Modern music cultures are inconceivable and unobservable without media. What is understood as music, how it is created, how it is dealt with and what remains of it is closely linked to media practices, knowledge, technologies and forms of organisation. This applies in particular to popular music cultures. They have proven to be a seismograph and discourse space of social and cultural articulations, whose surface seems banal, loud or eternally the same, but at their core address (and mostly capitalise) complex and paradoxical constellations of power, desire and standardisation.

+++ Discussions of popular music and media were part of the course content from the very beginning (1974) +++ The intention was to make a clear break with the history of the subject (musicology) +++ It was to be about people, not about musical works +++ This corresponded to pedagogical concepts and signs of the educational reform at the end of the 1970s +++ Activity-orientated teaching +++ Practical relevance +++ Apparative practice +++ Orientation towards music and music practices of the present +++ Social and cultural change +++ Expansion of the academic field of vision +++

With the introduction of BA and Master's degree programmes (2005-2007), the Music and Media specialisation is represented in all degree programmes offered by the Institute of Music.

As part of the Integrated Media Master's programme, the Institute of Music cooperates with the Institute of Art and Visual Culture (Code). This Master's programme focuses on the areas of media-artistic and commercial media production and media processes.

The Institute of Music maintains a variety of ERASMUS COOPERATIONS

Against the background of Prof. Dr Susanne Preisendörfer's expertise, the following research focuses have been established:

- Theories and methods of researching popular listening practices and scenes (Sarah Chaker, Thomas Schopp, Kiwi Menrath, Arne Wachtmann, Thomas Flömer)

- Global Music Studies (Stefanie Alisch, Anastasia Wakengut, Hani Alkhatib, Vincent Rastädter, Christine Heinen)

- Cultural Policy (Bernd Wagner, Beate Fröhlich)

Research projects in which the employees are/were involved:

- Research Training Group: Border Formations in Migration Society

- Research Centre: Genealogy of the Present

- Doctoral programme: Identity constructions of young adults in Belarus

- DFG Network: Sound in Media-Culture

Hardly any other phenomenon has influenced cultural self-image in the last century as strongly as the development and increasing ubiquity of technical means of communication and their social impact: media. Although the separation of image, movement and sound has been technologically cancelled in common digit today, the media world is usually apostrophised as a world of images, rarely as a world of sound.

In media studies, there is an obvious deficit in the field of acoustic media. And the tradition of thought in musicology has so far assumed an immanent structure of meaning in music, the content of which is primarily determined by its form. The almost classical "music in the media" approach collides where the mediality of music - and not the intended or received content - provides the key to understanding musical practices. This applies not only to the various forms of popular music, but to all sounds that are produced, disseminated and appropriated, affected and constructed by the media. Such an understanding should also enable future music educators to deal meaningfully with the musical practices of those entrusted to their care.

Guided by this research perspective, academic work is supervised and reviewed and research projects are conceived and organised.