mediated intimacy

One morning in November, I woke up to a private message from Polish music scholar Maciej Smółka. Maciej and I initially met at the Purple Reign conference at the University of Salford in 2017. In the years since, we regularly touch base to keep up on what we’re listening to and working on. [Of note, Maciej recently published The Sound of a City, a much needed work on the relationship between certain styles and their locale, eg Nashville country, Seattle grunge, and San Francisco psychedelia.]

Maciej’s note pointed me to a recent blog post of his wherein he digested Laura Veirs’ latest album, Phone Orphans. Having some familiarity with our project on musical intimacy, he thought it may be of interest. He was of course, correct. 

Veirs’ recorded her latest album completely via the voice notes app on her phone. As Maciej puts it, the album provides the listener sonic entry into Veirs’ intimate world. Despite the implicit invitation, Phone Orphans feels like a sonic breach of privacy to Veirs’ personal, sonic space. Maciej’s post is well worth reading, and I don’t intend to rehash his insight here. But it did get me thinking about Phone Orphans as exemplary not just of intimacy in terms of the recording’s sonics, but the album’s framing, and how that necessarily primes our own experience with the record. 

More specifically, Maciej’s post brought to mind the relationship between intimacy and technology. Central here is a seeming contradiction. By definition, mediation implies distance (geographic or otherwise), which would seem to work against any sense of intimacy (or closeness). Yet mediation has long been a conduit for intimacy in the absence of physical co-presence. Introducing their collection of essays on intimacy, Levinger and Raush (1977: vii) note the palpable tensions between our continued desire for closeness and intimacy alongside the increasing social distance from one another. As modern social, cultural, and economic forces encouraged such distancing, the rise of electronic mass media offered means for us to at least perceive the closeness and intimacy that were otherwise becoming more difficult to achieve. [Brenton J. Malin’s book Feeling Mediated is an especially rich examination of these tensions, and goes well beyond concerns of intimacy to understand the interplay of media and emotion.]

Scholars have covered mediated intimacy as implicated by a variety of technologies, including radio (Arnheim 1986; Douglas 2004; Hilmes 1997; Horton & Wohl 1956; Jarman 2013; Loviglio 2005; Scannell 1996), podcasting (Sienkiewicz & Jaramillo 2019; Spinelli & Dann 2019), YouTube (Berryman & Kavka 2017; Burgess & Green 2018; Jerslev 2016; Johnston 2017; Lee & Watkins 2016), and A.I. (Brooks 2021; Devlin 2018). Following analog examples such as love letters, the telephone provides one of the earliest manifestations of technologically mediated intimacy, and this is reflected in both scholarship and popular culture.

Carolyn Marvin (1990) notes the telephone’s capacity for intimacy at a distance, for example, while John Durham Peters (1999) contends with its history as an inherently erotic medium. AT&T underscores telephony’s intimacy in its long running marketing campaign that beckons consumers to “reach out and touch someone,” a slogan the company continues to evoke in marketing its wireless data plans. As this body of work suggests, neither physical distance nor technological mediation necessarily diminish opportunities for intimacy formation and maintenance. Indeed, the telephone has a good deal of historical baggage here. As a point-to-point/one-on-one technology, the telephone harnesses users’ voices. As we discuss throughout Musical Intimacy, the human voice is intricately bound up in matters of identity and expression - voices are uniquely “ours.” Although the telephone’s disembodiment of the voice forces us to cede some control here, its promise to discreetly deliver our voice to the intended party makes this an acceptable concession. Be it asking for dates, maintaining long distance relationships, or phone sex, the telephone is not by any means a direct substitute for co-present intimacy, but it may be the next-best thing under particular circumstances. 

Throughout the 20th century, popular music served as an especially rich domain for expressing and cementing the telephone’s role in intimacy and the cultural imaginary. Lisa Colton’s (2014) chapter on Lady Gaga does a fantastic job of surveying this body of work with particular attention to how these songs construct gender, and how the telephone serves as a conduit for romance in their lyrical narratives. In Chapter 4 of Musical Intimacy, we analyze Prince’s 1982 B-side “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore.” Without giving away too much of that analysis, the Prince song is interesting from a lyrical perspective in that rather than embracing the intimate affordances of the telephone, the song’s emotive power rests on a failed intimate connection, as the narrator pleads for his love interest to call (“If what we had was good / How come you don’t call me anymore?”).

Fellow Minneapolitans The Replacements took a similar tack two years later in “Answering Machine” (from 1984’s Let it Be). In The ‘Mats tune, the narrator’s frustration comes not from a lover who won’t call, but one who can’t or won’t pick up their end of the line (“How do you say I miss you to an answering machine? / How do you say good night to an answering machine?”). Sonically drawing the point home, “Answering Machine” includes in its mix a phone company recording, the telephonic predecessor to a 404 page (“If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again / If you need help, hang up and dial your operator”). 

