In public discourse about popular music, one of the most common modes of engaging with popular music might simply be called ‘explanation’. Think of TikTok videos that explain music theory – ‘Sea Shanties Music Theory Explained!’ Think of prominent YouTube creators who explain a particular song or aesthetic – ‘Jazz Concepts Explained!’ or ‘Eminem's “Monster” Explained!’ Think of profound Twitter threads that unspool some aspect of music history or a common misconception about a genre. Think of the Vox series on Netflix simply called Explained, which offers episodes that dive into both specific genres such as ‘K-Pop’ and ambitiously broad topics such as ‘Music’.Footnote 1
When people use the word ‘explanation’, they usually imply a transfer of insider knowledge to a broader public. These explanations come from many different sources – for example, academics, corporations, and amateur creators – in order to advance ideas about musical excellence, aesthetics, virtuosity, theory, rules, and history. Explanations are often arguments disguised as neutral descriptions.
In this brief piece, I focus on one of the most popular and rapidly growing areas of music explanation: music podcasts. By music podcasts, I simply mean podcasts that centre music as a primary subject matter, usually featuring some combination of banter between hosts and music recordings. A list of these podcasts could include Switched on Pop, All Songs Considered, Song Exploder, Sound Opinions, Bottom of the Map, Lost Notes, Dolly Parton's America, Cocaine & Rhinestones, and even Radiolab. We could add numerous podcasts to this list. Much variation exists between these podcasts, including their thematic approach, the identity of the hosts, and the particular subject of any one episode.
I argue that we should think of music podcasts as persuasive demonstrations of music consumption. Music podcasts contain implicit arguments for the accessibility of musical value by modelling various listening strategies. The hosts usually set out to explain music but often implicitly model listening for their consumers. They tell us what musical details are significant. They imagine what sensory perceptions we all share – related to range of hearing, vision, physical ability, sensitivity to sonic stimuli, and so on. They establish certain parameters for what should be considered as part of the music – technologies, listening devices, identities of listeners, historical context, reference points, and politics. They create content aimed for particular listening devices, such as high-quality speakers or headphones. They even model how one should communicate a powerful listening experience to others, as they render listening as something audible.
In what follows, I explore three music podcast examples in order to demonstrate how these persuasive listening techniques manifest in form, content, and style. I begin with Switched on Pop, as I examine how an episode about listening discloses particular assumptions about listening as a (non-)bodily technique. I then turn to All Songs Considered, demonstrating how performances of listening can advance ideas about the intimate relationship between recordings and bodies. Finally, I explore Disability Visibility, arguing that podcast formats offer arguments about the accessibility of musical value.
I hope this provides an inventory of a few prominent listening strategies in music podcasts, which assert broader cultural value systems under the guise of a simple explanation of how music works. I do not want to praise or condemn any particular podcast in its entirety because podcasts can be quite dynamic, extensive, and complex forms of art. In the process of writing this article, I often found myself feeling ambivalent about all the podcasts mentioned here, as well as sympathetic to the difficult craft of creating sound-based performances. My goal is for this article to be insightful to those making podcasts, listening to them, or researching them. I hope this article can draw critical attention to music explanations, in terms of not only the explicit arguments they offer, but also the underlying assumptions about musical listening that they advance.
A note on podcasts
For all the ways podcasting might seem distinct, this practice represents an update to many pre-existing audio media practices. The difference between radio and podcasts can be a contentious issue in music and media studies. In Sound Streams, Andrew Bottomley offers a history of the convergence of radio and internet, arguing that contemporary audio media practices can be considered as radio.Footnote 2 Indeed, podcasts emerge as a result of radio's development through networked digital media cultures, rather than some sort of distinct break with the past. A short history of podcasts could include downloadable audio shows in the 1990s, the rise of MP3 players in the early 2000s, the creation of podcast apps, the popularity of serialized shows such as Serial, the formation of major podcast companies, and the acquisition of podcasts and podcast companies by major streaming services. Podcast was named ‘word of the year’ in 2005 by the New Oxford Dictionary, and many have called our current moment the Golden Age of Podcasting, in a way that harkens back to the so-called Golden Age of Radio.
