Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Music

First Advisor

Kane, Brian

Abstract

People today largely agree that music streaming is significantly changing the ways we experience music. But what often goes unnoticed is the question of how, exactly, such changes occur. What are the processes that are embedded in a media form that can bring about such broad-scale changes to listening practice? What are some methodological tools we can use to understand these causes and effects? My dissertation seeks to address these questions by exploring how music streaming mediates cultures of musical listening. I will stage a complex relationship between musical ontology, the listening experience, and sonic technologies that forms a perspective on how streaming interfaces with such changes in listening practices. Part 1 introduces the central theoretical tool for my dissertation: a formal model that maps out a mode of listening. My model formalizes a relationship between musical ontology, the listening subject, and aesthetic ideology, which I use to define music streaming as a structure of listening practice. This dissertation then moves on to identify two major shifts that music streaming has brought about. Part 2 diagnoses a shift in the “song” as the unit at which people relate to, experience, and understand musical listening. I pinpoint a catalyst of this change as the widespread adoption of digital rights management technologies, which I argue has changed what it means for music to be mobilized via relations of original and copy. The second shift I identify, which is the subject of Part 3, involves the conditions of surveillance that interpellate the listener as a social subject. I show that music streaming entangles listener surveillance with a definition of the subject stemming from the history of information theory research extending from telephony to digital computing. I explore how these two mechanisms create an illegibility of race for musical listening. I conclude Part 3 by attempting to imagine alternative listening formations in music streaming that would denaturalize the structures presently maintaining the illegibility of the listening subject.

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