These vestiges of the landline era may seem antiquated in 2024. Advances such as email, text, and videoconferencing have diminished the telephone’s role in interpersonal communication and as such, intimacy. Or maybe the nature of that intimacy has changed. The phone may now be used less frequently for voice communication, asking a crush out on a date, or late night phone calls to a distant lover. But the intimacy of the telephone may simply have shifted from the communicative act to the technology itself. The smartphone is ultimately a personal object, and a personal archive. Our devices include contacts and text histories, and interface any number of data points about our behavior, including geolocation history, social media activity, personal calendar, and cloud file storage, to name but a few. 

Which brings us back to Phone Orphans. Although we encounter it as a commercially released album, the framing of these songs as voice notes from Veirs’ smartphone primes us to experience the album a certain way. Voice notes are most often personal notes to ourselves. Although our access to Veirs’ recordings is clearly consensual, as Maciej points out, it can be difficult to shake the feeling that we’re accessing something at least initially intended to be personal, private. That kind of closeness to Veirs’ creative process can convey an intimate, fly-on-the-wall perspective for listeners. Moreover, the sonics of the recordings on Phone Orphans further emphasize this sense of intimacy, demonstrating elements of sonic spatiality and inadvertent intimacies that we discuss throughout Musical Intimacy. For example, the acapella “Up is a Nice Place to Be” lacks much in the way of sonic density, encouraging listeners to focus on Veirs’ lyrics and voice. And her voice orients us spatially as well; this particular track is not especially high in fidelity, so we get a good deal of room noise, while Veirs’ voice reverberates slightly, as it might in a bathroom or a minimally furnished space. In other songs such as “Creatures of a Day” and “Tiger Ocean,” we can hear Veirs’ body interacting with her acoustic guitar, be it the percussive pluck of her calloused fingers picking out the melody, or the squeal of her fret hand as it slides across the strings. So while the telephone may not provide the same kind of narrative intimacy it did in past recordings, Phone Orphans invites us to consider how our phones are not now devoid of intimate potential, but rather, the nature of the intimacy that it affords has evolved with the technology - a storehouse of personal, intimate data rather than (or at least in addition to) a means of romantic connection.

-Zack

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References

Arnheim, Rudolf. (1986/1936). Radio. London: Faber & Faber Ltd.

Berryman, Rachel and Misha Kavka. (2017). ‘I guess a lot of people see me as  a big sister or a friend’: The role of intimacy in the celebrification of beauty vloggers. Journal of Gender Studies 26(3): 307-320.

Brooks, Rob. (2021). Artificial intimacy: Virtual friends, digital lovers, and algorithmic matchmakers. New York: Columbia University Press.

Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. (2018). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Colton, Lisa. (2014). Who’s calling? Telephone songs, female vocal empowerment and signification. In Iddon, Martin and Melanie Marshall (Eds.), Lady Gaga and popular music: Performing gender, fashion, and culture. New York: Routledge (pp. 67-81).

Devlin, Kate. (2018). Turned on: Science, sex, and robots. London: Bloomsbury.

Douglas, Susan. (2004). Listening in: Radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Horton, Donald and R. Richard Wohl. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19(3): 215-229.

 Jarman, Freya. (2013). Relax, feel good, chill out: The affective distribution of classical music. In Thompson and Biddle (Eds.), Sound Music Affect: Theorizing sonic experience. London: Bloomsbury. 183-204.

 Jerslev, Anne. (2016). In the time of microcelebrity: Celebrification and the YouTuber Zoella. International Journal of Communication 10: 5233-5251.

 Johnston, Jessica. (2017). Subscribing to sex edutainment: Sex education, online video, and the YouTube star. Television & New Media 18(1): 76-92.

 Lee, Jung Eun and Brandi Watkins. (2016). YouTube vloggers’ influence on consumer luxury brand perceptions and intentions. Journal of Business Research 69(12): 5753-5760.

 Levenger, George and Harold L. Raush. (1977). Preface. In Levenger and Raush (Eds.), Close relationships: Perspectives on the meaning of intimacy. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. vii-x.

 Loviglio, Jason. (2005). Radio’s intimate public: Network broadcasting and mass-mediated democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marvin, Carolyn. (1990). When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peters, John Durham. (1999). Speaking into the Air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Scannell, Paddy. (1996). Radio, television, & modern life. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Sienkiewicz, Matt & Deborah Jaramillo. (2019). Podcasting, the intimate self, and the public sphere. Popular culture: The international journal of media and culture 17(4): 268-272.

Spinelli, Martin and Lance Dann. (2019). Podcasting: The audio media revolution. New York: Bloomsbury.

noticing musical intimacy?

