STeMS Speaker Series | Viral: Metaphor, Narrative, Music

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, “going viral” had nonetheless become commonplace—the epidemiological metaphor characterizing an increasingly-familiar trajectory of explosive circulation, remix, and reportage expanding from individual nodes of audiovisual content online. This presentation briefly historicizes and contextualizes the contagious concept, before suggesting how “virality”—as aesthetic repertoire, as popular narrative, as social logic made concrescent in platform architectures—might also be understood as a form of musicality.

I argue that participation in the production, watching, listening to, circulating, or sharing of “viral” digital internet objects has constituted a significant site of 21st-century musical practice. And across the 21st century, digital platforms have adapted to facilitate this viral musicality, using music’s positive capacities—aesthetic pleasure, communal participation, social connectivity—to enable corporate profit-making, corral attention, and incentivize acceptance of increasing technocapital enclosure of the internet and everyday life.

Paula Clare Harper, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, is a musicologist who researches music, sound, and the internet. She is interested in putting digital ephemera and oddities into broader context, in hearing the musicality of online meme cultures, and in tracking music’s creation and circulation across digital platforms and communities. Her current book projects include Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, and the co-edited collection Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans.