Immersed in Pop! Excursions into Compositional Design

Recent changes in consumer audio and music technology and distribution - for example the addition of 3D audio formats such as Dolby Atmos to music streaming services, the recent release of “Spatial Audio” on Apple and Beats products, the proliferation of musical content in virtual reality and 360º videos, etc. - have reignited a public discourse on concepts of immersion and interactivity in popular music and media. This raises questions and necessitates a deepening of popular musicological discourse in these areas. This thesis thus asks: what is the relationship between so-called immersive media and immersive experience? How are immersive and interactive experiences of audiovisual popular music compositionally designed? And to what degree do interpretations of immersion and interactivity in popular music imply agency on part of the listener/viewer? To address these questions, Bresler has authored or co-authored four articles and book chapters on music in immersive and interactive media with a focus on compositional design and immersion in pop music. In the framing chapter, these articles are contextualized through the coining of the term immersive staging, which is a framework for understanding how the perceived relationship between the performer and listener is mediated through technology, performativity, audiovisual compositional design, and aesthetics. Additionally, the chapter makes a case for the hermeneutic methodologies employed throughout.publishedVersio

The Sampling of Bodily Sound in Contemporary Composition: towards an embodied analysis

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.The listener’s experience as an embodied subject is at the centre of this work. Embodied experience forms the basis for analyses of three contemporary compositions that sample bodily sound, in order to question how such works represent and mediate the body. The possible applications of this embodied methodology are illustrated through three case studies: Crackers by Christof Migone (2001), A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure by Matmos (2001) and Ground Techniques (2009) by Neil Luck. The findings of each analysis are placed within discussion of critical and theoretical concerns related to the (re)presentation, mediation and manipulation of the body both as materiality and as social construct, using, in particular, work by Hansen (2004) and Wegenstein (2006). The sampling practices of these works lead to the fragmentation of the represented bodies, in which margins between bodily interiors and exteriors are frequently crossed, bringing about a reconfiguration of the musical subject. Furthermore, the celebration of the bodily origins of these works complicates notions of recorded sound as disembodied. The analytical methodology developed in this thesis derives from a consideration of approaches in a number of fields: feminist musicology, music psychology, embodied cognition, phenomenology, music and gesture and new media theory. The sensations and affective responses of the listening body are discussed alongside an examination of how listening is shaped by processes of technological mediation. This thesis attends to both the body that is listening and the body that is listened to. I argue that it is not adequate to understand the works studied as merely representing the body, but suggest it would be more appropriate to understand the relationship between work and body as multi-faceted, conceptualising the body and recorded sound as mutually framing. This uncovers not only technology as mediation, but also the body as mediation. Finally, the case studies are used to reflect upon the limits of the embodied analysis methodology and its potential for wider application.This study was part-financed with the aid of a studentship from University College Falmouth and a grant from The Sir Richard Stapley Educational Trust

Cinderella; or Music and the Human Sciences. Unfootnoted Musings from the Margins

It has become fashionable among scholars to wax autobiographical with the reader, presumably to shed any remnant of the illusion (suggested implicitly by the conventional apparatus of a scholarly text and footnotes) that one might be speaking with an objective voice, or with an argument whose merits can be considered and even accepted without reference to personal and therefore circumstantial prejudice. Today's penchant for presumed full disclosure of one's subjective standpoint, however, is more likely either a species of authorial vanity masquerading as methodological scrupulousness or evidence of a greater interest in oneself than the subject one is writing about. In this case, the reader who wishes to distill the prejudices of the author and speculate on their origins must begin with the author's notion that one can talk effectively about the character and value of arguments by using procedures of reading and research that hold up under scrutiny and require no subjective apologetics. Botstein concludes that the definition of future methods of analysis, including the setting of the research agenda, cannot be undertaken from within the current traditions of music history or musicology

Supporting Methodology Transfer in Visualization Research with Literature-Based Discovery and Visual Text Analytics

