Affectiave milieus and singing bodies in a social musical app

Abstract

This chapter reveals how Smule, a social-music application, de-territorializes music from the canons of professional territories, performers and milieus. The app is a site of an assemblage of musical composition comprising overlapping events. The musical score, already composed and databased, reconnects with new singing bodies (To Deleuze, bodies are de-stratified and comprise both human and non-human machines). In this context of users appropriating Smule, they become singing bodies through their interrelations and assemblages with music; the features of the interface, the affective potentialities of the app and that of users; in addition to singing, searching the database and pairing with already existing music bodies to compose the duet song. These singing bodies are bodies without organs [BwO]) that reconfigure popular music, besides unfolding the emergent potentiality of affective work engendered by the becoming musical performances of amateur singers. The becoming-music in Smule is performed through relations between the human and the non-human, the material and the immaterial bodies. The assemblage of these bodies enunciates and exhibits affective tendencies and attunements. Musical performances enacted through singing along with the materialities of the interface of the app re-ontologize music in Smule. Further, the musical bodies (an assemblage of singing bodies and sonic materialities), recode milieus and events with new formations and becomings of music. While the sonic patterns are repeated, singing as an event in the different milieus of the app produces variations and differences.