Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century

Abstract

This anthology is the result of a scholarly collaboration we started in 2011. Thanks to the generosity of the Center for the Arts in Society and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University we were able create Listening Spaces, an interdisciplinary project to examine the variety of ways people listen to, consume, and produce music in an increasingly digitized world. It was an attempt to combine the methodological and analytical approaches of music theory, musicology, and psychology with the historical materialism of cultural studies. We also conceptualized our project as a way of bridging a practitioner’s emphasis on musical performance with a humanities and social science focus on the objects, cultures and politics human beings create out of music-making. Our approach is not entirely new. This set of concerns is broadly understood as the province of ethnomusicology, which attends to the above set of interlocking concerns with an anthropological thrust. Since the early 1990s these concerns have also been addressed within the field of sound studies, which, as Jonathan Sterne writes “takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (Sterne 2011, p. 2). While music is not the central focus of sound studies, we were drawn to it precisely because it represented a way to conceptualize the study of music in a way that truly embraced many mediating formats and scholarly disciplines.