Plasticine Music–or the intimate social life of cultural objects

Abstract

Why do you value recorded popular music? How does popular music sticks to our lives through time? This article presents the concept of Plasticine Music to explore the way music becomes an assemblage through our individual embodied history with it. The concept intends to expand on recent developments on the value of recorded popular music outside capital and production systems. By following scholarship from Music Sociology and Feminist Materialism it invites to consider how pieces of music become part of our biographies through emotional forces, embodied actions and affects that transform the way we relate to music; the music change and we change with it. It focuses on the materiality of music with modifiable qualities, flexibility, resistance and non fixity, which lead to multiple new shapes. Plasticine music is a form of changeling traditional conceptions of meaning and cultural consumption, as well as considering the affective force of cultural objects.