Musical Pleasure Research Articles

Comment on Solberg and Jensenius: The Temporal Dynamics of Embodied Pleasure in Music

In the paper 'Pleasurable and Intersubjective Embodied Experiences of Electronic Dance Music', Ragnhild Torvanger Solberg and Alexander Refsum Jensenius report on a study in which the movements and self-reported affective responses of a group of dancing participants were recorded and related to structural properties of Electronic Dance Music. They observed that, compared with tracks that had a relatively flat dynamic development, tracks which included a 'break-down', 'build-up' and 'drop' of textural layers were associated with greater changes in movement amount and higher ratings of pleasure. Here I comment on their results and methodological approach and use the opportunity to address the continuous pleasure that was treated as a control in this experiment, discussing some reasons why affective responses to music with more evenly distributed dynamic progressions are so often ignored.

Is the Idea of ‘Musical Emotion’ Present in Classical Antiquity?

This article investigates to what degree the concept of ‘musical emotion,’ a term coined by contemporary psychology, can be traced in antiquity. Hence, it is necessary to begin by clearly defining ‘music’ and ‘emotion,’ in both ancient and modern understandings. The distinctions between ‘musically induced emotions’ and ‘musical emotions’ strictly speaking, and between the ‘referentialist’ and ‘absolutist’ (or ‘cognitivist’) school in music psychology structure the question. While most ancient theorists believe that the impact of music on the passions (παθήµατα) is of pedagogical or therapeutical relevance as it is able to create ethos in the human soul throughmimēsis, others, similar to the cognitivists, limit its effect to (aesthetic) pleasure. Emotions unique to music are not explicitly discussed by the ancient theorists, although an indirect acknowledgment possibly exists in form of metaphorical descriptions of musical experiences, a certain notion of specifically musical pleasure, and the idea of music’s magical power.

The effect of social and ambient factors on impulse purchasing behavior in social commerce

ABSTRACTSocial commerce is an exciting new business model in the e-commerce world. Because it is a relatively new concept, the strategies that achieve the best market performance remain unclear. To better understand consumer purchasing behavior and develop corresponding strategies, special characteristics of social commerce need to be considered. This study uses the stimulus-organism-response framework to examine the effect of social presence and ambient factors from the impulse purchasing perspective in a social commerce context. Experimental data were collected from 300 social commerce users related to nine social commerce deals, and hypothesis testing was performed using a partial least squares model. First, the results of our study indicate that social presence in a social commerce site replicates the presence of consumers in the retail environment and makes consumers feel like shopping together, which leads to higher impulse purchasing behavior. Second, this study identifies music tempo as a potentially important ambient factor in the success of a social commerce site. Third, this study finds a very interesting phenomenon that the scarcity of a deal can have a negative effect as a moderator between music tempo and pleasure. The findings of this study suggest that a pleasant and entertaining experience is necessary and a social aspect needs to be incorporated for better performance in social commerce sites.

