The Susan Boyle Phenomenon (2009)

Center for Journalism Ethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009

European Journal of Communication 24(4): 481-493., 2009

Exploring the vote-in formats Strictly Come Dancing and Britain’s Got Talent, this article examines how mass communication is changing as a result of audience involvement via digital platforms. The central argument is that feedback opportunities provided by new technology represents new ways of connecting with the audience, and thus new challenges for the TV industry.

Musicians produce virtual performance videos of themselves and others on websites like YouTube. In a society with ubiquitous Internet and prominent social media interactions, music education can benefit by exploring the practices of musicians who produce music online, such as the creators of virtual vocal ensembles. A virtual vocal ensemble is a video containing multiple audio-visual tracks layered together through a technique called multitracking. In this performance practice, a virtual vocal ensemble creator records and combines multiple tracks to make a choir of clones or works with others in collaborative or collective ways. The purpose of this study was to explore the implications of virtual vocal ensembles and the medium that emerged from the development and distribution of those videos. This study situates the creators of virtual vocal ensembles within a sound recording medium, based on a theoretical framework developed by Sterne (2003) that defines a medium as a contingent network of relations made up of people, practices, institutions, and technologies. Guiding questions focus on the musical and social implications of creating virtual vocal ensembles, the entities listed above, and the relations between them. Traditional research methods and Internet inquiry were combined to create a multiple case study that examined three YouTube channels, each produced by a video creator. Data included the observation of the videos on the YouTube channels, text comments, and website analytics as well as interviews with video creators and others pertinent to the cases. A cross-case analysis was conducted to produce assertions that attended to the guiding questions. Creators of virtual vocal ensembles developed methods to construct and publish their videos, which were limited by their musical and technological abilities and the resources available. As musicians produced virtual vocal ensembles, online communities containing iii elements of fandoms, learning communities of practice, and music making spaces developed. Implications of the performance practice have effected the way the medium is situated within society as well as the way creators perform choral music and sing. For example, when performers create virtual vocal ensembles, they develop identities as virtual performers and express themselves musically and theatrically. Musical arrangement, voice range expansion, and autonomous exploration of musical concepts were also results of creators’ performance practices. Creating virtual vocal ensembles require not only musical skills, but also technological and production abilities that can be applied to music education practices and expand conceptions of ensemble, performance, and medium. As producers of virtual vocal ensembles, video creators use social media to expand their reach and develop a community that has aspects of a fandom as well as learning and music making communities. Music educators can incorporate the practices of virtual vocal ensemble creators into their instruction and help students learn skills that may allow them to make music outside of the choral ensemble classroom in virtual contexts.

PhD Thesis, 2016

Contemporary congregational songs (elsewhere referred to as ‘praise and worship’ music, or contemporary worship music) began some forty years ago in Western Pentecostal/Charismatic contexts, but their influence is now worldwide and pan-denominational. While professional and popular discourses relating to this genre are widespread, scholarly engagement is still nascent. Where it is available, it is most often the examination of a specific contextualisation of the genre. Moreover, the music of the genre is under-represented in analyses because researchers have preferred sociological, historical, or theological methodologies. Finally, lacking from the contemporary congregational song (CCS) discourse is a research method and meta-language to facilitate a generic understanding of the genre; its texts, producers, and consumers. This thesis provides a broad scholarly platform for CCS; a framework for their creation, analysis, and evaluation upon which future scholarship can build. This thesis identifies, defines, and explores the CCS genre, its texts, its production and producers, and Christians’ engagement with these mediated texts as individuals, and in corporate worship settings. The methodology employed to achieve these aims is a tri-level music semiology (Nattiez, 1990). At the first level, twenty-five of the most popular CCS sung in churches around the world are subject to individual and collective analyses, based on their most-viewed YouTube versions. Key lyrical, musical, and extra-musical characteristics were identified. At the second level, Christians attending CCS-oriented churches were directly surveyed to ascertain their engagement with CCS. Two key questions were explored: What can Christians sing? And, What do Christians want to sing, and why? Supporting data from the 2011 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) was also analysed and cross-tabulated. Finally, key CCS writers/producers/performers were interviewed to ascertain the degree to which they considered diverse and localised congregational engagement. This study sheds new light on the CCS genre, articulating its musical, lyrical, and extra-musical elements in greater detail and depth than has previously been available. It also reveals CCS as primarily a functional genre, facilitating musical worship for individual and gathered Christians. Furthermore, CCS is a contested genre, constantly under a process of negotiation and transformation by various stakeholders. Tensions between the new and the familiar, the individual and communal, the professional and vernacular, all contribute to the formation and evolution of the contemporary congregational song genre.

