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Sounding Out The City — Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life
... 'The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can't remember any technological experience that was quite so wonderful as being able to take music and move it through landscapes and architecture' -Gibson in Bull (2000) This quote from Gibson also alerts us to another important concern, that of the listener's freedom of movement through space, the feature that distinguishes the personal stereo experience from the home hi-fi experience. Just as we expect a VR experience to contain an explorable environment with some degree of freedom of movement, even if it's just the freedom to orientate the head and look around, should such agency be a requirement for an audio augmented reality experience? ...
... Within the discipline of sound studies, specifically the history of sound technologies, it could be suggested that rather than being unique, original or at least highly distinguishable from other audio experiences, what we think of as AAR is in fact just the next step in the evolution of augmented listening. This audio augmented reality journey is perhaps, most recently, best illustrated by a lineage that includes the Walkman, Discman, the MiniDisc player, iPods and iPhones (Bull, 2000), though is evident through the history and development of listening technologies (Sterne, 2003;Ouzounian, 2020). This could be described as an ability to enable a greater sense of acoustic virtual reality, or greater proficiency to augmentation the listener's environment with virtual audio content, then was previously possible, a trait that appears to distinguish each subsequent and significant development of our listening technologies. ...
... Within such an experience, in order for it to qualify as an AR or, for that matter, an AAR experience, according to Azuma et al's (2001) definition, we'd require an explicit association between the virtual content and the physical reality. For this we need to rely on chance and the ability of the listener to find, make and imagine these associations, which we know, according to Bull (2000) and Aceti (2013) are quite possible, thus making the experience of mobile listening, even a linear stereophonic one, an experience that is capable of realising an audio augmented reality. ...
This thesis explores the characteristics, experiential qualities and functional attributes of audio augmented objects within the context of museums and the home. Within these contexts, audio augmented objects are realised by attaching binaurally rendered and spatially positioned virtual audio content to real-world objects, museum artefacts, physical locations, architectural features, fixtures and fittings.
The potential of these audio augmented objects is explored through a combination of practice-based research and ethnographically framed studies. The practical research takes the form of four sound installation environments delivered through the use of an augmented reality mobile phone application that are deployed within a museum environment and in participants’ homes.
Within these experiences, audio augmented objects are capable of being perceived as the actual source of virtual audio content. The findings also demonstrate how the perceived characteristics of real-world objects and physical space can be altered and manipulated through their audio augmentation.
In addition, audio augmented museum objects present themselves as providing effective interfaces to digital audio archival content, and digital audio archival content presents itself as an effective re-animator of silenced museum objects. How audio augmented objects can function as catalysts for the exploration of physical space and virtual audio space within both the home and museum is presented. This is achieved by the uncovering of a sequence of interactional phases along with the uncovering of the functional properties of different types of audio content and physical objects within audio augmented object realities.
By way of conclusion, it is proposed that the audio augmented object reality alters the current, popular experience of acoustic virtual reality from an experience of you being there, to one of it being here. This change in the perception of the acoustic virtual reality has applications across an array of audio experiences, not just within cultural institutions, but also within various domestic listening experiences including the consumption and delivery of recorded music and audio-based drama.
... In the field of sociology, music has been relatively little analyzed as part of the sonorities set in motion in cities, and has been considered much more frequently in its aesthetic forms (styles, genres) and as a commodity in contemporary society, including with regards to the culture industry, ideology, reception, identity and lifestyle formations, especially among the younger generations, within several theoretical lineagessome of them mentioned above. The most interesting contributions to a more integral exploration of sonorities taken as a revealer for fundamental elements in urban life are based on approaches related to the sociology of everyday life; they seek to approach the specific uses and meanings of sound forms as elements that re-signify or construct social relations and identities, as exemplified by the works of Bull (2000), DeNora, and Frith. ...
... But it still highlights the predominance of the sense of vision as a way of exploring urban sociability. Even the rereadings of such authors often placed more emphasis on the visual aspects of their analyses (Bull 2000). ...
... Cities, machines, and the technological means of reproducing recorded music would create "sound walls" that would isolate individuals from their own environment. Bull (2000) gives an interesting example of how natural noises can be seen as "pollution" in certain circumstances: the sound of the ocean waves disturbing a cell phone conversation from the deck of a ship. But the most relevant critique of Schafer's formulation concerns the very notion of city that would lie behind his conception -detached from the set of cultural practices that constitute the urban soundscape (Arkett). ...
... Rhythmanalysis has been widely used to study place, especially city space including in historical accounts of urban street life (e.g. Highmore 2002 as discussed earlier), everyday routines in contemporary urban spaces (Chen 2013;Degen 2010;Hall 2010;Smith and Hall 2013;Sgibnev 2015), gentrification (Degen 2008;Kern 2016), gender and ethnic inequalities in the night-time economy (Schwanen et al. 2012), absence (Gibas 2013), consumption (Cronin 2006;Kärrholm 2009), street performance (Simpson 2008(Simpson , 2012, festival spaces (Duffy et al. 2011), domestic space (Nansen et al. 2009), imagined space (Weizman 2000), the sounds (Bull 2000;Labelle 2008Labelle , 2010 and senses (Degen 2008) of the city. In their introduction to a special issue of The Sociological Review on 'Urban Rhythms' , Rob Smith and Kevin Hetherington argue that 'a critical consideration of rhythm allows for an understanding of the contemporary urban era that distinguishes it from those of the past' (2013: 5). ...
