Immersed in Pop! Technology, composition and reception in popular music

Zachary James Bresler of the Faculty of Fine Arts the University of Agder has submitted his thesis entitled «Immersed in Pop! Excursions into Compositional Design» and will defend the thesis for the PhD-degree Wednesday 9 March 2022. 

He has followed the PhD-programme at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Agder, with specialisation in Popular Music Performance.

Summary of the thesis by Zachary James Bresler:

Immersed in Pop! Technology, composition, and reception in popular music

Recent innovations in the technologies of music composition, production, and consumption have changed the possibilities for both creating and listening to popular music.

For example, in autumn 2021, Apple introduced the Spatial Audio technology to their music streaming service Apple Music, allowing for immersive 3D music experiences for listeners with Apple and Beats branded headphones or home theaters capable of reproducing Dolby Atmos 3D sound. In this, they join the streaming services Tidal and Amazon Prime Music, who have had Dolby Atmos on their platforms since 2020.

New and interesting questions

The rising popularity and availability of so-called immersive media experiences, including music streaming and other technologies like virtual reality (VR) and 360° videos on Facebook and YouTube, raise new and interesting questions for musicology and media studies.

• How are these media in dialogue with “traditional” media, and what does that tell us about both new and old forms of music and music video?
• To what extent is music that is marketed as spatial and immersive actually so, and what is the relationship between immersive media and the experience of immersion?
• And how do audiovisual musical artists use these immersive media forms to shape and perform their various identities and personas in new ways?

These questions are addressed through a dissertation that includes a framing chapter and 4 articles/chapters, which are being published in international scholarly journals and anthologies.

The candidate uses a primarily hermeneutic methodology, which combines new approaches to music analysis with multimodal and intertextual models to demonstrate how both the artist and the listener/viewer are staged in pioneering ways within immersive media.

Disputation facts:

The trial lecture and the public defence will take place at Auditorium B2 003, Campus Kristiansand and online via the Zoom conferencing app, on this link:

https://uiano.zoom.us/j/67928898951?pwd=b1lyTXZqVEZpblF1Mi9Dd1VnKzNvZz09&from=addon

Dean Marit Wergeland, Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Agder, will chair the disputation.

The trial lecture Wednesday 09 March at 15:30 hours 

Public defence Wednesday 09 March at 17:15hours

 

Given topic for trial lecture: «The trial lecture should address two main areas:

1. If the immersive can be “anything,” what then allows an analysis to highlight it? What signifies the immersive in form, function, composition, experience, or reading? How must terms such as flow, immersion, absorption, and interaction be more clearly defined in order to create building blocks for a “musicology of immersion”? And what is required of an analytical project that teaches us about artists’ immersive works and experiences?
2. If your premise is that the immersive is not defined by a technology or an intention but, theoretically, by an experience which can be derived from any situation, what considerations – in terms of unequal access to the feeling of safety – must be included in the cultural, political, economic, and music-theoretical analysis of immersion?»

Thesis Title: «Immersed in Pop! Excursions into Compositional Design»

Search for the thesis in AURA - Agder University Research Archive, a digital archive of scientific papers, theses and dissertations from the academic staff and students at the University of Agder.

The thesis is available here:

PhD Thesis Zach Bresler_Dissertation_wISSN

The Candidate: Zachary James Bresler: (Killeen, Texas, USA 1989 - grew up in Pierce, Nebraska, USA) Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance (minor in Music Technology) University of Nebraska in Lincoln (2012) Master of Music Performance, University of Nebraska in Omaha (2014). Present position: Assistant Professor in music production and recording, University of Stavanger.

Opponents:

First opponent: Professor Emeritus Derek B. Scott, School of Music, University of Leeds, UK

Second opponent: Professor Philip Auslander, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Professor Nina Sun Eidsheim, University of Agder /The Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California Los Angeles, USA, is appointed as the administrator for the assessment committee.

Supervisors in the doctoral work were Professor Stan Hawkins (main supervisor) and Jon Marius Aareskjold-Drecker (co-supervisor in the first part of the doctoral work)

What to do as an audience member:

The disputation is open to the public. Follow the trial lecture and the public defence on this link:

https://uiano.zoom.us/j/67928898951?pwd=b1lyTXZqVEZpblF1Mi9Dd1VnKzNvZz09&from=addon

A Zoom-link will be returned to you. (Here are introductions for how to use Zoom: support.zoom.us if you cannot join by clicking on the link.)

We ask audience members to join the virtual trial lecture at 15:20 at the earliest and the public defense at 17:05 at the earliest. After these times, you can leave and rejoin the meeting at any time. Further, we ask audience members to turn off their microphone and camera and keep them turned off throughout the event. You do this at the bottom left of the image when in Zoom. We recommend you use ‘Speaker view’. You select that at the top right corner of the video window when in Zoom.

Opponent ex auditorio:

The chair invites members of the public to pose questions ex auditorio in the introduction to the public defense, with deadlines. It is a prerequisite that the opponent has read the thesis. Questions can be submitted to the chair Marit Wergeland on e-mail marit.wergeland@uia.no