Hello! I want to share some thoughts on the difference between active and passive listening and how the concept of musical intimacy can be heard or felt no matter ‘how’ you are listening. One thing that has been going through my mind lately revolves around the concept of musical intimacy and how it not only permeates music, but how it reaches us when we are listening to music. When we are listening actively to music, we are listening with intent, and we are involved in the musical journey as it plays out in real time. How many of us listen to music in an active manner every day? I’ll bet it’s most of us. If there are aspects of musical intimacy in the music, we are open and ready to absorb the ideas since we are engrossed in the sonic experience. When we are listening to music passively, it often accompanies another task: housework, driving, anything mundane that could use a little aural spice! This week, I was in the car and I wasn’t intending to listen actively, as I was thinking about something else entirely unrelated to the music. A track came on that featured an incredibly emotive vocal, and my brain instantly shifted gears from a passive listening mode to one that was more active precisely because of the musically intimate nature of the vocal in the song. Musical intimacy can run very deep in the music we listen to as it enhances our daily experience. Has something similar ever happened to you? Have you been inadvertently drawn in to a song when you weren’t expecting it? If so, let me know in the comments.

“Not available in stores”

When I first started thinking about the marketing of musical intimacy (and what became Chapter 5 in the book), one set of examples that sprang to mind were a series of TV commercials for various mail order compilations in the 1980s-1990s. Ultimately, there “just wasn’t enough there there” to include these in Musical Intimacy, but they are worth revisiting and discussing as media artifacts that, despite their relative ephemerality, provide a unique spin on how notions of musical intimacy have been marketed to consumers.

Though a quaint notion from a 2023 vantage point, mail order music was big business in the pre-digital era, at least big enough to justify its existence. Distributors like Time-Life, Razor & Tie, and others put up the licensing fees to compile multi-record sets of popular hits, the selling point of which was not having to pay for a stack of albums when presumably consumers only wanted the radio hits anyway. As the advert for Razor & Tie’s 1993 compilation Totally ‘80s puts it, “If you went to the store and bought all these hits on CD, it’d cost you 400 bucks!” – making the $25, two CD set quite the bargain. These ads also made certain to point out that the compilations were “not available in any store,” emphasizing the exclusivity of the mail order pitch. Some compilations roped consumers into a subscription service, with new volumes of the series landing on customers’ doorsteps on a monthly basis. Others (like Totally ‘80s) were one-off, single purchase offers.

The scope of these collections varies widely, but typically each had some kind of thematic unity, be it driven by genre, time period, or some other characteristic. Romantically themed sets were common over the years, and it is specifically these sets that trade in part on a particular kind of musical intimacy.

The ad for Sessions Records’ 1986 collection Secret Love is exemplary.

The collection’s soft rock hits are just one part of the overall aesthetic – a white, presumably heterosexual couple donning fuzzy sweaters, canoodling by a roaring fireplace, with Secret Love providing the sonic backdrop for romantic and physical intimacy. When a jump cut finds the male on screen physically advancing on his love interest, we’re cautioned that Secret Love’s ability to generate intimacy is so powerful that it “really brings out the animal in some people.”

Starland Music’s 1994 Lost in Love collection repeats this motif, though it adds still life shots of glasses filled with red wine, as well as the declaration that the collection is “definitely a great album for those special times alone.”

The art work and commercial for Lakeshore Music’s Love Songs of the Seventies features a strange fixation on horses, though the equine companions disappear as if on cue when a snippet of Peter McCann’s “Do You Want to Make Love” is played.

The ads do tend to be racialized along predictable, stereotypical genre demarcations. Onyx Communications’ Hey Love collection presents three Black couples suffering through a boring get together that gets spiced up when the host drops the needle on his new album, which an off screen announcer tells us is filled with “the classic sound of sexy soul.” As the sound samples scroll, the scene lights dim as the couples dance close and slow. Hey Lover rescued the get together from stale boredom into yet another evening of romantic, physical intimacy. So potent is the collection’s ability to facilitate intimacy that one guest moves to borrow the host’s copy of Hey Love to continue the evening’s intimacy at home, but is rebuffed: “you’ve got to buy your own.”

These types of collections persisted through the 1990s, though by that decade, the commercials tended to feature music video clips rather than unique video copy. Time Life’s Ultimate Love Songs is one such example:

Likewise Rhino’s New Millennium Love Songs, though here the video clips are superimposed over a background of candy conversation hearts.

Numerous other examples from yesteryear play into these aesthetic tropes and stereotypes. Cheesy even in the context of their initial release, these ads attempt to make explicit the relationship between popular music (typically soft rock, sexy soul, or pop ballads) and intimacy. The implication is that these collections of mood music can facilitate romantic, physical, and sexual intimacy between consenting partners, though the ads present narrow identity representations of what sexual/romantic/sexual partners look like. Still, the ads restate a central claim that we make in Musical Intimacy which begins to get at the “why” question. Why (in its many iterations) is musical intimacy something that artists, engineers, producers, and marketers attempt to construct for listeners? The oversimplified answer is that listeners tend to find some kind of value in musical intimacy, be it an understanding of the artist (as in intimate recordings or performances), social bonds with others (as in the communitas generated among audience members), or music’s role in our personal (especially sexual and romantic) relationships. And if musically intimate experiences have value for listeners, constructing musical intimacy is a worthwhile endeavor on the part of artists, producers, and marketers.