Bach and God by Michael Marissen

Reviewed by: Bach and God by Michael Marissen Paul Westermeyer Bach and God. By Michael Marissen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 257pp. Michael Marissen is Professor Emeritus of Music at Swarthmore College. One of his teachers was Eric Chafe who discussed J. S. Bach’s Cantata 21 (Tears into Wine, 2015) in a lengthy tome of six [End Page 465] hundred pages. The detail in that book concerns the theological theme that produced the title, but the underlying theme is that Bach’s music requires both a theological/liturgical and a musical understanding. In far fewer words, Marissen argues the same underlying theme, that Bach’s music cannot be understood as aesthetic musical pleasure in which words can be ignored, nor can the importance of words be emphasized to make the notes trivial ornaments. Rather, the music interprets the text. Marissen’s book, however, unlike Chafe’s, is devoted to more than one work. Its detail centers in part on The Musical Offering as homage to God and not “abstract” chamber music or homage to Frederick the Great (7, chapter 7), but this book is primarily about anti-Judaism which here means not mean disagreement, but contempt. Bach, like all of us, had his blind spots. His period, like all periods, had its systems of injustice. The church, though sojourner, participates in and sometimes supports these principalities and powers, denying its own message which is partly why it confesses its unknown sins. Bach was not exempt from these sins. That is the detail Marissen examines. He points out that Bach sinned in against Muslims, Roman Catholics, and Calvinists; and he reflected the anti-Judaism of his time and place. He comes off better than Luther (113), and his St. John Passion comes off better than Handel’s Messiah. (Marissen devoted whole books to those two works [Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach’s St. John Passion, 1998; Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah, 2014]). But Bach is not exempt, at least not in Marissen’s view. In a long footnote (68) he acknowledges those who disagree with him. Marissen divided his book into four parts with seven chapters, each an edited version of an earlier article. Part I discusses basic Lutheranism with two chapters on the musically theological and historically informed readings of Bach’s librettos. Part II takes up anti-Judaism with a chapter on Bach’s Cantata 46 about the destruction of Jerusalem (amazing musical exegesis, but Bach at his “grimmest,” [115]) and one on Bach’s cantatas, the Jews, and the Gospel of John. Part III continues anti-Judaism with two chapters on Bach’s Passion settings. Part IV discusses religious expression in chamber music. Its chapter on the Musical Offering has affinities to Marissen’s [End Page 466] compelling insights in The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, 1995. Although Marissen may press some ambiguities to their breaking point, he notes that Bach’s St. John Passion indicates a greater concern for Christians and their sin than for anti-Judaism (155–157) and that other texts in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion work against Matthew 25:27, “His blood be on us and on our children” (158–59 and 179ff.). What Bach thought, however, whether he even agreed with his librettos (75, n. 26, and 123), or what Marissen believes are not the chief concerns here. (Marissen comes from a strict Dutch Calvinist background and views himself as an agnostic.) This is a careful study, in part a detailed biblical word study, laying out the anti-Judaic perspective of which Bach was a part. For providing us that data we need to be grateful. Paul Westermeyer Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc

CREATING A TRADITIONAL ORCHESTRA FOR THE NEEDS OF SPECIAL EDUCATION

The creation and teaching of a musical ensemble constitutes a complex process. The process becomes all the more complex when it entails the needs of Special Education. The goal of the present study is to present the teaching of a traditional orchestra to individuals suffering from intellectual deficits. Our methodological framework is anchored on: (a) Applied Behavior Analysis (Miller, 1962; Krumboltz & Krumboltz, 1972; Gibbs & Luyben, 1985; Kazdin, 1984) with the help of technology (Makris, 2015); and (b) the analysis of the mathematical law governing musical pleasure (Makris, Mullet, 2003). More specifically, we will be analyzing the manner in which we can create and teach a traditional orchestra to mentally disabled individuals through the application of the model “visual stimulus” – “psychophysical reaction”. The gradual shaping of behavior entails progressive reinforcement and not anticipation of perfection, the motive of the mentally disabled individuals to participate and be included. The results presented in the graphs confirm in practice the success of the present endeavor.

Musical pleasure and reward: mechanisms and dysfunction.

Most people derive pleasure from music. Neuroimaging studies show that the reward system of the human brain is central to this experience. Specifically, the dorsal and ventral striatum release dopamine when listening to pleasurable music, and activity in these structures also codes the reward value of musical excerpts. Moreover, the striatum interacts with cortical mechanisms involved in perception and valuation of musical stimuli. Recent studies have begun to explore individual differences in the way that this complex system functions. Development of a questionnaire for music reward experiences has allowed the identification of separable factors associated with musical pleasure, described as music-seeking, emotion-evocation, mood regulation, sensorimotor, and social factors. Applying this questionnaire to a large sample uncovered approximately 5% of the population with low sensitivity to musical reward in the absence of generalized anhedonia or depression. Further study of this group revealed that there are individuals who respond normally both behaviorally and psychophysiologically to rewards other than music (e.g., monetary value) but do not experience pleasure from music despite normal music perception ability and preserved ability to identify intended emotions in musical passages. This specific music anhedonia bears further study, as it may shed light on the function and dysfunction of the reward system.

