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Hearing Harmony offers a listener-based, philosophical-psychological theory of harmonic effects for Anglophone popular music since the 1950s. It begins with chords, their functions and characteristic hierarchies, then identifies the most common and salient harmonic-progression classes, or harmonic schemas. The identification of these schemas, as well as the historical contextualization of many of them, allows for systematic exploration of the repertory’s typical harmonic transformations (such as chord substitution) and harmonic ambiguities. Doll provides readers with a novel explanation of the assorted aural qualities of chords, and how certain harmonic effects result from the interaction of various melodic, rhythmic, textural, timbral, and extra-musical contexts, and how these interactions can determine whether a chordal riff is tonally centered or tonally ambiguous, whether it sounds aggressive or playful or sad, whether it seems to evoke an earlier song using a similar series of chords, whether it sounds conventional or unfamiliar.

“Hello, hello Brazil” was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace.  New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions.

McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid–twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.

From Queen Latifa to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock 'n' roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigor and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses.

Bayles defends the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls 'perverse.' She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical.

Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility," Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant mood."