[csaa-forum] Reminder: Listening to popular music CFP

[Jedediah Sklower]

Volume! La Revue des musiques populaires

Apologies for cross-posting.

Volume! a French peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the
interdisciplinary study of popular music seeks contributions for a
special issue on listening. This issue will explore the premise that a
focus on listening can be a fruitful basis for the analysis of popular
music, one that can enrich our understanding of aesthetic
relationships and signifying practices. Any scholarly essay on popular
music and its listeners or how it is listened to is welcome. Here are
some examples of approaches that have generated interest in our
editorial discussions:

More on Volume ! (history, editorial board, archives etc.) at www.seteun.net

Call for papers
Listening to popular music: practices, experiences, representations

Submission deadline: June 1st, 2011


Listening practices: how do we listen to popular music?
We know that listening occurs across a wide range of contexts,
involving different social rites and different technologies, from the
jogger with an iPod to huge concerts in stadiums. How do these
contexts shape the activity of listening? What forms of listening
exist, and what assumptions, methods, goals, practices tend to
characterize each type? We might also consider listening to encompass
a range of subject positions or listener identities (the
musicological, the sociological, a variety of aesthetic stances, etc.)
A single individual may employ different listening approaches at
different times, or create his/her own hybrid way of listening to
“scrutinize” the music (s)he appreciates or analyzes. What effects on
the listening experience do such choices create? How do sets of
listening practices work to form communities that validate and may
even entrench these auditive identities? How do these communities in
turn shape listening practices?

The seeing ear and the listening eye.
Another productive approach might be to consider listening as a
synthetic or synesthetic faculty, the imperialist ear also looking for
what does not belong to the order of sounds, or the eye infringing
upon the ear’s prerogatives. In popular music, visual elements have
long been a key part of many artistic presentations, and this has been
both increased and transformed in the internet and multimedia age.
Auditory attention can be grafted onto a network of correspondences
between the senses: what effects do looks, styles, gestures, images,
dancing have on listening? What would Elvis have been if we could not
have seen him? How do the representations of “race”, gender or style
influence our perception of a specific band or musical genre? While
musical emotion may always depend in part on musical factors (quality
of the performance, of the sound reproduction etc.) it is also
typically conditioned by extramusical circumstances. How then do the
environment, the historical context, the collective or individual
moods, the listener’s personal history inform the perception of a
specific musical moment? How has our perception of music evolved, and
could we write a “history of our ears”?

Ears under surveillance: perceptions and identifications of auditive
communities.
Listening can become the base for a discourse focused on the meaning
of music and music use, for example, the influence that certain forms
are expected to have on the taste, emotion and attitude of youth
(Satanist proselytism in extreme metal, sexism and crime in “gangsta”
rap, violence in punk etc.). Discursive attacks from the outside
(moral, political, scientific authorities) are typically countered by
discursive defenses or celebrations from the inside. While some
listening practices may be valued for promoting activity, creativity
or originality, others are stigmatized for engendering passivity,
vulnerability, or even servitude or perversity. What type of listening
subject is thus constructed? How can we analyze the issues raised in
these debates from a scholarly perspective informed by research and/or
theory? What can we learn about listening itself and the uses and
meaning of popular music in general by studying these discourses,
their moralized aesthetic prescriptions and proscriptions, their
ideologies?

Other, more general, possible categories:
- listening practices, uses of
- listening and technology, multimedia
- the musical experience
- social & cultural history of listening
- musical education via listening
- listening on stage, interactive forms of listening
- listening and the other senses
- the activity and productivity of listening
- listening and meaning
- listening and subcultures
- fans, fandom and listening communities
- identifying listeners
- the science of listening
Again, these are meant to be suggestive, not to define boundaries.

Submission deadline: June 1st, 2011. Contributions should be sent by
email (English or French, 30.000 to 50.000 characters, Harvard system
of referencing, in .doc – Word 2004 format) with an abstract, a set of
key words and a short biography of the author, to the following
addresses:

editions at seteun.net,
gerome.guibert at wanadoo.fr & jedediah-sklower at hotmail.com

Detailed instructions for authors, French version of the CFP here: http://www.seteun.net/spip.php?article229