Music at the Margins of Sense
University of Michigan Press - Music & Social Justice series (forthcoming 2026)
Music at the Margins of Sense contests the prevailing misconceptions associated with deafness in Western music through the creative endeavours of musicians from across the diverse audiological and socio-cultural spectrum of hearing loss.
By surveying a range of musical examples drawn from EDM, heavy metal, rock, experimental music, sound art, music video, and Hollywood cinema, the book shows how deafness is mistakenly idealized as an extreme physiological state of absolute auditory silence and inborn heightened tactility, a recurring trope I call “the figure of deafness.” I argue that the figure of deafness is invoked in these and other cultural contexts to newly understand the extreme margins of sensory and musical experience in ways that centre and affirm normal hearing, while obscuring the intrinsic diversity of deaf sensory experience and subjectivity, as well as "the heterogeneity of ear-listening” (Mills 2015), foreclosing more diverse ways of being and musicking in the process.
The book ultimately imparts a multisensory, multimodal conception of musicianship unbounded by institutionalized conceptions of musical authority and skill, idealized sensory types, and strict ontological definitions of music that I term “expert listening.” I offer expert listening an analytical framework and musical value system that embraces diverse articulations of bodily autonomy, multisensory interdependence, perceptual agency, and musical self-determination as the foundation for inclusive musical world-building.
Chapter 1: From the Figure of Deafness to Expert Listening
Chapter 2: Deafness qua Silence
Chapter 3: Deafness qua Vibration
Chapter 4: A “Natural” Ear, a “Good” Ear, and a “Bad” Ear for Music
Chapter 5: Tinnitus, Hyperacusis, and Auditory Self-Regulation
Coda: Expert Listening as Musical World-Building
Status: manuscript accepted for publication by the press, August 2025. Final revisions and formatting underway prior to entering production.
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.
