Popular music

About: Popular music is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13461 publications have been published within this topic receiving 186174 citations. The topic is also known as: pop music & pop.

Music in Everyday Life

Abstract: The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Abstract: This work contains almost 30,000 articles containing over 25 million words on musicians, composers, musicologists, instruments, places, genres, terms, performance practice, concepts, acoustics and more. All the articles are written by experts in their subject. There are over 500 biographies of composers, performers and writers on music and over 1,500 articles on styles, terms, and genres. It also includes: over 500 articles on ancient music and church music over 700 articles on regions, countries and cities over 2,000 articles on instruments and their makers and performance practice over 650 articles on printing and publishing over 1,200 articles on world music over 1,000 articles on popular music, light music and jazz over 250 articles on concepts 85 articles on acoustics 126 articles on sources and a one volume index.

Music distribution systems

Abstract: Music is blanket transmitted (for example, via satellite downlink transmission) to each customer's computer-based user station. Customers preselect from a list of available music in advance using an interactive screen selector, and pay only for music that they choose to have recorded for unlimited playback, for example, by a “CD burner”. An antipiracy “ID tag” is woven into the recorded music so that any illegal copies therefrom may be traced to the purchase transaction. Music is transmitted on a fixed schedule or through an active scheduling process that monitors music requests from all or a subset of satellite receivers and adjust scheduling according to demand for various CD's. Receivers store selections that are likely to be preferred by a specific customer. In those instances where weather conditions, motion atmospheric layers or dish obstructions result in data loss, the system downloads the next transmission of the requested CD and uses both transmissions to produce a “good copy”. In conjunction with the blanket transmission of more popular music, an automated CD manufacturing facility may be provided to manufacture CD's that are not frequently requested and distribute them by ground transportation.

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

Abstract: Acknowledgments Music Talk The Value Problem in Cultural Studies The Sociological Response Common Sense and the Language of Criticism Genre Rules On Music Itself Where Do Sounds Come From? Rhythm: Race, Sex, and the Body Rhythm: Time, Sex, and the Mind Songs as Texts The Voice Performance Technology and Authority Why Music Matters The Meaning of Music Toward a Popular Aesthetic Notes Index

Identity and control : a structural theory of social action

Abstract: In proposing a comprehensive network theory that cuts across the range of social sciences, Harrison White rejects conventional hierarchical models and focuses instead on efforts of control in a social structure described as a tangle of locked-in practices. He argues that the widely held conceptions of "person" and "goal" grounded in traditional political economy do not provide a basis for social theory that is either coherent or consistent with current developments in psychology and anthropology. White replaces "person" with "identity", which, in a distinctively human sense, emerges from frictions and social noise across different levels and disciplines in networks. Likewise, he reshapes the notion of "goals", maintaining that they merely inhabit sets of stories used to explain agency and that action itself comes through selective strategies to break through formal organization. As his main empirical basis, White uses case studies covering a wide range of topics, including tribal religions, changing rhetorics of industrial administration and the premodern Church, practices of state-building and changes of style in popular music. His analyses draw from English social anthropology, n