Raphaël Nowak

The sound of music heritage: curating popular music in music museums and exhibitions

Abstract A significant amount of previous academic research into popular music museums centres on critiques of the content, design and layout of predominantly authorised institutions. Throughout much of this research, authors consistently criticise the use, or rather, the perceived misuse, of music played within music museums, arguing that the music itself, rather than artefacts, constitutes the most significant part of popular music exhibition. This article seeks to counter this trend by exploring the challenges of incorporating recorded sound into popular music exhibits as understood by curators and exhibit designers. Utilising interviews conducted within 14 authorised and DIY museums devoted to popular music, the researchers demonstrate a distinct contrast between current academic critiques of music use in these museums and the attitudes of the people who create them. The result is a varied discussion surrounding sound in the museal space, including issues of sound bleed, technology and the creation of balance between artefacts and sound. This account draws attention to curators’ intentions of telling the story of popular music history by engaging with both the visual and aural memories of museum patrons, and suggests a new understanding of the purpose underpinning popular music museums in modern contexts.

Analysing Everyday Sound Environments: The Space, Time and Corporality of Musical Listening

This article develops the notion of ‘sound environment’ as a new way of theorizing the relationship between music, audiences and everyday life. The article draws on findings from an empirical case study conducted with young people between the ages of 21 and 32. In focusing on this age range, we consider ‘mundane’ music consumption practices in contrast to the more ‘spectacular’ forms of youth cultural music consumption often documented in academic work. In an age characterized by the increasing omnipresence of music, young people hear or listen to music in various configurations, for example, by mobilizing a particular music technology and content or hearing music while shopping in a department store, visiting a friend at home, or travelling in an elevator. Drawing on the concept of the ‘sound environment’, this article looks at variables of space, time and body to explain the contextualization of music in everyday life.

Understanding Everyday Uses of Music Technologies in the Digital Age

When American student Shawn Fanning and his uncle John Fanning created the peer-to-peer application Napster in 1999, they probably knew little about the extent to which this innovation would change the face of music consumption on a global scale. Indeed, ever since the massive success of peer-to-peer applications that have all followed the path opened by Napster, much has been said and written about the nature of change brought by the digital age of music technologies in music consumption.

Curating popular music heritage: storytelling and narrative engagement in popular music museums and exhibitions

ABSTRACT In parallel with a globally ageing ‘baby-boomer’ population, Western societies have seen an increase in the number of museums devoted to popular music. However, the discourse, design and display of traditional museums is at odds with the culture of popular music and its audience. This article explores how curators of ‘new museums’ of popular music harness aspects of storytelling to increase patron engagement within their exhibits. Drawing on interviews with curators in popular music museums around the world, it seeks to understand the ways memory and narratives are embedded in decisions regarding the design of substantial exhibitions and individual displays through a three-part framework of narrative-led approaches to design. Therein, the authors highlight issues relating to the overt use of narrative in popular music exhibits, including knowledge of amateur expert patrons, the potential for skewed or unbalanced histories, and the institutionalisation of the popular music genre at large.

The multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life: uncovering the performative hybridity of the iconic object

This article looks at the Apple iPod as an iconic and hybrid music object and explores the multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life. It reviews the existing literature on the iPod and advances two main paradigms on iPod culture – the individual cognition enabled by the Apple object during private and mobile listening practices or the algorithmic socialization afforded by the use of the Genius recommendation system for example. Tackling these two existing paradigms, I pose the hybridity of the iPod as the basis of its iconicity. Thus, the iPod allows its users to associate its materiality with various sorts of activities in everyday life (individual mobile listening, music sharing, algorithmic connections), and with other material objects (computers, earphones) and media (music social media). As an iconic object that accompanies the various moments of users’ everyday lives, the iPod embodies the new possibilities and directions of music consumption in the digital age of technologies and entangles issues that emerge in contemporary society, such as the increasing blurry separation between individual experiences and social structures.

Friendships with benefits? Examining the role of friendship in semi-structured interviews within music research

Abstract This article explores the ‘methodology of friendship’ and its wider potential within music research. Drawing on two research examples that made use of ‘friendship’ in distinct fashions – one that explores music listening practices in everyday life and the other, music as a site for racialisation – the article discusses how friendship can be incorporated within semi-structured interviews. The case studies act as examples of how to negotiate alterity in music research and how friendship represents a potential for gathering more detailed data. The notion of ‘alterity’, at the core of research relationships is critical to shift the conversation to an informal tone and improve the depth of the discourses gathered from informants. Consequently, this article addresses debates within qualitative (music) sociology by reconsidering friendship as an axis of power and examines the nature of the data gathered in semi-structured interviews through the methodology of friendship.

Curatorial practice in popular music museums: An emerging typology of structuring concepts

Museums have been central to the institutionalisation of popular music as heritage; yet, there has been little scholarly focus on the curatorial strategies behind the exhibition of popular music’s past. This article outlines an emerging typological framework of structuring concepts in curatorial practice in popular music museums. The typology brings into conversation concepts previously identified by a number of popular music museum scholars. These concepts are critically assessed and built upon substantively by drawing on the subjective experiences of curators involved in the exhibition of popular music in museums in a range of geographical locations. Eight concepts are discussed: dominant (and hidden) histories, projected visitor numbers, place, art and material culture, narrative, curator subjectivity, nostalgia and sound. We argue that such a framework acts as a useful tool for comparing institutional practices internationally and to more fully understand the ways in which popular music history is presented to museum visitors.

When is a discovery? The affective dimensions of discovery in music consumption

ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of music discovery and seeks to provide a definition of the act of discovering music content. Research on music consumption has weakly theorized what the moment of “discovery” consists of, since it has been more preoccupied with debates about the conditions of discoveries, which either highlight the importance of individuals’ social milieus or the enhanced technological agency that they enjoy in the digital age. Drawing on qualitative data about musical experiences, this article frames discoveries as affective responses to music content that occur within individuals’ life narratives and mediate their interpretation and definition of music.

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

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.

Rethinking the Roles of Music through Its Association with Life Narratives

The intertwinement of music with time does not only emphasize the necessary sociological investigation of the phenomenological relationships between individuals and everyday contexts as mediated by music. Research on music consumption must also allude to how the moments of interactions with music form a broader sense of musical accompaniment over time. For instance, in the first chapter of this book, I explore the evolution of music technologies and modes of consumption over the last 15 years, hinting towards a longitudinal perspective on how individuals of various generations adopt — and eventually abandon — certain technologies. In general, research on music consumption highlights its increasing omnipresence in everyday life and therefore its resource value for individuals. Such an approach evokes issues of the evolution of individuals’ everyday lives. As a consequence, it is underpinned by the question of who they are. In partaking in individuals’ everyday lives, music is said to contribute to constructing self-identities. For example, as Peter Martin states, ‘… [music] is often an important factor for the assertion or imputation of identity, both for individuals and social groups’ (2006, p. 28). However, the role of music on individuals’ identity construction and/or management remains unclear and debatable.