This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject.
The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound.
Leppänen, Taru: - Taru Leppänen's research engages with feminist new materialisms, and feminist and cultural studies of music. She has a multidisciplinary background in musicology and gender studies: she is a lecturer in gender studies at the University of Turku, and adjunct professor of musicology at the Universities of Turku and Helsinki.
Moisala, Pirkko: - Pirkko Moisala is Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include gender and cultural studies of music. In addition to monographs and anthologies in Finnish and Swedish, she is the author of Kaija Saariaho (University of Illinois Press 2009), Gender and Qualitative Methods (Sage 2003) and Cultural Cognition in Music (Gummerus 1991), as well as the co-editor of Music and Gender (University of Illinois Press 2000).
Tiainen, Milla: - "Milla Tiainen completed her PhD at the University of Turku, Finland, and works currently as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests range across musical performance, the voice in contemporary arts and media, cultural and feminist musicology, and new materialist and posthumanist thinking. In addition to a monograph and a co-edited collection of essays (in Finnish), she has published widely in international edited volumes and journals, such as Body&Society, Cultural Studies Review, and NECSUS - European Journal of Media Studies. Milla is a founding member of the COST-funded research initiative "New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on How 'Matter Comes to Matter?'" (2014-2018)."
Väätäinen, Hanna: - Hanna Väätäinen is a music and dance scholar who has worked at Abo Akademi University, University of Eastern Finland and University of Helsinki. She has done ethnographic research on competitive wheelchair dancing, movement improvisation and Swedishnesses in Finland in relation to music. She has written two books and published articles in Finnish scholarly journals and edited volumes.
