AMS Preliminary Program
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AMS Preliminary Program Virtual Annual Meeting 7–8 and 14–15 November 2020 This schedule is subject to change. A nal program will be published at the end of October. Day 1, 07 Nov 2020 09:00AM - 09:45AM Morning yoga session Track : AMS/SMT Joint Sessions | SMT | AMS Meeting Room 1 10:00AM - 10:50AM Musical Contagions, Circulations, and Ecologies of Listening to Social Media Track : AMS Webinar 1 Speakers Michael Levine, University Of North Carolina - Chapel Hill Paula Harper, Washington University In St. Louis Hannah Judd, University Of Chicago In the opening decades of the millennium, pervasive social media and digital streaming services and online audiovisual listening platforms have eected new modes of authorship, enabled new patterns and pathways of circulation, and engendered new forms and practices of participatory culture.The papers in this panel explore intersections of sound, music, and digital platforms and technologies in the twenty-rst century-considering how music and musical practice shape-and are shaped by-novel digital modalities and new media formats. These new modalities enable the formation of new types of musical communities, around novel objects that push at traditional boundaries of "music." Through examinations of catchy jazz ris, mini dance challenges, and bedroom music studios, the authors of this panel draw together disparate sonic and audiovisual objects that resonate shared themes of circulation, aect, and vernacular labor. The papers examine connective features of catchiness, even "virality," enabled by emergent digital ecosystems, stressing the centrality of aspiring amateur creators and remixers to digital musical communities. The objects under consideration illustrate the close proximity of audiovisual gimmickry and the stakes of creators' livelihood, while also forwarding digital listening as space for demonstrations of virtuosity and community. In addition to bringing together a variety of mediated musical objects, the case studies examined by this panel's authors stretch across platforms familiar and unfamiliar, corporate and oppositional-from YouTube and TikTok to the "sneakernet" of Cuba's el paquete semanal. The panel authors examine how the architectures, aordances, and constraints of the platforms themselves shape both the musical objects that they circulate, and the listening behaviors of the listeners and viewers that use them. By turning our critical aural attention to the aective resonances of online musical encounter and exchange across platforms, the papers on this panel work together to highlight an understanding that music, genre, and technologies are cultural constructions and not neutral. These platforms of online listening are aective and political environments where users' activity, behavior, and values reveal important insight into the dissemination of popular music, identity politics, digital labor and fandom, economic and cultural hierarchies/inequities, user interactions and demographics, and the aesthetics of online making, performing, and sharing. Sneaking Across the Digital Divide: Piracy and Music Making in Havana’s Bedroom Studios 10:00AM - 10:50AM Presented by : Michael Levine, University Of North Carolina - Chapel Hill Cuba ranks among the world's least connected and most repressive nations for information and communication technologies. To circumvent these restrictions, technologists and entrepreneurs have developed an alternative to the internet called el paquete semanal (EP) or "the weekly package." Cubans across the country use el paquete semanal to share digital content without cables or modems. Through a nation-wide, underground "sneakernet"-the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network- this 1-terabyte collection of music, movies and software applications is delivered discreetly to participants' USB drives ostensibly without the knowledge of the Cuban state. Though ocially illegal, I argue that el paquete semanal acts as a dynamic, grassroots form of virtual communication that is more equitable to artists and their audiences than the globally accessible, high-bandwidth internet models propagated by application-based music streaming platforms.Among other media, EP makes available an unprecedented range of musical choices to consumers, including reggaetón reparto (or Cuban- style reggaetón), which is otherwise banned from the nation's state-owned media platforms. Due to ocial biases regarding the perceived vulgarity of reggaetón reparto, these artists-almost all of them Afro-Cuban-are censored from broadcast over ocial media channels. For Cubans without internet access, this means that their work is only accessible through EP. This seeming limitation, however, does not impose limits on artists' popularity. EP, in fact, provides a platform whose scope and frequency allows artists the opportunity to disseminate music throughout the nation without requiring the support of state media or other cultural gatekeepers. Artistic activity is instead centered around make-shift music recording studios that often serve dual roles as both bedroom and digital recording setup. In these intimate spaces, music is created, contested and shared across virtually accessible public spaces.In this paper, I employ ethnographic observations, informal interviews and material analysis of the informal methods of "sneakernet" circulation of several artists and producers working in and around these Havana-based bedroom recording studios. From these private spaces, producers use el paquete semanal to participate in both ends of music circulation: Pirated software is rst downloaded from the device, allowing artists the means to generate new musical material. Finished products are then distributed through subsequent releases of el paquete semanal. Lastly, through increasing access to social media platforms, artists promote their music virtually across the world. How does this production cycle contest the authority of popular music streaming platforms accessed throughout the Global North (e.g. Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music), and how is the increasing adoption of internet- capable devices shifting the way in which Afro-Cuban artists distribute and promote music through social media platforms? I situate pirated sonic technologies employed at Havana-based recording studios as central to the production and circulation of music, and connected to an emerging network society existing outside Cuba's ocial media sphere. Against the assumption that media piracy produces only copies, el paquete semanal sounds new possibilities. Music as Sync and Hook in the TikTok Bedroom 10:00AM - 10:50AM Presented by : Paula Harper, Washington University In St. Louis Scholarship around the YouTube platform has often centered the bedroom as metonymic for the platform's aesthetics and participatory practices more broadly: low-quality video and audio production, a modality of intimacy and unscripted direct address, and harvestable as content for response or remix. In this paper, I analyze how users on the late-2010s platform TikTok build on this framework and savvily deploy the bedroom (and other individualized domestic enclosures, including the home and car) as performance space-the location of displaced and asynchronous collaboration, instruction, and display. A decade past the rise of YouTube, TikTok performers complicate simple collapsings of intimate space with amateur aesthetics; the platform's own built-in ltering and editing features encourage the creation of content that uncannily sutures high and low production values. The TikTok bedroom is necessarily porous, honeycombed together with others across the app, modules linked through music and dance. A popular platform feature enables "Duets"-split-screen video responses that amplify both original creator and new collaborator. Similarly, dance challenges abound, linked by the musical tracks that accompany them and supplemented by a tutorial subgenre in which skilled dancers demonstrate popular choreographies. On TikTok, moreso than on any preceding platform, music and sound function as fundamental components of contagion and spread. Crucially, each video's sound le is made visible as a metadata hyperlink; when clicked, the le assembles an archive of all other videos using the same sound--and the viewer can easily tap a button within that archive to contribute to it, making a video accompaniment of their own. With music as an architectural platform feature designed to condense participation around sound les as hooks, performing along with a popular sound functions as a gateway to visibility, aording guaranteed inclusion in a potentially-viral archive. Across videos, sound and music thus serve as sites for both sink and sync, ensnaring user attention and behavior as they construct digital communities of shared aect and practice.I situate this centering of the microsoundtrack as a culmination of longer histories of digital virality, in which sound and music have been widely instrumentalized to render surveillance, advertising, and the mechanics of digital platform capitalism more palatable. TikTok, I argue, functions as an accelerated YouTube-in the duration of its videos, the speed of its production and exhaustion of memetic content, and in its blatant absorption of the bedroom into the sphere of digital aspirational labor. Of Gimmickry and Man: the Lick’s Circulation through Virtual Jazz Communities 10:00AM - 10:50AM Presented by : Hannah Judd, University Of Chicago