analysing everyday sound environments: the space, time and corporality of musical listening

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published online 19 May 2014Cultural SociologyRaphaël Nowak and Andy Bennett

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Analysing Everyday Sound Environments: The Space, Time and Corporality of Musical Listening

Raphaël NowakGriffith Centre for Cultural Research, Australia

Andy BennettGriffith University, Australia

AbstractThis article develops the notion of ‘sound environment’ as a new way of theorizing the relationship between music, audiences and everyday life. The article draws on findings from an empirical case study conducted with young people between the ages of 21 and 32. In focusing on this age range, we consider ‘mundane’ music consumption practices in contrast to the more ‘spectacular’ forms of youth cultural music consumption often documented in academic work. In an age characterized by the increasing omnipresence of music, young people hear or listen to music in various configurations, for example, by mobilizing a particular music technology and content or hearing music while shopping in a department store, visiting a friend at home, or travelling in an elevator. Drawing on the concept of the ‘sound environment’, this article looks at variables of space, time and body to explain the contextualization of music in everyday life.

Keywordsbody, music, listening, sound environment, space, time, consumption, sociology, popular music studies, youth

Introduction

Since the publication of DeNora’s (2000) Music in Everyday Life, there has been increas-ing emphasis in sociological studies of music on examining the mundane, ordinary spaces and places of music consumption. This approach has helped broaden the scope of

Corresponding author:Raphaël Nowak, Griffith University, Kessel Road, Nathan, Queensland, 4111, Australia. Email: [email protected]

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2 Cultural Sociology

music sociology, away from aspects of production, dissemination and performance. At the same time, it has also demonstrated the need for an understanding of music audiences that extends beyond the remit of subcultures, scenes, neo-tribes and other ‘spectacular’ framings of music consumption. However, as Hesmondhalgh (2002) and others have noted, the concept of everyday life remains poorly theorized in music sociology, often being couched in broadly generalistic terms as a catch-all for often vague articulations of musical significance in mundane contexts and spaces.

The central purpose of our article is to contribute to this aspect of contemporary music sociology by bringing a new theoretical dimension to the understanding of music and its significance in everyday life. More specifically, we are concerned with examining how aspects of musical taste, social space and choice of playback technologies combine and cohere to produce specific individual experiences of music in everyday contexts. We explore this through the application of a term that we refer to as the ‘sound environment’, which we adopt and modify from the work of Martin (1995). As we will presently expli-cate, the sound environment refers to the particular assemblage of variables – space, time, body and choice of technology – necessary for the diffusion and consumption of music in everyday life. The article draws on empirical data generated through interviews conducted with 24 young people between the ages of 21 and 32 in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, both major urban conurbations in southeast Queensland, Australia, between 2010 and 2011.

Background: Youth and Music

As noted above, during its initial development the sociology of music was largely focused around aspects of production, dissemination and performance (see, for example, Frith, 1983). The parallel development of research on spectacular youth subcultures came pre-dominantly from the field of cultural studies and specifically from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (see, for example, Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige, 1979). Significantly, much of the subcultural scholarship was concerned far less with music than with aspects of youth style (Laing, 1985). Nevertheless, this work became a fundamental steer on the way in which youth audiences for popular music were studied and interpreted for a number of years beyond the publication of the CCCS’s key works on subcultural theory. The impact of the CCCS subcultural theory’s legacy on youth and music research can be understood in two principle ways. First, it created a binary between what came to be known as ‘subcultural’ and ‘ordinary’ (that is, non-subculturally affiliated) youth (Clarke, 1990 [1981]; Williams, 2001). Second, on the occasion where the relationship between youth and music was a focus of sociological enquiry, the subcultural legacy created a precedent for understanding this relationship in terms of class background. This is exemplified in Murdock and McCron’s observation regarding connections between youth taste in music and educational achievement in the context of the British comprehensive school system of the early 1970s:

The basic technological and stylistic division between ‘progressive’ rock and mainstream pop largely corresponded to a social division within the youth audience, between those who had left school at the minimum age and those who stayed on to take up a place in the rapidly expanding



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higher education sector, a division which in turn largely reflected the class differentials in educational opportunity. (1976: 23)