Review: Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music by Susan McClary

Review: Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music by Susan McClary

Charles Burney; or, the Philosophical Misfortune of a Liberal Musician

ABSTRACTThe moral and political propriety of musical pleasure constituted one of Charles Burney's continuous lines of thought from the 1770s to the 1790s. As a public figure, the music historian found himself called upon to state why music matters – in a preface, a dedication or an essay. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burney read in musical performances symptoms of contemporary society and politics, but, unlike Rousseau, he perceived in modern music signs of civilization's progress. Musical excellence, according to Burney, required both freedom and affluence; thus while Burney rejected absolutist monarchy, he nevertheless praised the achievements of court culture. Indeed, his advocacy of music as an ‘innocent luxury’ reads as an addendum to eighteenth-century disputes on the morality and benefits of luxury. The social implications of this definition of music, however, are problematic: while Burney acknowledged the right of each individual to feel as they please, he also claimed for the music critic the exclusive authority to speak publicly about music. This essay explores these aspects of Burney's political philosophy of music in relation to the works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Avison, Wollstonecraft and Hume.

Neural interactions that give rise to musical pleasure.

Music is arguably one of the most potent rewards, existing in all cultures as far back as history dates, and currently reported to be among the most pleasurable stimuli by most individuals. In this review, we summarize the literature to investigate how a mere sequence of sound events can become so pleasurable. We examine the role of the brain’s mesolimbic reward and reinforcement circuitry in processing of rewards, and how the connectivity of this system has become more integrated with higher-order brain regions involved in complex thought to give rise to abstract pleasures. We suggest an integrative role for complex cortical processes with long-existing reinforcement circuits and an interaction between sensory processing and decoding mechanisms and affective processing.

Pleasurable music affects reinforcement learning according to the listener

Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while those with lesser dopamine efficacy learn better to avoid punishments. In this study, we explored the practical implications of musical pleasure through its ability to facilitate reinforcement learning via non-pharmacological dopamine elicitation. Subjects from a wide variety of musical backgrounds chose a pleasurable and a neutral piece of music from an experimenter-compiled database, and then listened to one or both of these pieces (according to pseudo-random group assignment) as they performed a reinforcement learning task dependent on dopamine transmission. We assessed musical backgrounds as well as typical listening patterns with the new Helsinki Inventory of Music and Affective Behaviors (HIMAB), and separately investigated behavior for the training and test phases of the learning task. Subjects with more musical experience trained better with neutral music and tested better with pleasurable music, while those with less musical experience exhibited the opposite effect. HIMAB results regarding listening behaviors and subjective music ratings indicate that these effects arose from different listening styles: namely, more affective listening in non-musicians and more analytical listening in musicians. In conclusion, musical pleasure was able to influence task performance, and the shape of this effect depended on group and individual factors. These findings have implications in affective neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, learning, and music therapy.

Supplemental Material for Neural Interactions That Give Rise to Musical Pleasure

Supplemental Material for Neural Interactions That Give Rise to Musical Pleasure

Ever-changing cycles of musical pleasure: The role of dopamine and anticipation.

