Music in Everyday Life

In an interview on The Ethnography of Music

What do you mean by an ethnographic approach to music?

There are many different social scientific methods to research music. There are approaches that focus on historical dynamics, others that focus on the semiotic (either lyrics or sound structures) components of songs, and others that focus on what people do with music and how they interact with music and with one another with regard to music. The latter is called ethnography. It is a research tradition – typical of anthropology and related fields – used to write about people’s ways of life. Of course it’s not just used for the study of music, but within this context it works particularly well because of its elegance and simplicity in revealing the everyday life dimensions of musical production and consumption. Imagine going to a concert. What would you do there? You would watch the show, listen to the music, sing along, cheer, interact with friends, and all that jazz, right? Well, you couldn’t get a sense of all that by way of historical or semiotic analysis. Ethnography is about being where the action is, and taking part in it. That level of participation, combined with observation, when repeated over and over, allows you to scrutinise what people take for granted.

On to your first book: what does Tia DeNora argue in Music in Everyday Life?

DeNora makes an incredibly simple, but incredibly compelling argument: within the domain of everyday life we utilise music as a technology. We do not always do so in an overly rational way, of course, but for the most part we act towards music in light of what it does for us. On the basis of a lot of interviews about how people listen to music DeNora finds that music is a technology of the self, a set of tools and techniques, which we utilise, for example, to work out harder at the gym, clean up floors to, or set the tone for a date. DeNora’s focus in especially on how music is used to mould our emotional states, or to play into them. I think anyone can relate to that. Can anyone bear listening to Phil Collins while they’re trying to pump some iron at the gym?

She argues that music plays an important role in shaping human behaviour. How does music affect the way we behave in society today?

One of the most interesting ideas that arise out of her work is the strategic use of music to set or modify emotions. Music, in this sense, is used as a means to an end – whereas traditionally, as a form of art, music ought to be made and consumed for its own sake. What that means is that we now have an incredible amount of choice of music made and consumed for a specific purpose. Take for example workout music: it has become a genre in its own right.