Inhabiting Sound: Tactile-sonic links in musical meaning

Connections can be suggested between music’s occupation of physical space, its relative ‘presence’ (using Edward Hall’s notion of proxemics), and the various senses of movement which pervade it. Movement might be seen to operate with respect to music at a variety of levels of metaphorisation – as increasingly complex chains of analogy which point back to our early physical experience of the world. But of course music is, fundamentally, action. Humans put energy into systems - external or internal to themselves - which transduce that energy into the movement of air. At the acoustic level music is, emphatically and unmetaphorically, movement. Perhaps such simple physical perceptions form one route through which we might understand and explore shared senses of meaning and their capacity for ‘transduction’ between multiple individuals. Our (developmentally) early sensory models of the world, built from encounters with its physical resistances and affordances, might be a route to understanding our more clearly encultured and abstracted ('higher' level) understandings of music.

Emotions and Power: Reconciling Conceptual Twins

While the existence of an ‘emotional turn’ within the social sciences is now widely acknowledged, some areas have garnered less specific attention than others. Perhaps the most significant absence within this literature is an explicit exploration of the relationship between emotions and relations of power and domination. This article will attempt such an endeavour. In doing so, I will draw on some key work from within the sociology of emotions, such as Barbalet, Collins, Kemper and Turner, and from the power literature within social theory more generally, including Dahl, Elias, Foucault, Giddens, Gramsci and Lukes. The main thrust of the argument is that power and emotion are conceptual twins in need of a serious theoretical reunion, and that emotions have played a largely unacknowledged, ‘under-labouring’ role within most theories of power. The need for a more unified approach to these two concepts is highlighted.