In this article, I present podcasting as a cultural practice. I am convinced by Bottomley's argument that podcasts should be considered in the history of radio, and I follow his suggestion that we consider podcasting as a practice, rather than a distinct medium. For the sake of clarity, I refer to ‘podcasts’ and ‘radio’ as distinct hereafter in this piece in order to highlight podcasting as a field of practice in the longer history of radio. Mine is a sociological decision, which proceeds from the idea that people refer to and consider podcasts as different from radio, but I hope that many of the qualities I describe here evoke connections with radio scholarship outside the realm of podcasting.
Some of the qualities people attribute as distinct to podcasting can help to home in on what makes podcasting feel distinct to listeners as a cultural practice. In Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution, Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann offer eleven elements that characterize podcasts: 1) ‘consumption on earbuds’; 2) consumption in public due to mobility of listeners; 3) listener control in terms of rewinding or ‘back scanning’; 4) discovery of new content in more selective ways; 5) ‘niche global audiences’; 6) embedded into social media; 7) less gatekeepers for content; 8) free or oriented around a free model; 9) evergreen and available in perpetuity; 10) can be modified by creators even after release of content; and 11) less timing or scheduling constraints than with radio.Footnote 3 My approach in this article considers how these elements can inform music-related podcasts in ways that build on previous radio practices but organize around a different combination of values.
Notably, many of these characteristics also apply to the digital practices described across the articles in this collection. Mike Levine's work demonstrates how USB-based networks in Cuba can fuel viral music that circulates around governmental gatekeepers, and Luis Achondo demonstrates how WhatsApp serves as a critical driver of anti-social conflict between niche global fandoms. Podcasts also enable forms of circulation that create niche audiences outside of conventional media channels in ways that can fuel ideologies on a wide spectrum, and their appeal comes, in large part, from the sense of intimacy that they generate due to crafting a remotely engaged audience that feels a sense of community. In myriad ways, I hope the themes in my article evoke broad universal questions about digital cultures, as well as probe the particularities of podcasting.
How podcasts persuasively model listening
In explanations of how popular music works, music podcasts often encourage us to adopt particular ideas of what counts as musical listening. In this section, I explore an episode of Switched on Pop that focuses on the activity of listening itself. I emphasize how the episode frames listening to a song as a particular relationship between the ears and a self-contained sound recording in a way that reproduces some of the core ideas of structural listening. This framing is not unique to Switched on Pop but rather represents an extremely popular conception of musical listening – likely the most common way to understand musical listening in popular and academic discourses.
According to their telling of the origins of the podcast (in the book Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why It Matters), musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding formed Switched on Pop – a nod to Wendy Carlos's Switched on Bach (1968) – as a result of a sudden epiphany on a road trip down the California coast. Both had recently acquired a ‘new respect for the musical integrity that animates even the bubbliest of bubblegum pop’.Footnote 4 They admit to being snobs before this discovery, and their podcast homes in on particular hits in order to explain how various elements within a song ‘work’, so to speak. They draw attention to rhythm, timbre, melody, chord progressions, and so on. They invite expert guests who layer cultural context onto the music. They frequently reference Western art music, in order to help their listeners – who might be more versed in this musical tradition – orient themselves to pop.
For all of their expansive topics and impressive range of popular music, they nonetheless reveal a particular perspective that centres relatively normative ideas of listening with the ears and the mind. This approach becomes particularly transparent in the episode titled ‘How to Listen to Music in 4 Easy Steps’. In their fiftieth anniversary episode, released on 1 December 2016, they jokingly give listeners the Switched on Method™ for listening, fully admitting that their own method for listening reflects a particular cultural approach that does not universally apply to all listeners. As the episode plays, they analyse Leonard Cohen's ‘Hallelujah’, demonstrating four listening techniques that engage: 1) the liner notes (what they call ‘objective’ information about the music's creation and component parts); 2) the needle drop (what they call ‘just listening’ to the song); 3) scratch (pausing to reflect on particular elements); and 4) remix (applying one's own ‘scaffolding’ around a particular recording).Footnote 5 The episode is a particularly valuable opportunity to hear their ideas about listening discussed in a direct way.
