Music and Social Movements

Music is a key component of social movements. This article addresses the relationship between music and social movements through four foci: collective identity, free space, emotions, and social movement culture. Collective identity is developed and nurtured within free spaces through the use of music. These spaces are often rife with emotions that are instrumental in development of collective identity. A social movement culture may develop as these processes unfold. Music is part of this culture and serves as an important mechanism for solidarity when participants move beyond free spaces to more contested ones. Examples of song lyrics demonstrate these processes. Research on music and social movements, it is argued here, can be enhanced by addressing technology and popular culture.     

Homophily of music listening in online social networks of China

Homophily, ranging from demographics to sentiments, breeds connections in social networks, either offline or online. However, with the prosperous growth of music streaming services, whether homophily exists in online music listening remains unclear. In this study, two online social networks of the same group of active users who listened to complete songs over 1000 times and posted over 100 tweets are established, separately, in Netease Music and Weibo. Through presented multiple similarity measures, it is evidently demonstrated that homophily does exist in music listening for both online social networks. The unexpected listening similarity in Weibo also implies that knowledge from generic social networks can be confidently transferred to domain-oriented networks for context enrichment and algorithm enhancement. Comprehensive factors that might function in the formation of homophily are further probed, and many interesting patterns are profoundly revealed. It is found that female friends are more homogeneous in music listening and that positive and energetic songs significantly pull users close. Our methodology and findings shed light on realistic applications in online music services.     

“Don't Step on My Groove!”: Gender and the Social Experience of Rock

This article utilizes a symbolic interactionist framework to examine how gender is, and is not, salient in “depth‐listening” practices. Based on qualitative interviews with male and female fans of contemporary “angry” rock music by female performers, the author shows that men and women engage in similar processes of cultivation (especially with regard to emotion) in depth listening, but that they also employ gender as a socio‐semiotic resource to interpret their relationships to the music and artists differently and to evaluate what this music could mean in their daily lives. Gender identity is influential in how the music is constructed as personally transformative for informants and as having implications for social change.     

'When you're trying something on you picture yourself in a place where they are playing this kind of music'– musically sponsored agency in the British clothing retail sector

Despite the philosophical tradition from Plato onward, sociologists have not yet explored in full music's role as an active ingredient in social formation. This project has been left to environmental psychologists and market researchers who are more interested in 'what' music can cause than in exploring its mechanisms of operation and the implications of these mechanisms for the constitution of social agency. This paper draws upon ethnographic research in and around High Street retail outlets to examine music's role in shaping consumer agency – in-store conduct, purchase behaviour subjectivity, identity. Exploring music in this way illuminates the interface of material culture, social action and subjectivity. Music is used by retailers to signal target clientele and brand image and to structure the temporal dimensions of the retail to environment over the day, week and year. It is also used to structure in-store conduct. It is more important in relation to younger shoppers and to 'browsers'. Some stores rely upon unacknowledged skill of sales assistants, who often act as ambassador users of store products, to make and implement local music policies. Music provides contextualization cues that may structure in-store subjectivity and clients' orientations to themselves as consumers and to goods on display. The heightened degree of aesthetic reflexivity exhibited by younger shoppers may be part of a transformation of the processes in and through which agency is produced and reproduced, one that is linked to an ascendancy of commercial control over agency's constitution.     

Adolescents and Music Media: Toward an Involvement‐Mediational Model of Consumption and Self‐Concept

Using social cognitive theory and structural regression modeling, we examined pathways between early adolescents' music media consumption, involvement with music media, and 3 domains of self‐concept (physical appearance, romantic appeal, and global self‐worth; N=124). A mediational model was supported for 2 domains of self‐concept. Music media consumption was positively associated with adolescents' involvement with media focusing on music personae. Higher involvement was associated with perceiving the self as less physically attractive and having lower overall self‐worth. Music media consumption was directly related to adolescents' evaluations of their own romantic appeal. Results suggest that through involvement processes with music media characters, adolescents may use music media as a venue for social comparison against which they evaluate their own physical attractiveness and self‐worth. Music media consumption may also provide social modeling for normative expectations about romantic relationships regardless of the level of involvement. Gender differences were nonsignificant in the mediational model.     

