Columbia was well repesented in the panel discussion orgaized by Ethnomusicology PhD Student Whitney Slaten at the 2015 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) in Louisville last week.  The title of the panel was “Representing Labor in Digital Media: Radio, Records and Live Performance” and it represented an extension of Slaten’s research on the relationships between music and labor, sound engineering and reproduction technologies, and popular music.

Slaten presented a paper entitled “Sonic Color and the Transparency of Music Production: Mixing Porgy & Bess on Broadway.” He was joined on the panel by AJ Johnson, a recent PhD alumnus of the Department, who presented a paper entitled “Re-purposing Music on Alternative Radio: Cultural Work and Imagined Communities,” and Didier Sylvain, a current Ethnomusicology PhD student in the Department, who presented a paper entitled “Find the Self, and then Kill It: Creating Experimental Electronic Music and the Metaphysical Labor of Innovation.”  Prof. Kevin Fellezs offered critical remarks as an unofficial respondent to the panel, and gave his own paper “Forever Love: Japanese Metal in America,” later the same day.

Congratulations to all!