Music listening is highly pleasurable and important part of most people's lives. Because music has no obvious importance for survival, the ubiquity of music remains puzzling and the brain processes underlying this attraction to music are not well understood. Like other (such as food, sex, and money), pleasurable music activates structures in the dopaminergic reward system, but how music manages to tap into the brain's reward system is less clear. Here we propose a novel framework for understanding musical pleasure, suggesting that music conforms to the recent concept of pleasure cycles with phases of wanting/expectation, liking, and learning. We argue that expectation is fundamental to musical pleasure, and that music can be experienced as pleasurable both when it fulfills and violates expectations. Dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain represent expectations and violations of expecta- tions (prediction errors) in response to rewards and salience signals. We argue that the human brain treats music as an alert/incentive salience signal, and suggest that the activity of dopamine neurons represents aspects of the phases of musical expectation and musical learning, but not directly the phase of music liking. Finally, we propose a computational model for understanding musical anticipation and pleasure operationalized through the recent theory of predictive coding.Keywords: music, pleasure, reward, dopamine, anticipationSupplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0031126.suppSome people prefer Mozart whereas others prefer Nirvana or Bob Dylan, but common to most of us is that we find great pleasure in listening to music. Indeed, music is consistently rated to be among the top 10 things people find pleasurable in life (Dube & Lebel, 2003). Consequently, researchers have suggested that music listening is rewarding in itself (Huron, 2001, 2003; Vuust & Kringelbach, 2009; Wallin, Merker, & Brown, 2000; Zald & Zatorre, 2011). This might explain why music is so widely used across situations in our everyday life and why music has sustained such prominence in human cultural development (Fitch, 2005; Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003).Similar to the processing of other rewards, the brain structures that mediate musical perception and pleasure are thought to be anatomically and functionally separated (Peretz, 2010). This sep- aration of perception and pleasure has permeated existing music research (Peretz, 2010), and consequently most studies concentrate entirely on one or the other system. This may partly be owing to the advantages and disadvantages associated with different brain imaging methods. Functional MRI (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) have high spatial resolution, allowing the study of emotion processing by midbrain structures. However, the high spatial resolution comes at the cost of the temporal resolution, which is essential for studying online musical anticipation. A high temporal resolution measuring changes on the basis of millisec- onds is an integrated part of electroencephalography (EEG) and magneto-encephalography (MEG). Consequently many EEG and MEG studies describe anticipatory processes in the auditory cor- tices (Brattico et al., 2009; Brattico, Tervaniemi, Naatanen, & Peretz, 2006; Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi, & Pantev, 2004; Garza Villarreal, Brattico, Leino, Ostergaard, & Vuust, 2011; Janata, 1995; Koelsch, 2009; Koelsch, Jentschke, Sammler, & Mietchen, 2007; Leino, Brattico, Tervaniemi, & Vuust, 2007; Loui, Grent-t-Jong, Torpey, & Woldorff, 2005; Maess, Koelsch, Gunter, & Friederici, 2001; Patel, Gibson, Ratner, Besson, & Holcomb, 1998; Schiavetto, Cortese, & Alain, 1999; Toiviainen & Krumhansl, 2003; Trainor, McDonald, & Alain, 2002), but few relate this knowledge to the pleasure of music.In this article, we propose a novel framework for understanding musical pleasure. …

LE PLAISIR ‘PROPRE’ DE LA TRAGEDIE EST-IL INTELLECTUEL?

In this article, I oppose ‘cognitivist’ interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics (Belfiore, Donini, Gallop, Halliwell, Wolff) which defend the idea that the pleasure proper to tragedy is a pleasure of an intellectual nature, and I defend an ‘emotivist’ interpretation according to which this pleasure is essentially of an emotional nature. I pass in review the passages of chapters 4, 9, 14 and 26 wherein the question of the ‘pleasure proper’ to tragedy is dealt with, in comparing them with what Aristotle tells us about musical pleasure in Politics VIII.

Supplemental Material for Ever-Changing Cycles of Musical Pleasure: The Role of Dopamine and Anticipation

Supplemental Material for Ever-Changing Cycles of Musical Pleasure: The Role of Dopamine and Anticipation

Hey, What’s That Sound?

