I hear music: Popular music and its mediations

Abstract

Using as its platform Philip Tagg's 2011 article ‘Caught on the back foot: Epistemic inertia and visible music', this essay identifies gaps in the literature of popular music studies. In particular it discusses aspects and forms of music-making which do not fit the model of popular music based on modern mediations and commodification, but which are nonetheless crucial to an understanding of the history and present state of the relationship between music, affect and society. These are discussed under the headings ‘vernacular music' and ‘corporeality', both of which are largely occluded by theoretical models that deploy conceptual categories inappropriate in the analysis of sonic phenomenologies. The essay proposes a greater interdisciplinary and historical range, and a closer link between the study of music and the physiology and physics of sonicity and noise.