Murdock and McCron’s interpretation of youth and music is characteristic of a broader trend at this time whereby the music, style and other aspects of popular cultural taste were effectively regarded as a vehicle for exploring underlying structural features of identity and its perceived tie to the socio-economic relations of capitalism. This approach was taken to a higher level of theoretical sophistication by Willis (1978) in his study Profane Culture, which examined and compared the stylistic and musical tastes of a motorcycle gang and a group of hippies.1 In the first part of the book, Willis presents extended interview data in which the bikers and hippies articulate their respective prefer-ences: motorcycles and rock ‘n’ roll ’45s in the case of the bikers; hallucinogenic drugs and progressive rock albums in the case of the hippies. According to Willis, although presenting as spontaneous forms of stylistic appropriation in keeping with the trends of the time (the early 1970s), each of these stylistic preferences could be linked back to class background, educational achievement and occupational status. Willis develops this argument using the concept of ‘homology’, which he describes as ‘the continuous play between the group and a particular item which produces specific styles, meanings, con-tents and forms of consciousness’ (1978: 191). For Willis, the stylistic responses mani-fested by the bikers and hippies reflected the structural experiences of the social actors involved. Thus, the bikers’ love of rock ‘n’ roll music corresponded with their male working-class sensibilities of toughness and male bonding, while the hippies’ preference for progressive rock resonated with their more educated, middle-class background and interest in abstract and surrealist concepts.

From the early 1980s onwards, this kind of approach to interpreting the social mean-ing of musical taste and associated stylistic preferences came under increasing scrutiny. For example, Harris (1992) argues that a key problem with homology was that it stripped the actor of any capacity for reflexive agency. Likewise, Bennett contends that Willis:

… is using music primarily as a means of uncovering the social processes that he perceives as underpinning the formation of musical taste – the former then being used to explain away the latter … Far from being reflexive and creative agents, choosing music because of the way in which its rhythm, tempo, melody, sound, lyrical content, production, packaging, and so on, appeals to them as individuals, the bikers and hippies are depicted … as acting unconsciously and in accordance with structurally embedded antecedents which basically ‘tell’ them ‘how’ to react to particular aural and visual stimuli. (2008: 422–3)

Elsewhere, subcultural theory has been critiqued for sidelining empirical research altogether in favour of theoretical abstraction (Clarke, 1990 [1981]) and for applying (in the case of Hebdige, 1979) tenets of art theory in which bodies became merely canvasses for sartorial displays of style (Cohen, 1987). Such criticisms eventually gave rise to what has become known as a post-subcultural turn in the study of youth culture, itself a prod-uct of a broader cultural turn in social and cultural theory. The latter bespeaks a new emphasis on culture not as merely the byproduct of socio-economic factors, but an entity in itself capable of framing individual and collective identities and shaping the terrains




of everyday life (see Chaney, 1994). A new generation of youth sociologists, among them Bennett (2000), Muggleton (2000) and Miles (2000), applied ethnographic research in an effort to reposition young people as reflexive agents, their musical and stylistic preferences being framed not purely around class, education and occupation, but by forms of aesthetic practices derived through the symbolic appropriation and re-inscription of objects, images and texts in ways that cut across class, ethnicity and gender in what Chaney (1996) has termed ‘lifestyle sites and strategies’.

While post-subcultural theory arguably did much to free the academic study of youth culture from its central pre-occupation with class, by the same token it did little to shift the focus away from examples of ‘spectacular’ youth, a fact illustrated by the genres of music that post-subcultural theorists chose to concentrate on in their work, for example, dance, punk and rock. Hence, in one critical way post-subcultural theory replicated a fundamental drawback associated with subcultural theory; that is, an almost exclusive emphasis on music’s significance for youth audiences at risk or on the margins and/or associated with niche forms of ‘underground’ culture and its associated practices.

However, the cultural turn also provided the intellectual stimulus for other develop-ments in sociology, including a broader appreciation of more mundane forms of cultural engagement and participation. This development in sociological theory and empirical research gave rise to new ways of understanding the importance of cultural forms. This also extended to music, with a key text in this respect being DeNora’s (2000) Music in Everyday Life. A pertinent point of departure in DeNora’s work is her emphasis on the individual as a point for developing a sociological framework for understanding musical affect. Framing music as what she refers to as ‘a technology of self’, DeNora looks at how ‘music is appropriated by individuals as a resource for the ongoing constitution of themselves and their social psychological, physiological and emotional states’ (2000: 47). While a significant step forward, both in terms of recasting musical affect as an individual experience and in beginning to mine the mundane everyday spaces in which musical encounters generally take place, music is itself presented as an inherently rigid entity in DeNora’s work. In essence, there is little attempt to map the more nuanced effects of music’s everyday presence as it is experienced through the prism of other expe-riences and encounters that feature in everyday life. In this sense, there are important insights to be gleaned from Small’s (1998) concept of ‘musicking’. Through this con-cept, Small suggests a fundamental shift in thinking about music, moving away from the conventional interpretation of music as a relatively static cultural ‘object’, to recast it as a ‘process’ as individuals interact with, and are acted upon by, music in myriad ways during the course of their everyday lives.

