Volume! La Revue des musiques populaires
Call for papers
Apologies for cross listing and posting.
Volume! is a French semestrial peer-reviewed
journal dedicated, since 2002, to the
interdisciplinary study of popular music. More
information (editorial board, downloadable
archives etc.) on the journal and our book
collections can be found on our website: <http://www.seteun.net>www.seteun.net.
We are proud to present our latest call for papers, dedicated to:
Listening to popular music: practices, experiences, representations
Submission deadline: June 1st, 2011
Listening practices: how do we listen to popular music?
Focusing on listening is a fruitful basis for
the analysis of popular music, as it enables to
discover the most intimate details of the
aesthetic relationship and of signifying
practices. How does the listener?s (individual
and collective) activity shape musical
experience (technological uses, listening
skills, social rites)? We adjust different
practices and types of listening to the
different musics we listen to: what forms of
listening exist, and with which assumptions,
methods, goals, practices does each type of
listener (the musicologist, the sociologist, the
amateur etc.) ?scrutinize? his/her object? How
do musicians listen to each other on stage, or
to the audience? What sensitive effects do such
choices create, and how do they form coherent
communities (fans, musicians, researchers?) that
validate, legitimize and entrench these auditive
identities? Can we eventually write a cultural ?history of our ears??
The synesthetic ear: what does it look for?
Listening can also be considered as a synthetic
or synesthetic faculty, that constantly
overflows the strict universe of music and may
thus be informed by what does not belong to the
order of sounds. Of course, auditive emotion
relies on musical factors (quality of the
performance, of the sound reproduction etc.) but
it also depends on extramusical circumstances:
how then do the environment, the collective or
individual moods, the listener?s biography or
historical conditions transform the perception
of a specific musical moment? Auditory attention
can be grafted onto a network of correspondences
between the senses: what retroactive effects do
looks, styles, gestures, ideas, images, subcultures have on listening?
Ears under surveillance: perceptions and
identifications of auditive communities
From the outside, listening can become the base
for a discourse focused on the meaning of
music, the influence that certain forms are
expected to have on the amateur?s taste,
emotion and attitude (Satanist proselytism in
extreme metal, sexism and crime in ?gangsta?
rap, violence in punk etc.), and thus a means
by which he is identified. What norms on
feeling, interpreting, reacting do such
moralized aesthetics prescribe? What type of
listening subject do they identify (some being
valued for their activity, originality, others,
stigmatized for their passivity, immaturity,
vulnerability, or even their voluntary servitude or perversity)?
NB: These are only suggestions for research. Any
article submitted on popular music and its
listeners or how it is listened to will go
through the double-blind peer review process.
There also is space in Volume! for papers on popular music and other topics.
Contributions should be sent by email (30.000 to
50.000 characters, Harvard system of
referencing, in .doc format) with an abstract,
key words and a short biography of the author, to the following addresses:
<mailto:(editions /at/ seteun.net)>(editions /at/ seteun.net),
<mailto:(gerome.guibert /at/ wanadoo.fr)>(gerome.guibert /at/ wanadoo.fr)
& <mailto:(jedediah-sklower /at/ hotmail.com)>(jedediah-sklower /at/ hotmail.com)