Listening, in the conception offered by these hosts, is a matter of various forms of attention that one consciously applies to a song. Sloan mentions that you can ‘listen with your right brain’, ‘listen with your left’, ‘listen analytically’, and ‘viscerally and emotionally’. The hosts mention many elements one can actively listen for, which can reveal various layers of a given song (they use a layer cake metaphor). Yet in their mention of the many ways one can listen, certain constants remain. The things in between – platforms, playback devices, bodies, file formats – are outside of consideration. The topics of identity – for example, gender, race, disability – do not arise in the four steps, and they seem to imagine that all of their listeners have normative hearing. How might their suggestions apply to d/Deaf listeners, whose listening techniques may involve a different combination of sensory modes of perception?Footnote 6 To put this another way, they seem to regard listening as something that happens naturally with the ears and involves simply focusing on different elements in a song, despite the ways in which our particular listening techniques emerge and are constrained by historically conditioned relationships between bodies and sound technologies – what Sterne calls ‘audile technique’.Footnote 7
This concept of listening also relies on the idea that a song is a self-contained object and (somewhat paradoxically) an abstraction. Their listening method treats the song as an object that may be manifested through different formats and playback technologies but in essence remains the same. Is Leonard Cohen's ‘Hallelujah’ the same song if listened to as a FLAC file or an MP3?Footnote 8 Sloan admits that his personal preference is to first listen to a ‘song in a vacuum’, and he later talks about how one can ‘put [a song element] under the microscope’ and ‘try to decode what is happening’ in a given spot. The elements that can be analysed in such a way transcend format or playback context, in this model.
The listening strategies modelled by the Switched on Method evoke structural listening, a contentious issue and widespread practice in many domains of music studies for the past thirty years. Rose Subotnik's Deconstructive Variations characterizes and critiques this approach, linking it to assumptions inherited from Schoenberg and Adorno.Footnote 9 Structural listening involves bracketing the historical context of specific performances and cultural elements in order to examine the internal coherence of a given piece of music. The listeners should search for ‘a unifying principle to establish the internal “necessity” of a structure as tantamount to a guarantee of musical value’.Footnote 10 Listeners search for this unifying principle through connecting individual elements to this broader structure.
In structural listening, the actual perception of sounds can be much less important than engagement with abstracted elements of a composition. Subotnik suggests this approach involves prioritizing engagement with a written score.Footnote 11 Andrew Dell'Antonio elaborates on this point: ‘[T]he written score is seen (!) as having more integrity than any sonic realization of the musical work, and as more indicative of the creative process of the composer, which manifests itself through the structural necessity and organic completeness of the musical ideas that unfold from the beginning to the end of a musical work’.Footnote 12 In other words, the actual perception of sound is subordinated to a consideration of elements within a piece as symbolic parts or abstractions. The structures of a piece transcend any single example of those elements in a specific listening environment.
The Switched on Method does dwell on sounds but tends to treat them as a score, avoiding in-depth engagement with bodily perception. In other words, the hosts tend to emphasize the organic completeness of the musical elements in a recording, but any particular sonic manifestation of those elements – for example, format, playback technologies, contexts of listening, bodies of listeners, ambient sounds in a listening environment – are less important. The hosts present recorded sounds as elements that transcend context, unaffected by any kind of liveness in the moment of listening.Footnote 13 In the Switched on Method, the authors do not attribute supreme authority to Leonard Cohen (the compositional intent often associated with structural listening), and they embrace ways the music might be interpreted differently among listeners, beyond Cohen's original intention. Yet the idea remains: the song's recorded elements transcend context and can be analysed through close investigation of the relationship between various parts that form a unifying whole. Indeed, they model the ways that structural listening has become a pervasive way of analysing popular music recordings.
