Misc (including sound studies)

Question 1

Agawu, Kofi. 2003. Representing African music: Postcolonial notes, queries, positions. New York: Routledge.

Answer 1

Agawu argues for a “scientific project of African musicology” (p. 49) in order to counteract the difference produced by modernist epistemologies. A consequence of that difference is that African musics have historically been treated in analytic terms that are distinct from those used for Western art music. He anticipates that if all musics were to be subject to the same analytic rigor, the EuroAmerican center would become more inclusive of African values.

Question 2

Fales, Cornelia. 2002. The paradox of timbre. Ethnomusicology 41.6: 56–95.

Answer 2

Argues against foregrounding textual features such as melody

• -timbral features are more culturally salient for performers and listeners.
• -several musical examples, dwelling on three Burundi song styles, to argue that properly timbral features are often attributed to more consciously apparent sonic stimuli (such as melody), and thus contribute directly to the sense that music has elusive affective meanings.

Question 3

Fales, Cornelia. 2005. Short­circuiting perceptual systems: Timbre in ambient and techno music. In Wired for sound: Engineering and technologies in sonic cultures. Edited by Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello, 156–180. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.

Answer 3

Proposes that the evolution of sound technologies over the past 150 years—from the mechanical to the electrical to the digital—are fundamentally shifting humans’ orientations to the auditory world from experiential and cognitive perspectives. Electronic music that can create sounds with no relation to the external world de-­anchors the historical connection between musical sound and the “real world” in which music has previously been performed.

Question 4

Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.

Answer 4

An examination of the ways that rap music challenged conventional definitions of popular music in the 1980s and 1990s. Rose argues that by shifting the locus of pop music value from melody and harmony to rhythm—and therefore to the distortion of low­-frequency vibration— rap introduced noise into the logic of popular music consumerism. The convergence of oppositional textual and sonic narratives is central in her analysis.

-foundational for research that links the timbral features of popular music to social practice

Question 5

Novak, David. 2013. Japanoise: Music at the edge of circulation. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

Answer 5

An ethnographic examination of “noise” as a transnational musical style that has become especially associated with contemporary Japan. Sonic “coherence” is examined as both an auditory and an historically specific phenomenon, with “noise” understood as sonic modes that violate accepted ideological sonic configurations.

Question 6

Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The political economy of music.

Answer 6

A formative work that argues that music is best understood as a socially, culturally, and historically specific organization of noise. While the primary argument of the book concerns political economy—that the organization of what any given society defines as music prefigures emerging forms of political organization and struggle—the metaphoric equation of social organization with sonic consonance or dissonance provides a novel way of understanding musical aesthetics.

Question 7

Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and reverb: Fabricating space in popular music recording, 1900–1960.

Answer 7

A predominantly textual analysis of sonic features that index “space” in monaural popular music sound recordings. This work is an invaluable resource to thinking about how the sonic qualities of ethnographic recordings are implicated in the representation of musical practices recorded in the field.

Question 8

Perlman, Marc. 2004. Golden ears and meter readers: The contest for epistemic authority in audiophilia.

Answer 8

Examines ideologies that link the rarefied listening practices of audiophilia to discourses that legitimize the evaluation of sound quality. The essay, based on ethnographic research, highlights the tension between scientific studies of sound quality and subjective evaluations that link sound directly to sensual experience, and points to how discourses about sound often ironically decouple technology from notions of the scientific.

Question 9

Ochoa Gautier, Ana Maria. 2006. Sonic transculturation, epistemologies of purification and the aural public sphere in Latin America.

Answer 9

explores the creation of an aural public sphere as constitutive of the colonial modern in Latin America by addressing the disciplinary construction of studies of traditional and popular music in the region.

Question 10

Feld, Steven. 2012. Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression.

Answer 10

This monograph articulates why sound is socially, cosmologically, and ecologically efficacious, demonstrating how these domains are connected through ways of listening. It offers a way in to close analysis to support the argument, and it treats music, language, weeping, song, and the acoustic environment as equally valuable in a social ecological world. Originally published in 1982.

Question 11

Feld, Steven. 1996. Waterfalls of song: An acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea

Answer 11

Unpacks the poetic, referential, musical, and acoustic details of a performance by the Kaluli singer and composer Ulahi. Explains these details in terms of Kaluli music theoretic discourse and situates the performance and lyrics in Ulahi’s biography and, more broadly, in Kaluli ways of relating to the gendered social and ecological world. Argues for the concept of “acoustemology,” sound as a way of knowing the world.

Question 12

Feld, Steven, Marina Roseman, Charles Keil, et al. 1984. Symposium on comparative sociomusicology.

Answer 12

Articles, responses, and discussion of new ways of thinking about the global and comparative questions about music raised by Lomax and Cantometrics, but arguing for a more radically local sense from which to make such comparative assessments. This approach is meant to overcome, in part, the criticism of Lomax’s glancing engagement with the musics and societies he was comparing.

Question 13

Feld, Steven. 1997. Dialogic editing: Interpreting how Kaluli read Sound and Sentiment.

Answer 13

What happens when one presents one’s writings and recordings to the subjects of one’s work and gives them full license to critique? How does one share authorship with research subjects? How do research subjects force one to reassess one’s own interpretations of their own cultural practices and meta-cultural understandings?

Question 14

Taylor, Timothy D. 2007. Beyond exoticism: Western music and the world.

Answer 14

This book addresses the three systems of domination from the 17th century to the present—colonialism, imperialism, globalization—and the
power enacted to musically represent Others.

Question 15

Stokes, Martin. 2004. Music in the global order.

Answer 15

explores accounts of globalization generated through the interactions and global myth­making generated by musical processes.

Question 16

Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making music Zulu in a South African studio.

