Plasticine Music – or the intimate social life of cultural objects

ABSTRACT

Why do you value recorded popular music? How does popular music sticks to our lives through time? This article presents the concept of Plasticine Music to explore the way music becomes an assemblage through our individual embodied history with it. The concept intends to expand on recent developments on the value of recorded popular music outside capital and production systems. By following scholarship from Music Sociology and Feminist Materialism it invites to consider how pieces of music become part of our biographies through emotional forces, embodied actions and affects that transform the way we relate to music; the music change and we change with it. It focuses on the materiality of music with modifiable qualities, flexibility, resistance and non fixity, which lead to multiple new shapes. Plasticine music is a form of changeling traditional conceptions of meaning and cultural consumption, as well as considering the affective force of cultural objects.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• materiality
• cultural consumption
• attachments
• bodies

‘Music is a powerful force in my life’, ‘Music is the most important thing in my history’, ‘Without music I could not have gone through the hardest moments in my history,’ ‘That song marked my life.’ These are common phrases when people discuss music, which regularly appeared in the research on music, technology, and everyday life that led to this paper. Participants would have a song, or a specific set of songs, that helped them to cope with life difficulties or reminded them of a loved one, as many of us have. How these songs become part of us, our individual histories, our identities, and our lives, is the focus of this piece. By following conceptual developments around affect, emotions, materiality, and understanding music experiences as material assemblages, this paper proposes an approach to analysing how popular music becomes important for listeners through everyday life and how that importance transforms over time. The paper puts forwards the concept of Plasticine Music to understand the affective and material relations between the listener, everyday life, and the music people get attached to.

Risking oversimplification, it is possible to characterise social approaches to music as focusing on three central issues. First, through understanding the aesthetic object as a carrier of meanings as represented by Adorno’s work (2002); second, through analysing the social interactions that define objects as art (Becker 1982); and third, through analysing the strategic use of social determinants of taste to reproduce a system of inequalities (Bourdieu 1979). Scholars are now trying to reconcile these positions from several disciplines while developing an analysis that includes the materials of music and the mediations in a unique process of production, circulation, and consumption (de la Fuente 2016). This piece aims to further those ideas expanding the conceptual repertoire through a dialogue with feminist materialism (Fox and Alldred 2014) and their consideration of affects and emotions.

The conceptual approach presented treats music as an assemblage and not as a stable object. It intends to offer an alternative approach to the socio-cultural value of music in everyday life that does not follow an economic framework (Skeggs 2014; Gopinath, Stanyek, and Beaster-Jones 2014; Marshall 2019; Stewart 2012; Hesmondhalgh 2013). The paper also seeks to contribute to discussions about materiality in media and cultural studies (Sterne 2014; Siles and Boczkowski 2012; Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot 2014), by decentring formats and mediation, while considering them part of broader assemblages that form an intimate biography, an attachment, inclusive of elements such as sound and content (Peterson 2016; Henriques 2014; Lepa Steffen, Egermann, and Weinzierl 2015). Those elements here are treated as assemblage effects. The intimate biography of a musical object — a song — can arguably help us grasp another dimension of the value of music circulating in the world: that of our intimate and emotional life with music, which cannot be separated from our context.

By following the intimate biography of a song with a listener, the paper examines how the music object — the song — gets constituted as an assemblage that is attached to the individual’s identity but also to a shared social values system system relying on the material dimensions of the song. This idea follows Maalsen’s (2019) interest in pursuing the biographies of music objects to challenge dominant notions of ownership and property, by outlining the transformation of the aura through their story and value as sound, to find the value of sound objects in their social life, drawing together a range of actors while distributing their identity through space and time.

The concept of plasticine music sits alongside those ideas, but it focuses on the relation between music and listener as an assemblage. I contend that music becomes valuable through a series of material, intimate and social interactions, or to follow Barad’s (1996) concept, intra-actions. These intra-actions produce affects, sensuous experiences and emotions that provide the assemblage with determined possibilities and forms in each specific life story, while a part of that assemblage remains circulating along the socio-material world. Hence, the argument avoids the notion of music as a product only subjected to ownership or consumption, by regarding it as a cultural object that by forming assemblages cannot be separated from our intimate lives, practices, emotions, and social selves.