Hey, What’s That Sound? Hua Hsu (bio) Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century. By Charles Hiroshi Garrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 312 pages, illustrated. $24.95 (paper). Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. By David Suisman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 368 pages, illustrated. $29.95 (cloth). Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. By Karl Hagstrom Miller. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. 384 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Medium Cool: Music Videos From Soundies to Cell Phones. Edited by Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 360 pages, illustrated. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About. By Joshua Clover. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 198 pages, illustrated. $21.95 (cloth). $16.95 (paper). “You may be sitting in a room reading this book,” writes the American composer Aaron Copeland in the opening pages of his 1939 book, What to Listen for in Music.1 The title of Copeland’s foray into music appreciation presumes an answer. After all, who would buy such a book merely to confirm the accuracy of his own senses? Over the course of his gently didactic pages, Copeland carefully calibrates his reader’s critical apparatus and offers a readymade vocabulary to deal with issues of form, technique, and style. But he also captures another of music’s effects. In his introductory notes, as if by accident, he describes the sublime thrill that precedes issues of scale, tone, timbre, or rhythm, if it does not negate their importance altogether: “Imagine one note struck on the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room—proving that the sound element in music is a powerful [End Page 963] and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.”2 For many of us, this is answer enough: it is precisely music’s capacity to produce “powerful” and “mysterious” effects that strikes us to our very core. As that note trembles in the air, everything changes. Whether it is a composition that baffles or annoys us, drawing us deep into its inscrutable layers, or a charming tune that feels eerily familiar upon first listen, we react to music at a seemingly instinctual level first. Copeland’s authority notwithstanding, most of us do not believe we need to be told “what to listen for”—rather, music feels like a self-evident truth. Perhaps this is why writing about music has always seemed an undignified pursuit. The durable and oft-deployed comment comparing writing about music to “dancing about architecture” offers the swiftest retort, and maybe the murkiness of the remark’s origins—it has been attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, Thelonious Monk, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, and Frank Zappa, among others—epitomizes the timeless, everyman nature of this resistance to intellectualizing musical pleasures, as if the plaint were so universal that it simply doesn’t matter who uttered it first.3 The keepers of mystery will always claim the high ground, for the connections we forge with pop songs seem beyond scrutiny. What motivates this distrust toward thinking too deeply about the history or effects of popular music? What is at stake when we write or theorize about music? And how did we come to anticipate such intimate responses to pop music—how did we learn what to listen for? Perhaps this ambivalence toward the concentrated study of popular music points to a fear that we will somehow taint or undo our feelings about the past—and perhaps this fear is a valid one. Pop songs do not exist outside of history, even if they work by making us think otherwise, as though time were standing still. One might hear, encoded in twentieth-century song the mythology of nation building, the consolidation of publics and counterpublics, the testing of new identities. Pop songs are artifacts cataloging discarded styles and formerly fashionable ideas about pleasure and pain, performance and spectatorship. These five new books about music in the twentieth century show what can happen when one listens closely...

(Ne)ugodje vplivanja: Georg Rochbergove Kapriciozne variacije za violino brez spremljave (1973)

V sestavku soočam Herolda Blooma »Strašljivost vplivanja« z vrsto novejših in še zlasti uspešnih glasbenih adaptacij Blooma, pri čemer ponujam teorijo glasbenega (ne)ugodja na podlagi postlacanovske psihoanalize.

Swinging Bach: Bobby McFerrin and Guests (review)

Reviewed by: Swinging Bach: Bobby McFerrin and Guests Jim Farrington Swinging Bach: Bobby McFerrin and Guests. DVD. Presented by Nina Ruge and Alan Bangs. With Bobby McFerrin, Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, Jacques Loussier Trio, King’s Singers, German Brass, Ji´ri Stivin and Collegium Quodlibet, Turtle Island String Quartet, Quintessence Saxophone Quintet, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Christian Gansch. Leipzig, Germany: EuroArts Music International, 2000. 2050406. $19.99. Crossover. The very word strikes a range of emotions from disgust to greed to benign satisfaction to curiosity and back to horror on the part of the music-buying public. Readers will recognize where they fit into this continuum. Those who look down their noses at music that takes from a variety of traditions and makes something else neglect centuries of musicians and composers doing the same thing. Today's so-called "crossover" music (which can trace its history back to any vernacular musician appropriating melodies by composers of art-with-a-capital-A music) is enjoyed by millions who simply enjoy music, and yet is reviled by those for whom classical, jazz, or a particular kind of ethnic music is their primary if not sole musical pleasure. The concert under consideration here was held in Leipzig in 2000, part of the "24 Hour Bach" celebrations commemorating the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death. This was an outdoor concert in the Marketplatz using several stages, plus a balcony for the remarkable German Brass. Thousands of appreciative people crowded the plaza despite rain throughout much of the evening, providing a palpable energy. Unfortunately the weather seemed to wreak havoc with some of the intonation, particularly that of the Quintessence Saxophone Quintet. Not everything on the concert was of the crossover variety, but everything was based at least in part on the music of Bach, who of course spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in Leipzig. Production qualities throughout are very high, with two surround sound options (Dolby Digital and DTS), and subtitles in three languages. The two hosts, who speak at times in both English and German, introduce most of the performers and works, and attempt to explain the musical context that the concert is trying to capture, but ultimately are superfluous. The packaging and marketing of this disc would lead one to believe that Bobby McFerrin is the central performer. While he may be the most recognized name, he is present on only four segments. Nevertheless, McFerrin steals the show with his remarkable audience participation rendition of "Ave Maria," during which he sings the moving Bach accompaniment while the audience sings the soaring Gounod vocal line. Another high point is the King's Singers lone contribution to the video, "Deconstructing Johann," showing all the wit, panache, and remarkable vocalizing for which the ensemble is famous (and what may be the best use I've seen of an otherwise corny ringtone at the opportune moment). With such a large number of performers and wide variety of styles, some unevenness is inevitable. For example, flutist Jiři Stivin's performance of two movements from the Orchestral Suite, BWV 1067 with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig are [End Page 681] almost painful to hear, such is the stylistic disconnect between ensemble and soloist; once he walks to the adjacent stage midway through the "Badinerie" to finish that movement with his jazz group, all is well. Something would have been missing had Jacques Loussier not been present. In the late 1950s, his Play Bach Trio promoted this kind of crossover music specifically with Bach's works in mind, selling millions of copies. Critics were not kind at the time, and the last several decades have not improved their opinion of the genre. Jim Farrington Eastman School of Music Copyright © 2007 the Music Library Association, Inc.

