Listening methodologies for qualitative music research
This is a topic that I’m really looking forward to discussing!
Musicians have a particular interest and expertise in listening. Any research that deals qualitatively with musical phenomena – processes, behaviours, cultures, etc – may have to define sensible and robust ways to examine the consequence of the particular ways that people listen to music. Sometimes those listening experiences are the focus of the research, but usually they are not.
Here are a couple of readings to browse:
- Holmes and Holmes (2013), ‘The performer’s experience: A case for using qualitative (phenomenological) methodologies in music performance research.’ Pretty heavy on the ol’ epistemological stuff. What I think it does well should be to provoke some chat about how to access and report on music-specific experience through qualitative data.
- Lavee and Itzchakov (2023). ‘Good listening. A key element in establishing quality in qualitative research.’ I think this is interesting alongside, because it’s absolutely not music-specific – but there are principles here that apply for any form of qualitative person-interested research. (And if music research isn’t person-interested, I’m not sure what’s the point…!)
