Role-Normative Modes of Listening and the Affective Possibilities of Music

Abstract

What is the value of music as a resource within contemporary modes of consumption and throughout everyday life? Is it in fact possible to account for the myriad of ways individuals interpret music and associate it with everyday contexts? The promise of the sociology of music establishes the mediated affects of music’s textuality throughout the course of its diffusion, or within modes of consumption. In other words, music certainly has characteristics, or ‘affordances’ (DeNora, 2000; see also Gibson, 1966, 1979), that are ‘invariants’ (Clarke, 2005), but which are also fused and mediated within an assemblage of ‘variant’ characteristics, from the multi-layered composition of everyday contexts to the emotional reflexivity of individuals who hear it or listen to it. Musical texts acquire a variety of associations within contemporary modes of music consumption, particularly in considering that the diffusion of recorded music is also materially differentiated by the range of music technologies that individuals use to listen to it in everyday life. As Tia DeNora (2000) points out, the sociology of music does not aim to overlook the importance of music texts. On the contrary, by acknowledging the various configurations of affects that music text acquires within contexts, the sociology of music refuses to reduce the signification of music to its invariant characteristics, which could somehow only be uncovered by experts in the field (Finnegan, 2003). Texts entangle a set of stimuli that are responded to within contexts (Martin, 1995). The challenges presented by an analysis of music’s affects lie in the definition of what an ‘affect’ is, in the conditions of its emergence, and in how it is grasped upon and interpreted.