[ES] La creciente especialización de la ciencia está motivando la rápida fragmentación de disciplinas bien establecidas en comunidades interdisciplinares. Esta descom- posición se puede observar en un tipo de investigación en visualización conocida como investigación de visualización dirigida por el problema. En ella, equipos de expertos en visualización y un dominio concreto, colaboran en un área específica de conocimiento como pueden ser las humanidades digitales, la bioinformática, la seguridad informática o las ciencias del deporte. Esta tesis propone una serie de métodos inspirados en avances recientes en el análisis automático de textos y la rep- resentación del conocimiento para promover la adecuada comunicación y transferen- cia de conocimiento entre estas comunidades. Los métodos obtenidos se combinaron en una interfaz de análisis visual de textos orientada al descubrimiento científico, GlassViz, que fue diseñada con estos objetivos en mente. La herramienta se probó por primera vez en el dominio de las humanidades digitales para explorar un corpus masivo de artículos de visualización de propósito general. GlassViz fue adaptada en un estudio posterior para que soportase diferentes fuentes de datos representativas de estas comunidades, mostrando evidencia de que el enfoque propuesto también es una alternativa válida para abordar el problema de la fragmentación en la investigación en visualización

Spatial and Psychoacoustic Factors in Atonal Prolongation

Lerdahl's atonal analysis takes the prolongation approach. He explains the method through examples in Weber and others

Introduction

No abstract available

Sound Kinks : Sadomasochistic Erotica in Audiovisual Music Performances

In this dissertation I study musical, sonic and multimodal representations of sadomasochistic erotica in films, music videos, stage performances, and popular music. The study consists of an introductory chapter (1), a theoretical chapter on sadomasochism (2), three chapters discussing six case studies (3–5), as well as discussion and conclusion chapters (6 and 7). The examples investigated are the films Secretary (2003) and Duke of Burgundy (2014), Leonard Cohen’s song ‘I’m Your Man’ (1988), Elvis Costello’s song ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’ (2002), Rihanna’s song and music video S&M (2011), and a filmed operatic production of W. A. Mozart’s Don Giovanni focusing on the character Zerlina (1787; dir. Claus Guth, 2008). In the conclusion, I briefly discuss the film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) as an example of post-feminist, neoliberal sadomasochism occurring at the time of writing. This study introduces a new conceptual tool for interpreting music with specific regard to eroticism: kink reading, or kink listening. My research is informed by three main areas of inquiry and methodologies: cultural musicology, queer musicology, and close reading. I theorise sadomasochism in a resolutely multifaceted and critical way using theory on performative materialism, which emphasizes both the lived experience of sadomasochism and the social power structures informing practices. My findings indicate that there are certain strategies through which SM erotica has been depicted in music, which often include a mixture of humorous musical language and semiotic signifiers of the Uncanny, or the unsettling. This combination is distinctive of depictions of SM sex scenes. The music is often encoded as multisensory, and transforms perceptions of time and place. While sadomasochist representations can reflect cultural imbalances, SM can also be utilized as a queer, critical tool for empowering non-normative bodies, genders, and sexualities by making practitioners sexual agents rather than victims. SM can also broaden the concept of sex from a genital-oriented, procreation-directed activity to a state of mind combining suspended time and space and a mixture of sexual pleasure and sexualised pain.Sadomasokistinen erotiikka audiovisuaalisissa musiikki-esityksissä Väitöskirjassa tutkitaan sadomasokistisen erotiikan musiikillisia ja äänellisiä esityksiä nykykulttuurissa, erityisesti populaarimusiikissa ja musiikkivideossa, elokuvassa ja oopperassa. Tutkimus koostuu johdannosta (luku 1), teoreettisista tarkasteluista (luku 2), musiikillisten ja audiovisuaalisten esitysten analyyseista (luvut 3–5) sekä keskustelu- ja tulosluvuista (luvut 6–7). Tutkimusaineistona ovat elokuvat Secretary (2003) ja Duke of Burgundy (2014), Leonard Cohenin laulu ‘I’m Your Man’ (1988), Elvis Costellon laulu ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’ (2002), Rihannan laulu ja musiikki-video S&M (2011) sekä Zerlinan henkilöhahmo W. A. Mozartin oopperan Don Giovanni (1787) nykytuotannossa (ohj. Claus Guth, 2008). Luvussa 6 käytetään myös elokuvaa Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) esimerkkinä nykypäivän sadomasokistista kuvastoa hyödyntävästä populaarikulttuurista neoliberaalina ja post-feministisenä ilmiönä. Väitöskirjassa kehitetään uusi lähestymistapa erotiikan tarkasteluun musiikissa: kink-luku eli kink-kuuntelu. Tämä perustuu kulttuuriseen musiikintutkimuksen, queer-musiikintutkimukseen sekä audiovisuaaliseen lähilukuun. SM-kuvastoa lähestytään monipuolisella tavalla performatiivisen materialismin kautta, joka painottaa sekä elettyä mielihyvää että sosiaalisia valtarakenteita, joista SM koostuu. Tutkimuksessa todetaan, että musiikissa SM-erotiikka kuvataan usein camp-huumorin kautta, johon on sekoitettu kumman (engl. Uncanny) tunnetta. Lisäksi SM:lla leikittelevät äänimaailmat laajentuvat moniaistillisiksi kokemuksiksi ja venyttävät ajan ja paikan käsitteitä. Vaikka SM voi heijastella kulttuurisia vallan epäsuhtia, sitä voidaan myös pitää queer-henkisenä kriittisenä konseptina, joka voimaannuttaa epänormatiivisia kehoja, sukupuolia ja seksuaalisuuksia tekemällä niistä aktiivisia seksuaalisia toimijoita uhriposition sijaan. Tämä voi laajentaa seksuaalisuuden ja seksuaalisen aktiviteetin käsittämistä sukupuolielinkeskeisestä ja lisääntymispäämääräisestä määrittelystä mielentilaksi, jossa aika ja paikka hämärtyvät ja jossa seksuaalinen mielihyvä ja kipu sekoittuvat nautinnollisesti.Siirretty Doriast

