Forthcoming Fall 2026 - University of Michigan Press - Music & Social Justice series
In Music at the Margins of Sense, Jessica A. Holmes contests prevailing misconceptions associated with deafness and hearing in Western music by turning to the musical experiences of deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing disabled musicians in order to impart a multisensory, multimodal conception of music and musicianship. Through a range of examples drawn from music history, popular music, recent film, and popular science, Holmes reveals that “deafness” is mistakenly understood as a state of total silence and heightened tactile sensation, a stigmatizing trope she calls the “figure of deafness.”
Holmes explores music-making spanning auditory, visual-spatial, vibrotactile, and non-sonorous modalities, including the creative practice of Christine Sun Kim, all-deaf electronic dance music raves, the musical experiences of hearing aid users, and music and musical instruments devised to mitigate tinnitus and hyperacusis. By examining the cultural production of “natural” hearing in the design, branding, and musical programming of digital hearing aids, Holmes offers a reappraisal of hearing that defies naturalized perceptual processes and auditory thresholds, the idealization of sonic fidelity, and biologically driven conceptions of musicality. Music at the Margins of Sense ultimately champions an understanding of musicianship that embraces the lived experience of disability as a vital locus of musical creativity and expertise.
Chapter 1: From the Figure of Deafness to Expert Listening
Chapter 2: Deafness qua Silence
Chapter 3: Deafness qua Vibration
Chapter 4: Hearing beyond a “Natural Ear for Music”
Chapter 5: Auditory Self-Regulation
Coda: Expert Listening as Musical World-Building
Release date: November 11, 2026
The Musical Vernacular of Depression
University of Michigan Press - Music & Social Justice series (under contract)
In recent years, depression has become an undeniable focal point in Western popular music in several key ways, including as a term freely invoked by pop artists and fans to disclose, destigmatize, and normalize everyday experiences of depression and anxiety; as an explicit pretext for listening to pop music as a form of “mood regulation” in connection with mood and activity-themed playlists on music streaming platforms and video sharing apps; and as a distinct musical and visual style forming around key musical personae and different gender-coded sugbenres.
My book attends to this complexity as reflective of the prevalence of clinical depression in young people and its associated social inequalities, and the widespread cultural destigmatization of mental health, particularly among Gen Z.
I thus approach the semantic practices, stylistic conventions, and affective cultures associated with depression in pop music as a dynamic aesthetic formation and expressive language that I call, the musical vernacular of depression. I argue that the musical vernacular of depression blurs a clinical definition of depression as a common and serious mood disorder (DSM-5; ICD-11) with a generational sensibility that is unbounded by diagnosis and pathology, bridging work in disability studies, mad studies, affect theory, the psy-disciplines, and critical public health studies in the process.
Through analyzing the gendered and racial dynamics of the musical vernacular of depression across diverse musical contexts – from bedroom pop to “sad girl” indie to ASMR “whisper” singing to the “sad boys” of mainstream hip hop to fan and platform-curated mood-themed playlists – I argue that pop music is transforming the ways young people conceive of, communicate about, and tend to their mental health amid a worldwide disparity of mental health care, for better or worse, while evaluating the cultural implications of this paradigm shift.
Status: First two chapters completed.
