Free | No ticket required

Mead Witter School of Music Musicology Colloquium Series

Humanities Building
Room 2441

Paula Clare Harper presents:
“Use This Sound”: Viral Musicking and the Noisy Path to TikTok

TikTok’s innovative audio invitation – “Use this Sound” – points to the potency of music and sound for encouraging and archiving viral phenomena in 21st-century digital and platform culture. This presentation, frames TikTok’s centering of the microsoundtrack as the culmination of longer histories of online virality, which – this talk argues – has been musical all along.

Ultimately, the talk situates TikTok as a somewhat-inevitable incarnation borne of decades-long accelerating internet and social media trends, in which sound and music have been widely instrumentalized to render surveillance, advertising, and the mechanics of digital platform capitalism palatable.
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Paula Clare Harper researches music, sound, and the internet. An assistant professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, she is currently at work on a book on the musicality of online virality, as well as on a co-edited volume of scholarship on Taylor Swift.