Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Remote Intimacy

2021; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jpms.2021.33.1.11

1533-1598

Sara Marcus, Karen Tongson, Paula Harper, Kimberly Mack, Eric Weisbard, Simon Zagorski‐Thomas,

Diverse Musicological Studies

In the spring and summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced conferences and other gatherings to cancel or radically change course, whole new genres of discussion about popular music rapidly took shape online. From fully reimagined conferences to brand-new Zoom talk series, scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts came up with ways to convene remotely, bringing a far-flung community closer together in a time of physical distance.My initial remit at the Journal of Popular Music Studies, which I joined as an associate editor mere months before Covid-19 emerged, was to publish traces, transcriptions, and transmogrifications of live discussions from academic gatherings as well as multiplatform music festivals, museums and galleries, venues for music and performance, and community organizations. The pandemic has spurred transformations in our conversations that none of us could have anticipated, and we at JPMS are working to register and reflect on what has changed.The previous issue of JPMS (32.4) featured transcriptions of two such online events: a discussion between Shana Redmond and Gus Stadler about their new books on Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie, and the Pop Conference’s “Deconstructing Little Richard” panel that was organized by Jason King and Tavia Nyong’o. For the current issue, we reached out to the organizers of several projects that have held space for conversations about popular music since the pandemic began. We invited them to take stock of how the migration of our conversations online has changed the field, how newly dominant platforms like Zoom are reshaping our discussions, and what lessons from 2020 we might carry with us into whatever comes next.We checked in via email with Paula Harper of the Music Scholarship at a Distance series; Eric Weisbard and Kimberly Mack of the Popular Music Books in Process series; and Simon Zagorski-Thomas of the London Calling 2020 IASPM UK & Ireland Conference, the Music Production and Creative Technology research seminars, and the 21st Century Music Practice symposia. And Karen Tongson, program organizer of the 2020 Pop Conference, chose to reflect live on the process of migrating that conference online, so she and I touched base, fittingly enough, over Zoom.As the interviews collected here make clear, the field of popular music studies—both the parts that are firmly lodged within the academy and the parts that cross over into the public realm—has met the challenges of the past year with creativity, generosity, and rigor, inventing and adapting ways to keep our conversations active while widening our circles of interlocutors. Of course, this scarcely begins to compensate for the still-escalating losses that have marked the coronavirus pandemic. But it is nevertheless encouraging to see how much we’ve learned since March 2020, and how many useful practices and insights we are incorporating into our field as we continue to think, speak, listen, and write our collective way into an unknowable, if everywhere audible, future. —Sara MarcusThis discussion took place over Zoom in July 2020.With Will Robin, I co-founded a daily Zoom colloquium series in March 2020 called Music Scholarship at a Distance. The goal was to give scholars a chance to share work that they had been scheduled to present at recently canceled conferences, in a one-paper-a-day format. All told, Music Scholarship at a Distance (MSaaD or #MusicColloq for short) hosted over 35 papers in its normal run—everything from scholars presenting their first conference paper, to seasoned veterans, with some alternate format panels and workshops in between—to an audience that daily ranged between 30 and 100 music scholars and supporters. We also hosted two weeks of the Teaching Music History Conference, in a similar format, and the door is open for us to continue hosting special or one-off events, like watch parties for pre-recorded AMS annual meeting videos.Creating a community! To garner participants and attendees, Will and I circulated the announcement to listservs and to our various academic communities on social media. Since we were putting this together early in the pandemic timeline, the colloquium series was something that provided a schedule, structure, and a small degree of academic normalcy to people’s early-quarantine days and weeks. We decided on a single daily presentation, rather than a traditional multi-day multi-panel conference format, to try to cut down on burnout and broaden accessibility for presenters and attendees alike—and ultimately, we had a number of people who became regulars, attending every or nearly every day, along with people who only dropped in for one or a few presentations. By a few weeks in, many people knew each other’s names, each other’s cats, each other’s kids and Zoom backgrounds, etc. I know that I wound up creating relationships with people who had previously only been vaguely familiar usernames on Musicology Twitter.It was really great to be able to make the space—we had a number of scholars give their first-ever presentations at #MusicColloq, and the community couldn’t have been more supportive, with questions and feedback and encouragement throughout. Additionally, I feel like we provided a proving ground for some digital conference strategies that other folks have gone on to implement or improve. I hope that we have been useful as a low-stakes tryout for some aspects of higher-attendance society conferences that happened over the summer and into the fall.Ours was created