Gaze in married couples

This study examined the looking behavior of married couples during a 10 minute interaction segment. The variables examined included marital adjustment level, interaction role (speaking or listening) and type of message. Wives were more likely to look at their spouses than husbands were, and speakers were more likely to look at their partners than were listeners. While high marital adjustment spouses looked less over all types of mesages, low marital adjustment spouses particularly looked more than the highs on negative messages, suggesting either a confrontation component to the looking, or a strong need to monitor the partner's reactions in such situations. There was also evidence of more displayed competitiveness in the low marital adjustment couples. Correlational analyses revealed that there were different relationships between the looking behavior of the speaking spouse and the looking behavior of the listening spouse, and between the spouses' patterns of looking when speaking or listening and that these differences were dependent on marital adjustment level.     

Music listening: its effects in creating a healing environment

Older adults face challenges in function, cognition, and isolation as they age. Nurses are responsible for providing a healing environment to promote health and well-being. Music listening is an intervention that could be used to facilitate a healing environment. This article provides examples of evidence that music can improve the healing environment for older adults, both physiologically and psychologically. Music can connect individuals with their emotions and bring about a sense of self-awareness that improves the quality of life for older adults. Music is a safe, inexpensive, and easy-to-use intervention that nurses can implement independently to help older adults cope with pain, acute confusion, and functional deficits. Examples of ways nurses can use music to provide a healing environment are also included.     

An Ethnography of Emerging Latino Music Scenes

We report on an ethnographic study of three emerging scenes in which Latino music is produced, performed, experienced, and celebrated in Houston, Texas: rock en Espanol, gay Latino dance music, and professional soccer supporters' music. Music is an important feature of Latino culture, since it informs migration, citizenship, spirituality, and other aspects of the contemporary Latino experience. Three interactionist concepts inform this study. The concept of scene directs our attention to the comprehensive social worlds driven by Latino music. The concept of idioculture directs our attention to the ways audience members experience Latino music within everyday life small groups. The concept of place directs our attention to how Latino music creates new locations to anchor the self in reference to country of origin, present music communities, or possible symbolic locations such as America or La Raza. We conclude with suggestions for a revised interactionist concept of music scene.     

Symbolic Interaction with Consumer Products: An Affect Control Theory Approach

Symbolic interactionism is one of the few social psychology perspectives that recognizes the important role of physical artifacts, including consumer products, in social life. Consumer products are artifacts people can use to maintain the expressive order within social life – the order that is embedded within the shared meanings of a culture. As a formal theory of symbolic interactionism, affect control theory emphasizes culturally shared affective meaning, the impressions produced within social events, and identity processes that rely on those cultural meanings and social events. We contend that affect control theory provides a framework for understanding and researching how consumer products influence people's social experience and interaction. First, we specifically explore how affect control theory's concepts of affective meaning, identity modification, and impression management can be applied to understanding consumer products. Building on this foundation, we then consider how affect control theory might also contribute to three new research directions: social interaction with consumer products, affective design of consumer products, and the prosumer identity created from consumer products. Our conclusion is that affect control theory provides sociologists with a means of exploring the important and fascinating questions that emerge when we consider people's symbolic interaction with consumer products.     

The Attitude of High School Pupils Toward History

Music has been a source of inspiration, of protest, of wisdom, and of emotion for millennia. In the United States, music became woven into the fabric of the culture well before it became a nation and it remains so today. Songs have expressed a range of emotions and informed listeners of historical, social, and political issues at every level of sophistication. Yet our passion for music, coupled with its significance as an artifact of history, has not found its way into classrooms in any prominent way. This article explores four models of using music in the history classroom, each of which ventures to encourage history teachers to consider music, its analysis, and even its creation as integral to history curricula. Each model uses various instructional strategies grounded in tenets of historical thinking and range from a teacher-centered Close Reading Model to inquiry and discovery-based approaches, concluding with a student-centered model of Creative Development.     

