Managing participation in interaction: The case of humming

Interactional encounters call for participants to maintain joint involvement in the activity at hand. However, when interactional problems emerge, participants may seek to redefine the current participation framework to ensure the intelligibility of the situation as a whole. This paper describes one interactional resource to accomplish such a shift: humming. Drawing on data consisting of 32 instances of humming from three different settings, and using conversation analysis as a method, I demonstrate how humming can be used to manage problems caused by the participants either failing to perform the expected actions or performing inappropriate actions. Through humming, the participants can publicly “accept” their co-participant’s solitary engagements, maintain the separateness of the participants’ activities, signal a need for “time-out” from the joint activity, and downgrade the interactional import of their embodied actions. Thus humming is also related to morality. On the one hand, humming signals the participants’ cooperative stance despite their divided involvement. On the other hand, the mere act of making the current participation framework audible may alert the co-participants about its inadequacy.