Digital Antiphony: Memes and the Musicality of Internet Culture

Tue, October 6, 2020 12:45 PM at Zoom (if you wish to attend, please email Michael Callahan at mrc@msu.edu)

Dr. Braxton Shelley, Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute and Assistant Professor of Music in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, presents a guest lecture at Michigan State University. The event is free and open to the public. It will take place via videoconference due to the COVID-19 pandemic. If you would like to attend, please contact Michael Callahan, Music Theory Area Chairperson, at mrc@msu.edu.

Abstract

This talk attends to the ever-expanding virtual archive of memes, GIFS, and other digital media, exploring these two questions: 1) What modes of creativity do these digital artifacts reveal? 2) What ways of listening do these potentially-viral objects solicit? Drawing together resources from music studies, media studies, visual studies, and philosophy, I will suggest that the production, modification, and distribution of these contagious, and frequently-humorous, items be understood in antiphonal terms. As such, “digital antiphony” names the emphatically intertextual and intermusical product and process of internet culture, a rich, emergent conversation that simultaneously materializes and refigures social categories of race and gender, concepts of belief and authorship. If antiphony is the logic of digital culture, then the meme is its animating force. With its generative interpenetration of call and response, the meme evidences a distinctly digital preoccupation with form, offering one sense of what it means to be musical in the 21st century.

Bio

Braxton D. Shelley is an assistant professor in the music department and the Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. He was the 2016 recipient of the Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society.

Shelley completed a PhD in the history and theory of music and a master of divinity at the University of Chicago. He earned a BA in music and history from Duke University. In his doctoral dissertation, “Sermons in Song: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination,” Shelley’s analysis of gospel music braids cognitive theory, ritual theory, and preaching with studies of repetition, form, rhythm, and meter.