in response to the pandemic, so it was virtual from conception. That said, we experienced our share of hiccups and learning-curve problems, from Zoombombings to various other small-scale technical difficulties. In part because we were working so small and so ad hoc, we were able to be pretty nimble and learn quickly from our mistakes—with just the two of us moderating, we wound up crafting an on-the-fly set of best practices that we tweaked whenever necessary, as well as keeping abreast of all the technological changes and updates that the platform itself was implementing.Mine is deeply indulgent, but I’m going to indulge! So, for the “regular” run of Music Scholarship at a Distance, Will Robin (my colloquium co-founder) gave the first paper, and we decided that I’d give the last. I’d spent the preceding seven weeks on the administrative side—helping run tech, doing social media promotion, moderating and watching people’s presentations, seeing the community of MSaaD develop a crew of regulars with a wide array of expertise and a weird web of inside jokes. When it came time to give my paper, as the last regularly recurring session of our first run of colloquia, I was pretty emotional about saying goodbye to that community, and it was clear that many of them were as well. As I gave the paper, I saw the notifications pop up for incoming chats—as I mention in a few other places below, one of the joys of Music Scholarship at a Distance was the enthusiasm and collegiality with which the community used the chat function to respond in real time—but I did my best to ignore the notifications as I was giving the paper, of course! The question period came and went, and Will and I said our goodbyes—but then I downloaded the chat log, and had a whole separate record of my paper, from the perspective of a community of listeners and real-time responders. They had clever suggestions, derailing pun-based jokes, and interesting lines of inquiry I hadn’t considered, and then the whole thing ended—as chat records of virtual conferences tend to do—with a barrage of encouragement and congratulations. That chat log is perhaps one of my most treasured pandemic objects.So far, I miss the fortuitous coffee line or conference bar meetings from big conferences, or the coffee break discussions at small ones—the places where we catch up with acquaintances we haven’t spoken to in a while, where by necessity we get drawn into conversation about our work or the paper we just heard. That said, many of the virtual conference spaces I’ve encountered thus far—including and especially #MusicColloq—have seen attendees make copious use of side-channel functions like Zoom chat, to engage with ongoing papers and with other attendees in productive conversation, resource sharing, and good-natured joking. I know that keeping a chat functionality open is a luxury that, for large conferences, could involve moderation concerns—but I think that my favorite experiences so far have included this component.Many people have mentioned the increased accessibility in various virtual formats. Presenters who couldn’t have otherwise made it to conferences for financial reasons or other reasons can now attend virtually. Virtual formats also enable accessibility options for presentation engagement, like closed captions. These are obviously great, and perhaps the pandemic has made strides in opening up a hybrid conference future, where these are default options. I’m even a fan of the pre-recorded paper with live questions or feedback, which seems like it might limit technological glitches and going-over-time issues in an in-person setting, as well as letting the presenter breathe and focus on responding to questions and engaging in conversation around their work. Finally, I’ll just shout out once again my enthusiasm for the live chat feed, which I’ve seen used in both deeply productive (knowledgeable scholars dropping links to relevant sources!) and highly amusing (topical puns!) ways. It feels like the best parts of the heyday of live-tweeting conferences, without the distraction of having to be on Twitter, and I’d love to find a way of recreating it at “live” conferences.I’m a bit curious about the question of platforms. We decided on Zoom pretty early on, and it seems like quite the industry standard at this point, but it has been interesting to observe what virtual projects are making successful use of other platforms. I know the North American Conference on Video Game Music hosted their mid-June conference on Twitch (https://vgmconference.weebly.com/), an inspired resituating of particular scholarship into a platform built around that scholarship’s subject matter. I also saw a “Twitter conference” in which people tweeted their papers as threads. On the flip side, there’s a danger of overload—it’s a lot to ask scholars and attendees to learn a host of new platforms, or to try to treat Twitter as a conference space, or to navigate webs of interlinked platforms in an attempt to replicate various aspects of traditional conference-going. Basically, I’m eager to see new models get tried out, and to continue learning about the successes and drawbacks of other similar virtual endeavors!Rather stupidly, I’ve taken on three online projects since the Covid-19 lockdown:These have all been based on WordPress websites and have involved a combination of video presentations (mostly embedded from Vimeo and YouTube) and text/image/audio content. The videos have been made and uploaded by the presenters themselves, except for the online discussions which have involved using the record function in Zoom meetings and, occasionally, YouTube Live.I am also the series editor for the new Cambridge University Press Elements series on 21st Century Music Practices. This is a dual-format platform—online and print—for monographs of 20,000–30,000 