Music as atmosphere : collective feelings and affective sounds / edited by Friedlind Riedel and Juha Torvinen.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Music as Atmosphere - Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds is the first collection of essays on music, sound, and atmosphere. The volume assembles an impressively cross-disciplinary panoply of scholars from music studies, sound studies, philosophy, and media studies, all of whom investigate music and sound as shared environmental feelings, that is, as atmospheres. The contributors explore atmosphereological approaches to musical traditions and practices, aural histories and memory, music's relationship to the body, social collectives, and nature. They probe conceptual issues at the forefront of contemporary discussions of atmosphere and affect but then also extend the spatial and relational focus towards fundamentally temporal questions of performance, process, timbre, resonance, and personhood. In doing so they touch on the capacity of atmospheric relations to imbue a situation with an ambient feeling and to modulate social collectives but also underscore auditory experience as an acoustemology for atmosphere. In addition to original research, the volume features a first translation of an important text by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, and a debate on affect and atmosphere between the philosophers Jan Slaby and Brian Massumi. This wide-ranging collection provides a strong theoretical framework and vibrant case-studies. It also proposes some intriguing new approaches. It constitutes a rich resource for scholars and students of music, sound, aesthetics, media, anthropology, and contemporary philosophy"-- Provided by publisher.