Edinburgh Napier University

  The sociology of popular music has tended to eschew conventional musicological approaches and instead to locate the listening experience as one rooted in social uses and pleasures. Where musicological analysis is employed, it tends to reinforce the commonality of pleasures by proposing a reading of music that can be mapped on to listeners’ social experiences. Such studies risk presenting static and predictable accounts of listening.

Instead, we can examine the development, consolidation and renewal of audiences’ approaches to listening, and explore the tools and processes they use, such as music journalism, amateur writing, rituals of collecting; in short, an ethnomethodological approach to the array of musical analysis used by listeners themselves, not by sociologists or musicologists.

A rich site for such research is what we might term ‘unpopular’ forms of popular music, such as avant-garde rock, free improvisation and Noise. These styles comprise a largely unconsidered field of music where explicit ideologies of experimentation, exploration and ‘progress’ can render genres unstable and where musical practices challenge dominant accounts of the social, the authentic and the ‘real’ in popular music.