Switched on Pop hosts do begin the episode with an acknowledgement of many ways of listening to music in a variety of contexts, although these references tend to be brief without much deeper engagement. They verbally praise the new ideas people might bring to bear on a recording, while leaving room for indeterminacy in their own interpretations. They even conclude the episode with a professed love for ‘deep listening’, in a nod to Pauline Oliveros and an endorsement of Christopher Small's ‘musicking’.Footnote 14
I choose to analyse Switched on Pop primarily because of its prominence, as well as the fact that its assumptions about listening appear so common in many popular discourses about music. The Switched on Method reflects the dominant approach in music departments in higher education. These departments long devalued and then accepted popular music, but often in ways that validate that music in Western art music terms (e.g., the Switched on Pop hosts repeatedly refer to Cohen as a ‘composer’). In Hungry Listening, Dylan Robinson offers a history of these dominant listening regimes, particularly at the intersection of settler encounters with Indigenous people.Footnote 15 He writes of settlers’ racist ‘civilizing mission’ as involving control of the senses: ‘Listening regimes impose and implemented “fixed listening” strategies that are part of a larger reorientation toward Western categorizations of single-sense engagement, as well as toward Western ontologies of music located in aesthetic appreciation.’ Contemporary listening regimes come from these origins, which align ear-based listening with white, European musical traditions. Applying structural listening strategies to popular music can validate select popular music recordings (show that ‘musical integrity’ can animate even the ‘bubbliest of pop’), but these listening techniques ultimately champion the tools and their users more than they expand concepts of musical excellence to broader musical worlds.
Intimate possibilities of podcasting
In the previous section, I describe how explanations of listening can serve as endorsements of listening strategies, and in this section, I consider how music podcasts facilitate forms of listening that create feelings of closeness between bodies and media. I use All Songs Considered to examine how podcasting can enable this intimacy in both form and content.
I model my use of the word ‘intimacy’ on the usage by Martin Spinelli and Lance Dann, while acknowledging that the term almost always accompanies new types of media.Footnote 16 New forms of media – in terms of audiovisual makeup and cultural conventions – often evoke descriptions of intimacy, as a result of a disruption of previous sensory norms. My goal is to describe what might evoke these feelings with podcasts, though I would not suggest that podcasts uniquely evoke these qualities. In other words, intimacy may take a unique form in the case of podcasts, though the evocation of intimacy can be quite common in descriptions of new media.
Spinelli and Dann emphasize qualities of podcasts that make personal, individualized listening possible, but these experiences also create opportunities for closeness with media and other listeners. They suggest listening often occurs on private listening devices (e.g., using headphones) in a way that enables ‘an interior and intimate mode of listening’.Footnote 17 They describe podcasts as a mobile medium that gives ‘listener control’ to users, who can actively seek out material, scan through content, re-listen at will, and compose playlists. Their interviewees also indicate a particular vocal style that characterizes podcasts:
Many of our interviewees noted, and sometimes lamented, that what they hear as a chatty, familiar, personal, fluid, intimate, or even ‘American’ tone has come to be associated with podcasting … this is often contrasted with a more ‘European’ style of audio production frequently described as sophisticated, anonymous, musical, sound-rich, crafted, and even male. Interestingly, this style also tended to be associated with radio rather than podcasting.Footnote 18
Radio and podcasts are far too diverse to make too many generalizations, but the listeners interviewed by Spinelli and Dann at least feel like podcasting achieves a relatively informal, ‘intimate’, and ‘fluid’ style, which creates a context for new forms of listening that might not be possible in audio media that has strict temporal broadcasting guidelines, established channels of distribution, and a limited array of vocal styles.
