Welcome to my page here on Sleeve. I’ll be sharing thoughts, essays, and side notes on music, sound, and culture — the things I keep circling back to when I’m supposed to be working on other stuff. To start with, I would like to say something about listening.
There’s this idea I’ve borrowed from the New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small. In his book Musicking, he poses the thought that music isn’t something we just listen to — it’s something we do. Even listening, when you’re really listening, is an active thing. You’re participating. You’re musicking.
But most of us have learned to treat music like a non-participatory product. Someone performs, we sit and consume. Politely. Quietly. And then there’s 'the voice shame' — the Norwegians even have a word for it: Stemmeskam. The sense that your voice doesn’t belong. Maybe someone told you, casually, once, that you couldn’t sing. So, you refrain from humming along with your favourite music while you're on the train for the fear that someone heard you. We need to deal with that and start telling children that they can sing, and that they have every right in the world to use their voice no matter how it sounds.
Meanwhile, music itself has often become a thing related to technological perfection: Autotuned, algorithm-fitted, X-Factor tight. No room for error. No room for us. I think that’s a loss. I would like to write about that loss here — about listening, about voice shame, about why music should be something we do, not just consume.
Thanks for being here. Tell me — do you sing? And if not, why?