The Callenders, Eighteenth-Century Northern Nurserymen and Seedsmen

The Callenders developed the retail and wholesale seed trade in Newcastle from the 1740s until 1807. They ran nurseries in Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, and Leeds, specialized in medicinal plants, created a music pleasure garden, published nursery catalogues, surveyed, designed gardens and wrote on planting. This paper gives an insight into the variety possible within the eighteenth-century nursery trade and into the way in which regional nursery and seedsmen related to the London trade, to the continent and to each other.

THE ITALIAN MENACE: OPERA BUFFA IN REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

The Parisian premiere of Paisiello’s Nina, o sia la pazza d’amore on 3 September 1791 triggered a hostile reaction from French librettists and composers. Since the opéra comique on which Paisiello had based his opera remained in the active repertory of the Comédie-Italienne, Nina was considered an infringement of copyright legislation recently passed by the National Assembly. In the controversy that followed, matters involving intellectual property and opera aesthetics were linked to revolutionary struggle. At a time when clarity and transparency were identified as republican virtues in France, the carefully wrought balance between music and text that was associated with French operatic genres acquired new political resonance. Simultaneously, the perceived emphasis on sensual musical pleasure – at the expense of a coherent libretto – in Italian operas like Nina was eyed with suspicion, deemed a potential symptom of counterrevolution. In this way, the relative merits of French and Italian opera were superimposed on issues of revolution, reaction and national identity.

The Poetics of Electrosonic Presence: Recorded Music and the Materiality of Sound

The properties and possibilities of music recordings remain surprisingly undertheorized despite recorded music’s ubiquity in contemporary musical life and the increasing attention technologically mediated musics have received from researchers in a variety of disciplines. In this essay, I propose that by taking recordings seriously as cultural objects and abandoning assumptions about their “inauthenticity”, we can gain new insights into the multiple roles music plays in social life. Three basic questions structure what follows: 1. What is the nature of recorded music? 2. What does it do? 3. Why do people buy it? The first question will be examined in the most detail, and will lead us to a consideration of musical sound itself as a semiotic/sensible phenomenon. Addressing the second question will occasion a discussion of how the recording and playback of musical sound transforms listening experiences and reconfigures social space, and answering the third question will involve a necessarily incomplete and exploratory investigation of the use values recorded music offers to consumers, accompanied by a rethinking of our current understandings of musical pleasure. I will argue throughout that the products of music recording technologies should not be evaluated according to their “truthfidness” as mimetic representations of live musical performances, but as specialized cultural objects in their own right. As will become clear, implementing this view entails devising new analytical tools and re-examining received wisdom on the possible meanings of musical commodities.