-Zack

Just Listen…and Play

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“Turn that up! No, not that one - the other one!”

Recently, I was in the studio editing guitar tracks for a client’s upcoming project. As I was intently focusing on the feel and sonics of the rhythm guitar tracks (of which there were many!) I was working off of the client’s mix notes, since they couldn’t be here for the actual mix session. One of the requests was to “tighten” the guitar tracks up; that is, edit them so that they conform closer to perfect metronomic time. Normally in a circumstance like this, an engineer might try to quantize the audio, but quantization can often lead to unpredictable interactions with the other tracks, or worse. And of course, when one starts moving and editing tracks in this manner, the sonic issue of phase coherence certainly comes into play.

Four hours later, I finished up the client’s requests for this mix revision, mixed down a rough but semi-polished version of the full mix and shipped it off via the magic of file transfer. No CDs or tapes anymore – at least, it’s a rare request…the immediacy of digital file transfer can be a positive or a negative. Although, sometimes, a workflow can be interrupted when things happen too fast (more on that in a future post, for sure).

Anyway, later in the week, I was informed that the band made the decision to go back to the original versions of the raw-ish guitar tracks - “unquantized” and “more natural” sounding were some of the descriptions they used. The band’s new mix notes advised me to return the tracks to their former timing glory, before all of the editing surgery and, and, as Brian Eno says, a massive amount of “screwdriver work.”

There is a lesson to be learned here (hopefully!), and I think it has to do with musical authenticity and, in a more specific way, musical intimacy. The original guitar tracks weren’t “out-of-time,” they were just not perfect. It’s ok to have a track feel human; it’s what draws us in, makes us feel connected. We can tell when tracks and songs and artists are genuine, and we can tell when they are not; the concept of musical intimacy is present, and lurking just beneath the sonic surface for those who wish to listen intentionally and connect to music on a deeper, yet inescapably fundamental level.

I hope they don’t want to do the same thing to the drum tracks…

Zack’s Writing Soundtrack

Like many of us, music is a near constant in my daily life, and certain activities are better suited to certain types of music. Although I’m fairly omnivorous in my musical tastes, the focus required for writing often leads me to music that leans heavy into the instrumental side of the scale. More often than not, this means sifting through specific titles from the cd collection or streaming platform.

But early in the writing process for Musical Intimacy, I attended a fantastic talk by Regina Bradley who, at the time, had just published Chronicling Stankonia (2021, University of North Carolina Press), and was dropping absolute knowledge bombs about her writing and marketing process for the book. One of the ideas that Dr. Bradley shared was her practice of a curated playlist to serve as a soundtrack to writing.

Writing is of course a journey that constantly shifts and moves in directions both expected and not. And the way that I approached it, this playlist became a side quest of sorts; I started populating it in the early summer of 2021, but continued to add tracks and re-sequence the playlist over the course of writing Musical Intimacy. It leans heavily on jazz and jazz adjacent tunes, and as such, also helped to shape Jazzish, the radio show that I began in the fall of 2022. Mostly newer artists, a few favorites sprinkled in, but all in all grooves that I relied on while writing and revising.

Enjoy! What are your go to artists/albums/tunes for writing? Let us know in the comments!

Musical Intimacy: A Discography

A favorite feature in music books is a discographic appendix. Space limitations did not allow us to include a discography in Musical Intimacy. That being the case, we knew we wanted to provide one on this site. Check out the Discography page, which includes playlists for each chapter!

Welcome!

Welcome to the the online hub for Musical Intimacy, published in September 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic. We are thrilled that our book is now out in the world! While the published book is a finite object, we envision this website as being a space to continue the conversation. Throughout the writing process, there were of course many ideas that didn’t make it onto the page, and many paths not taken. The website provides a space to further ruminate on ideas around Musical Intimacy, to share bits left on the cutting room floor, share some of our process, and hopefully, to hear readers’ ideas about and experiences with musical intimacy.

The Blog will be the most dynamic piece of the website, the space where we’ll continue to share and develop ideas around musical intimacy. A general overview of the book (and a free preview of its Introduction) can be found on the About the Book page. Keep up with conferences, book talks, digital appearances, and more on the Upcoming Events page, while the Contact Us page can be used for direct contact, as well as inquiries for talks, classroom visits, and the like.

We look forward to continuing the conversation, to engaging, and of course, to listening.

-Zack and Todd