Hennion (2003, 2007) draws on a similar principle when looking at everyday interac-tions between music and ‘amateurs’. In an age when everybody can (supposedly) access music in ways that suit their personal aesthetics and choice of lifestyle, Hennion argues that music listeners are ‘amateurs’ (or ‘music lovers’), since their practices affirm an engagement with music. However, Hennion constructs musical experience as an indi-vidual journey that is made uncertain due to it being defined by a number of mediations both planned and contingent. As such, argues Hennion, listening to music is all about ‘letting [it] happen and making [it] happen’ (2007: 109). Despite his very individualistic account, Hennion rejects any accusation of relativism. Instead, he argues that his account



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of music ‘does not lead to relativism, but to new experiences, to all of those revisions, conversions and discoveries that mark the careers of amateurs’ (2007: 111, emphasis in the original). The approaches developed by Hennion and DeNora are often considered similar. However, even if both present a more individualistic approach to music recep-tion than had previously been the case in sociology, Hennion favours a focus on indi-vidual trajectories while DeNora’s starting point is music’s possibilities and affordances in relation to actions.

Both DeNora and Hennion are critiqued by Born (2005, 2011), who argues that music needs to be seen as a form of social mediation. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998), Born conceptualizes a theory of ‘music’s social and temporal media-tion and its nature as a distributed object’ (2005: 8). She seeks the ontology of music beyond its linguistic characteristics: ‘if the linguistic mediation of music is pervasive, it cannot be reduced simply to language. Music has no material essence but a plural and distributed materiality’ (2011: 377). Thus, according to Born, mediations are as impor-tant in understanding the experience of music as sound itself. She concludes: ‘music’s mediations have taken a number of forms, cohering into what we might term assem-blages, which themselves endure and take particular historical shapes’ (2005: 8). However, contrary to Hennion, Born develops a theory of mediations that includes notions of collective meanings attached to music. By definition, Born’s mediations are historical. It is through this collective account of music that it is possible to understand the formation of an ‘aggregation of the affected’ (Born, 2011: 384). The work of Born is useful in understanding the collective interest of individuals in particular types of music, while shifting the focus from the notion of group belonging towards one of musical affect. Problematically, however, Born’s work remains largely at the level of theoretical speculation and lacks an enunciation of principles to engage in empirical research on music’s everyday qualities and significance. Thus, in order to advance the consideration of music as social mediation, it is necessary to develop an empirical perspective for this approach.

Music and the Sound EnvironmentThe ‘everyday’ is a taken-for-granted category … hardly ever discussed or defined, even in books which carry the term in their title. ‘Everyday’ in such sociology comes to mean something like ‘ordinary human experience’, and it is sometimes crudely opposed to systemic, structural processes, which are implicitly understood as unknowable, unanalyzable, unthinkable. (Hesmondhalgh, 2002: 120)

In the face of such complexities [i.e. of musical mediations], it is unhelpful to divide the study of music itself from the study of its social, technological and temporal form. (Born, 2005: 33)

In this section, we draw on the ‘sound environment’ to account for everyday interactions with music. We argue that this theoretical framework provides a more grounded approach for understanding what happens between audiences and music within everyday life, and for explaining the contemporary ubiquity of music (see Kassabian, 2002, 2013). We first turn to the notion of the ‘sound environment’ as addressed by Martin (1995) in his com-pelling book Sounds and Society. Martin does not extensively develop the notion of




sound environment as a theoretical framework, but uses it in relation to the historical evolution of music technologies. He writes: ‘the mass availability of radios and disc or tape players has given people unprecedented control over their own sound-environment’ (1995: 21, emphasis in the original). To Martin, the sound environment is intrinsically connected with the notion of control. Through the increasing number of music technolo-gies, individuals have the choice to be accompanied by music the way they desire to be. Martin points towards how music invades everyday life, but in accordance with individu-als’ definition of their sound environment.