... Second, sound is an important counter to the dominance of the visual in accounts of urban experience. Michael Bull's (2000) ethnography of the use of personal stereos in urban space contributes to an auditory understanding of the self in/and of the city. Personal stereo users listening to music sidestep the imposition of linear rhythms as they carve out 'segments' of time on the move with autonomy and privacy or 'concentrate on mood maintenance that overcomes the journey time' itself. ...
... Moods, he says, are more important than specific images, atmospheres more relevant than spectacles. We have encountered examples already that explicitly explore music in urban space and rhythm as something which is embodied and experienced in sound (Bull 2000, Moore 2013, Labelle 2010. Sonic methods more generally seem to be gaining ground as a sensory approach in part as an important counter to the dominance of the visual in accounts of urban experience (Biddle and Thompson 2013). ...
... The portable music player was turned into a "constant companion," carrying the personal music collection like a "digital Sherpa" (Bull, 2014, p. 107). Recently, mobile music listening was also investigated in a broader sense, where being on the move also included listening in the car (e.g., Greb et al., 2018), shared listening via headphones (Bull, 2000), and listening to music via smartphone loudspeakers or boom boxes (Lasen, 2018). Moreover, although mobile devices can also be used in private and fixed settings (e.g., Bull, 2014;Nag, 2018), mobile music listening is inherently understood as happening in public. ...
... Krause et al. (2016) showed that listening to music on public transport is associated with higher levels of control over the selection of music, as well as attention and liking of the music, compared to the overall mean for different locations (e.g., at work or in a restaurant, pub, or club). Picking the right song that matches the current mood, activity, or surroundings is crucial for mobile music listeners (Bull, 2000(Bull, , 2006Nag, 2018;Skånland, 2013), and they most often choose their favorite music or at least familiar music (Heye & Lamont, 2010). A personalized listening experience is further promoted by streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube, permitting the listeners to access millions of songs on demand and to choose a suitable song for any situation (IFPI, 2019;Krause & Brown, 2019;Nag, 2018;Watson & Drakeford-Allen, 2017). ...
... Mobile music is mostly listened to "from door to door" (Bull, 2005, p. 345)-for instance, while commuting to work-and is used to fill "dead time" (Gripsrud & Hjorthol, 2012). As a form of time management, listening to music makes journeys more bearable (Bull, 2000). Being in public often comes with unpleasant sounds and conversations of strangers, and an important strategy for mobile listeners is to take control over the environment by blocking out unwanted noise from external sources (Bull, 2000;Simun, 2009;Skånland, 2011), which can also enhance concentration (Chen, 1998;Williams, 2004). ...
Mobile music listening is widely recognized as an integral part of everyday music use. It is also a rather peculiar experience, since the listeners are surrounded by strangers in public and at the same time engaged in a solitary and private activity. The current study aimed at investigating the functions and experiences of mobile listening with a quantitative online questionnaire, and collected further information about mobile listening situations and listening habits. Among respondents ( n = 203), 89% reported listening to music while being on the move. We found mood-related and cognitive functions to be most prevalent (e.g., enhancing mood, relaxation, prevention of being bored), whereas least important functions relate to social dimensions (e.g., feeling less lonely, feeling less watched). Regarding experiences of mobile music, respondents most commonly adapted their mood to the music and lost touch with the current surroundings. A principal component analysis on ratings of functions and experiences resulted in an underlying structure of five dimensions, representing different levels of involvement: (1) Mood Management comprises functions to satisfy individual needs; (2) Absorption and Aestheticization encompasses deep listening experiences and altered perception of the surroundings; (3) Social Encapsulation and Self-Focus describe the distancing of oneself and changes in attention; (4) Distraction and Passing Time include the prevention of being bored and making time pass faster; and (5) Auditory Background is defined by a non-attentive and rather unaffected music listening. These results highlight the immersiveness of mobile music listening. By creating an individual soundworld, listeners distance themselves from the surroundings aurally and mentally, and modify their attention, perception, moods, and emotions, leading to an improvement of daily life experiences while moving.
... As a medium that brings music to the listener, it can be considered a musical instrument (Alperson, 2008, p. 44 Reproduction (1969), which has fuelled views ranging from fears of how art loses its power to attitudes that digital creation fundamentally redefines artistic expression in a hypermediated culture. In this paper, I will apply an approach often used in sound studies (Bull, 2000(Bull, , 2001Sterne, 2003), which means the article's analytical angle is strongly guided by the listener's position. In this way, the article contributes to the theme of this special issue, which discusses the socio-cultural role of technology in digital music practices. ...
... It has changed the consumption of music and the relationship between artists and audiences -which were previously spatially restricted to certain places like concert halls, festivals, and living rooms -in revolutionary ways. Many studies focusing on portable devices and mediated listening have, for example, discussed what kind of modes of listening technologies generate ('active' or 'passive'), or have considered how portable digital devices reformulate space, place, and interpersonal experience (Bull, 2000(Bull, , 2001Du, 1997;Foale, 2014). ...
... Lastly, I argue that the 'for-mode' highlights at a more general level social, political, and ethical questions about musicking in digital infrastructures. By starting from a social perspective, there is no doubt that the way music is a collective social force has changed (Borgo, 2013;Bull, 2000Bull, , 2001Du, 1997). Instead of being stable institutions within which music production and consumption take place, cultural practices are part of 'mobile' practices: digital environments tempt us to access, filter, and remix. ...
