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Mapping the Soundscapes of Popular Music Heritage

This piece was commissioned from a paper presented at the inter-disciplinary symposium Mapping, Memory and the City in February 2010. This was one of the first academic conferences I attended and indicates my emergence as an early career researcher and practitioner. The paper builds on my work in establishing the Birmingham Music Archive in 2008, an avowedly civic-minded project which aims to celebrate the city of Birmingham and its musical heritage. Returning to academia from the music industries after a considerable absence, scholars in the School of Media encouraged me to be reflexive about my practice-based work. This led me to reflect on my approach to popular music heritage, asking questions of how communities form online around popular music and what role it plays in people’s everyday lives.

Collaborating with Paul Long on this piece broadened my understanding of the theoretical landscapes of practices of cultural heritage, not just in terms of popular music, but its relationship with space, place and identity, and more significantly, with memory studies. This intellectual leap has prompted me to extend and deepen my work in this field, to look beyond just the ‘music’ of popular music to it’s associated cultures, ephemera and to the role it plays in individual and collective memory, heritage, activist archival practices and the everyday lives of people and communities.

The beginnings of this work are laid out in this article and are the base upon which I have built further research and publications in the field on online popular music archives, histories and heritage. This approach also informed my activity as the originator and executive producer for the Screen West Midlands funded film Made in Birmingham (2010).