Music In Everyday Life

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

What is it that makes people want to live their lives to the sound of music, and why do so many of our most private experiences and most public spectacles incorporate - or even depend on - music? 'Music and Mind in Everyday Life' uses psychology to understand musical behaviour and experience.

Taking a cue from Erving Goffman’s classic work, Asylums, Tia DeNora develops a novel interdisciplinary framework for music, health and wellbeing. Considering health and illness both in medical contexts and in the often-overlooked realm of everyday life, DeNora argues that these identities are by no means mutually exclusive. Moreover, she suggests that the promotion of health and more specifically, mental health, involves a great deal more than a concern with medication, genetic predispositions, clinical and neuro-scientific procedures. Adopting a holistic, interactionist focus, Music Asylums reconnects states of wellness and wellbeing to encounters with others and - critically - to opportunities for aesthetic experience. Building on DeNora's earlier work on music as a technology of self in everyday life, the book presents music as an active ingredient of action, identity, capacity and consciousness. From there, it suggests that access to, and evaluation of, music is an important ethical matter. Intended for scholars and practitioners in psychiatry and psychology, palliative care, socio-music studies, music psychology and the allied health professions, Music Asylums showcases music's role in the existential project of being and staying well, mentally and physically, from moment-to-moment and across all realms of social life.

Why is music so important to most of us? How does music help us both in our everyday lives, and in the more specialist context of music therapy? This book suggests a new way of approaching these topical questions, drawing from Ansdell's long experience as a music therapist, and from the latest thinking on music in everyday life. Vibrant and moving examples from music therapy situations are twinned with the stories of 'ordinary' people who describe how music helps them within their everyday lives. Together this complementary material leads Ansdell to present a new interdisciplinary framework showing how musical experiences can help all of us build and negotiate identities, make intimate non-verbal relationships, belong together in community, and find moments of transcendence and meaning. How Music Helps is not just a book about music therapy. It has the more ambitious aim to promote (from a music therapist's perspective) a better understanding of 'music and change' in our personal and social life. Ansdell's theoretical synthesis links the tradition of Nordoff-Robbins music therapy and its recent developments in Community Music Therapy to contemporary music sociology and music studies. This book will be relevant to practitioners, academics, and researchers looking for a broad-based theoretical perspective to guide further study and policy in music, well-being, and health.

Just as music has the power to inspire, it has the power to irritate and enrage. Why does certain music annoy us? Why does it force us to leave rooms, invade our personal space and affect us on a visceral level? Based on more than 70 interviews, this book discusses the everyday challenges of living together with unwanted music. It examines issues of taste, individual rights, private and public spaces, violence and the law. The interviews explore various relationships with forced listening and the behaviors that result. Interviewees talk about emotions and reactions to the nuisance caused by music, highlighting matters of otherness, individualism and rights. They discuss experiences with neighbors, at stores, on the street, while commuting and even in their homes - and reveal the complex social interactions mediated by music and sounds in our day-to-day lives.

This book addresses the issue of music consumption in the digital era of technologies. It explores how individuals use music in the context of their everyday lives and how, in return, music acquires certain roles within everyday contexts and more broadly in their life narratives.

From the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland) comes an exciting source of theoretical approaches, epidemiological findings, and real-life examples regarding the therapeutic and health-enhancing effects of music. Experts across fields including psychology, neurology, music therapy, medicine, and public health review research on the benefits of music in relieving physiological, psychological, and socioemotional dysfunction. Chapters link musical experiences (listening and performing, as well as involvement in movement, dance, and theatre) to a wide range of clinical and non-clinical objectives such as preventing isolation, regulating mood, reducing stress and its symptoms, and treating dementia. And the book’s section on innovative music-based interventions illustrates opportunities for incorporating musical activities into public health programs. Among the topics covered are: · Associations between the use of music, cultural participation and health-related outcomes in adult Scandinavian populations · Music practice and emotion handling · How music translates itself biologically in the body · Music as a forum for social-emotional health · Participation and partnership as core concepts in music and public health · Music therapy as health promotion for mothers and children at a public health clinic Music and Public Health will gain interested readers among researchers, teachers, students, and clinicians in the fields of music education and therapy, as well as researchers and students of public health who are interested in the influence of culture and the arts. The book also will be relevant to administrators in public health services.

Everyday Musical Life among the Indigenous Bunun, Taiwan contributes to multidisciplinary research on music in everyday human life by pushing beyond the urbanized Western populations routinely featured in such writing. Based on ethnographic study in Buklavu, a village in southern Taiwan mostly inhabited by the indigenous Bunun, the book explores villagers’ contemporaneous musical engagements and pathways, paying heed both to imported music—such as TV theme tunes, karaoke singing, church hymns—and to the transformation of Bunun traditions through school and community interventions and folkloric festivals. The case study underpins a new, widely applicable, theoretical model for the study of music in everyday life in global society which is historically engaged, sensitive to individual and group diversity, cognizant of the interplay of the mundane and the exceptional, and primed to support applied research.