In this collection, the work of Anaar Desai-Stephens nicely captures how digital cultures evoke intimate aesthetics. In particular, her analysis of Shraddha Sharma as an early and prominent star on YouTube in India connects Sharma's success to an aesthetics rooted in the ‘ordinariness of Sharma's setting and self-presentation’.Footnote 19 In Desai-Stephens analysis, she argues that artists like Sharma capitalize on a casual sensibility that contrasts YouTube with the more formal, curated, and choreographed productions from Bollywood. Her work helps explain why listeners to podcasts may also feel that the casualness helps yield a sense of relatability and emotional connection, especially in contrast to older and alternative forms of media that can be much more scripted.
All Songs Considered offers an interesting example of this kind of intimacy, particularly for the ways in which the programme comes from a radio organization and now circulates as a podcast.Footnote 20 All Songs Considered is a weekly online multimedia programme started in January 2000 by Bob Boilen. The show evolved into a webcast and then a central part of NPR Music, now existing as part of a network of audio streaming music content. Some NPR stations also directly broadcast the programme on the radio, and the podcast appears on streaming platforms and the NPR One app. All Songs Considered is a podcast but also an umbrella that includes many recurring segments and shows.
Within the All Songs Considered umbrella, a recurring show appears that features new music, and one particular episode reveals how intimate listening emerges as a focal point on the podcast. In the podcast episode titled ‘New Music Friday: The Top 8 Albums Out Sept. 4 (2020)’, Stephen Thompson talks to Tarik Moody. Coming from 88Nine Radio Milwaukee, Moody appears on the show to discuss Big Sean's Detroit 2.Footnote 21 After listening to a snippet of ‘Still I Rise’, Moody reflects on how he hears the track. He lauds Big Sean's embrace of Detroit's Black music history, particularly highlighting themes of depression and therapy in the form of Zen meditation. Moody praises the album for its embrace of ‘weaknesses’, in distinction to the swagger that often takes precedence over ‘sensitivity’ in some hip hop subgenres. Moody says he has also been diagnosed with heart disease recently, reflecting on how the music's themes acknowledge unique struggles of Black men in ways that ‘spoke to [him] on different levels’. While these examples may be somewhat subtle and abbreviated, they reveal how audible descriptions of listening can situate a recording in relation to the body and context. If the Switched on Method focuses on how popular music works, Moody focuses on how popular music works for him. It is a small but significant element of the podcast and the theory of listening it models. This podcast offers an audible form of listening, which acknowledges how a listener's identity – Blackness, impairments, masculinity – influences reception, where weakness can be a valuable part of the relationship between music recordings and a listener.
Beyond this particular round-robin style show, All Songs Considered also features an editing style that generates ideas of collective listening, which include vulnerability and intimacy. During the show, Boilen will usually preface a musical clip by saying ‘Let's listen to…’. Then when the hosts come back in after the track plays, they speak as if they had just listened to it together, offering spontaneous responses that react immediately to the music in the moment. These subtle editing choices simulate a collective live listening experience, making the comments feel like they are not scripted. Instead, listeners to the podcast feel as if they are experiencing the music alongside the hosts of All Songs Considered, rather than being given a curated episode copiously edited after the fact.Footnote 22 This technique exemplifies how podcasting can enable a reflective mode of talking about popular music, which values vulnerable reflection over a kind of authoritative scientific analysis.
While vulnerability may be something encouraged by podcast hosts and producers, Nina Sun Eidsheim reminds us that listeners play a large role in shaping how we perceive vocalizations of singers and speakers.Footnote 23 Her work addresses the critical ways that listeners may selectively hear the sounds of others, in ways influenced by racial essentialism and the perceived naturalness of certain vocalities. People bring racialized frameworks to the perception of the voice, influencing how they connect timbre with emotion, passion, and feeling. While Eidsheim explores these topics in African American music, Mari Yoshihara grapples with similar questions about stereotypes of Asian American performers, whose ‘passion’ can often be dismissed as ‘technically proficient but artistically inexpressive’.Footnote 24 Therefore, whether or not a podcast achieves vulnerability requires attention to the complex racial matrix between the musical artists, podcast hosts, and the network of podcast listeners. Vulnerability, in other words, emerges out of a relationship and not through the aesthetic of art within one medium.