When proposing plasticine music as the concept to grasp these challenges, the paper invite us to think with clay, which integrates mass and meanings through its interaction with other elements, absorbing them into itself and producing distinct shapes at every encounter. It is the kind of clay with which children play, and artists use for crafting audio-visual art. A clay that changes in time through interacting with other elements, while maintaining its material mass. This feature of such clay is critical to understanding the metaphor of plasticine music. It is possible to see these qualities in music: being transformed and adapted while remaining the same, making music work in different contexts. It is my argument that a biographical exploration of the music object is key to challenging traditional separations and embracing the assemblage and its journey, so even when the data comes from two qualitative research projects, this text focuses on a single research vignette that is explored in-depth as a reflective outcome with the participant and the music itself.

First, I would like to introduce Perla, 36 years old, living in Texcoco, within the State of Mexico, just 35 min away from Mexico City—where she used to be when I interviewed her and where we listened to music together in 2014. She loves music; she used to work for an international DJ managing his digital social platforms. Her preferences are diverse. She used to go to electronic music festivals—that she would describe in intensive detail—and rock concerts, where we occasionally chanced upon each other after that interview. Perla loves a specific song, Black by Pearl Jam. I will use some parts of my encounter with her to shape the concept of plasticine music. For now, readers can join by listening to the song in any format at hand.

The first section of this paper revises scholarship around music and materiality, with a focus on the material formation of the music experience. The second section will introduce some ideas from the feminist materialism literature, particularly attending to their understanding of the assemblage as unstable and mobile, led by the sensuous and affective relations among different actors; it is in that section where I develop the concept of plasticity that forms plasticine music. Afterwards, the paper explains the methods used to collect the stories that, alongside the theories, resulted in the vignette presented. Afterwards, the focus goes on what I call the Perla-Black assemblage, which became the impetus for interpreting my data in new ways. Finally, the paper introduces the concept of plasticine music as a valuable addition to understanding the music assemblage concerning the intimate and the social in everyday life.

Materialities of the musical experience

The analysis of music in everyday life (DeNora 2003a; Nowak 2016; Martin 2006) focuses on the individual practices of music listening and the mediations that produce those relationships. This scholarship considers the materialities of listening by attending to the elements that form and mediate the encounter, such as sounds, technologies, contexts, uses, and the body. With it, the focus is on the experience of listening and the actions produced by those relations. From that perspective, listening develops from the conjunction of music with other elements, creating values, meanings and emotions while influencing tastes, moods and individual biographies. These elements and their links open possibilities for further understanding the role of music and media in society (García Quiñones 2019; Bergh and DeNora 2009). Following these ideas, the argument follows the role of emotions, affects and stories to shape the sound object while making it flexible. For that purpose, it relies mainly on concepts from music sociology, media studies, cultural studies and feminist materialism. This section develops the first three.

Materiality in music sociology scholarship follows music’s relationship with the body and how we conduct that relationship throughout the world. Music is mediated and simultaneously mediates individual and social life through identity (DeNora 1995) and the way listeners conduct their actions in the world (DeNora 2003b). Listeners coordinate bodies, minds and emotions with music, doing things with it. By moving away from the Adornian approach in which music is explained by the social, DeNora removes music from its role as a passive object—something to be explained—to analyse it as an active ingredient of social life (DeNora 2003a). The analysis starts from an embodied and material perspective, paying close attention to the emotions arising from that experience (DeNora 1997) and the way that sound becomes a critical element of self-management in the world (DeNora 2000). As a result, considering music in abstract terms does not suffice; we must pay attention to specific features of music in specific situations, its features and interactions, affordances, and the material features of sound. Following these ideas, this paper does not consider the music object a discrete object, but an assemblage produced and productive of the multiple features mentioned.

DeNora’s understanding of sounds foregrounds the structure of the music piece while allowing considerations of the body and its relation to the music. The materiality of sound as technologically mediated vibrations that impact the body is an essential source for practices and discourses (Revill 2000; Jensen 2006), as well as the production of space and feelings (Henriques 2007). Music sound circulates through material spaces and objects, producing assemblages of aesthetic practices that form genres and social identities (Birenbaum Quintero 2018; Henriques 2014). The music experience is composed of several material elements that are assemblage effects such as vibrations, movements, and circulation technologies. As such, formats and devices form practices that shape social relations and experiences of consumption (Katz 2004; Sterne 2012), but also as a set of rules and objects that can be productive of expertise, preferences, and stories (Raine 2020; Lepa Steffen, Egermann, and Weinzierl 2015; Leonardi 2010). Media, devices, and formats play a role in the assemblage proposed by this paper; they are part of specific practices with historicity in individual life, but the focus is not on them.

