Music History IV: Music, Gender, Race, and Audiences

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the key theoretical terms, techniques, and concepts from Lectures 9 through 12.

Convergence

The fusion of two or more media forms, such as aural and visual arts, film and music industries, live and recorded music, or music video and live performance.

Source Music (Diegetic Music)

Music that originates from within the film's world, which characters are aware of, used to set a scene and provide key plot information.

Dramatic Music (Non-Diegetic Music)

Music that exists outside the film's world, which characters cannot hear, used to focus viewer attention, draw out narrative moments, and evoke specific emotional responses.

Mickey-Mousing

A technique of visual and sound synchronization, common in cartoons and horror music stings, used to suture disembodied music into the visual image.

Leitmotif

A technique adapted from Wagnerian opera where a specific musical theme represents a person, relationship, object, situation, or feeling, developing alongside the story arc.

Sounding Ornaments

A technique described by Oscar Fischinger in 1932 where shapes drawn directly onto the optical soundtrack strip of film stock produce pure synthetic tones when run through a projector.

Oramics

A drawn-sound machine developed by Daphne Oram in the 1960s that generated synthetic electronic sounds by drawing shapes onto 35-mm film stock.

Foley Artists

Studio specialists who create sound effects using physical objects to mimic or generate realistic noises for on-screen film actions.

Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR)

A post-production process in film sound design where actors overdub their voice tracks in a studio to achieve audio clarity and precise visual synchronization.

Horizontal Sequencing

A dynamic game scoring practice involving preset changes in musical motives or textures triggered by player location or specific game challenges.

Vertical Rescoring

A dynamic game scoring practice that adds or subtracts musical layers in real-time response to player actions while maintaining a single key or simple modulation.

Video Art

An artistic medium emerging in the mid-1960s using accessible video technology to create spontaneous, interactive visual music and challenge traditional notions of silent visual art.

VJing (Video Jockeying)

The practice emerging in the 1980s of mixing, looping, and manipulating visual media samples in real time to synchronize with live music performances.

New Woman

An early 20th-century cultural symbol representing emerging female autonomy and social progress, highlighted by literary characters like Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House.

Sedimentation

The process by which social norms, gender roles, and cultural traditions establish authority over time, actively producing music genres embedded with specific social values.

Pathological Masculinity

An aesthetic direction explored by late 20th-century acts like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse that critically or confrontationally staged disturbing, destructive, or toxic aspects of male behavior.

Overidentification

An artistic and political tactic of exploring controversial or problematic subjects from the inside in order to expose their internal contradictions.

Essentialism

A philosophical perspective positing fixed, inherent essences for people or things, which simplifies complex identities like race or gender into monolithic categories.

Constructivism

A theoretical framework countering essentialism that views identities as evolving social constructs shaped by context and culture rather than fixed traits.

Elementalisation

A process identified by Daniel Grimley in Carl Nielsen's music where musical features are reduced to a pure state to evoke a distinct regional or Nordic character.

Strategic Essentialism

A concept articulated by Gayatri Spivak where minority groups intentionally affirm shared essentialist identities as a positive political strategy to claim cultural recognition.

Sorrow Songs

Ancestral folk songs passed down by enslaved African Americans, described by W. E. B. Du Bois as the articulate message of the slave expressing suffering and spiritual longing.

Black Atlantic

Paul Gilroy's concept describing a shared, transnational Black-diasporic cultural tradition that links music across national borders through shared memory and heritage.

Creolisation

A postcolonial cultural process in a globalized world where diverse cultural elements blend and coexist rather than merging into a uniform monoculture.

Structural Outsiderism

The underdog ethos inherent in US hip-hop that was adopted and adapted by global immigrant and working-class groups to articulate local societal marginalization.

Subculture

A group within society distinguished from the dominant culture by shared tastes, values, and lifestyle rituals, often using style as a form of symbolic resistance.

Bricolage

A subcultural technique, conceptualized by Dick Hebdige, of re-signifying everyday objects into symbols of anti-establishment identity, such as safety pins in punk culture.

Subcultural Capital

A concept introduced by Sarah Thornton to describe status and prestige gained by scene members through specific knowledge, dress, dancing, and behavioral markers.

Scene

A flexible context for music-making and listening that transcends rigid local boundaries, social class, or physical locations compared to traditional subculture theory.

Neotribe

A concept derived from Michel Maffesoli describing fluid music communities bound together by a shared emotional state of mind or ambience rather than fixed demographics.

Post-Fordism

An economic and cultural era defined by flexible production, market fragmentation, individualized consumer choice, and specialized niche products.

Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs)

Localized, temporary spaces carved out by subcultural groups to maintain collective resistance practices amid hyper-individualist societal fragmentation.

World Music

A commercial marketing category established in 1987 by independent record labels that categorized diverse non-Western musical traditions into a unified commodity for Western audiences.

Cultural Omnivory

A late 20th-century taste pattern characterized by post-class, highly individualistic consumption across a wide array of musical genres and cultural traditions.