The Social Life of Tunes: Representing the Aesthetics of Reception
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I report on two years of participant observation of traditional musicians in Dublin, Ireland. In Irish traditional music, players from all walks of life gather at pub sessions to play tunes together. Due to the ethos of traditional music, the representation of tunes is a constant aesthetic concern. Drawing on the aesthetics of reception, I show how arriving at the proper “text” of a tune poses unique challenges. Rather than simply reading notes on sheet music, traditional musicians must imaginatively read the creative text on a “virtual space” to create art. Making music involves a nuanced process of learning, knowing, and retaining a tune. The tune is not a static entity but one dynamically shaped by its social context and provenance. The social life of tunes suggests that technologies ought to support the practice of practicing seamlessly across the performance-oriented session and the solitary pursuit of skill, while allowing novices a way to conceptualize the historical flexibility of the tune. I will outline a new agenda of surveilling tradition to represent the aesthetics of reception. With the burgeoning interest in the collaborative work of tradition, this work provides new perspectives into the creative processes involved in representation.
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Number of citations to item: 7
- Norman Makoto Su, Lulu Wang (2015): From Third to Surveilled Place, In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi:10.1145/2702123.2702574
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- Norman Makoto Su (2020): Threats of the Rural: Writing and Designing with Affect, In: Human–Computer Interaction Series, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6_3
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- Lynnsey Weissenberger (2015): Toward a universal, meta-theoretical framework for music information classification and retrieval, In: Journal of Documentation 5(71), doi:10.1108/jd-08-2013-0106
- Sean McGrath, Alan Chamberlain, Steve Benford (2016): The Grime Scene, In: Proceedings of the Audio Mostly 2016, doi:10.1145/2986416.2986433