Noticing Musical Becomings: Deleuzian and Guattarian Approaches to Ethnographic Studies of Musicking

In this article, we expand conceptually upon approaches in cultural musicology and ethnomusicology that conceive of music in terms of shifting textual signs and performances of cultural meaning. Our aim is to propose some new ways of considering music in terms of relational events, doing, and becoming. We ask: what if music does more than symbolically mediate and represent worlds? What if music constantly comes into being and does things as part of intrinsically messy realities that consist of relations between a variety of processes and things: vibrations, sounds, sensations and feelings, human bodies and minds, non–human entities, words and meanings, spaces, movements and materialities, (re)arrangements of social organization and power, and more? How might our conceptions of music, on the one hand, and our methodological stances, on the other, reconfigure if we harness this kind of relational and inherently heterogeneous occurring as a starting point? Our questions are inspired by the process thinking of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and by the work of latter–day theorists who develop this thinking, such as Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Rebecca Coleman, Elizabeth Grosz, and Brian Massumi. Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be regarded as an effort to contest transcendent ways of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari pursue this aim by aspiring to an ontology that is not grounded upon being but upon the processuality or primary dynamism of reality. In his early sole–authored work Difference and Repetition, Deleuze equates being with becoming by stating that identities only emerge from repetition as difference: “Returning is thus the only identity . . . ; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different” (1994, 41). This to say that things—whether human subjects, philosophical ideas, or musical formations—are not founded on an essence. Their being, or identity, consists in their processual, and thereby inevitably varying, situationally actualizing, open–ended existence. Being is the effect of (the return of) difference rather than difference being the effect of being (see, for e.g., Deleuze 1994, 41, 55). The order between being and becoming gets overturned. Better put, the category of being loses explanatory power and dissolves into becoming. It is, indeed, becoming that will figure and be elaborated as the guiding concept of our theoretical reflections in this article, illuminated by examples drawn from our recent ethnographic work