TY - CONF TI - A Mixed Methods Approach to Questions Concerning the Mediatization of Musical Experience AU - Lepa, Steffen T2 - Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age AB - Since the invention of the phonograph, there has been a debate about the consequences of the musical artwork’s technological reproducibility for everyday musical practices and for music’s future status within society. While some theorists feared a decline in valuation and the subsumption of production and reception of musical works to the logics of commodity fetishism (Benjamin, 1936 / 2003), others were more optimistic and forecasted the advent of a new aural culture as an outcome of the electronic media revolution (McLuhan, 1964 / 1995). With the beginning of the 21st century, a further significant step in the meta-process of mediatization of music has nearly been finished: The digitalization of audio content and the invention of high performance audio compression algorithms and miniaturized mobile music devices have nowadays led to a ubiquity of opportunities for experiencing music in everyday life not imaginable a decade ago. In conjunction with the new sharing possibilities of the internet, digitalization has additionally created the (by now also mobile) access to a global inventory of musical works that is larger than anyone could listen to in his lifetime. While media ethnographic studies on the formative role of contemporary digital media technologies for musical listening practices (Bull, 2007) and social functions of music in everyday life (DeNora, 2003) have shown the different and complex social uses of mediatized music for coping with the emotional and social requirements of society, empirical access to questions regarding historic change of these matters alongside technological turnovers has until now been limited to discourse-analytic approaches (Weber, 2008). How did people individually react with their listening styles to the technological inventions they experienced during their lifetime in the 20th century? In which aspects did they stay to the fundamental listening habits that they acquired in their youth? And which affordances of audio media technology (Clarke, 2007) might have led some to not only adopt to new devices, but also to new listening strategies that afforded new social uses of music? In order to address these questions, the mixed methods approach employed in our study links survey data on current audio media usage of different age cohorts, sex and educational backgrounds to narrative-biographical interview analyses about experiences with the audio media at disposal during our informants’ childhood, youth and later life. The presentation shall deal with selected findings that might give rise to interesting discussions on the social and cultural implications of the mediatization of music. C1 - Bremen DA - 2011/// PY - 2011 ER -