Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Miscommunication and misunderstanding is a part of our everyday listening lives. While many misunderstandings are minor and inconsequential, some have serious implications for our lives (e.g., divorce, termination, war). While a number of factors may affect how much we understand (or misunderstand) someone, Mulanax & Powers (2001) suggest that important contributors to misunderstanding lie with a receiver’s listening orientation, capability, and skill. One means of conceptualizing listening misunderstandings is through the concept of Listening Fidelity
Listening Fidelity is defined as “the degree of congruence between the cognitions of a listener and the cognitions of a source following a communication event (Fitch-Hauser, Powers, O-Brien, & Hanson, 2007, p. 82). The LF measure provides a means of quantifying “the level of congruity between the mental images of the source and receive without the potential impact of the listener’s verbal, reading, and writing proficiencies in describing the cognitions developed as a function of a communication event” (Fitch-Hauser et al, 2007, p. 82). Mulanax and Powers (2001) established the initial reliability and predictive validity of the LF measure using a U.S. American student population.
Most recently, Fitch-Hauser et al. (2007) explored a variety of other variables potentially related to Listening Fidelity. They concluded that Listening Fidelity is an important aspect of the listening construct, addressing the accuracy of reception.
This study examines the listening fidelity construct in a cross-cultural setting. Analysis of data collected from U.S. American Caucasian and U.S. Hispanic American students is presented.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Listening Diasporally: Claude McKay’s Ditch Carmen as a Critique of Opera and its Listeners

This paper will consider the implications of music in Claude McKay’s Banjo as a critical site of national and disasporic representation. Critics have noticed that Banjo explicitly and titularly revalues the lowly instrumentalist (Lincoln Agrippa Daily is Banjo’s given name), the easy accessibility, and pagan freedom of the banjo. In Banjo there are different musical genres and something more than a sociology of music that would rehabilitate American slave culture and restore while augmenting its African roots. Listening diasporically, which is to say for the mix of cultures and with the canaille in Marseilles, McKay is interested in criticizing the bourgeois reception and the national character of opera as well as—or even as a kind—folk music. But McKay does not celebrate music or even diasporic vagabondage in a folkish ways; instead he disturbs the categories by which musical performance and reception promote nationalism and racism.
I will focus on a layered mise en scène where a brazen French teenager, whose usual reading matter is cinema fanzines, sings a lusty version of Carmen’s famous Habanera. Replete with raunchy audience, funky atmosphere, and followed by an inter-racial cat fight that itself riffs Bizet’s opera, this incident stimulates, among other things, a reflection on the relationship of Harlem to opera at the Met. Recalling his own brief ventures into the segregated spaces of allegedly high and apparently white culture, Ray, the novel’s self-reflexive intellectual, mocks both bourgeois nationalist dreams of inclusion in New York’s segregated houses and the provincialism that keeps authenticity and “the blues” in Harlem. Carmen, with its philosophical and cultural freight of interpretations and its knife-wielding diva-whore, affords McKay one of Banjo’s several vehicles for critiquing both American nationalism and bourgeois black cultural nationalism. Before but in line with Theodor Adorno’s critique of “fetishism in music” (with formulaic listening that conforms to commercial branding) and its attendant “regressive listening” (where advertising limits perception and freedom), McKay’s Carmen offers a look at the American and African American reception of music from outside. Friedrich Nietzsche had also used Bizet and Carmen, with its irresistibly erotic and recognizably African rhythms, to puncture Richard Wagner’s grandiose ethno-nationalist dream of German opera and Anglo-Saxon mythology. It is fruitful to consider McKay’s vernacular criticism alongside these differently attuned cultural critiques, as this paper will show. However, McKay’s precise attention to revising and restaging the opera-within-an-opera in an integrated and multilingual bar participates creatively in the criticism it would perform, and, in this way, it trumps the philosophers’ readings. It constitutes an audience that, while it cannot break free of the class and race antagonisms of the opera’s plot, could—if we would—listen to subversive and/or African diasporic music all over the map.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: To improve Teacher Education programs, ask the students!! Not our collegiate students, but K-12 students. The students’ voice offer us definitive directions for the improvement of our teacher education programs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: My paper examines how punk and alternative rock subcultures have created their own commercially independent media, such as independent record labels and fanzines, through a so-called "do-it-yourself ethic." The formation of independent media is a response to the growing concentration of power among corporate conglomerates in the entertainment and music industries. The do-it-yourself ethic gives people involved with punk and alternative rock music democratic access to a means of creative expression, empowering them to be cultural participants rather than just consuming spectators. In many cases, it also enables them to use music as a vehicle of protest and activism, a kind of "public sphere" that gives voice to viewpoints marginalized by mainstream media while facilitating dialogue about critical social issues. My paper gives special attention to the "riot grrrl" movement and subculture, a collective of young women who sought to revitalize feminism by using fanzines and music as media for consciousness-raising and community organizing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: An experiment was conducted to investigate the impact of the emotional context of an overall radio ad on cognitive and emotional responses to individual words within the ad.