Paula Clare Harper, assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago, presents "Viral: Metaphor, Narrative, Music" in this installment of the 2025-26 THEME lecture Series. Her lecture is made possible with support from the Wilberforce and Myra D. Hanford Endowed Program Support Fund in American Music.
Abstract
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.
Biography
Paula Clare Harper 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 project, Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, documents the early 21st-century rise of ubiquitous social media platforms through an understanding of them as mechanisms for facilitating virality—a virality that is deeply sonic, and that can be productively analyzed as musicking. From Geocities and Webrings to Twitter and TikTok, the book charts a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, through exchanges between the vernacular work of digital actors and the top-down corporate attempts to capture, corral, and control their viral participatory practices.
Additionally, Paula’s research interests in music, gender, and digital fandom intersect in ongoing work on pop divas including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift; after co-convening the summer 2021 “Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music and Media” conference, she is now co-editing the volume Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans. This edited collection uses Swift as a prism through which to analyze a variety of timely and intersecting issues in contemporary digital culture and music—from songwriting and copyright, to constructions of race and gender, to fandom and digital reception.
Paula holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University, an MA in Music History from the University of Washington, and an AB in Music and English from the University of Chicago. Prior to her appointment at Chicago, she held positions as Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.
Series Background
THEME: A colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education held on select Friday afternoons during the academic year.