With attention to cumulative experiences in time, plasticine music is interested in what is displayed as knowledge for listening. A successful listening experience will lead to repetition and replay. Still, it is always different even when listeners seek a similar experience. As with Mol’s (2010) ontological objects, this will lead to unpredictable outcomes, producing their course of action in each occurrence. Grasping those transformations requires a longer analytical perspective, including moral and cultural conventions, the idea of genre, or the history between the object—song— and the individual (Bloomfield, Latham, and Vurdubakis 2010; Davis and Chouinard 2016). Every new encounter is different. Mediators of the assemblage have changed concerning the world and each other. The music we learnt to dance to when young could now be the one we use to block the soundscape (Beer 2007; Nowak and Bennett 2014) while working in a busy cafe; we have learnt how to use it for those purposes. Music is not only shaped by our interactions with the world but also by how we interact with it over time and how we perform our listening habits in everyday life.

The assemblage that plasticine music suggests is socio-material and de-centred. It does not dismiss technologies or content but attends to the idea of consumption as an experience. For Born (2005), the musical experience assemblage appears at the encounter of subjects and objects through the mediation of technologies and contexts. In that assemblage, all the elements are in a constant process of agencement or signification. In Born’s (2010b) work, there is essential attention to the multiple temporalities of the object, which shape its current meaning and form. She also calls for attending to the materiality of the musical object, which can also resist the action of all the actors involved, by the action of moving mediations that are socially conditioned (Born 2010a; Born 2012; Born 2011; Straw 2012). For plasticine music, those temporalities become essential, as the transformations it attempts to explain only happen over time in the relationship between the individual, the music, and their context.

Plasticine music responds to the call for producing explanations for long-term attachments to music and their transformations through the life course (Benzecry 2009; Benzecry 2011), foregrounding the role of the body, affects and emotions. The revised scholarship allows us to advance from listening as an activity to the complexity of listening as an aesthetic experience. In this transformation, it might be possible to attend to the negotiations of agency between listeners, music and devices, but also the cumulative engagement through multiple encounters. Through that process, the sound object becomes an intimate biographical object while belonging to the social world. As we will see with Perla, the object remains the same, but it shapes our experience through negotiating forces and encounters.

New materialities of music

Plasticine music appeals directly to the material form of recorded music. A recorded song travels around different presentations while it appears to remain the same. Your favourite song is accessible to me on a record, a streaming service, or played by the cover band at the pub around the corner; it is the same song, indifferent to your meanings or my context. It is solid but still malleable. It might still be part of the history of a genre or a contextual set of signifiers, but more is needed to understand your history with it in your particular settings. This paper intends to resolve the split different/same by thinking about the malleability of music and how it operates through distinct moments in the life course.

The idea of plasticine music privileges music as an affective experience that the listeners use to make sense of their world and emotions. It demands us to follow our intimate story with music, with a specific song that travels from one moment to another through devices, arrangements, and contexts, with different interactions each time. The song is treated as a mutable mobile, becoming fluid while travelling through different networks and moments (de Laet and Mol 2000; Law and Mol 2001). Plasticine music connects those configurations of the song through time and how they make sense for the listener in their context. However, to expand on the malleability of those songs and their attachments, one must consider the affects and emotions acting while shaping the song. To achieve that, this piece suggests combining the knowledge produced within sociology, media and cultural studies with feminist materialism.

By rejecting traditional dichotomies, such as human/non-human, matter/culture, and knowledge/knower, recent scholarship has focused on the assemblages produced by interactions between objects, bodies, affects, and practices (St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei 2016). The materiality of those assemblages takes an active role in the configuration of the world, knowledge production and power (Lupton 2019), making the matter a non-passive actor, offering possibilities depending on the embodied practices of approaching and knowing it, which transforms all the assemblage each time (Barad 1996). Objects emerge as knowing objects through what Barad terms intra-action; through meeting each other, they shape themselves, producing an unstable and relational agency (Barad 2003). Therefore, those assemblages change as they move through time and space, producing different affective forces (Lupton 2018). Those assemblage affects are critical to my argument. Our relationship with recorded music is not only a social or human one; between the music and ourselves, many elements intra-act to produce our interest and attachment to it, actors that mediate and create the possibilities of doing things with music. According to the framework outlined here, those attachments change over time. They are always different while they are the song. In other words, when we listen to the song that we love, we also listen to the accumulation of objects and effects we have been developing throughout our whole biography.