Answer 16

This ethnography, which is principally sited in the control room of a recording studio, considers the politics of music production through
which a sound of Zuluness comes to circulate on the market during South Africa’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s.

Question 17

Feld, Steven. 2000. A sweet lullaby for world music. Public Culture 12.1: 145–171.

Answer 17

This essay explores the tension between celebratory and contentious narratives of music’s globalization and increasing virtuality. It historicizes the term “world music” and addresses how the interplay between anxiety and celebration takes form in the circulation of particular phonograms from ethnomusicological archives to the world music market.

Question 18

Feld, Steven. 1996. Pygmy POP: A genealogy of schizophonic mimesis.

Answer 18

Drawing on R. Murray Schafer’s term “schizophonia,” this article coins the term “schizophonic mimesis” to denote different practices of interaction and extraction of music from different parts of the world in the intensification of globalization. Feld specifically traces how this happens with pygmy music.

Question 19

Keil, Charles, and Steven Feld. 1994. Music grooves: Essays and dialogues.

Answer 19

A collection of previously published articles and newly transcribed dialogues between the two authors. In the era of “World Music” bins at big­box record stores and parallel charts in Billboard magazine, Keil and Feld reexamine their previous scholarship on world music, and talk through the confluence of commodification practices, sonic conventions, circulation networks, and performance practices of musicians from various musical traditions.

Question 20

Feld, Steven. 2012. Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression

Answer 20

This monograph articulates why sound is socially, cosmologically, and ecologically efficacious, demonstrating how these domains are connected through ways of listening. It offers a way in to close analysis to support the argument, and it treats music, language, weeping, song, and the acoustic environment as equally valuable in a social ecological world. Originally published in 1982.

Question 21

Feld, Steven. 1996. Waterfalls of song: An acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi

Answer 21

Unpacks the poetic, referential, musical, and acoustic details of a performance by the Kaluli singer and composer Ulahi. Explains these details in terms of Kaluli music theoretic discourse and situates the performance and lyrics in Ulahi’s biography and, more broadly, in Kaluli ways of relating to the gendered social and ecological world. Argues for the concept of “acoustemology,” sound as a way of knowing the world.

Question 22

Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983

Answer 22

Argues that Western classical music of the 17th through 19th centuries is amenable to a Chomskyan syntactic analysis whereby musical motifs may be organized into a series of hierarchically embedded trees. Indeed, if any music presents itself to the analyst as foregrounding its “syntax,” it is Western classical music of this period.

Question 23

Jakobson, Roman. 1987. Musicology and linguistics. In Language in literature.

Answer 23

Discusses parallels between the study of music and phonology. Like the sound systems of languages, music is a hierarchically organized collection of systematic relations between elements. Tones in a scale are thus analogous to phonemes. It is through understanding how elements gain their sense through these contrasting systematic relationships that makes the study of musicology analogous to that of linguistics. Originally published in 1932.

Question 24

Feld, Steven, Aaron A. Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels. 2004. Vocal anthropology: From the music of language to the language of song.

Answer 24

Through three case studies, describes overlaps between affective, indexical, and iconic aspects of speech and song. The first case describes the sound symbolism used in recording studio conversations about timbre. The second two present analyses of the vocal inflections of San Carlos Apache and Texas country singers.

Question 25

Feld, Steven. 1974. Linguistic models in ethnomusicology.

Answer 25

A critical review of ethnomusicologists’ attempts at using linguistic theories to account for musical phenomena. A foundational point for
thinking about more recent explorations of the language­-music relationship.

Question 26

Wennerstrom, Ann. 2001. The music of everyday speech: Prosody and discourse analysis.

Answer 26

Explores the idea that the prosodic features of speech—intonation, tempo, stress, and pause patterns—are central to the communicative
value of a speech act. The work thus overtly links the sonic material of musicality in speech acts to key questions of discourse analysis.

Question 27

Tomlinson, Gary. 2001. Musicology, anthropology, history.

Answer 27

Traces the academic distinction between “history” and “ethnography” to a philosophical split between vocal and instrumental music in the West. Argues that the distinction between texted song and untexted “pure” music was the lynchpin in the emergence of musicology as a historical rather than culturalogical endeavor.

Question 28

Spitzer, Michael. 2004. Metaphor and musical thought.

Answer 28

An exploration of the ways in which discourse about music in the Western tradition has made use of metaphorical tropes to communicate about musical experiences held to be abstract. Presents a history of key metaphorical concepts in musical metadiscourse, such as “harmony,” “rhythm,” and “melody.”

Question 29

Feld, Steven, and Aaron A. Fox. 1994. Music and language.

Answer 29

A review of the scholarly social science and humanities literature on the subject. The authors argue that the language/music literature falls into four basic groups, investigating (1) linguistic aspects of music, (2) musical aspects of language, (3) poetic uses of language in musical contexts, and (4) linguistic metadiscourses on music. They propose Peirceian semiotics moves scholars past these categories.

Question 30

Feld, Steven. 1984. Communication, music, and speech about music.

Answer 30

Analyzes the phenomenon of “speech about music” in order to demonstrate the ways in which music and language overlap as forms of communication. Feld rejects the approach that places language at the “referential” end of a continuum with music occupying the “emotional” opposite end.

Question 31

Porcello, Thomas. 1998. “Tails out”: Social phenomenology and the ethnographic representation of technology in music­making.

Answer 31

Examines links between field research and musical performance, and argues for recorded sound as a metaphor for the fieldwork encounter.

Question 32

Feld, Steve, and Donald Brenneis. 2004. Doing anthropology in sound.

Answer 32

Explores what might be promised and entailed by imagining ethnographic scholarship not as written text, but as aural.