The paper examines the sonic experiences of the listener in digital environments by using a Bluetooth speaker as an example. It discusses how the everyday use of a speaker highlights human beings’ material and multi-sensory situatedness in digital environments. Based on the analytical approaches concerning embodiment, movement, and infrastructures, the paper aims to develop further the idea of musicking in everyday life contexts. It suggests that in addition to the social importance of music, the material approach to musicking reveals new political and ethical questions, especially those concerning the power of code and planetary sustainability.
... This disparaging vision of electroacoustic communication is thus preoccupied with the "false" relationships created by sound reproduction. This interpretation has been significantly revised by scholars such as Michael Bull (2000), whose empirical and theoretical research vouches for the creative aesthetic and narrative experiences rendered by personal stereo usage in contemporary urban life. 45 Turning to the specific case of radio, Schafer despairs that the interruptions created by broadcasts produced the first "sound wall" by isolating the individual and providing a kind of background wallpaper or ambient noise. ...
... Its mention of flags and colours emphasises a visual overstimulation of the eyes. Yet this de-scription of sensory overwhelming also implies an auditory experience, with the loud cheers of thousands and the sounds of marching feet producing intense resonances and reverberations in order to "sound out" the entire city landscape (Bull 2000). ...
... Or perhaps I have not given much attention to the mentioning of sounds when reading about them. In the field of urban studies, there is a predominance of the sense of vision (Mendonça, 2022;Bull, 2000). I do know that on the day after the percussion recital, I was much more attuned to the soundtrack that came with the scenery. ...
... Where the cultural techniques perspective adopted here diverges perhaps most strikingly from that of classical cultural-studies or material-cultures approaches to sound media technologies (Bull, 2000;Du Gay et al., 2013;Manuel, 1993) is in its overt interest in what symbolization affords the users of media technologies. Theorists of cultural techniques have repeatedly drawn attention to how writing-an act that necessarily spatializes inscriptions in media-can be used to confer additional meaning to a sign by virtue of the location of marks in space. ...
... Zanima ga, kako se subjektivno doživljanje mesta preobraža ob poslušanju glasbe s pomočjo uporabe slušalk in sodobnih prenosnih predvajalnikov digitalnega zvoka -torej z izkušnjo »zapredkanja« (cocooning ;Bull 2000: 32). Analiza izkušenj fotografinje, kolesarja in glasbenega navdušenca priča o raznoterih načinih poslušanja glasbe med vsakodnevnim premikanjem po Turkuju na Finskem in v Brightonu v Veliki Britaniji, saj -kot je ugotavljal že Michael Bull (2000) -uporaba prenosnih predvajalnikov glasbe reorganizira čute tako, da postavi na prvo mesto sluh. Sledeč Edwardu Caseyju in Stevenu Feldu, Uimonen pojmuje kraj oziroma mesto kot dialoško konstrukcijo. ...
Through the prism of urban space, the paper critically analyses and reflects on cultural anthropological and humanistic orientations in the study of the senses. The first part of the paper explores the genealogy of two key anthropological approaches to the 'life of the senses', namely the anthropology of the senses and sensory anthropology, outlines their relationship to art, and relates them to the recent emergence of 'walking methodologies'. The second part of the paper focuses primarily on the methodological integration of anthropology with art, while the third part of the paper focuses on the introduction of walking as a methodological 'tool' in ethnographic research.
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Skozi prizmo urbanega prostora prispevek kritično razčlenjuje in reflektira kulturnoantropološke in humanistične usmeritve v preučevanju čutov. Prvi del prispevka raziskuje genealogijo dveh ključnih antropoloških pristopov k »življenju čutov«, in sicer antropologije čutov in čutne antropologije, oriše njun odnos do umetnosti in ju poveže z nedavnim porastom t. i. hodečih metodologij. Drugi del prispevka se tako osredinja na predvsem metodološko povezovanje antropologije z umetnostjo, tretji pa na vpeljevanje hoje kot metodološkega »pripomočka« v etnografskem raziskovanju. Nazadnje prispevek očrta druge prispevke, ki sestavljajo zbornik.
... Journalists can certainly complain that the "real" audiophile is a dying breed in the digital age (cf. Bull 2000;Björnberg 2020). However, this does not call into question the technological discourse or the narrative of progression -it just marks a shift in its content. ...
... Hampton et al., 2010;Hatuka & Toch, 2016). Utbredt teknologi som personlige lydenheter og hodetelefoner muliggjør for sin del «[the] sounding out [of] the city» (Bull, 2000). Funnene mine støtter imidlertid ikke løst funderte påstander (f.eks. ...