In other studies about sound – and particularly under the banner of Sound and Technology Studies (S&TS) – attention has been drawn to the notion of the ‘sonic envi-ronment’. Pinch and Bijsterveld argue that the notion ‘includes not only the “natural” environment of sounds, such as waves breaking on a beach, but also compositions and sound sculptures which fill spaces such as gardens with sounds that invite people to lis-ten’ (2004: 642). To Pinch and Bijsterveld, music is never heard alone, but is encom-passed within an environment of noise and sounds. They observe:

New audio and recording technologies, however, have enabled people to reestablish some control over their direct sonic environment (though not necessarily over the music made) and thereby other aspects of daily life, in a crowded, urban world dominated by technologies usually not within the control of the ordinary citizen. (2004: 644)

The mediated aspect of music listening – present in Born’s (2005, 2011), DeNora’s (2000) and Hennion’s (Hennion et al., 2000; Hennion, 2003, 2007) analyses – is here associated with the notion of control over music technologies. In other words, a greater focus on the materiality of musical interactions is provided with the concept of sound environment. Indeed, considering that the historical evolution of music technologies points towards a greater control by individuals over their musical interactions (see Martin, 1995; Nowak, 2013), the anchorage of different technologies into specific spaces raises the question as to how individuals listen to music, and on what basis they choose to do so.

The theoretical contributions of both Martin (1995) and Pinch and Bijsterveld (2004) are implicitly present in a number of analyses of music listening practices. For example, a similar idea to that encompassed by the concepts of sound environment and sonic envi-ronment is latent in the accounts of Kassabian (2002, 2013) and García Quiñones, Kassabian and Boschi (2013) on the concept of ‘ubiquitous music’. Kassabian defines ‘ubiquitous music’ as follows:

Those of us living in industrialized settings (at least) have developed, from the omnipresence of music in our daily lives, a mode of listening dissociated from specific generic characteristics of the music. In this mode, we listen ‘along-side’ or simultaneously with other activities. It is one vigorous example of the non-linearity of contemporary life. (2002: 137)

The omnipresence of music in everyday life is a phenomenon of modern societies. García Quiñones, Kassabian and Boschi (2013) argue that much of the music individuals hear in their everyday lives is not chosen. Kassabian (2002) even talks about the ‘source-lessness’ of ubiquitous music. As such, it contradicts Martin’s idea that individuals have a greater control over their sound environment. Indeed, Kassabian raises an important



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question in her work when she asks: ‘what do we know about most of the music we hear?’ (Kassabian, 2002: 136). This question is in line with two important tenets of the sound environment that need to be considered: first, music is mediated by all sorts of variables that define the space of listening, and also by individuals’ own subjectivity, which includes their attention, cognitive capacities and musical knowledge. The second tenet relates to the multiplicity of listening modes according to everyday sound environments.

Stockfelt (1997) analyses different modes of listening and what he calls ‘adequate music’. Stockfelt bases his approach on music genres in order to look at modes of listen-ing and music environments. He writes: ‘Each style of music … is shaped in close rela-tion to a few environments. In each genre, a few environments, a few situations of listening, make up the constitutive elements in this genre’ (Stockfelt, 1997: 90). Stockfelt provides the example of the genre ‘opera’ that is not only defined by a musical style but also by a place (the opera house) and other elements (such as the clothes typically worn to an opera event by the audience). The association of these elements makes music ade-quate. It follows, therefore, that there can be music that is not adequate to particular environments. Thus the adequateness of music within an environment is not necessarily a given. Rather, it is a process that includes the identification of actual elements of per-ceptions within an environment. For Stockfelt (1997), music is therefore adequate if it is listened to within the right environment. However, Martin differs in his interpretation of sound environment, by emphasizing the individual’s identification with elements they perceive in their environments:

We do not just ‘respond’ to stimuli. Rather, we actively identify significant objects in our environment, interpret them on the basis of our prior knowledge, and decide on an appropriate course of action. (1995: 56)

Martin reintroduces the body in the relationship between music and the environment. As such, his account is more grounded in individuals’ subjectivities and narratives than Stockfelt’s (1997) take on modes of listening as being imposed upon individuals.

The concept of the sound environment positions music as diffused within particular contexts. These contexts are shaped by variables of time and space, and by individuals’ corporality while listening to music. Thus the sound environment can be referred to as an assemblage of these three variables. It is a form of everyday practice through which music is experienced and acquires its meaning on both individual and collective levels. It is through its place within the construction of the sound environment that music achieves status as an object adequate to the task of providing, in conjunction with the other elements of the sound environment, a desired stimulus for the individual. In the following section of the article we explore this point further with reference to empirical data collected during a 12-month study of young people’s music listening practices in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, in Southeast Queensland, Australia.

