[Seniors in the SOAN department have the opportunity of pursuing a field-based research project that culminates in a senior thesis. I’ve asked our seniors to briefly describe the research project they are beginning to configure for fieldwork in the remainder of our academic year.]
Over time, the way we share music has changed; from records to the radio, to cassettes to CDs, and finally across the internet in the form of MP3s and WAVs, it has never been easier to create, share, and acquire music. Through these changes, the way that we experience and interact with music has taken new forms, and with the introduction of social media platforms specifically for music, such as Soundcloud and Spotify, our interaction with music has changed substantially. The inclusion of these social media-spheres has given artists and their fans direct lines of communication that change the dynamics of the audience-performer relationship. I hope to unravel why these platforms have become so popular and the reasoning behind why this is the next step in how we spread and interact with music.
Music appreciation and performance has been present for most of my life. I recall my sister gifting me CDs with notes written in sharpie across the paper envelope. I coveted these possessions and still have many of them to this day. I have played in rock, funk, jazz, world, and reggae bands from a very young age, and today I am in a band and enjoy producing and writing tracks in my free time. Because of the centrality of music in my life, I am surrounded by musicians and artists who are also seeking to find meaning in this new media-scape, and I can only assume that this is not a feeling exclusively felt between me and my friends, but also across the globalized world. My involvement in the music community also provides to me a list of individuals who would be valuable assets for interviews and participant observation.
The data I will be collecting in this project will consist primarily of ethnographic interviews with artists who utilize these platforms as well as listeners who use them as a source of music. I plan to construct a survey of the Puget Sound student body to obtain representative statistics about how my generation interacts with music. I hope to interact with artists from a wide range of different genres to gain a broader sense of understanding regarding who is using these platforms and see if there are any trends that are genre specific. I would also like to interview managers to get a sense of what they are recommending to the artists they manage and how these recommendations shape the musical scene. This project could shed light on how technological changes in the world around us shape how we interact with one another and create social spaces.
SOAN 