Against Expectations: Pop Music, Formal Entropy and Hyperlistening in Short-Form Culture

Musicology Colloquium/Musikvidenskabeligt Fagligt Forum

How is pop music changing under the conditions of contemporary platform culture? This presentation examines how short-form media environments reshape musical form and listening practices, with particular attention to changing relations between formal anticipation, unpredictability, and immediacy. Bringing together pop music studies, platform studies, and media philosophy, I consider how contemporary pop increasingly privileges fragmentation and moment-based intensity over coherence and formal organization of musical expectation.

Central to this argument is hyperlistening, a concept I am developing to describe the reciprocal relation between musical attention and musical form in short-form culture. Hyperlistening conceptualizes listening as taking place across fragments of music, images, text, users, and platforms. In short-form video, cropped music becomes part of audiovisual configurations that organize attention and anticipation through affective practices of scrolling, repetition, and algorithmic sequencing. At the same time, these conditions feed back into pop music, reshaping its formal organization. Through musical analysis, I examine how this reciprocal process becomes audible in contemporary pop and introduce formal entropy as a way of conceptualizing its growing discontinuity and unpredictability.

The talk is open to the public