Plasticine Music Socio-Material Strategies of Loving our Songs

Event details

My presentation is based on the findings of a research conducted in Mexico and the Uk about the role that music plays in listeners life. It departs from the concept of music as an assemblage and the concept of Attachments. This assemblage of devices, sounds, meanings, possibilities, expectations and knowledges from the past is what I call the Musical Experience. To learnt from it I developed the Music History Method, in which listeners would show me their devices, objects and collections and we might listener together some of their favourite music while they tell their story.

My findings suggest that the listener, through everyday practises, get attached to music by five main ‘drivers’, (1) construction of an intimate and a (2) social identity, (3) spatial and experiential management,  (4) the pursue of constant discovery and (5) a help to make sense of the world. Those drivers are constantly constituting each other.  

In this presentation I will focus on the way in which music is made malleable — through some of the above features — that allows the listener to keep the attachments to that specific music, while at the same time transforming them. Through strategies like acquiring knowledge, listening with others or listening at a different life stage, music becomes is transformed while at the same time stabilised. The metaphor of playing clay is helpful to make visible the object, as something that remains materially the same, and the way it is shaped to adjust different situations, to make the attachments to remain alive.

About the speaker