Orbital transmissions: affect and musical public-making in London

This thesis is a multi-sited ethnography of live music audiences in London. Drawing insight from four broadly defined field sites—classical music, sound art, dub reggae, and electronic/dance music—the thesis investigates the role of affect in the formation of musical and sonic publics. Music’s affective propensities refer to its ability to generate visceral states and adrenal surges that elude obvious discursive representation, and that often seem pre-conscious. The importance of these somatic feelings lies in their ‘public-making’ capacities: their ability to bind us to or separate us from others in ways that can transform or reinforce broader social relations. The central contribution of the thesis is that it advances new empirically grounded ways of understanding the workings and potentials of musical and sonic affect, offering insight into the social and affective processes by which music and sound generate collectivities, the extent to which such collectivities endure, evolve, or evaporate over time, and the opportunities they present for putting existing social orders into question. Above all, the thesis demonstrates through rich ethnographic and historical research how musically incited affect has to be analysed by reference to social, cultural, historical and political conditions. I show that affect, as it is engendered by music and sound, is an ambivalent mechanism, able to strengthen as well as challenge dominant social orders. On the basis of this ethnographic work, the thesis simultaneously develops a new theoretical framework to critique influential theories of affect derived from the humanities and social sciences that portray affect as pre-mediated and involuntary: as an emancipatory force operating autonomously from subjectivity and social identity. The thesis is thus committed to the generative effects of putting theory and empiricism in dialogue, employing a ‘post-positivist’ empiricist methodology (Born, 2010a) that moves constantly between speculative theory and historically informed ethnography. Arguing that an empirically grounded theorisation of affect is central to an understanding of musical and sonic experience, musical and sonic publics, and therefore also to a musical and sonic politics, the thesis acts as a rejoinder to theories of listening and live audiencing in musicology and sound studies, while also advancing several secondary themes that cut across the thesis as a whole. These themes include questions of genre and creativity, specifically the contingent relations between musical producers and their publics; music and community vis-à-vis wider critical discourses on community and inclusivity; theories of temporality and the aesthetic; and musical taste and social stratification. Finally, in the Conclusion, the thesis suggests possible new directions for thinking about the affective politics of music and sound, oriented around three logics: antagonism-agonism; community-collaboration; and emergence-divergence