Nevertheless, there is another reason to use this scholarship to think about music, its attention to sensuous and affective forms of knowing, and the formation of assemblages and the forces produced by them (Bennett 2004; Washick et al. 2014). Affect, for this text, is defined as the capacity to affect or be affected. Affects are intensive bodily interactions that produce a potential for transformation (Clough 2008; Massumi 1995). While affect shows an order that could be otherwise, it is not entirely unpredictable; social lines guide its action. In those bodily encounters, emotions appear as ways of relating to others in specific situations that are also closely related to the individual dispositions and possibilities that distribute relations again (Wetherell 2012; Burkitt 2014). As we will see in the following section, in the continuum of assemblages and experiences in the world, emotions can become affects again, producing new assemblages (Fox 2015) and new intimacies (Latimer 2019). By attending to affects and emotions it is possible to follow changing relations with cultural, emotional and bodily relations that produce the experience of meanings. In terms of music, the concept follows the affects and emotions transforming the experience, which is dependent on the music, its lyrics, the cultural context, or our memories, but the specific moments of consumption also shape it. Positive or negative outcomes of those experiences change how we relate to other songs, experiences, or the social world.

As explained, I am referring to the clay some children play with, mix and sculpt in distinctive shapes, but that can also keep its form for a long time or receive more materials to be mixed in at any point. I propose the idea of plasticine to consider these assemblages, their intra-actions and effects. My understanding of plasticine is similar to Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. She starts from the key features of plasticity found in different philosophical accounts; (1) The power to receive form, (2) to give form—as a sculptor, and (3) the capacity of the destruction of form to produce new form (Malabou 2005; Malabou 2012; Crockett and Malabou 2015). Although her philosophical project is beyond the boundaries of this paper, it is worth noting that her attention is mainly on the third feature, the affective power of events to transform through trauma and affection within the body that produce forms of the self (Silverman 2010). Her interest in the changing form through affective events becomes an essential element for plasticine music, as I observe the transformative relation of the musical object as a material assemblage through everyday life.

The concept of plasticine music focuses here on recorded music and its assemblages, as opposed to rigid material objects. It does not dismiss the role of devices and technologies but allows us to surpass their rigidity. At the same time, it also de-centres content and meaning as the focus of the musical experience, considering all their features as assemblage effects. Nonetheless, the concept follows previous discussions on formats and devices that mediate our cultural experiences, shaping our relations with ideas and practices, and producing individual experiences that can be traced as memories or preferences (Straw 2010; Straw 2012; van Dijck 2006; Anderson 2007). It also pays attention to their intra-actions as producers of possibilities for action and emotions. Likewise, plasticine music considers the lyrics or structures of the piece as effects that belong to convergent dispositions but not acting as scripts for the interpretation of the music by the listener. The formal elements of a song are considered part of a series of learned practices that include meanings, contexts, previous experience, and media (Negus 2012; Siles and Boczkowski 2012; Hayles 2004; Morley 2007). Then, the production of affective attachments to a song will also be moved by how people listen and their possibilities and practices of interpreting it and listening to it every time. Those transformations will become particularly salient in the case of Perla and Black by Pearl Jam, as the lyrics are in English, following a very mellow guitar sound. Perla speaks English, but she has learned it over many years—as many of us have— so rather than understanding every word from the beginning, she has been discovering new sounds and features of the song as she practised it in different circumstances.

The concept of plasticine music follows an interest in practices and mediations from sociology, media studies and cultural studies. However, it draws together perspectives from feminist materialism to focus on how affects and emotions play a significant part in forming attachments through material assemblages that become part of our relation to the world. The reading produced allows a focus on the experience that is not rigid but cannot be understood outside the material. Assemblages affect other assemblages, but they are also affected by other assemblages over time, changing how specific songs form potential agencies. Plasticine music cuts across the individual and the social by following each listener and their stories. By decoding these intimacies and potentialities of music, the concept allows us another reading as to why music is essential for individuals in society.

