The vocal construction of self : Icelandic men and singing in everyday life.

Abstract

Musical identity and music in everyday life have both enjoyed increasing popularity in recent research and discourse. The present study is related to both these themes and investigates the nature and function of singing in men's everyday lives. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the study looks specifically at vocal lives constructed in interviews with 13 men from northeast Iceland. Additionally these men and sixteen others, who sing in the same choir, kept one-week vocal diaries in order to facilitate the sampling of their everyday vocal experience. Interpretations of this data are situated contextually by the critical use of historical, anthropological, sociological, and ethnographical data. Emerging themes suggest that these men see singing as a central concept of Self. Furthermore, these themes appear to correspond closely to the psychological theory proposed by Robert Weber in his recent revision of William James's seminal, triadic model of Self. Men in the study locate Self in singing: their vocal behaviour appears to be an important technology of Self; that is a forming agent and defining concept in elements of physical, social and spiritual Self. Findings illustrate singing's agency in the changing Self and in the maintaining of core and unitary Selves. They exemplify ways in which vocal behaviour configures personal and social life and how personal and social identities can be vocally constructed, performed, and celebrated. Additionally, men's vocal behaviour and men's narratives about them, construct complex and times contradictory masculine identities. The study argues for the importance of phenomenological paradigms and in particular, for a music psychology of individuality which attempts to build theory from individual case studies towards the nomethetic. These research frameworks are shown here as being able to provide unique perspectives on the nature of musical and vocal function