Artikkelen befatter seg med tilfeldig interaksjon mellom byens fremmede. Slik interaksjon er et grunnleggende og ofte feiret trekk ved bylivet. Hvilke forhold som utløser kontakt av denne typen, har likevel sjelden blitt systematisk dokumentert. Artikkelen utforsker underliggende omstendigheter som bevirker tilfeldig, vennligsinnet interaksjon mellom fremmede i byens utendørs offentlige rom. Den bygger på mangeårig etnografisk feltarbeid i Oslo samt referansemateriale fra Argentina. Den presenterte studien viser at et bredt spekter av omstendigheter bevirker eller autoriserer slik samhandling, sortert under hovedtypene «eksponerte posisjoner», «åpningsposisjoner» og «gjensidig åpenhet». Her hviler studien på, underbygger og videreutvikler en mindre påaktet del av Goffmans banebrytende interaksjonssosiologi. Studiens funn peker mot en kontinuitet i og videre gyldighet av disse underliggende omstendighetene. Artikkelens hovedbidrag til forskningen på offentlige rom og sosial interaksjon er den utførlige, empirisk funderte kategoriseringen av omstendigheter som får byens fremmede til å samhandle på spontant, fredsommelig vis på offentlige steder. Derigjennom byr den også på noen lærdommer for samtidig byutvikling
... Flanking the VSI articles, is a flourishing and lively scholarship in geography and related disciplines, one that is bolstered by the establishment of sound studies as an interdisciplinary phenomenon. Key avenues of enquiry across these sound-related studies have investigated the role of sound, music and sonic media in understandings of self and other, in constructions and mediations of public and private environments, and in the reciprocal affective and emotional relations between bodies, objects, places and ideas (see for example: (Anderson et al., 2005);Bull, 2000;Connell and Gibson, 2004;(Gallagher, 2011);Hudson, 2007;Mattless, 2005;Peters, 2018(Wissman, 2016). Sound, in its capacity to traverse the boundaries of the material and the social has offered geographers a mode through which to focus on https://doi.org/10. ...
... Musikhören während des Pendelns wird unter dem Begriff des mobilen Musikhörens untersucht, das als ortsunabhängige Höraktivität in der Öffentlichkeit definiert und durch die Nutzung mobiler Endgeräte und Kopfhörer ermöglicht wird(Kuch & Wöllner, 2021). Bereits mit dem Aufkommen des Walkmans in den 1980er Jahren wurde die mobile Musiknutzung als Akt der Selbstermächtigung im urbanen Raum verstanden(Hosokawa, 1984) und spätestens mit den empirischen Untersuchungen vonBull (2000) zeigte sich, dass damit bis zu einem gewissen Grad Kontrolle über die eigene Wahrnehmung zurückgewonnen werden kann. Dieses Gefühl von Autonomie findet in einer sogenannten "auditory bubble"(Bull, 2005, S. 344) statt, was auf eine vorrangig auditive Kontrolle hindeutet. ...
Während die Weltgesundheitsorganisation schon seit geraumer Zeit auf die negativen Auswirkungen von Lärm hinweist, sind nach wie vor viele Menschen im Wohnumfeld und auch im öffentlichen Raum hohen Lärmpegeln ausgesetzt. Ob Musik im Umgang mit Umweltlärm genutzt wird und welche Zusammenhänge mit der individuellen Lärmempfindlichkeit im urbanen Raum bestehen, sollte im Rahmen der vorliegenden Studie untersucht werden. Dazu wurde ein Online-Fragebogen erstellt, der neben der Häufigkeit des mobilen Musikhörens auch das Motiv des bewussten Lärmausblendens und das Hörverhalten sowie die individuelle Lärmempfindlichkeit erfasste. Die Ergebnisse von 149 Befragten zeigen, dass diejenigen Personen, die empfindlicher auf Lärm reagieren, unterwegs und auch allgemein weniger Musik hören als weniger lärmempfindliche Personen. Wenn lärmempfindliche Personen unterwegs Musik hören, dann jedoch häufiger als andere, um sich von störenden Geräuschen abzuschotten. Kopfhörer mit lärmabschottender Wirkung (Noise-Cancelling, Over-Ears, In-Ears) wurden von 107 der Befragten verwendet, wobei lärmempfindliche Personen diese Art der Kopfhörer nicht häufiger nutzten. Die Bedeutung der Lärmempfindlichkeit für das Musikhörverhalten im urbanen Raum steht im Zusammenhang mit mehreren Faktoren, die weiterführende Untersuchungen unter Einbeziehung von Pegelmessungen und situativ empfundener Lärmbelastung empfehlen lassen.
... Además del estudio sobre la evocación musical-espacial mencionado anteriormente, Ben Anderson ha venido estudiando las maneras en las que la música es usada para sentirse mejor, para generar esperanzas de un mejor futuro desde la experiencia del presente cotidiano como un horizonte de posibilidad (Anderson, 2002(Anderson, , 2005(Anderson, , 2006 y para transformar los espacios vividos del aburrimiento en espacios donde se siente una mayor capacidad de actuar y ser influido (Anderson, 2004b). En espacios públicos, Michael Bull ha estudiado cómo la escucha de música con audífonos es utilizada para redefinir la territorialidad del habitante urbano y generar espacios que se sienten más propios (Bull, 2000). En nuestra investigación sobre la construcción de escenarios musicales callejeros en Sidney sugerimos que la música callejera condensa sonoridades, ritmos y memorias de otros lugares y al mismo tiempo da lugar a interacciones y prácticas que constituyen a la ciudad en lo que llamamos «contagio de ritmos» -entretejidos de ritmos musicales y ritmos urbanos que constituyen también un «contagio de espacialidad» (Neve, 2008: 84). ...
... While for Bulland DeNora the portable audio player is a technology of the self-an extension of sonic agency in an increasingly chaotic environment-more contemporary theorists critique the exercise of control as a replication of neoliberal regimes of disciplinarity and commodity fetishism. 48 This is precisely what links the histories of mood music and its foundations in labor productivity science with technologies for sound conditioning. 49 The concurrent developments of these cultural technologies signify a continuity in the historical relationship between sound and work embodied in flexible notions of efficiency. ...
