Veronika Muchitsch

In this presentation, Veronica outlines an incipient research project on mediations of mental health and gender in online music cultures. The project focuses on young women's musical and multimodal practices on TikTok, whose interface enables people to easily record, save, and repurpose audio tracks. The project begins at the crossing of public discourse surrounding young women's deteriorating mental health that has been associated with the negative effects of social media and the growing role of digital media apps in mediations of (mental) health. The project seeks to contribute new knowledge about young women’s uses of music and sound to discuss and mediate mental health in algorithmic media culture, where the visual has constituted a privileged mode of analysis. The project combines feminist theorizations of sound, affect, and technology with methods for (online) ethnography, auditory analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis. It pursues three lines of inquiry: First, the projct examines young women's thematizations of mental health through music practices; Second, it investigates the roles of sonic and sociotechnical properties in these processes; Third, it seeks to theorize the gendered subjectivities forming through these practices.

Biography: 

Veronika Muchitsch (PhD) is a researcher in Musicology at Uppsala University, who works at the intersections of feminist theory, musicology, and sound studies in the study of contemporary auditory cultures. Resulting from her postdoc research on mediations of gender in algorithmic music culture (Södertörn University and University of Oslo, 2021-2024), recent publications include articles on the affective qualities of TikTok’s mimetic music culture (Popular Music and Society, 2024) and mediations of gender in ‘genrefluid’ playlist curation on Spotify (IASPM Journal, 2023). Her article on transfeminine voice in the work and reception of singer-songwriter Anohni (Popular Music, 2023) develops her doctoral research on voice and gender (Uppsala University, 2020) and was awarded the IASPM-Norden Early Career Scholar Award 2024.

For more information, please contact sanne_krogh.groth@kultur.lu.se