YouTube has come to epitomize the possibilities of digital culture. With more than seventy million unique users a month and approximately eighty million videos online, this brand-name video distribution platform holds the richest repository of popular culture on the Internet. As the fastest growing site in the history of the Web, YouTube promises endless new opportunities for amateur video, political campaigning, entertainment formats, and viral marketing—a clip culture that has seemed to outpace both cinema and television. The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, archive, and cultural form. This remarkable volume brings together renowned film and media scholars to debate the problems and potential of "broadcasting yourself." The YouTube Reader takes on claims of newness, immediacy, and popularity with sytematic and theoretically informed arguments, offering a closer look at the available texts on YouTube and the policies and norms that govern their access and use.

2016

Is today’s professional and commercial YouTube culture the downfall of a ‘participatory culture’ in which there were no lines between producers and consumers and the approval of the ‘YouTube community’ was revenue enough? This study argues otherwise and challenges the participatory culture and social media paradigms which have been predominant in the research thus far. It offers an analysis of the most subscribed YouTube channels of the first two years of the platform's operation (2005 and 2006). The aspects in focus are users’ backgrounds and motivations for using YouTube, video production, settings, modes of performance, cinematography, editing, the overall form of videos, and the activities of the contributing users and of others with regards to the videos once uploaded to YouTube. It shows that dedicated video production mattered already in the early years of the platform. It shows how YouTube users employed their performing bodies and audiovisual techniques in creative ways to produce their videos – and how they made their videos successful and generate revenues on and off YouTube. How is YouTube an extension, transformation, or break from media like film and television? How can YouTube videomaking be situated with regards to other cultural practices? This study offers novel insights. The website: http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de/2016/4407/4407.htm The full pdf: http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de/2016/4407/4407.pdf

"Fan/Remix Video," edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 9, 2012

This case study of spreadability analyzes the Lady Gaga music video "Telephone," which has been appropriated and reworked by YouTube users sharing derivative works online. What properties of the music video stimulate user appropriation? What hybrid audiovisual forms are emerging from its reworking by users? In order to answer these questions, between January and August 2010, I conducted participant observation on Lady Gaga's official social network profiles and collected 70 "Telephone" derivative videos on YouTube. I identified three main categories of video creativity: (1) music (which includes covers, "me singing" videos, music mashups, and choreography); (2) parody (in which YouTube users and comedians humorously imitate Gaga, creating spoofs); and (3) fashion (in which makeup artists and amateurs appropriate the star's image to create makeup and hair tutorials). "Telephone" has become spreadable because it integrates dance music and choreography, costume changes, cinematic references, and product placements that work as textual hooks meaningful to different target markets: live music, dance, chick, and postmodern cinematic cultures. In particular, Gaga is a cult body that explicitly incorporates previous cinematic and pop music icons. Users are stimulated to reenact Gaga's cult body online. On YouTube, spreadability is thus strictly related to the appropriation of cult bodies. Fans, comedians, independent musicians, fashionistas, and pop stars construct their own cult bodies by deliberately borrowing characteristics from previous media icons and reenacting them in online videos in order to fulfill their expressive and professional needs.

After more than 5 months of research and work, this is my dissertation for the Master's of Public Policy at the Hertie School of Governance. The text explores how popular music can be a catalyst for political participation, especially among young adults, and its repercussions in a multimedia era. Going through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, as well as in the democratic transition of Mexico in 2000, this thesis proves that music serves a fundamental role in society and that in can galvanize people into taking part in the political landscape. ​ This thesis contains first-hand accounts of artists such as Klaus Meine from Scorpions, Paco Ayala from the Mexican rock band Molotov, and a number of musicologists and specialists of the likes of Prof. John Street (University of East Anglia), Prof. Josh Kun (University of Southern California) and Prof. Julia Palacios (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México), as well as journalists and researchers like Erik Kirschbaum (Reuters, Los Angeles Times, Berlin RIAS Commission) and Mariana "H" Hernández (Excélsior).