Using the urban portmanteau terms "coffice" and "coffitivity" as a starting point, this paper examines ideas around sound and productivity with a focus on coffee shop ambiences. The project considers café soundscapes "soundscapes of productivity" reflective of changing attention spans, work process, and stress management that invoke cultural histories of Muzak, personalized sonic spaces, and the sonic management of everyday life. A result of over six years of ethnographic observations, recordings, and decibel measurements, Soundscapes of Productivity has also been compiled into a Story Map as a kind of soundwork collage of different coffee shop ambiences in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver is used here for its local specificity, including a rapidly gentrifying urban infrastructure and a creative freelance haven with aspirations to be the Canadian Silicon Valley. The project presents an opportunity to link scientific discourses of the stimulus response model of sonic productivity historically and politically with the modern practice of productivity playlists, and bridge them together with acoustic environments seemingly replicating former factory production-environments such as the urban coffee shop.
... Notes 1. Given that listening to music constitutes another especially popular form of home-entertainment (e.g., Bull, 2000;Bull & Black, 2005;North & Hargreaves, 2008), it is perhaps surprising that olfactorily enhanced musical experiences have yet to become popular outside of the nascent space of multisensory experiential/performance (see Di Stefano et al., 2021). 2. Note that this review will not cover scent's use in the setting of the museum/art gallery (see Spence, 2020a, for a review), nor its use in the cinema (see Spence, 2020b, for a review), nor liveperformance settings either (see Spence, 2021a, for a review), given that these topics have recently been reviewed elsewhere. ...
There has long been interest in both the tonic and phasic release of scent across a wide range of entertainment settings. While the presentation of semantically congruent scent has often been used in order to enhance people’s immersion in a particular context, other generally less successful attempts have involved the pulsed presentation of a range of scents tied to specific events/scenes. Scents have even been released in the context of the casino to encourage the guests to linger for longer (and spend more), at least according to the results of one controversial study. In this narrative review, I want to take a closer look at the use of scent in a range of both physical and digital environments, highlighting the successes (as in the case of scented theme park rides) and frequent failures (as, seemingly, in the context of scent-enabled video games). While digitally inducing meaningful olfactory sensations is likely to remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future, the digital control of scent release/delivery provides some limited opportunities to enhance the multisensory experience of entertainment. That said, it remains uncertain whether the general public will necessarily perceive the benefit, and hence be willing to pay for the privilege.
... The power of listening and listeners' efforts to actively shape their listening has been most prominently examined in work on music and listening (e.g. Bull 2000). But it is there in every kind of sensory experience, and it is understood and used far better in the food and wellness industry than in cultural research. ...
Sensory matters have crossed paths with cultural scholarship for more than two centuries and have, during the past two decades, received renewed attention in ethnological fields and various publishing ventures. The working of the senses in tandem with cognition facilitates the experience of pleasure and pain, fear and
elation – but to what extent can (or should) this realm, situated between individual experience and social coding, be accessible to cultural research? The paper probes a number of examples and methodological issues in grasping experiences and sites
of interaction where sensations are expressed in a culturally shared fashion and explores which areas of research may profit particularly from an expanded ethnographic sensibility.
KEYWORDS: senses, experience, ethnography, verbal art.
... Ingold (2011) elaborates that we do not phenomenologically experience the world divided up into sections in terms of the senses, further highlighting that in the insistence on a connection between sound and space, the concept of soundscape cannot account for sounds that travel, such as sounds that are recorded and then played out of context, as is the case for CDs recorded by Welsh tourists who have visited Patagonia. Connected to this is the issue that the concept of soundscape implies a shared sound, and therefore it cannot account for private sounds as experienced through headphones (Feld 1988;Bull 2000). Another implication in the idea of 'soundscape' is that it exists independently of individuals, as opposed to the idea that people themselves create the soundscape, and with it the type of image that they seek to portray. ...
In 1865, a group of 153 Welsh settlers emigrated to Argentina, following an offer from the Argentine government of 100 square miles of land on which to live, with the hope of creating a little Wales away from Wales, free from the influence of the English. The thesis explores the historical and present day implications of this emigration through an ethnographic account of how and why Welshness is created, sustained, and performed in the Chubut Province of Patagonia, Southern Argentina. The thesis is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Gaiman and surrounding areas with a community of Welsh Patagonians who live in the Chubut Province. It argues that individual and collective subjectivity (of both the Welsh self and the broader community as Welsh) was performatively constituted in the settler colony through the dynamics of seeing and being seen, and through the dynamics of hearing and being heard. In making this argument, it moves beyond the sole focus on linguistic and visual metaphors in work on subjectivation, to consider the possibility and implications of a musical subjectivation, seeking throughout to draw out the tensions between the personal relations of belonging created by this subjectivation and the broader political power dynamics in the performance of Welshness. The argument unfolds through an ethnographic analysis of several different encounters: encounters between Indigenous Tehuelche (who were the original inhabitants of the land that was colonised) and the Welsh settlers as depicted in media, literature, academia, and through stories told in present-day Patagonia, encounters between tourists from Wales and local Welsh Patagonians in choir rehearsals in Gaiman Music School, encounters between the Welsh Patagonians and their own performances as Welsh as they watch films of 5 themselves during film-nights in Gaiman, encounters between music and community in Gaiman Music School in terms of the role of music in creating a homogenous and coherent Welsh community, encounters between the self and the ideal musical ‘I’ during acts of musical self-cultivation, and finally the heightened performance of these encounters in the annual Eisteddfod (a Welsh festival of the arts) which was held in the province.