The sound of liminality: MHD's afro trap,affective listening,and the (re)invention of Afropean identities in France

This article is an exploration of the world making capacities of afro trap. Through an extended case study of MHD's discography, I ask what can be learnt about the liminal experiences of postcolonial black citizens, or Afropean citizens, in France, by listening to popular music. I argue that through embracing, reinventing, and (re)producing familiar Afropean soundscapes, MHD claims and creates from his liminal subject position. Going against the assumption that Frenchness and blackness are always mutually exclusive and in tension, this music sonically proposes a way of being otherwise in France, stemming from this liminality. I see in what I call ‘the sound of liminality’ an instance of ‘queering ethnicity,’ one which channels the affective capacities of sound. I propose affective listening as a method that, incorporating autoethnography to consider critical listening positionality, facilitates a renewed attention to sound as an object of sociological inquiry.     

Listening in a Multilingual World: The Challenges of Second Language (L2) Listening

Research into language acquisition and oral language use was examined in order to identify key factors that contribute to the successful acquisition of second language (L2) listening ability. The factors were grouped into three major domains: affective, cognitive, and interpersonal. It is claimed that in each domain, proficient L2 listeners have developed strategies, that is, plans of conscious action, in order to address persistent challenges of L2 acquisition. For the affective domain, the strategies concern development of resilience in order to maintain long-term motivation and investment of identity as an active user of the L2. For the cognitive domain, the strategies involve relearning the phonological system of the L2 as an independent system in order to counteract native language influences and using compensation tactics to supplement the influences of semantic organization of one’s native language. For the interpersonal domain, the strategies involve accommodation to communication styles and a task orientation to interaction. Research is reviewed from cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, pragmatics, bilingualism studies, and language pedagogy, with the aim of identifying particular obstacles faced by L2 listeners and practical approaches used to cope with them.     

Extending the Symbolic Interactionist Theory of Interaction Processes: A Conceptual Outline

This article outlines the elements of a more robust symbolic interactionist theory of interpersonal processes. I argue that George Herbert Mead's conceptualization of interaction processes can be extended to explain not only micro‐level social processes but also key elements of meso‐ and macro‐level dynamics. By expanding Mead's and more recent symbolic interactionist theorizing, and incorporating key ideas from other theoretical traditions outside symbolic interactionism proper, it becomes possible to develop a theory of interaction that fills in important conceptual gaps in theories on the dynamics of micro‐, meso‐, and macro‐level social phenomena.     

Legitimating the First Tattoo: Moral Passage through Informal Interaction

Once considered low class or dangerous symbols, tattoos began to be defined as hip, trendy, and glamorous in the 1990s. Using the increasing popularity of tattoos among nineties youth as an example of moral passage, this article examines some of the interpretive processes at work in the destigmatization of deviance. Whereas researchers have positioned political action or population shifts as the main forces influencing moral passage, this article posits a new route toward social change. It builds on participant observation data with a population of middle‐class tattooees and examines how individuals attempted to legitimate their tattoos during interactions with others. First‐time tattooees in the 1990s are seen as agents caught between multiple symbolic orders—symbolic orders that generated conflicting images of tattoos. Relying on a set of legitimation techniques, middle‐class tattooees worked to overcome the negative meanings associated with tattoos by getting body art that conformed to core mainstream norms and values. By examining the creation and use of these legitimation maneuvers, this article reveals the way in which definitions of deviance are negotiated in everyday contexts. In addition, the process of legitimation identified in this article points to one way in which everyday interactions can contribute to larger cultural shifts.     

