Music as Media Research Focus Group
6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building (HSSB)
Conveners:
John Hajda (visiting Asst. Professor, Music), jhajda@music.ucsb.edu
Howie Giles (Professor, Communication), giles@comm.ucsb.edu
Statement of Purpose
What we know is based on what we ask and how we ask
it. This is certainly true for music, which has been
studied from a vast breadth and depth of perspectives.
Many of these perspectives are expressed as metaphors
that cross disciplinary boundaries and methodologies,
such as music symbolic form (semiotics/music theory)
or music as culture (anthropology/ethnomusicology).
We conceive of music as media – means of effecting
or conveying a message from producer (composer, performer)
to receiver (listener) – and as mass media –
means of communication (as music in radio, film, television
or advertising) that is designed to reach “the
people”. Our interests span traditional and contemporary
musical styles as they are manifest at UCSB and in our
community, such as hip hop, jazz, country, Western classical,
gospel, mariachi and Middle Eastern music. We also consider
the role of music in multimedia performing arts such
as opera, Polynesian dance, salsa, musical theater,
etc.
A musical work, or a multimedia work that contains
music, has significance at individual and collective
social, cultural, and political levels. Individually,
humans create, perform, and listen to music for multiple
affective and cognitive functions. On the collective
level, music embodies transactive cultural processes;
in other words, music affects our processing of social
events and social events, in turn, affect our interpretation
of associated music.
Our conception of music positions us to study music
from an interdisciplinary model that bridges so-called
“gaps” between the humanities and the sciences.
Although our approach as individual researchers has
mainly been quantitative and scientific, we are methodologically
and ideologically eclectic. We are interested in discursive
analyses of how people talk about music and their musical
experiences, preferences, and evaluations.
While there are journals in both psychology and communication
that specialize in music, on the whole music is peripheral
in both disciplines. In a similar way, psychological
and communication sciences perspectives are peripheral
in musicological research. Our desire is to elevate
this type of interdisciplinary research to the mainstream
of all three fields. Members of our group have research
contacts in a host of Pacific Rim countries in North
America, Australia and New Zealand, and east, south,
and southeast Asia. Therefore, we embrace and engage
a plethora of questions. A sampling of these questions
is provided below to reflect the flavor of the diversity
of our interests, and these include, but are not restricted
to:
• Strategies for music listening
• Identity
• Meaning and Persuasion
There is a body of extant research in anthropological,
musicological, psychological and sociological literature
that deals with these issues on a compartmentalized
basis. Our goal is to synthesize these approaches to
gain a more holistic understanding of relationships
and processes in music as media.
Participants
David Hamilton (Professor, Psychology)
Robin Nabi (Asst. Professor, Communication)
Caja Thimm (visiting Professor, University of Bonn,
Communication and Media Studies)
Upcoming Activities, 2005-06
John Hajda has proposed a fall symposium to the IHC
for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, Music/Multi-Media
and Meaning. We see this fall series as a way to “kick-start”
this Research Focus Group.
We wish to embark on a program of collegial, collaborative
research. While those who wish to benefit on a personal,
professional level are certainly welcome to participate,
our primary focus is to produce research that could
not, due to its complexity and multidisciplinarity,
be the output of a single researcher. It is one thing
to bring together people who are doing related research;
it is quite another to bring people together in order
to create research. We believe that the humanities would
benefit from the approach, which is common in the sciences.
While the focus of our group is collaborative research,
we foresee opportunities to bring in outside speakers.
Invited Speakers:
Professor Timothy Taylor (UCLA)
Professor Anno Mungen (University of Bonn, Musicology/Communication
and Media Studies)