... MC: I recognize their effectiveness in protecting the neurodiverse and auraldiverse population and any other citizen particularly sensitive to sound and noise, but my opinion is that we should focus more on action and interaction instead of attempting to 'cut it out'. Noise cancelling headphones and in general personal audio devices are very effective to create local and personal soundscapes (Bull 2000), but this multitude of sonic bubbles completely unrelated to each other can cut out social relationships and we may miss 'the unexpected, the new and the evocative (encounter)' (Lacey 2017). Last but not least, they impair your ability to hear functional sounds and vehicles approaching and thus can pose a danger to your own safety as a pedestrian (Schwebel et al. 2012, Lee et al. 2020. ...
In this paper, we offer a review of the sound art online exhibition ‘Acts of Air’ organized by the Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice group at the University of the Arts London (UAL) and some excerpts from an interview with the organizers Lisa Hall and Cathy Lane to discuss sound, health, the urban sound in lockdown and the future of our cities.
... In this context, music listening technologies are important not only for being isolated artifacts, carrying scripts and configurations (Akrich 1992; Woolgar 1990), but also for having infrastructural qualities (Star and Ruhleder, 1996;Star and Bowker 2006). Music listening tools have increasingly turned into interfaces through which people primarily interact with larger networks, platforms, and infrastructures: a situation very different from that in the age of the Walkman (Bull 2000; DeNora 2000), but also much more infrastructurally intricate than the one based on the use of the iPod (Bull 2007;Dant 2008). This shift in music listening can be addressed as one from technology-as-material-artifact to technology-as-infrastructural-interfaces: a change that has become particularly relevant in relation to today's smartphone-based music streaming listening. ...
How can sound and space be connected not only in a metaphorical sense? Over the last decades, philosophy of sound, aesthetics, and musicology have shown increasing interest in space inquiry. However, the way we interact with each other, communicate in space, and gather information about/in space is rooted in sound in a completely different way from those of musical metaphors. In this paper, I present an analysis of the role sound plays in the constitution of both space and relations of intimacy within it. Starting from the wealthy tips that E. T. Hall gives to us in order to delineate a new understanding of proxemics that includes sound experience, I argue that sound, silence, and noise are essential to determine the intimate space and the way we interact with it. Moving from a classical proxemics perspective, the analysis will focus on the intimate relation between sound, space, and body, dialoguing with phenomenology, anthropology, semiotics, and philosophy of space.
Apps for making music on smartphones and tablets are widely used by professional and amateur musicians alike. Based on a qualitative study, this article describes how making music with apps affects users’ sense of self and emotion regulation in everyday life. It demonstrates that music apps are used in “technologies of the self,” that they shape musicians’ self-constitution and allow a complex interplay between music, place, and the self. It argues that music production with apps can promote practices of self-government, but also serve as a tool of self-empowerment and critique.
The vast majority of work on language and landscape in Geography focuses on the linguistic landscape, which studies the presence or absence of certain languages or dialects on the landscape. This paper goes beyond linguistic landscape to explore language as representation of landscape imaginary. Landscape acts as a powerful symbol, and can work to strengthen territorial identities, solidifying nations as separate entities, intimately connected to the land that they inhabit. This is true of the nation of Galicia, an historic community in the northwest of Spain, where the national landscape and language have come to be inextricably linked in the Galician imagination. In conducting interviews with Galician educators about the nature of their language and its meaning to them personally, an unprovoked link emerged between the language and the landscape, painting the two as essential foundations of Galician identity. Language and landscape are seen as linked foundational symbols in a display of difference between Galicia and Spain. This paper uses themes that emerged from these interviews to elaborate how the Galician language can be seen as a representation of a landscape imaginary.
This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four sections – Histories, Techniques and Technologies, Mediation, Identities – with 16 thematic chapters. Each of these explores a musical or cultural topic as it developed over many years, and as it appeared across a diversity of musical practices. In this way, the text introduces both key musical repertoire and critical-musicological approaches to that work. It historicises music and musical thinking, opening up debate in the present rather than offering a new but closed narrative of the past. In each chapter, an overview of the topic's chronology and main issues is illustrated by two detailed case studies.
The article focuses on the political implications of field recording (FR) in relation to sound ecology, education, art, and technology. On the one hand, it discusses how FR can protect us as a social tool in a paradoxical relationship between FR as an artistic practice and social networks that motivate alienation. On the other hand, it addresses the difference between what we perceive as sonic properties used for aesthetic purposes and what neural networks compute to create their internal structures in the process of artificial intelligence. This article adopts a preliminary approach to the above-mentioned topics while it seeks to raise questions and awareness. Drawing upon such theorists as Voegelin, Steingo and Sykes, LaBelle, and Agostinho, it adopts a pragmatic perspective on everyday life and its political implications.
