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Syncing Out Loud: Listening Norms in the Twenty-First Century

Description

Abstract:
My project analyzes the intersection of listening, disability, and popular music in the twenty-first century United States. In particular, I focus on competing and contemporary listening norms in the reception of popular music recordings. I characterize what I call “normal listening”—a collection of ideas, practices, and technologies that sustain normative approaches to music recordings. Normal listening hardly describes the way most people listen but rather emphasizes a kind of privileged form of listening that has become institutionalized and naturalized in music education, listening devices, concert spaces, and academic discourse. This form of listening involves treating recordings as self-contained objects, which should be fodder for ear-based listening, detached contemplation, and structural analysis of musical elements. Normal listening often serves to validate hierarchical musical values that privilege tonal and rhythmic complexity and by extension people with normative hearing and formal musical training who can detect these elements. I feature practices that challenge these dominant modes of listening, by asserting the body as the material site of music reception. I gather them together under the phrase, syncing out loud, in order to highlight the impulse to sync the body with music recordings. Using participant-observation fieldwork, I focus on three communities of practice: karaoke in a local bar, air guitar competitions across the United States, and lip-syncing videos on digital platforms (musical.ly and YouTube). I emphasize amateur performers with disabilities, in order to underscore the stakes for these listening norms and their alternatives. Through humorous antics and sincere practices, participants in all three practices treat media reception as a performance, reflecting new norms of listening emerging in digital cultures and music-enabled social media. They counter normal listening, by asserting listening as something sharable, demonstrable, and embodied.
Notes:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019

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In Copyright
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All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.

Citation

McDaniel, John Byrd, "Syncing Out Loud: Listening Norms in the Twenty-First Century" (2019). Music Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/3en7-hw88

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