Note on the data

The research vignette presented here is from an encounter with Perla in Mexico City in the Winter of 2014. It comes from the first of two sets of interviews around music attachments, devices, and practices. The first included 19 interviews with musicians, business actors and music lovers in Mexico City. The second dataset was collected between 2016 and 2017. I conducted 41 interviews in Mexico and the UK focused on the listeners' history with their music but developing experiences of listening together (Allett 2010). This second set intended to share music and practices with participants, trying to capture memories, sensations and intense epiphanic moments (Green 2015; Woodward and Greasley 2015; Pink and Mackley 2013). This method allows the researcher to follow specific stories about music in their lives and find how they have shaped practices and meanings.

The initial analysis used constructivist grounded theory strategies (Charmaz 2014; Clarke 2005; Star 2007). However, while working alongside the theory, the possibility of working with a different conceptual frame made me review some of the stories from the first set of interviews with a different lens. Although the dataset contains several cases where plasticine music is visible, the paper focuses on a single research vignette to illustrate a complex research finding (Langer 2016). This vignette also worked as reflective practice. I built up the account with Perla during the interview as we shared our stories and attachments to the song, but I also shared with her the ideas that it produced in me subsequently; she has seen this account of her story. Finally, this vignette also attempts to engage the reader/listener in more detail with the ethnographic data that goes beyond the information presented, showing the closeness of the concept to everyone.

My conversation with Perla went beyond the three-hour mark. We listened to many songs at her house with her iPod. Some would appear randomly, but she brought others up intentionally to show them to me. Black, by Pearl Jam, belongs to this latter category. We listened to it many times throughout the interview. I listened to it multiple times while working on the data, we listened together as friends afterwards, and I kept listening to recall my time collecting data in my home country. To convey the convergence between my analysis, her story and the song, the paper intended to intercalate lyrics, which would also help the unfamiliar reader to understand the song. While this is not possible, readers are invited to listen to the song through their devices.

The perla-black assemblage

I met Perla at her flat north of Mexico City, where she lives with her mother and sister. We went to primary school together. She contacted me through social media, as I posted a call for participants that reached her. She introduced herself as an electronic music fan, which I noticed through the pictures on her account. She studied online for an engineering degree and worked as social media manager for an international DJ and music producer.

I first noted the white lead in her pockets, announcing an iPod and its headphones. At that moment, streaming services were not widespread in Mexico, and she had none available. She knew the limits of the amount of music she could put into the device. However, she was happy with those limitations, encouraging her to be more selective to accommodate its storage capacity. Later, while telling me how vital electronic music was for taking her mind out of being in the same place most of the time, she lent me the iPod, and I scrolled through her catalogue. Surprised, I found a lot of 90s rock; the likes of Soundgarden, Guns n’Roses, Red hot Chilli Peppers and Pearl Jam appeared alongside modern rock and multiple subgenres of electronic music. The profile I was building in my head felt challenged.

I inquired about that music. Perla explained: ‘music can be good or hurtful depending on what memories it brings. I just broke up with a boyfriend. I used to listen to a lot of jazz with him, so I cannot listen to jazz now’. That is what happened with rock music; it became a remnant from the past that she can revisit at will. She always listened to that music: ‘I had this Walkman that I used to carry everywhere, even to go to the shop for cigarettes. I used to play Enter Sandman by Metallica. Funnily enough, it was always that song’; she would even take longer paths when walking to let the song finish. As discussed above, the music would make her everyday experience easier.

Furthermore, she explained that she enjoyed preparing self-made mixed albums—they used to be called ‘quemados’ (burned) in Mexico (see Ávila Torres 2016)— for different situations. Her knowledge of that kind of music was quite profound. We talked for a long time about it and how the ‘grunge’ clothing style would help her to define her identity outside of traditional urban teenage pop consumers of that time. Nevertheless, what she explained about her boyfriend and jazz, made me notice that what happened with rock for her was not a coming-to-age change of tastes.

During the period of listening to rock and grunge, she moved in with her boyfriend to a Caribbean beach southeast of Mexico, searching for a change in life. They used to listen to the same music and shared most of their preferences. Five years before our encounter, she had an accident that saw her falling from the two-floor window of her flat to the ground. This event left her quadriplegic. She woke up in a hospital bed a few days later, and she almost knew what had happened and the consequences of it. The first thing she asked her mom was for her iPod; she needed music to cope with the pain and the days of treatment. While in the intensive care unit, her boyfriend came to visit. He took the iPod searched for a song, and put the headphones in her ears; it was Black, by Pearl Jam: ‘crying, he told me: this is for you. And I replied: but I am not dead yet, I am still alive!’ He gave it the meaning that I was not with him anymore. It was painful. That was his way of breaking up with her.