本⽂从听觉⽂化研究的⾓度出发探析城市声景与听觉主体之间的互动关系。通过梳理
国内学界对声⾳景观的⼏种研究路径和思考范式，提出应将⼈⽂学科的听觉主体思考融⼊
当前城市声景的讨论中。借⽤巴特的“刺点”和“意趣”概念，建构城市空间与声景、反思
性⾃我与听觉能动性之间的互动关系，在封闭私⼈化的“声⾳⽓泡”之外探寻由听觉触发
和串联的有机城市社会⽣活的可能性。
This paper considers the technologically-mediated constitution of auditory experience based on the analogy of a healthy natural soundscape as a well-balanced orchestra in which living creatures use the full range of acoustic frequencies to communicate and survive. Using the idea of (inner) horizonality proposed by Edmund Husserl, I argue that key technological inventions enabling the transmission and recording of sound made possible a new form of experience characterized by split horizonality. This new form of technologically-mediated auditory experience brought with it potential for both creative expression and manipulation. A broader historical trend driven by technology towards individualization that culminated with our present-day experience of constantly connected mobile phones deeply embedded in our everyday lives calls into question the soundness of thinking of our technologically-mediated auditory worlds in terms of the analogy of a healthy natural soundscape as a well-balanced orchestra.
With smartphones and wearable communication and information technologies (ICT) ubiquitous, mobile augmented reality systems (MARS) open up various opportunities for users to experience and interact with virtual information at physical locations. For example, MARS has been developed to provide information about destinations and attractions for tourists. Currently, prior studies mainly focused on the MARS recommendations from tourist organizations and professionals so there is a lack of design studies of MARS recommendations from users’ social networks. A “See What I See” MARS has been designed based on prior research findings on tourists’ companionship needs from their social networks and from their mobile devices. It is a user-generated “Situated Documentary” MARS for users to navigate new places based on their networks’ recommendations. A prototype was built and tested. Results show that users report the MARS is highly easy to use and useful, enhancing users’ experiences in a positive way. Users feel positive companionship from their friends and family members when they use the MARS at new places.
The matching of scents with music is both one of the most natural (or intuitive) of crossmodal correspondences and, at the same time, one of the least frequently explored combinations of senses in an entertainment and multisensory experiential design context. This narrative review highlights the various occasions over the last century or two when scents and sounds have coincided, and the various motivations behind those who have chosen to bring these senses together: This has included everything from the masking of malodour to the matching of the semantic meaning or arousal potential of the two senses, through to the longstanding and recently-reemerging interest in the crossmodal correspondences (now that they have been distinguished from the superficially similar phenomenon of synaesthesia, with which they were previously often confused). As such, there exist a number of ways in which these two senses can be incorporated into meaningful multisensory experiences that can potentially resonate with the public. Having explored the deliberate combination of scent and music (or sound) in everything from “scent-sory” marketing through to fragrant discos and olfactory storytelling, I end by summarizing some of the opportunities around translating such unusual multisensory experiences from the public to the private sphere. This will likely be via the widespread dissemination of sensory apps that promise to convert (or translate) from one sense (likely scent) to another (e.g., music), as has, for example already started to occur in the world of music selections to match the flavour of specific wines.
Increasingly privatized auditory spaces resulting from the mutual engendering of auditory cultural practices and sound technologies that separated the sense of hearing and segmented acoustic spaces have had a muting effect on our experience of Others that has intensified since the advent of mobile listening devices. In Section 1 of the article, I outline features of the social realm of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries that made modern sound technologies possible and then features of the technological realm that have shaped today’s social realm – all with an eye toward our experience of other people. Then, in Section 2, I reach for a few phenomenological tools from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Don Ihde to draw out the phenomenological vectors that have taken shape within the enmeshed sociotechnological context described in Section 1. Specifically, I show how technologically mediated auditory experience has been individualized and how the use of sound technologies on the go – whether wearing earphones or in a car – has had a muting effect on our experience of others.
In this chapter, we seek to conceptualize the shifts in mobile gaming through two key rubrics – ambient play and digital wayfaring—to coalesce the multiple forms of domestic, casual and urban play that constitute mobile gaming. This chapter begins with a contextualization through a short history followed by a discussion of pervasive games as vehicles for transforming urban environments into playspaces. We finish with a brief discussion of the Pokémon Go phenomenon as exemplary of both the possibilities and limits of contemporary mobile gaming. The chapter brings together three areas often disconnected—pervasive urban games, casual mobile games and domestic gameplay on mobile devices—to think about how mobile play has become ubiquitous and diversified.
Listening to sound individually while in close proximity of other people is increasingly enabled by a range of technologies. One still in development is sound zone technology that aims to provide personal sound without headphones or other wearable speakers. User-oriented studies in the area of personal listening primarily emerge from the fields of acoustics and sound engineering but are gaining increasing interest within HCI research. In this paper, we present a study investigating the experience of personal sound in relation to different types of situations and personal sound technologies. Our findings show strategies for adjusting personal sound and social interaction, descriptions of sound quality in relation to sound and situation types, and insights into participants’ experiences of awareness using personal sound technology. The paper contributes with a thematic characterisation of this type of technology, serving as a foundation for further studies. This furthermore initiates a discussion on personal sound technology and soundscape composition in how situation types affect which sounds to include or exclude, and when.