words. The first four outputs are currently in the peer review/production machinery and the first is due for publication before the end of 2020. Most of the existing Elements series are in the sciences, but Rupert Till is currently starting one on Popular Music, and I am also on the advisory board for that.Rather than talk about pros and cons separately, I would like to highlight some particular aspects that are unique to online formats and talk about how they not only have positive or negative aspects but also make you respond in a different way, alter the social dynamics, and/or allow or force you to think about the process in a different way: Synchronous/asynchronous. Obviously, being able to choose between engaging in real time or post hoc is a huge issue. One of the most striking things about the IASPM Conference has been that the online Zoom sessions typically have fewer than 50 people present and yet there are over 450 people registered on the conference (and you don’t need to be registered to view the content, so there may be many more viewers). It’s quite difficult to track (and to be honest I’m not very interested in tracking) the number of viewers, because they happen both “live” in the Zoom sessions and YouTube live streams and “post hoc” in the views on the website and YouTube directly. Despite what universities and government departments feel about metrics, the influence of a presentation is only tangentially related to the number of people who see it. Likewise, with comments and questions, these take very different forms in the Zoom sessions and in the website comments section (based on the WordPress blogging features)—and people have different levels and types of motivations; plus, each format encourages different types of question and levels of detail. It’s hard to quantify, but I would say participants engaged with both “live” questions and comments sections equally—obviously people had individual preferences but the overall usage was roughly equally divided. The comments sections involved mostly one-to-one conversations while the Zoom Q&A sessions encouraged more group discussion. The comments section also allowed for the “deeper dive” that is more characteristic of the conversations that continue into the coffee breaks at “face-to-face” events. The more variety there is, the richer the potential for experience, but that leads me on to…Energy levels and engagement. In designing all of these events—and partly because of my experience in running research communities online and two previous online conferences, for my Performance in the Studio project in 2012 and the Classical Music Hyper-Production project in 2015—I was very aware of the problems of user fatigue. Sitting on your own with a computer, no matter how interactive the technology/process, is far more draining than being in a room with people. Also, no university is currently (as far as I am aware) allowing staff a week “away” to “attend” an online conference. Indeed, my impression from anecdotal/personal communication is that there is a clear danger that universities can use the switch to online events as a way to squeeze more work out of faculty staff and to shift more research activity into their personal time. The logistics of current teaching (for staff delivering courses entirely online or through a blended approach) makes it far more difficult to keep work separate from “life.” The majority of the IASPM activity and all of the MuPaCT and C21MP events have taken place during evenings and weekends. I was therefore conflicted about the idea of turning IASPM into a 10-week part-time activity, because it de facto established it as something to be engaged with outside of your customary workload—just at a time when everyone’s workload was increased exponentially by the online teaching requirements of COVID-19. However, at the same time, it has proved to be an escape and a morale booster—a reminder of what we’re about. The other thing about these events is that, despite any branding that is applied to them, putting them online distances the ownership from any university and gives a stronger sense of ownership to the academic participants. One side benefit is that I haven’t had to deal with the usual nightmare of room allocation/booking, logistics, catering, student helpers, etc. It may just be my personality, but I find a WordPress site infinitely simpler than that.Parallel forms of discussion. One of the interesting aspects of Zoom (and Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Blackboard Collaborate, etc.) is that the chat function creates possibilities for public and private streams of “note passing in class” and metacommentary. These are mostly not captured in the video recordings and so they become ephemeral and fleeting as well as potentially invisible and selective/exclusive. And, of course, the asynchronous forms of discussion and comment are usually editable by the participants—allowing for the archive that remains for posterity to be tidied up, corrected, or even sanitized. As has become usual in recent years, there has been a whole load of social media going on in parallel with the sessions—mostly to promote engagement rather than to discuss—but this doesn’t seem to have been affected by moving the conference online. It is interesting to me that so little academic discussion happens on social media while so much political discussion does—but maybe that’s just in my bubble.