Embodied Meaning in Jamaican Popular Music

Abstract

Any DJ could tell you that you don't know what music really means until you see it in people's bodies. A DJ establishes a relationship between audio recordings and the crowd, responding to the speed and intensity of their movements, the symbolism of physical attitudes and gestures, their vocalizations, and the simple presence or absence of different people at the site of musical engagement. Forging this dynamic relationship is neither curation nor translation, nor encoding/decoding of music: it is knowledge, recognition, and affirmation of a shared moment of trust and intimacy. Such collaborative accountability to a living audience provides a useful framework for understanding the value of ethnographic work in media studies.Addressing bodies' political and historical aspects allows a researcher to evaluate how particular physical actions and interactions situate actors in relation to power. When working in the global South, where gendered and racialized dynamics shape the interpretive tools of scholarship, properly situating people's bodies helps to avoid replicating a colonial dynamic that defines the body by its use value, as an inchoate object to be counted and catalogued.While engaging with popular music practitioners in Jamaica, the birthplace of DJ culture, my 13 years of DJ experience has been central to my ability to understand how people make meaning with music. My own practice, heavily shaped by the aesthetic approach of Jamaicans themselves, leads me beyond observation into collaboration and co-presence.I focus on my embodied engagement with street dances: free, late-night musical events that occur on the sidewalks and streets of poor neighborhoods. As I traverse them in time and space, my own and others' emotions during the course of fieldwork are a primary "interpretive resource" (Bhardwa 41 citing; Wilkins). The longer I spent in Jamaica-in recording studios and musical events but also riding buses, traveling through rich and poor neighborhoods, watching local television, and listening to the radio-the more I gathered resources that helped me make sense of particular musical moments. Combining these resources with material, embodied engagement with music reveals the meaning of particular musical C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Proactive and reactive cognitive control in the absence of learning and memory confounds: Evidence from a cross-modal trial-unique Stroop task.

“…All experiments were programmed in JavaScript. Audiovisual stimuli were presented using the Tone.js JavaScript library (https://tonejs.github.io/; Mann, 2015; see Brosowsky et al, 2023; Reimers & Stewart, 2016). Tone.js delivers audio stimuli by “looking ahead” and scheduling the auditory presentation using the highly accurate audio clock.…”