Archive for calls, November 2010

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[ecrea] Volume! Call for papers : listening to popular music

Fri Nov 05 18:55:28 GMT 2010



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)



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