Name: Music Studies Colloquium: Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta
Start: 2024-03-01T16:30:00
Location: University of California, Berkeley

UC Berkeley Department of Music

Elevate your lunch break with The Loft Hour, a year-long series in that invites arts faculty to riff on their work over lunch, in an informal conversation moderated by an ARC-affiliated faculty member. Join us in welcoming our esteemed colleagues in Architecture, Art Practice, English, Ethnic Studies, Film & Media, History of Art, Music, and Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. The February program features Chris Batterman Cháirez (Music) and Cathy C Lu (Art Practice).

The Loft Hour: Chris Batterman Cháirez + Cathy Lu

University of California, Berkeley

How is it that “the one rush of hearts”—that swirl of feelings and music and sweaty bodies on a crowded dancefloor—can thicken into something that feels like communion and community? In this talk, I turn to the nexus of sound, feeling, and togetherness to investigate how collective listening and dancing can give rise to a sense of inchoate sociality— that is, something like a “we” coalescing under the surface of shared musical experience. While the idea that “music brings people together” is a common trope that is especially pervasive in electronic dance music scenes (EDM), accounts vary as to how music exerts such socially binding force. In club cultures, partygoers often use the term “vibe” to describe how they understand music to work in these contexts, bringing dancers into a sort of synchronicity of feeling. By understanding “vibe” as a subcultural conceptualization of affect, I explore how music-driven emotional convergence intersects with scholarship on musical entrainment, emotional contagion, ritual practices, and resonance.