Alternatively, vulnerability can also be defined as an openness to the indeterminacy of meaning in the listening experience. Judith Becker theorizes a ‘habitus of listening’ as ‘an inclination, a disposition to listen with a particular kind of focus, to expect to experience particular kinds of emotion, to move with certain stylized gestures, and to interpret the meaning of the sounds and one's emotional responses to the musical event in somewhat (never totally) predictable ways’.Footnote 25 Vulnerability can be an openness to the never totally predictable ways that music can impact someone, as listeners open themselves up to a personal experience to music rather than a more clinical detached approach to listening as a scientific practice. This definition of vulnerability implies a kind improvisational openness, which is connected but slightly different from vulnerability as an emotional state.
In both content and form, All Songs Considered exemplifies how podcasts can position listening as an intimate experience. As the hosts model the ways in which music recordings impact them personally, they also implicitly encourage podcast listeners to hear All Songs Considered in the same way. Of course, All Songs Considered could be subjected to some of the same kinds of critiques offered in the previous section, in terms of their consideration of songs without attention to format, playback devices, or non-normative listening techniques. However, I think the content and form of the podcast can often avoid a more authoritative mode of music reception, which seeks to understand how music works. Instead, they seem geared towards how music feels, which can lend itself to more openness to embodied modes of music reception and a recognition of a personal – rather than universal, objective – relationship to sounds.
Collective reception
In this final example, I show how music podcasts can enable the formation of listening communities that may otherwise be marginalized from AM/FM radio and/or other older forms of broadcast media. Not limited to some of the same geographical and physical limitations of terrestrial radio, podcasts circulate on social media, enabling people to share them across platforms. Podcasts often have global and also niche audiences. They can be easily downloaded as MP3s and listened to on mobile devices, and many of them circulate as free content, offering a relatively easy barrier of entry. All of these factors make the communal aspects of podcast listening unique, as they enable private listening yet enable the formation of extensive networks of listeners. In this section, I focus on Disability Visibility Podcast, which creates a community of disabled listeners through aesthetic and format choices that emphasize access and activism, and I focus on one episode in particular: ‘Episode 33: Disabled Musicians’.
Hosted, produced, and written by Alice Wong, Disability Visibility Podcast exists as part of a broader project called the Disability Visibility Project, which centres the perspectives of disabled folks who speak on a range of topics. Based in San Francisco, Wong launched the podcast in September 2017, as part of a distinguished career in community service, activism, and writing. Music is a recurring topic and component of the shows (though not an exclusive focus), and the episodes typically bring in a disabled person to share perspectives on their craft and/or experiences.Footnote 26 Wong also released a collection of essays in the book Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, which has an accompanying audiobook.Footnote 27
The format of the podcast mirrors the ways in which people may access sound recordings through different formats and media. While transcripts have increasingly become an accessibility strategy for podcasts in recent years, Disability Visibility goes far beyond this offering. For example, the podcast episodes are hosted on the Disability Visibility Project website for free. The site offers hyperlinks to additional reading materials, summaries of episodes, five possible ways of subscribing, keywords, two formats for transcripts, and the option to play in a new window, embed, or download the file. In other words, the website not only follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (guidelines for accessibility for platforms and websites) but also presents listeners with access options through many digital pathways and preferences. For example, the transcripts – Google document version and pdf – enable someone to follow along with a script while listening, reminding listeners that listening to audio recordings almost always involves using other senses to derive meaning.
The subject of the podcast situates popular music within political exigencies facing disabled people and communities. Released on 10 September 2018, ‘Episode 33: Disabled Musicians’ features a conversation between Wong and her guest Gaelynn Lea (who won NPR's Tiny Desk Contest in 2016). An activist musician, Gaelynn plays violin and sings. On the podcast, she describes growing up with brittle bone disease and embracing her musical career. Here is a transcript of their dialogue about the song ‘I Wait’:Footnote 28
WONG: Yeah. I saw you posted on Facebook, and I immediately shared it. So tell me about ‘I Wait’ and where the idea came from and what the song is all about for the listeners who haven't heard it yet.
