YouTube Music–Haptic or Optic?

Abstract

In her influential 2004 article, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?,” musicologist Carolyn Abbate suggests that music scholarship has fallen prey to a “metaphysical mania” in which music is reduced from a physical experience in time to hermeneutic abstractions of “the work.” She draws heavily on the writing of Vladimir Jankélévitch to argue that music must be understood as “exist[ing] in time” and as being “a material acoustic phenomenon” contingent on physical bodies performing and hearing.1 Working from her title, I pose a similar set of questions for music, and particularly dance-music videos, as experienced on YouTube, the massive video-sharing website: What is the role of the corporeal in experiencing music on YouTube? How do ocular-centric practices (the “optic”) emerge and interact with more tactile, or haptic, modes of spectatorship with such dance-centric videos? What happens to such videos as they enter the public realm and viewers respond to them? Where do these interactions between artists/producers and respondents take place?

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