Music and the Sound Environment: A Case Study

The empirical data for this research were collected over a 12-month period between 2010 and 2011. Respondents were generated for the research using a snowball sampling




method. In all, 24 young people between the ages of 21 and 32 took part in the research. Working on the assumption that this generation of listeners has been in contact with vari-ous types of music technologies, and particularly with the latest digital technologies, interviewees were selected on the basis of their age. The intention was to gather dis-courses about music from ‘ordinary music listeners’, that is to say, people who identify as music fans but not specifically as members of particular scenes or subcutures (Williams, 2001). The purpose of the empirical study was to discover the value that music holds in ‘ordinary’ listeners’ everyday lives. Williams argues that ‘most studies of young people focus on visible and identifiable instances of fandom or music-cultural activity, and this leads to an imbalance in accounts of young people’s engagement with music’ (2001: 226, emphasis in the original).

The initial assumption was that, first, the digital age of music technologies has had an impact on the way young people consume music and, second, that as a consequence music has played an increasing role in individuals’ everyday lives. In order to effectively exam-ine this assumption, a semi-structured interview approach was employed with respond-ents being asked to answer a range of open-ended questions seeking information on topics such as: the meaning of music in their everyday life; the different music listening patterns they develop in relation to everyday activities; and the music technologies they mobilize to access, obtain and listen to music. Semi-structured interviews were used in the study based on their proven effectiveness in similar studies – for example, Bull’s (2007) study of iPod users – and because this approach enabled music listeners to offer more well developed, personal accounts about their everyday interactions with music. The ‘method-ology of friendship’ (see Taylor, 2011) was deployed in order to gather very detailed and personal discourses about how music is diffused within everyday activities. Thus, inter-viewees could relate their repertoire of music preferences to how they actually mobilize their favourite artists in accompaniment of their everyday activities. Moreover, they were also given the opportunity to talk about their aesthetic relationship to different music tech-nologies and the control this gives them over their sound environments. In essence, it was knowledge regarding the mundane intersection between individuals, music, technologies and their everyday lives that was sought through the interviews. The interviews were recorded, with the respondents’ prior consent, on a digital voice recorder and later tran-scribed. In order to protect the identities of the respondents, pseudonyms have been used throughout this article. University ethics clearance was approved for the research before the fieldwork commenced. In what follows, we draw on these empirical data in order to provide a theoretical conceptualization of the notion of a ‘sound environment’.

The System of Interactions of Sound Environments

As outlined earlier, we draw on the concept of ‘sound environment’ as a theoretical frame-work for use in the study and explanation of the different forms that music takes in listen-ers’ everyday lives. As Figure 1 illustrates, our conceptual model of the ‘sound environment’ has three composite parts – body, space and time – encapsulated by an overarching medium, music. Our deployment of the sound environment model rests on the premise that musical meaning derives from a combination of bodily comportment as influenced by spatial and temporal factors. These three factors, we argue, are inextricably



Nowak and Bennett 9

linked and, through such linking, provide highly specific and contingent responses to musical texts. We do not suggest that the sound environment in any way regulates musical affect into a codifiable system of listening practices. On the contrary, as we endeavour to illustrate below, there exist various ways in which listeners mobilize, or are reacted upon by, music. The uncertainty of responses to music is defined by the correlation between the variables of time, space and body at the moment when music is heard.

What is certain, however, is that within sound environments, music listening occurs in the interactions between listeners, the spatial and temporal environments in which they exist, and with different levels of attention, levels of expertise, emotional responses and everyday activities; technologies that diffuse music; and lastly, music content whether chosen by, or imposed on, listeners, and its textual characteristics. Figure 1 shows how this system of interactions plays out and is contextualized within particular and successive everyday activities. For example, individuals can listen to music whilst in shopping malls and buying their groceries, and then listen to a radio station, album or playlist of their choice whilst leaving the shopping centre, activities that produce differ-ent modes of bodily comportment which themselves can influence the way that music is heard, responded to and understood. These two modes of listening practices are also dif-ferentiated by the particular environments that mediate the sound of music – the shop-ping mall and the car. The mundane diffusion of music in everyday life is correlated to everyday activities, which, in return, contribute to the meaning making of the sound of music, through its association with these very activities.