LEA: Yeah. OK. So ‘I Wait’ is that song kinda came to me during the healthcare debates, and I was just so frustrated. Because I would read these articles – and I'm sure people in the community understand what I'm saying – I would read these articles, but they would leave out people with disabilities, one out of every two at least. It was really poorly reported on, and I was so frustrated. And so that song was borne out of that frustration. And then kind of on a broader sense, you can't – you can; you have the option – but I don't want to alienate everyone I know [chuckles] by being angry all the time at all the injustice. If you really, really think about it all the time, every day, you could really bring yourself down. And so I allow myself times to be angry and think about it and work towards change. But sometimes you also just have to live. And so there's a balancing act. So ‘I Wait’ is about the what do you do in the meantime when you're working for change…
WONG: And try to enjoy our lives while we can.
LEA: Exactly. There's this one line in there: ‘Everybody knows that you need a place to go, and living isn't easy if you incinerate your home.’ What I mean by that, I guess, is if I blasted out every single thing that I saw wasn't accessible, it would basically affect almost everybody in my community. And I do talk about it, but there is a point where you also have to live in your community. For me, I personally feel that you have to keep respect in the dialogue, and not everybody agrees with that.
[I Wait] ♪ Can you see me
Way in the back here
I've been waiting
I've been waiting in line.
It's been a long time… ♪
The two go on to discuss a GoFundMe campaign for an upcoming album, which the podcast episode no doubt helps to promote. The podcast content describes the political urgency of the music, while directly contributing to that cause through financial support and signal boosting.
In addition to the content, the vocal style in the podcast mirrors an embrace of bodily difference. In his work on disabled voices in radio, Bill Kirkpatrick describes how non-disabled voices are ubiquitous in radio (Diane Rhem being the notable exception), as a result of a ‘capitalist logic’ and ‘listener-centred approach to speaker selection’ that operates on the ableist assumption that disabled voices are less pleasing or engaging.Footnote 29 Both Wong and Lea have non-normative voices that represent a type of vocal variation often excluded from the normatively pitched and hyper-efficient editing mode of many mainstream podcasts and radio. With a high-pitched voice, Wong speaks slowly with the sounds of a Bi-Pap machine punctuating her speech every few words. Wong directly acknowledges her vocal style as an intervention into ableist radio practices in an essay:
Radio can be a familiar friend, source of knowledge, a marker of time and place. But as a cultural institution, what constitutes a ‘good voice’ in radio reflects and transmits cultural norms and structures. By accepting the default ‘good voice’ as one that is able-bodied, one that is pleasant, clear, articulate and devoid of any markers of disability, you erase disabled people, rendering them the Other (or in fancy terms the subaltern) … How do disabled people take these instruments and make them ours by cripping them with our culture?Footnote 30
The slowness of her speaking, however, can make her easier to understand for some, and the pacing of the podcast can provide a more patient, reflective alternative to the hyper-efficient mode of editing in other audio media, where all unnecessary silences are shortened or eliminated. Her vocal cadence also connects these audio performances to political rejections of ableist time constraints (i.e., theories of crip time in disability theory).Footnote 31 Overall, her podcast not only centres a non-normative voice but puts her voice alongside other non-normative voices, in a way that creates a community where vocal variability becomes typical rather than exceptional.
The pacing of the Disability Visibility podcast also challenges dramatic shifts in our contemporary listening norms in digital cultures, which Paula Harper addresses in ‘Autoplaying, Unmuting, Attending’ in this issue.Footnote 32 Harper describes a new series of digital platform designs, which offer various ways of capturing user attention in the fullest and most expansive senses. She offers a broad timeline with notable examples: history of autoplaying videos, the separation of autoplay visual tracks with opt-in audio, premium models of YouTube that enable users to pay to not have their attention constantly required, and the co-optation of captioning features as another tool for leveraging user attention. Her work reveals how multiple social media platforms control the user sensorium, as their creators constantly strategize how to do so more efficiently and intensely. Harper's work makes me realize the power of a podcast that dwells in spaciousness, inefficiency, and patience – particularly how these aesthetics offer a form of subversion to hyper-efficient modes of content delivery elsewhere online.
