ABSTRACT

This book explores the atmospheric dimensions of music and sound. With multidisciplinary insights from music studies, sound studies, philosophy and media studies, chapters investigate music and sound as shared environmental feelings.

This book probes into cutting edge conceptual issues at the forefront of contemporary discussions on atmosphere, atmospherology and affect. It also extends the spatial and relational focus towards fundamentally temporal questions of performance, process, timbre, resonance and personhood. The capacity of atmospheric relations to imbue a situation with an ambient feeling and to modulate social collectives is highlighted, as well as auditory experience as a means of connecting with feelings. In addition to original research, the volume features a first translation of an important text by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, and a debate on affect and atmosphere between the philosophers Jan Slaby and Brian Massumi.

This novel contribution to the field of music research provides a strong theoretical framework, as well as vibrant case studies, which will be invaluable reading for scholars and students of music, sound, aesthetics, media, anthropology and contemporary philosophy.

chapter |42 pages

Atmospheric relations

Theorising music and sound as atmosphere

chapter 1|17 pages

Musical meaning in between

Ineffability, atmosphere and asubjectivity in musical experience

chapter 3|25 pages

Timbre, taste and epistemic tasks

A cross-cultural perspective on atmosphere and vagueness

chapter 4|18 pages

Atmosphere and Northern music

Ecomusicological-phenomenological analysis of Kalevi Aho’s Eight Seasons

chapter 5|18 pages

The “right” kind of ḥāl

Feeling and foregrounding atmospheric identity in an Algerian music ritual

chapter 7|18 pages

The substance of the situation

An anthropology of sensibility

chapter 8|19 pages

Bodies in motion

Music, dance and atmospheres in Palauan ruk

chapter 10|16 pages

The tune of the magic flute

On atmospheres and history

chapter 11|20 pages

Between things and souls

Sacred atmospheres and immersive listening in late eighteenth-century sentimentalism

chapter 12|17 pages

Transformations in mediations of lived sonic experience

A sensobiographic approach

chapter 13|7 pages

A pedagogy of the event

An introduction

chapter 16|16 pages

Dim, massive and important

Atmosphere in process