Conference Agenda

Mis- and disinformation pervade contemporary social media ecosystems. Texts of digital conspiracy, propaganda, and other fakery are generated for a variety of purposes–humorous, trolling, ideological, economic–and their spread is sustained by perverse incentive structures and conditions of widespread precarity. They circulate in a sublime swirl, spurred on by affectively-charged sharing and empowered by negligent moderation policies.

Standard accounts of fake news or digital disinformation tend to address the domain of journalism–inflammatory headlines and specious reporting, misrepresented data, maliciously altered photos or video. This paper, however, investigates a collection of phenomena that cohere under the broad category of “(online) musical misinformation”: phenomena that emerge from, or respond to, an environment of pervasive grift, institutional mistrust, and sophisticated technological tools for deception. For example, in the online hoax fandom for the (non-existent) movie Goncharov in 2022, fan-made music helped make the absent text at the conspiracy’s center more tangible. The similarly-structured Zepotha hoax, on the other hand, was engineered by a musician as promotion for her very real album. These uses of music in (mostly) good-natured deceptions preceded–but foreshadowed–a proliferation of sophisticated fake “leaks” by digital doppelgangers of popular artists, made possible by the emergence of high-quality and accessible generative AI tools. And these instances of fakery also connect with ongoing evaluations of musical “reality” in the streaming world, from claims of “fake musicians” and faked streams on platforms like Spotify (Goldschmitt 2020, Drott 2024, Pelly 2024) to accusations of industry deception in the popular “industry plant” discourse–a surfacing of anxieties regarding industrial inaccessibility and inequity (Sadler 2025).

Drawing on scholarship of conspiracy and fakery (Young 2017, Masco and Wedeen 2024), this paper seeks both to historicize and contextualize the emergent strains of musical misinformation. It asks what current discourses of reality and deception might reveal about contemporary epistemologies of music, and what the assemblages of musical fakery might help us understand about the crises of truth and trust in the 21st-century media ecosystem.

The viral #manvsbear trend sparked on TikTok posed a striking question: would women rather be left alone in the woods with a man or a bear? What began as a hypothetical debate quickly evolved into a broader reflection on gendered safety, exposing deep societal anxieties. Among the many digital responses, pop artist Jax’s 2024 song “I Choose Violence” emerged as a potent sonic and visual intervention. The visualizer for the song—Jax singing and holding hands with a bear—evokes both vulnerability and defiance, encapsulating the collective feminist rage sparked by the trend. Through music, movement, and digital aesthetics, Jax’s response exemplifies how social media curates and amplifies political expression, transforming personal anger into a shared cultural reckoning. Using a critical technocultural discourse analysis, this paper argues that “I Choose Violence” operates as both a call to action and a branding strategy, merging political positioning with professional self-stylization.

This paper situates “I Choose Violence” within an emerging genre of digitally-driven feminist music, which I term “echoFemme,” that harnesses social media’s viral mechanisms to mobilize affect and activism. The term “affective echoFemme” blends emotional intensity, feminist expression, and the viral resonance of digital engagement, capturing how feminist music spreads and amplifies collective emotion and activism across platforms. The song actively shapes its own reception through sound, image, and participatory engagement, circulating across digital spaces to transform individual expressions of feminist rage into collective action–thereby, reinforcing music’s role in shaping political discourse. Feminist media has historically adapted to evolving technological landscapes, and Jax’s intervention highlights how digital musicking expands the expressive possibilities of political engagement. By analyzing audience responses, algorithmic circulation, and intertextual engagements across social media platforms, this paper examines how social media enables users to remix, reinterpret, and amplify the song’s message. These interactions illustrate how digital musicking transforms music into a participatory act, shaping discourse on women’s agency, safety, and resistance. By exploring how sonic and visual elements structure participation, I demonstrate how feminist rage—curated, shared, and reimagined through online engagement—reshapes digital spaces and reconfigures the intersection of media, activism, and emotional expression.

I open my laptop and play one of my go-to café music YouTube streams, transforming my apartment into a cozy place with an ambiance that supports productivity. The soundscape invites me to stay awhile as I write along with an instrumental “chill out jazz” arrangement of Taylor Swift’s “cardigan.” This presentation attends to internet spaces and what they sound like. At a time when online platforms and virtual spaces have permeated everyday musical life, recognizing how much of our cultural activity involving music takes place online, I examine the virtual spatiality and soundscaping of platform environments to articulate the creative modes of soundscape remediation and practices of digital listening user-creators perform online. Soundscaping technologies are aesthetic technologies that shape and prune sonic space not unlike the ways gardeners and landscapers manipulate physical environments to achieve specific aesthetic results (Galloway 2026; Hagood 2019; Sterne 2013). While many populations in the Global North and well-connected Western nations are hardly ever offline, with the web so socially embedded that it is increasingly invisible in our everyday engagements, we must also turn a critical eye to music’s pervasive online-ness helps to better understand the meanings, uses, and ideologies of music, sound, and space in our digitally connected lives.

Informed by autoethnographic close readings of audiovisual content, interface analysis, and internet opinion data, I listen to and examine three collections of online soundscaping content: 1) ASMR soundwalks 2) virtual coffee shop streams and simulators, and 3) aquarium livestream radio. I use this audiovisual collection to attend to the ways spatiality and digital sense-making on YouTube, examining the creative strategies used to extend short-form video platforms into expansive audiovisual environments that speaks to broader trends in 21st century audiovisuality. Virtually soundwalking along with the whispered narration of a soundwalker delicately plucking the needles of an Eastern White Pine, working along to the clattering ceramic cups, burring coffee grinders, and ambient lo-fi beats, while delicate translucent jellyfish pulsate, drift, and throb to chillwave, bringing aquarium habitats into our homes are but a few examples where YouTube is instrumentalized to shape and remediate atmospheres of the everyday.