narrative semi-structured interviews with young Italian digital music consumers. The analysis mainly focuses on the appropriation of three specific technologies involved into the contemporary consumption of music: the iPod, the external hard drive and the vinyl disc. In order to understand the role of materiality in the age of dematerialization, the article adopts the ‘circuit of practice’, an explicative model that enables empirical analysis and that is aimed at highlighting the changing relat...

No matter that music is one of the forms of sound used in human communication – in this case to express what words cannot say; in spite of the fact that music, especially some of its more popular mani- festations, is fully endowed with features that characterize the phenomena that have long interested the majority of communication researchers and is often inseparable from them; the study of music and of communication have followed separate paths for years. There are many reasons for this, obviously rela- ted to a historical context which we can refer to here as Modernity.

The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 2018

This chapter focuses on the shifting conceptions of how to listen to music in the age of sound recording. I start with reviewing Adorno's concerns regarding a regression of listening and contrast these with new listening practices in the first half of the twentieth century. I show, then, how hi-fi enthusiasts in the Cold War era linked ideals of sophisticated music listening to recorded music and technical expertise. While the self-image of the cultivated yet technologically aware domestic listener greatly revalued the experience of skillful music listening, I show how societal change rendered normative ideals of listening increasingly unattractive late in the century. Relying on recent sound studies research and various historical sources, I offer a critical discussion of conceptions of skillful music listening and put this debate in the context of shifting self-conceptions among the middle classes as well as the power struggles this section of society faced.

Routledge eBooks, 2013

After a century of studies, there is no agreement on what it means to construct a sociology of music. From the beginning this "of" has been a place of tension, not of smooth coordination. If music has easily attracted social readings, there has been strong resistance to a systematic sociology of music whose aim would be to explain musical values or contents through reference to sociological factors. The most vehement prosecutor of such alleged reductionism was undoubtedly Adorno (e.g., 1976)-even though he himself became the worst reductionist when it came to popular culture (Adorno 1990); for him, only musics that are not really art deserve sociological treatment (it is difficult to know if this is more disrespectful of popular music or sociology!). By contrast, the opposite program-a positive explanation of the ways in which music is produced, diffused, and listened to-has been attacked on the grounds that, given its refusal to address "music itself," it cannot acknowledge music's specificity. In this opposition between two programs, a part of the question is specific to the case of music, but another is common to the social interpretation of any art. To a large extent, the sociology of art has defined itself through opposition to aesthetics. The aim was both to criticize any claim of autonomy for works of art and aesthetic judgment, and to return the experience of aesthetic pleasure-often regarded as immediate and subjective-to its social and historical determinations. The two types of causality mobilized above have often been described in social studies of art in terms of a distinction between studying either "the art object sociologically" or "the art object as a social process" (Zolberg 1990, chapters 3 and 4). One approach displays the mediators of art, the other how art mediates society. The latter takes art as an empirical given reality, and provides explanations of its social conditions; it can be respectful vis-à-vis the "artistic nature of art": the task of sociology is to give an account of the social conditions of its production, diffusion, and reception. The former shows art as a social artifact, or construction, of a group-an "art world"; as such, it is more invasive (it looks for the social nature of art, as Blacking (1973) would put it, not for wider social factors), and sees the claim of art to be autonomous as problematic. These two directions, one clearly empiricist and more devoted to specific case studies, the other more theoretical, are themselves divided into different trends. Across the board, though, sociology has set itself against a purely internal and hagiographic aesthetic commentary on artworks, "filling out" an art world formerly only including a very few chefs-d'oeuvre and geniuses. Mainstream productions and copies, conventions and material constraints, professions and academies, performance venues and markets, on the artistic side of the scene; and, on the social side, codes and rites of consumption, gender and ethnicity, and, in the specific case of music, modes of circulation in a "glocal" world: these are what have been pushed to the front of the scene. These mediations range from systems or devices of the most physical and local nature, to institutional arrangements and collective frames of appreciation