In a variety of ways that include format, conversations, and verbal descriptions of listening, Disability Visibility implicitly assumes that the reception of popular media involves disabled folks, while connecting disability activism with intersectional social justice work. While such a point may be obvious to some, the assumption that all listeners are non-disabled is deeply interwoven into discourses about music reception, aesthetics, virtuosity, and fandom. Indeed, scholars often assume listening happens in a vacuum without any contextual factors or bodily variation. Joseph Straus creates a caricature of this type of listening: ‘Normal hearing involves a listener alone in a room, listening to recorded sounds: nothing to see, nothing to touch, no opportunity to move, no active participation (playing or singing), and above all, no intervention or assistance from anyone else.’Footnote 33 Wong's podcast acknowledges listening as inherently social and dependent on others, as well as contextual. This podcast models how podcasts in general can intervene in ableist media practices and particularly ableist discourses of normal listening.
Conclusion
As one arena of the widespread proliferation of musical explanations in popular discourse, music podcasts can reveal underlying theories of listening that circulate alongside discussions of music. Music podcasts are audio media about audio media. In other words, they deploy listening strategies and describe listening. Listening is both a subject and a technique.
When we consider musical explanations, we may think of them as existing within broader categories of public musicology, applied ethnomusicology, digital humanities, or maybe even civic media engagement. As Jack Hamilton points out, popular music scholars have spent much time and energy thinking about how to intervene in public debates, while often failing to recognize their own indebtedness to non-academic work from journalists and critics.Footnote 34 Yet simultaneously as Hamilton also points out, scholars may be particularly eager to intervene in troubling assumptions that circulate online among non-specialists. As Hannah Judd reveals in her article in this special issue, the circulation of well-known media always advances a particular politics, even when the circulation may feel relatively silly, simple, or neutral, and viral memes can often contain deeply held assumptions about aesthetics, musical value, in-groups, and identities.Footnote 35
Thus, the desire to explain can come from the recognition that something is being widely misunderstood and warrants an intervention. In a conversation about ‘Musicology Twitter’ with Robin James and Imani Mosley, Matthew D. Morrison explains one dimension of these musical explanations from creators on Twitter:
And, often, these folks are drawing from the work of music scholars to make music ‘palpable’ to a lay audience (whether through YouTube channels, popular journalism outlets, Twitter threads, or individual blogs), using music as fodder for jokes (which, sure), or producing some version of ‘let me show you how this hip hop song works’ (i.e., music forensics), as Robin mentioned above. Even more frequently, these are white cis men who are aware of their ‘audience’ but not necessarily of their perceived authority.Footnote 36
Explanations may feel relatively benign, but as Morrison points out, they can often persuade people to adopt particular ideas about music while empowering privileged creators as cultural brokers who explain how music works in ways that serve their own interests.
In this article, I am highlighting the effects of explanations that do not always seem to be making a political intervention or explicitly controversial argument. In contrast to claims by creators who suggest they offer neutral explanations, I argue that any description of musical works is an argument for a listening technique, which advances a particular politics. Any description of a musical work contains an implicit assumption about whether the body matters, what universal characteristics listeners share, common reference points, and what aspects (if any) of the musical work transcends context. Put succinctly in the words of Deborah Kapchan, ‘listening acts enact’.Footnote 37
Alice Wong's podcast offers a reminder. We can embrace musical diversity in all of its forms, but such an embrace can only be so equitable, when we keep in place narrow ideas of listening and specific ideas about how listening should be communicated to others. The focus of an explanation cannot be separated from the format of an explanation. Both point to broader regimes of knowledge that can constrain meaning, even when they purport to provide it.