“Flattening” of the social process. The fact that the technologies of online distribution restrict all the visual and aural sources to a single point source (the screen and the speaker) and, in addition, have created a series of protocols that attempt to mitigate this, creates various issues. Our ability to “look around the room” is limited by the constraints of the two main formats (Presenter and Gallery in Zoom) and by the ability of participants to make themselves invisible by switching their cameras off. The existence of breakout rooms is something that we haven’t used in IASPM-UKI, MuPaCT, or C21MP, because they are designed for workshops and therefore managed by the organizers rather than being user-controllable. That will change no doubt (if it hasn’t already) and will allow multiple social interactions to happen simultaneously on the visual level as well as via chat. Similarly, the audio protocols are somewhat editable at the moment, but the default—of the loudest signal being used as a switch to reduce the volume of any others—makes normal, overlapping conversation much more problematic. Obviously, breakout rooms would mitigate this to some extent as well in that conversations can split off from the main group, and by switching off the audio-ducking technologies the overlap problem can be slightly reduced. However, the low quality of microphones and speakers on computers and the fact that all sounds emanate from the single source (speaker)—and, of course, the data compression that streaming audio and video requires when bandwidth gets strained—these all mean that our ability to understand the social dynamics of a situation through details of spatial audio, vocal timbre, etc.—anything other than the semantics of the words—is reduced by these technologies.Conference presentations as publications. Although there has always been a certain amount of variation in the level of peer review and post-event publication of presentations at conferences, the creation of websites full of conference presentation videos throws up some interesting questions about the nature of publications. Conferences have often provided a forum in which to try ideas out as part of the developmental process for future publication—and, indeed, their ephemeral nature has also allowed academics to present the same materials with only limited variation in different fora. These new formats put academics in the same dilemma as comedians when they started to release their stand-up shows as DVDs (or on YouTube)—you can’t keep performing your DVD material in the live shows, because the audience has already seen it! It does then mean that we have to have a discussion about the position of conferences and online versions of them in the broader context of research publication and dissemination.There are two that stand out. One is the first MuPaCT event, which went on for nearly four hours because we were all so glad to have found a way to talk about our research. That was back on May 6, so before all the others, and there were several people there who I only ever see at conferences and who it was great to catch up with. We turned the recording off after a while and just had a really good chat about research and teaching. The other was the first C21MP symposium which was, in some ways, the opposite: we were all people who would never usually get into the same room together because of geography, musical styles, and academic disciplines, and so the discussion had a really interesting edge and vibrancy for me.I’m probably having more sustained real-time discussion about popular music than ever before, but I certainly miss the face-to-face aspect—I’ve talked about some in the “flattening” section above. Some possible future changes are technological: multiple speakers and screens might be possible in hybrid events where small groups convene in different countries/regions—I believe https://music-psychology-conference2018.uni-graz.at/en/about/ did this in 2018 and are doing it again. That would allow for more sustainable conferences when the restrictions do get lifted. Some are about protocols: setting and managing expectations about the level of engagement with discussion/comments, number of hours, etc., etc. I think improving the audio would be a big deal, but perhaps more important would be allowing participants to hold events where they can exercise some control over the social situation—e.g., being able to hop from “table to table” via breakout rooms in Zoom to hold individual and small group chats. In other words—going to the coffee shop or the pub with the other participants. This is still not an option as far as I can see on platforms such as Zoom and Teams.I think the two features I outlined in answer to question 4 are important in relation to:The reasons that we chose to move the IASPM Conference forward from September 2020 to the summer of that year were twofold. First, we didn’t (and still don’t) know what was going to be happening in and beyond September, and so partly it was a question of working with what we knew we had. Secondly, I wanted to use the 10-week project to keep the flame of research burning during what was going to be a very troubled and lonely spring and summer for many people. For many of us, thinking about our research is often a release from the strictures and boredom of administration and assessment (although assessment can and should be fun too). The reasons for the other two projects (MuPaCT and C21MP) were to bring two other communities together. I had hoped there might be more interaction between the three projects, but the simple truth was that I took too much on and had to scale back.In some ways, the lesson is an obvious one. We had to rush into this for various reasons and so—despite learning from my previous online conferences, working with Katia Isakoff and Shara Rambarran on the Art of Record Production conferences, website, and journal and from Rupert Till putting Crosstown Traffic 2018 papers on YouTube—this was an experiment. We are all researchers, and we have to now look at the “data” that this experiment produced, conduct an analysis, and produce some conclusions that can suggest further experiments and practical implementations.