This dissertation investigates the interrelated dynamics of creativity, cultural politics, and cultural production in the context of an independent experimental music scene in São Paulo, Brazil. The participants in this scene hail from a variety of institutional backgrounds and incorporate creative practices that draw from a range of musical styles, from free improvisation to experimental hip hop to local practices such as capoeira and forró. Over the past decade, these musicians have created a collaborative network of artists, organizational leaders, and independent performance spaces and record labels dedicated to the production of experimentally oriented sound. Drawing from fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of five years, the dissertation proposes a framework for understanding musical experimentalism in terms of hybrid, collaborative social practice. The study argues for investigating cross-stylistic experimental musical creativity as a distinct phenomenon motivated by multiplicity, situated in opposition to established institutional supporters of experimental music, and complicated by the tensions that arise from encounters between diverse perspectives, identities, and practices. I further examine the social ramifications of this process, focusing on how participants seek to develop more egalitarian forms of discourse, performance, and community in the face of increasing stratification and authoritarianism in the contemporary Brazilian public sphere. The dissertation’s chapters follow a general narrative of cause and effect, beginning with a discussion of the role of previous cultural movements in shaping the scene’s current form, continuing through the ways in which individuals negotiate and transform these ideas within the context of creative and organizational practice, and finally turning to the ways in which the resulting practices sound back into broader urban and aesthetic contexts beyond the immediate milieu of the scene. Chapter One discusses the historical and ideological context of the São Paulo scene, focusing on the emergence of Brazilian independent experimentalism and the ways in which the DIY ethos pioneered in punk culture motivates experimental musical creativity. The second chapter addresses the ways in which the scene’s rhizomatic network dynamics foster ideal conditions for cross-stylistic collaboration and the strategies musicians employ to create the conditions for effective collaborative performance in the face of obstacles such as divergent idiomatic norms and onstage expressions of machismo. In the third chapter, I address the organizational and institutional context of collaborative creativity in the scene, focusing on how musicians have established a network of independent spaces and employed alternative media in order to respond to systemic institutional marginalization and create lasting connections between artists from different backgrounds. Chapter Four addresses the urban context of the scene’s creative and institutional dynamics, concentrating on the ways in which musicians employ public performance as a means of facilitating material engagements with urban space and sound. In Chapter Five, I investigate the ways in which members of the São Paulo scene engage with broader aesthetic structures, focusing on how musicians symbolically contest genre standards and song forms in order to create less hierarchical means of musical expression and develop more immediate responses to resurgent authoritarianism in the Brazilian political sphere.
Peaceful interaction among diverse strangers in public spaces is a much-celebrated feature of urbanity. The rise in privately owned and managed public spaces, tending to displace people, activities and exchanges that may discomfort target groups, has thus raised broad concerns. However, how such ‘new’, prestigious public spaces differ from ‘traditional’, everyday ones in terms of interaction among strangers, has rarely been carefully examined.
This dissertation examines peaceful chance interactions among strangers in two contrasting ideal types of public space. It primarily draws on extensive observation and categorization of activities and encounters in a selection of squares and adjoining spaces in central Oslo, Norway plus reference material from Argentina.
The investigation reveals that in the two main study sites, representing ‘traditional’ (Grønland) and ‘new’ (Tjuvholmen) public space, strangers interact on a regularized, recurrent versus a more infrequent, episodic basis, reflecting the presence or absence of prompting circumstances. A close reading of the international literature indicates that these findings have a broader, more general significance.
Herein, the study points to an important shift in urban governance and planning. In this shift, a conventional notion of attractiveness in the physical and social environment takes centre stage in prestigious urban developments at the expense of the disordered exchanges of everyday life.
While many of our colleagues are avidly baking and feeding their newly acquired sourdough starters while sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are conducting ethnographic work with individuals who have embraced the stylistics and aesthetics of improvisation in acts of caring for, listening to, baking with, and recording their sourdough starters, as well as performing alongside their bread-kin. Imagine, in some instances, the multispecies improvisational style of David Rothenberg’s co-performance with birds, whales, and insects (Rothenberg 2017; 2016; 2002; Ryan 2020), but with wild yeast and freshly baked bread. In this article we ask: What is it about the conditions of sheltering in place, quarantine, and domestic isolation that fosters an experimental space for reconfiguring multispecies improvisation and performance to include our foodways? Why has baking, specifically bread (and sourdough), rather than other forms of domestic activity and craft fostered this specific sonic response during these pandemic times? How are participants sharing, scrolling through, and listening to these domestic performances across social media? What does the sonic register of these multimodal texts communicate to other socially distancing social media users? Through ethnographic fieldwork of performing with, listening to, musicalizing, and caring for sourdough starters, their “screaming yeast” (Roosth 2009), and the baked result, this article places improvisation studies, domestic practices, multispecies performance, gastromusicology, and pandemic spatial conditions in dialogue to address these questions.
List of Illustrations. Acknowledgements. Introduction/Itinerary/Overture. Part I: Discovering Thirdspace: . 1. The Extraordinary Voyages of Henri Lefebvre. 2. The Trialectics of Spatiality. 3. Exploring the Spaces that Difference Makes: Notes on the Margins. 4. Increasing the Openness of Thirdspace. 5. Heterotopologies: Foucault and the Geohistory of Otherness. 6. Re--Presenting the Spatial Critique of Historicism. Part II: Inside and Outside Los Angeles: . 7. Remembrances: A Heterotopology of the Citadel--LA. 8. Inside Exopolis: Everyday Life in the Postmodern World. 9. The Stimulus of a Little Confusion: A Contemporary Comparison of Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Select Bibliography. Name Index. Subject Index.