Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 3
“Digital interfaces are significant in the study of congregational music for the ways they shape the expectations that worshipers bring to congregational experiences
and, in turn, how expectations for worshipful engagement shape how people listen to and participate with a range of music in their everyday lives.”
Mediating Religious Experience? Congregational Music and the Digital Music Interface
By Anna E. Nekola
Abstract
Using a “critical cultural” theoretical approach based on a Birmingham School approach to cultural studies, this chapter argues for analyzing media as a complex and interactive human-centered system of meaning-making, rather than reducing media to a set of technologies that produce a series of effects determinant of human behavior. Presenting and synthesizing a range of scholars in media, music, sound studies, cultural studies, and visual studies, this chapter places human activity—how people access, use, and make sense of the media in their lives, albeit always within systems of economic, political, and social power—at the center of analyses of media.
This chapter examines services such as Spotify, Pandora, and The Overflow, analyzing how music streaming services mediate the religious experiences of worshipers and worship leaders. It engages issues arising from changes to the form of the musical media—from the material objects of records and discs, and broadcasting media such as radio to digital commodities. For instance, cloud-based music streaming services appear to offer unlimited free access to vast quantities of music, yet this utopic idea of “freedom” neglects to consider complex issues of access and autonomy for both listeners and musicians. Users may shape playlists and influence others’ tastes, but artists and record labels also control what music is released to streaming services, and complex algorithms make some music more visible than others. Furthermore, even if users aren’t buying the music itself, they are required to pay for ongoing internet access and expensive playback devices that are designed for obsolescence, shifting costs and revenue from listeners and musicians to makers of software and hardware. The digital music interface thus raises crucial questions about how listeners encounter music, as well as for how congregational musicians make and circulate their music.