Running thoughts through music. A musical inflection of the sonic turn in consumer research

Abstract

If it is well established that narrative can be a tool to think with, I propose doing the same, in parallel, with music. My argument follows the drift of the sonic turn, but inflects it by emphasising the processual features of sound as music, which constitute ongoingness as metamorphically repeating onflow rather than (narrative) transformation. I re-enact Lonergan, Patterson and Lichrou's modulating reading technique to show how its power resides in getting readers to musicalise narrative data; then reproduce it as a research strategy using an embodied attunement technique to switch from an orientational narrative to an immersive musical world-view. By attending to the patterns of becoming that materialise when we listen to consumption in different styles, narrative-musical stylistic interplay is an epistemological strategy that translates the problem of where ex-periential consumption takes place (extraordinary vs everyday space-time) into the question of how consumption experiences go on (transformation vs onflow).