We are excited to announce the fourth and final event of the Electronic Dance Music Matters series, taking place on May 16th from 17:00-18:30 in the Heymanszaal. Our speaker is Dr Maria Perevedentseva, from the University of Salford, whose talk is entitled ‘Electronic dance music, entrainment and the extended self’.

Please see below for the abstract and further details:

Abstract:

Over the last decade, entrainment (as the temporal coordination of interacting mechanical systems) has been shown to play a significant part in music cognition in a variety of contexts. Motor and neural entrainment to periodicities in music have been observed in audiences and musicians, and related to affect induction, increased perceptions of musical pleasure, and prosociality. In these studies, electronic dance music (EDM) is often favourably invoked for its ability to promote multiple levels of entrainment due to its emphasis on interlocking cycles of regular, repetitive beats and the physicality of its mode of consumption, with dance movements providing additional cues for social synchronisation.

In this paper, I take a wide-angle view of entrainment, speculating on the possibility of entraining to timbral as well as rhythmic periodicities, and consider the musical, social, and psychophysical repercussions of these forms of self and environment coupling. I examine the ways in which EDM appears to be optimised for entrainment and relate this to the genre’s cultural history, aiming ultimately to probe why EDM listeners repeatedly seek out these musico-social experiences and how they may impact their wider habits and social outlooks.

BIO: Maria Perevedentseva is a Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Salford, with research interests in electronic dance music, timbre, cognition, and the analysis, history, and criticism of the popular avant-garde. She published an article on timbre and the “mycelial turn” in Dancecult in 2023, and has chapters forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music, the Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies, and a Routledge volume on Music Studies After the Internet. She is a co-founder of the Music and Online Cultures Research Network (www.mocren.org).

We look forward to seeing you there!