At first Black, was the most painful song in the world for her, but after a time, the affect attached to the whole genre of music. As she explained with the example of jazz, she struggles to listen to music that she connects with certain people or experiences. The attachment is too strong just to be cut off. It is still there as pain. In this case, it was a whole sound, ‘anything with guitars was very depressing for me’. But she still needed music to feel liberated. That was the moment she fully got into different electronic music forms. ‘It is good, for example, for therapy days, as sometimes it can be harrowing. But also when travelling long distances in a car. (…) It also makes amazing festivals’. She would get used to following the melody of each piece for long periods of time and get immersed in the whole atmosphere of the music.

While she was telling that story, we were listening to Black. I realised it could be hurtful for her, so I apologised and took the iPod to change it. ‘It is fine. I can listen to it now; I like it’. The song’s meaning had transformed for her again. A few months before our encounter, she started dating one of her friends who also enjoyed electronic and rock music. ‘It all changed when I went with him to the [Pearl jam] concert in 2011’. When they decided to go, they knew the song would appear; ‘we were tense, but when the band played the song, we started singing it. We turned our heads to look at each other and started hugging and smiling while singing. She then added the comment that instigated a change in understanding of how music moves through our lives: ‘the song got a new life for me’.

Perla is the same person who used to listen to rock, the one in the aftermath of the accident and the one in the concert with her new partner. There is no separation but a sense of merged historicity that gets a new meaning every time we talk about that song. There is a sense of constant transformation of the attachment, but it integrates different elements through affective encounters. Those affects produce new effects beyond simple reactions of inclusion or exclusions. They sum up and produce new shapes. It is not only the change in the meaning of a song, but a complete set of relations among bodies, devices, emotions and contexts travels through time. It left none of the involved actors unaffected, even me, as I harboured unknown emotions from the song imprinted from that interview. It would be difficult to cut across this story in a specific moment and make an interpretation that would not miss something relevant. The Perla-Black assemblage moves through time, producing different forces by changing form each time.

Plasticine music

As a sound object, the song Black is available for anyone with access to the Internet or a CD/record player. Its sound qualities differ depending on the physical place and devices or the version the listener has access to. It can be read as belonging to certain genre conventions, like grunge or rock. As the vignette shows, the lyrics are not prescriptive, anyone can sing the same song, but at the same time, these songs will be different songs. Its stickiness allows it not only to move around distinct moments in our lives but also feed back into the group level when those interpretations help the song to become famous and acquire specific features in particular cultural contexts. In this section, I will unpack the ideas from the vignette and the rest of the data available concerning the broader concept I am proposing.

It is possible to read Perla’s story as the systematic performance of taste, class or communities’ boundary work. Nevertheless, this would only recount a particular synchronous moment. It would also leave aside the translation process that she has constantly been practising as a Spanish speaker with English as a second language. Among the Mexican participants, there is a common perception of recorded songs as something that keeps changing over time as they translate the lyrics or get deeper into the composing elements of the recording, like instrumentations and melodies. However, in most cases, the interaction between previous knowledges and sounds provides emotional drivers to get into repeating the experience—listening again. Nevertheless, these interactions result from learned emotions through the affordances of listening (DeNora 2004) and the temporal dimensions that integrate the rock-listening girl in a non-English speaking country while mediating the past (Born 2011). Nonetheless, that would not allow us to grasp the quality of a shape-shifting object that has to adjust to remain relevant in its emotional power and as part of the individual and social history of each of us.

The salient feature that this piece attempts to highlight is the shift-changing assemblage over time. The song is a plural and distributed socio-material being, which produces an object that is experienced as a constellation of mediations of heterogeneous kinds, individual and social, corporeal and technological, visual and discursive, temporal and ontological (Born 2012). By considering the song an assemblage, it is possible to see the transformation guided by emotions that makes the song exist as part of Perla’s life but have its own life through Perla. It is not a change of taste, preference or just a form or reinterpretation; it is transformation producing its existence while bringing new emotions and encounters. Perla’s attachment to Black goes beyond a record in any format, the sounds or the lyrics; the vitality created through those interactions in different moments makes the assemblage exist.

