Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses A…
Musical Gentrification is an exploration of the role of popular music in processes of socio-cultural inclusion and exclusion in a variety of contexts. Twelve chapters by international scholars reveal how cultural objects of relatively lower status, in this case popular musics, are made objects of acquisition by subjects or institutions of higher social status, thereby playing an important role …
In The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. Eidsheim illustrates how listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre—the color or tone of a voice. Eidsheim examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as th…
Professional musicians who perform in hospitals, retirement homes and prisons, creatively stimulated by the residents; babies crawling over exercise mats, enjoying classical music together with their parents; concert-goers who take their seats between the musicians in order to experience music up close with all their senses - the opportunities to make and experience music are almost unlimited. …
Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music by Steven Jan is a comprehensive account of the relationships between evolutionary theory and music. Examining the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ that drives biological and musical-cultural evolution, the book provides a distinctive commentary on how musicality and music can shed light on our understanding of Darwin’s famous theory, and vice-versa. Comp…
In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great c…