Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series

With the rise of TikTok, YouTube, and Spotify, memes and other internet phenomena are becoming more and more audible in our daily lives. In this talk, musicologist Paula Harper briefly historicizes and contextualizes the contagious concept of “virality,” demonstrating how the concept might also be understood as a form of musicality. In Harper’s view, when we create, watch, listen to, circulate, or share “viral” digital internet objects, we participate in a significant site of 21^st century musical practice. Digital platforms, in turn, have adapted to facilitate this viral musicality, using music’s positive capacities—aesthetic pleasure, communal participation, social connectivity—to enable corporate profit-making, corral attention, and incentivize acceptance of increasing technocapital enclosure of the internet and everyday life.

Paula Clare Harper, an assistant professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, researches music, sound, and the internet. She is interested in putting digital ephemera and oddities into broader context, in hearing the musicality of online meme cultures, and in tracking music’s creation and circulation across digital platforms and communities. Her current book projects include Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms and the co-edited collection Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans.