Music as Atmosphere

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.

Friedlind Riedel is a doctoral researcher at the Kompetenzzentrum Medienanthropologie at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her interests include music and performing arts in Myanmar, cultural histories of listening and philosophies of music. Juha Torvinen is Senior Lecturer at the Musicology department of the University of Helsinki. He holds the title of Docent of musicology in Universities of Helsinki and Turku. Torvinen's research interests include philosophy of music, ecomusicology and contemporary Finnish popular and art music.

Atmospheric relations: theorising music and sound as atmosphere 1 Musical meaning in between: ineffability, atmosphere and asubjectivity in musical experience 2 Intensity, atmospheres and music 3 Timbre, taste and epistemic tasks: a cross-cultural perspective on atmosphere and vagueness 4 Atmosphere and Northern music: ecomusicologicalphenomenological analysis of Kalevi Aho's Eight Seasons 5 The "right" kind of --l: feeling and foregrounding atmospheric identity in an Algerian music ritual 6 Sonic atmospheres in an American jail 7 The substance of the situation: an anthropology of sensibility 8 Bodies in motion: music, dance and atmospheres in Palauan ruk 9 Acoustemologies of rebetiko love songs 10 The tune of the magic flute: on atmospheres and history 11 Between things and souls: sacred atmospheres and immersive listening in late eighteenth-century sentimentalism 12 Transformations in mediations of lived sonic experience: a sensobiographic approach 13 A pedagogy of the event: an introduction 14 Affect and atmosphere - two sides of the same coin? 15 Atmospheres - Schmitz, Massumi and beyond 16 Dim, massive and important: atmosphere in process