Embedded Files
Below you will find a brief overview of some of the projects Resonance Center faculty have engaged with.
A community music therapy approach was evaluated for students with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in a university setting with a postsecondary education program specifically designed for students with IDD. Action research was used to create space for social critique and reflexivity throughout the research process. The aim of the group approach was to establish community and relationships within the shared residence hall. Ten weekly sessions were held, and two performances were attended. Analysis of session notes, the researcher’s journal, and interview transcripts revealed a series of themes. The participants identified ways that community was enhanced through the program and also highlighted some of the challenges they experienced. The results indicated that community music therapy can provide an authentic relationship building experience for college students in an inclusive setting. Limitations and recommendations for future research and clinical work are included.
Researchers: Melody Schwantes, PhD, MT-BC and Eliana Rivera, MT-BC
Placing Depression/ Feeling Structures: Quare Affects and Expressive Strategies in Americana Music
This paper analyzes the expressive strategies Adeem and Kiah use to represent queer/trans perspectives on lived conditions that undergird depression in rural spaces. Drawing from Hil Malatino’s concept “side-affects” (Malatino, 2022), I examine how economic conditions, addiction and biopolitics, and political structures pattern negative affects which contribute to depression in queer and trans-Appalachians (Stimeling, 2020).
Amythyst Kiah’s “Southern Gothic” albums connect affective states of alienation to white supremacy and melancholy/addiction to economic displacement. Drawing from Black vocal, lyric, and instrumental traditions (folk, blues, rock), Kiah’s music negotiates these states by (dis)identifying with musical tropes of Appalachian and Southern feminine cis-heterosexuality (Royster, 2012; Murchison 2018) to realize Black feminist ethics. Adeem the Artist’s queer country albums connect depression to religion; addiction to the opioid epidemic; and rage/madness to neoliberal economies and U.S. nationalism. Adeem’s music (dis)identifies with sonic and narrative tropes in Appalachian traditions and 1990/2000s country music to critique white working-class masculinity and imagine intersectional coalitions. Analyzing interviews and performances, I reveal that both artists operationalize aesthetic negotiations with style and depression as tools to build community in the music industry and day-to-day life (Berlant 2011; Cvetkovich, 2012).
Researcher: Jacob Kopcienski, PhD
Inclusion of Students with Disabilities in Music Education
The goal of this multi-study project was to gather information about how children with autism were being served in music education classrooms in the public schools. We started with a large-scale survey sent to elementary music educators. We received a total of 569 responses; we analyzed the results from 441 who taught in the United States and who completed the entire survey. Most teachers were positive about including students with ASD and confident in teaching them. Teachers who expressed greater confidence in teaching students with ASD had more instruction related to special education during their undergraduate preparation and collaborated with more professionals in their school settings. Teachers reported that students with ASD were included in most of the regular music curriculum, and interactions with classmates were reported to be positive. Implications for teacher preparation, collaboration, and students’ music learning are discussed.
From the survey respondents, we purposefully selected two elementary music teachers to interview. Semi-structured interviews with these teachers allowed us to identify elements necessary for creating a culture of inclusion and implementing the inclusion of students with ASD. Follow-up, in-class observations with one teacher confirmed interview findings. Overall, results from the teachers’ interviews suggested elements that could impede or facilitate elementary music teachers in their efforts to create a classroom culture of inclusion and implement inclusion using best practices from music education and special education. Findings also provide important implications for music teacher preparation programs and school policies and procedures.
Researchers: Laura Brown, PhD, MT-BC, Ellary Draper, PhD, MT-BC, and Judith Jellison, PhD
In 2018, Nick Cline was an artist-in-residence with the Chicago Park District and the Inferno Mobile Recording Studio. Using music production technologies, he facilitated music-making and recording sessions at 20 parks throughout Chicago. View a sound map here. Inferno is a mobile youth arts program of the Chicago Park District that uses recording,
digital, new, and traditional media to facilitate experimentation, collaboration, and civic dialogue. As an outcome of this work, Cline contributed, “Upcycling into Instruments,” to the publication Sound Collaborations: An Inferno Cookbook and Manifesto. Edited by Hanna Brock, Sean Heaney, and Peregrine Bermas, Chicago Park District, 2019.
Sharing in the Groove’: Phish, Affect, and Affordances of the Live Music Environment
Where there are grooves, we find musicians, listeners, and dancers moving their bodies. These participants understand the musical texture of the groove through kinesthetic involvement, “feeling” the groove with their body as they converse in musical dialogue.
In this paper, I argue that a shared, collectively embodied and sustained affective experience is an affordance of groove, by examining the emergence of affect in Phish’s August 06 2010 live performance of “Cities.” Drawing on the theoretical foundations of groove (Keil 1994; Zbikowski 2004; Witek 2014), my analysis considers the musical, social, and embodied elements of this groove. Ethnographic evidence from video recordings and online fan communities is combined with original transcriptions of the music to show how the musical structure and synergistic interplay between the band and audience work to generate affect in the music’s process of becoming. Simultaneously, I build on work in Phish Studies (Blau 2010; Yeager 2010; Cohen 2020) to contend that this groove is a musical expression of place and being-in existential communitas. In this way, the band and audience are, as Phish puts it, “sharing in the groove.”
The “4E” approach from the cognitive sciences and phenomenology is used to theorize how this groove cultivates and sustains a highly affective musical environment that affords complex forms of synchronized engagement, such as dance, via entrainment (Trost et al. 2017; Clayton et al. 2019), cognitive extension (Kreuger 2014 and 2016), and joint-action (Knoblich and Sebanz 2008; Kirschner and Tomasello 2010). I present two instances of collectively embodied “participatory sense-making” as dynamic affective-motivational interactions between the band and audience that propel the jam forward, generating and sustaining waves of affect along the way.
Researcher: Robert Wuagneux, PhD
Phish Studies Conference Presentation
Music fans use a set of shared practices—clothing, images, language, bodily gestures—to build live music scenes. How does the way such scenes are constructed produce a sense of belonging? In this presentation I use the music of the improvisational rock band Phish and their complementary scene as a case study to explore how music can be used to facilitate positive social transformation.
Using ethnographic evidence and the concept of “affordances”, we will explore how the 501(c)3 non-profit “phan” group Phans for Racial Equity (PHRE) deploys scene practices in their world-building efforts toward racial equity in the Phish and broader live music scene. Attendees will be invited to discuss how their affective experiences with music might have influenced their way of being in the world, and how we might use music’s affordances to build a more equitable world.
Researcher: Robert Wuagneux, PhD
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