The argument for plasticine music lies around the possibility of following these stories from an intimate perspective. The concept is guided by other projects attending the social life of music and media (Crossley 2020), sound (Maalsen 2019) and musical instruments (Bates 2012). At the same time, it departs from them by looking at the relations, forming forms of value that constantly negotiate between the personal, the social, and the object itself. It also follows the idea of distributed identity proposed by Kassabian: [it] ‘does not live in a single subject, rather it is a flow across a field which constantly morphs into different shapes and contours, depending on the circumstances’ (Kassabian 2013, p. XXVII). It makes visible the mutual transformations (Barad 2003), surprises or resistances of the experience (Lupton 2018) that produce variable intensities and affective forces (Bennett 2004; Washick et al. 2014; Latimer 2019). Therefore the sound object remains open to constant stabilisation and re-stabilisation (Benzecry 2009; Benzecry 2015) that can only be looked at through a form of intimate biography. This idea suggests that music is perceived as an object that gains new qualities and effects even when being the same. It moves through feelings, desires, and changes; the creative object produces unexpected outcomes (Fox 2013). A song is as important as someone’s attachment to it, such that the same song could be an unrecognisable object for someone else. Plasticine music is an ethnographic way of thinking about music, following its transformations in the intimate and social world.

Only some of the songs listeners consume in everyday life are converted to everlasting intense attachments, seemingly left in the past. Still, music keeps moving even when it seems to remain in the past. An easy example is someone listening to teenage pop, like S Club 7—a UK pop band active in the late 90s—that later would become a joke about ageing among people of a similar generation. For some listeners, nostalgia and commercial projects converted reunions of such bands into commercial success, re-shaping them into a significant attachment as a shared meaning amongst a generation. An opposite example is a listener who used to enjoy rap, reggaeton or banda, a taste dropped when becoming aware of problematic discourses around violence or gender. Plasticine music illustrates the shape-shifting process as something that is not linear, not predictable, and that could give rise to different interpretations and uses of the song. The affects that transform the shape and agency of the assemblage could always come from disparate origins that gain the possibility of affecting as an intra-action. From language and emotional links with someone else to collectable objects, personal stories or news—like the accusations against performers like Ryan Adams and Michael Jackson, songs and their meanings change through time and context, both wider and personal, creating a cessation of the enjoyment for some listeners.

Conclusion

Recorded music contains and produces forms of value in everyday life beyond capital. It produces connections with others with our environment and quotidian life. Plasticine Music contends to add another layer to those forms of value to make sense of and shape experiences and memories, narrating threads of our lives in the social world in connection with our intimate selves. Popular music enables connections with our lives and produces forms of understanding emotional experiences, co-producing them through media devices. Music is part of assemblages enabling other assemblages through affects that change over time, keeping attachments alive and producing new affects and possibilities. The concept examines the experience and what it does in everyday life as materials and bodies get involved. While seemingly attending to an individualistic idea, it allows for including socio-material relations, sounds, devices of access, cultural signifiers, bodies, and emotions produced in a concert. It follows intra-actions between agencies that change relationships with music for each individual while following the sum of those meanings while listening together over time.

The contribution of this paper is to understand the music experience as an assemblage that could not be guaranteed to favour the different elements at play, producing specific affects concerning the world and other forces around it. Hesmondhalgh (2013) suggests that music matters, in social terms, because of the possibility of exploring differentiated and plural forms of being. From a different perspective, Marshall (2019) argues that music has never been that valued as a practice. There is a dimension, at the same time social and individual, in which we need to explore the importance of music and how it is shaped through everyday life. The value of music for individuals is the possibility of being managed, used, curated, controlled, re-signified, and shaped while, at the same time, mediating our relationship with the world, memories, loved ones and ourselves. The argument here de-centres the attention on media, music or practices, as music travels in different forms in everyday life. However, it also looks at their role to produce forces that keep music exciting and loved by the listener. There, music becomes that ‘force’ or the ‘support’ to go through difficult times. Plasticine music is also what keeps our songs marking special moments in our histories. Does the song remain the same?

Acknowledgments

The author wants to thank Sandra P. González Santos, Daryl Martin, Roz Williams, and the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología  [grant no 338397 & 411071].