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Full-Text Articles in Musicology
Listen Like This: Audiovisual Argument In Rockumentary, Lindsey Eckenroth
Listen Like This: Audiovisual Argument In Rockumentary, Lindsey Eckenroth
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Rockumentaries are commodities that construct authoritative interpretations of popular music history, shaping how we come to know, value, hear, consume, and identify with popular music and those who create it. The arguments rockumentaries make, and the ways they make them, are the subject of this dissertation. Rather than position rockumentary as a genre, I investigate it as a set of representational tendencies to be examined in relation to stardom, authenticity, fandom, the culture industry, and the music(ians) these films represent. My introduction argues that rockumentaries operate according to what I call the offstage pattern, a dialectical structure in which …
Audio Quality As Content: Everyday Criticism Of The Lo-Fi Format, Elizabeth Newton
Audio Quality As Content: Everyday Criticism Of The Lo-Fi Format, Elizabeth Newton
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the matter of authenticity with respect to audio recordings. In the early 1990s, the term “lo-fi” (“low-fidelity”) emerged as a label used to categorize many different types of popular music, indicating widespread fascination with what I call audio quality, the perceived character of an audio recording. I define audio quality as the relationship between content and mediation, which varies greatly by circumstance. My archival research of zines, press releases, and correspondence examines this relationship in three case studies: Wu-Tang Clan, Bratmobile, and Elliott Smith. I posit the lo-fi format as a critical structure that emerged in …