Cambridge Companions to Music: The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture by Cook Nicholas & Ingalls Monique M. & Trippett David

Author:Cook, Nicholas & Ingalls, Monique M. & Trippett, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

Online Devotional Resources: Muslim and Christian YouTube Videos as Audio-Visual Icons

Music plays perhaps the most formative – and transformative – role within the third type of devotional practice: the use of audio-visual resources for rituals experienced online. Exploring case studies from Muslim and Christian devotional videos on YouTube illustrates how audio-visual media draw together images, text, and music and sacred sound in a manner designed to produce powerful religious experiences for devoted viewers. Further, these religious practices online challenge established authorities – and sometimes even key tenets of religious orthodoxy – shaping expectations and religious experience in a way that spills into offline religiosity.

Sound is recognised as the dominant sense within Islamic religious devotional practice, and its strategic use has been key to the success of revival movements within contemporary Islam (see Hirschkind 2006). Both listening practices and communication styles within contemporary Islam have shifted markedly due to the introduction and widespread use of audio and audio-visual technologies. In his research on popular cassette sermons in Cairo, Charles Hirschkind writes that catering to devotees whose listening practices have been shaped by the media and entertainment industries has altered both sermon rhetoric and the aesthetics of oral delivery. These rhetorical innovations ‘combine classical sermon elements with languages and narrative forms rooted in such diverse genres as modern political oratory, television dramas, radio news broadcasts, and cinematic montage’ (2006, 11).

Expanding Hirschkind’s work on cassette sermons to digital audio-visual media, Nabil Echchaibi analyses the rhetorical and stylistic innovations within Islamic communication that have resulted from popular Muslim preachers’ use of various digital online technologies. Using Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled9 as an example, Echchaibi notes that his sermons involve ‘a creative triangulation of the physical, the visual, and the digital’ (2013, 445), and that his embrace of the integrative potential of digital technologies has introduced new aesthetic possibilities: ‘Khaled has moved beyond aural media and therefore expanded the sensorium his followers draw from to build pious identities in a world of confusing sounds, images, and digital bytes’ (448).

As a spoken form, Khaled’s sermons often use dramatic, evocative visual imagery; online, some of his videos feature superimposed images and many include background music. On one video sermon posted to Khaled’s YouTube channel in June 2016, a recording studio forms the central source of images during the minute and a half of opening credits.10 The opening video segment features a hand turning a knob; as a tape reel starts to rotate, soft arpeggiated piano music with heavy reverb begins. As the song continues, a rapid succession of images from the recording studio (hands turning dials and knobs, cassette decks, analogue equalisers, and a pianist’s hands on a keyboard synthesiser) are interspersed among images of sacred texts, illuminated light bulbs and the imposing wooden door of a mosque. The instrumentation quickly thickens, as violin, ‘ud, a full string section, and a male voice are added to the texture. The musical highpoint (01:13) features lush string orchestration and a male vocalist singing a melismatic line as several dynamic

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