Black Edens,country Eves: Listening,performance, and black queer longing in country music

ABSTRACT

This article explores Black queer country music listening, performance, and fandom as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining, and continued racial and economic segregation. For many Black country music listeners and performers, the experience of being a closeted fan also fosters an experience of ideological hailing, as well as queer world-making. Royster suggests that through Black queer country music fandom and performance, fans construct risky and soulful identities. The article uses Tina Turner's solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! (1974) as an example of country music's power as a tool for resistance to racial, sexual, and class disciplining.     

Musical Ties That Bind: Nostalgia,Affect, and Heritage in Festival Narratives

Affective heritage embracement, a collective narrative of nostalgia, is identified at two popular music festivals. “MusicFest” embraces a tradition of “Red Dirt” country music through performance (music festival), whereas the “Walnut Valley Festival” embraces a bluegrass/folk musical heritage through performance and participation (musicians' festival). The symbolic importance of musical interaction is explored to highlight the experienced emotionality that leads to the affective ties that bind these otherwise temporary communities. This collective narrative reveals the various functions of nostalgia wherein collective sentiment both reflects and creates the perceived authentic experiences of festival attendees.     

Mirroring,Mentalizing, and the Social Neuroscience of Listening

Listening to another speak is a basic process in social cognition. In the social neurosciences, there are relatively few studies that directly bear on listening; however, numerous studies have investigated the neural bases of some of the likely constituents of successful listening. In this article, I review some of this work as it relates to listening, with a focus on two auxiliary processes in the comprehension of speech: perceiving the nonverbal behaviors, such as facial expression, that accompany an utterance (i.e., how it is being said); and interpreting an utterance and the nonverbal behaviors that accompany it in terms of the speaker's state of mind (i.e., why it is being said). The review indicates the presence of two large-scale systems in the human brain that play a major role in successful listening: the putative mirror neuron system, which likely facilitates the relatively automatic perception of the how of speech; and the so-called mentalizing system, which likely underlies our ability to actively reach conclusions about the why of speech behavior. I conclude by considering the possibility that the dynamic interaction of mirroring and mentalizing processes may be pivotal for successful listening and social interaction more generally.     

What Types of Training Improve Learners’ Performances in Second Language Listening Comprehension?

This study investigates the impact of a high-level and a low-level process-based L2 comprehension training on L1 French students’ listening performances. These students (N = 108) of English, Spanish, and German came from five different classes. After a L2 comprehension pretest, the participants were divided into two experimental groups. During the experimental phase, the two groups listened to the same three documents in their respective L2. The first group undertook listening comprehension activities relying on low-level processes, while the second group undertook activities aiming at fostering their use of high-level processes. These second types of activities were based on the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal & Tafaghodatari, 2006). As hypothesized, less skilled listeners trained to automatize low-level processes, scored significantly higher on the comprehension posttest than on the pretest. However, the hypothesis that more skilled listeners trained to develop high-level listening processes, would score better on the posttest than on the pretest could not be verified. Nevertheless, we observed some tendencies showing that more skilled learners had drawn some benefits from the training. In our conclusion, we argue that the impact of a high-level and a low-level process-based L2 comprehension training strongly depends on learners’ initial levels.     

Twelve-month-old infants’ physiological responses to music are affected by others’ positive and negative reactions

Infants show remarkable skills for processing music in the first year of life. Such skills are believed to foster social and communicative development, yet little is known about how infants’ own preferences for music develop and whether social information plays a role. Here, we investigate whether the reactions of another person influence infants’ responses to music. Specifically, 12-month-olds (N = 33) saw an actor react positively or negatively after listening to clips of instrumental music. Arousal (measured via pupil dilation) and attention (measured via looking time) were assessed when infants later heard the clips without the actor visible. Results showed greater pupil dilation when listening to music clips that had previously been reacted to negatively than those that had been reacted to positively (Exp. 1). This effect was not replicated when a similar, rather than identical, clip from the piece of music was used in the test phase (Exp. 2, N = 35 12-month-olds). There were no effects of the actor's positive or negative reaction on looking time. Together, our findings suggest that infants are sensitive to others’ positive and negative reactions not only for concrete objects, such as food or toys, but also for more abstract stimuli including music.