In proposing the concept of the ‘sound environment’, we aim to account for all the different musics that listeners hear in the course of their everyday lives, in correlation with how these musics are diffused and mediated by space, time and body. These three variables are intertwined to explain how listeners perceive and pay attention to music. The ‘sound environment’ draws on the social mediations of music, through time and space, as well as on the individual interpretation of music.

Space

Sound environments define space as much as space defines sound environments. The spaces of listeners’ everyday lives relate to their everyday activities and therefore

Figure 1. Diagram of the system of interactions that define a sound environment.




different moments in their everyday social environments. If music is becoming more omnipresent in everyday life, it is due to its presence in more of those spaces associated with everyday life. Thus, Stockfelt observes:

Each hearing person who listens to the radio, watches TV, goes to the movies, goes dancing, eats in restaurants, goes to supermarkets, participates in parties, has built up, has been forced (in order to be able to handle her or his perceptions of sound) – to build up an appreciable competence in translating and using the music impressions that stream in from loudspeakers in almost every living space. (1997: 89, emphasis in original)

As Stockfelt notes, music is there, and individuals do not necessarily choose to be sur-rounded by music.

Space mediates what music is played, how music is chosen in a space and for what purpose, how it is diffused within the space and therefore heard, and the visual environ-ment where music is played and listened to. Listening to the same music at home through earphones or at a mall through loudspeakers consists of two different sound environ-ments. Writing about music in malls, Jonathan Sterne argues:

[In a mall], music becomes a form of architecture. Rather than simply filling up an empty space, the music becomes part of the consistency of that space. The sounds become a presence, and as that presence, it becomes an essential part of that building’s infrastructure. (1997: 23)

Music is utilized to give a definition to spaces. It has a particular function that denotes particular connotations about the space. Listeners have to cope with this presence. In the following extract, interviewee Robert talks about music at his workplace – a retail store:

Interviewer: How do you get to know new albums and artists that then you would include in your musical taste?

Robert: It’s bizarre, you know … sometimes, it’s from the radio, because I’m always listening to it at work, that’s where I find the most things … And that’s probably why I’m listening to a lot more commercial radio kind of stuff, because it’s always in my face, and I truly believe that sometimes, if a song has a decent melody and whatever, if it’s played enough then people would buy it. But every now and then, a friend suggests something to me, but apart from that I’m just being on the internet. I get on iTunes and have a look, see what the new releases are, what’s in the top 10, I just make a preview of that.3

(Robert, 28, retail assistant)

The sound environment of the retail store where Robert works is defined by the same radio station on an everyday basis, as is often the case with retail stores (see DeNora, 2000). Robert creates an association between ‘pop’ music and his workplace, because it is within this particular sound environment that he comes to listen to this type of music. As such, pop music is interpreted in close relation to the space of the workplace and its topological characteristics. Although this is not the type of music that Robert is



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essentially fond of, he has turned this repeated proximity to such a sound environment to his advantage by utilizing it as a way of broadening his scope of music preferences.

Space embeds music within different mediations that contribute to its affective response by listeners, and to the creation of its meaning. It locates the ‘distributed mate-riality’ (Born, 2011) of music. In other words, it creates a synchronicity between the sound of music and its environments. Such interaction can make music adequate to an environment, depending on the listener’s response to it.

Interviewer: Do you have other sources to discover new music?Rodney: At the shops, there’s usually music there: JB Hi-Fi, Sanity, Big W and

Target as well … I sometimes ask what’s playing on the radio …

(Rodney, 25, finance clerk)

The spatial variable of sound environments defines the type of music that is heard and how it is heard. In the case of Rodney’s visits to retail stores, radio stations wrap him in particular sound environments. Eventually his attention will be raised by a favourable response to a certain song within this space. Music is ubiquitous, but contrary to what Kassabian (2002) affirms, it is not necessarily sourceless. In Rodney’s example, the source is clearly identified by the listener, to the point where he can undertake further research to extend the interaction he has with those particular tracks that pique his inter-est in this particular manifestation of the sound environment.

Space implies that music is either imposed upon listeners – such as in retail stores or malls – or used to block unwanted sound, for instance, by using a mobile device (iPod) and earphones. This dichotomy raises the question of collective forms of listening (music being imposed) and personal forms of listening (music being chosen). For example, Simun (2009) goes so far as to describe private mobile listening practices as de-socializing listeners. In fact, the technological aspect of listening practices comes right into play both to shed light on this ‘imposed’ versus ‘chosen’ dichotomy, and to move beyond it. Music at malls can easily be avoided by ‘superimposing’ personally selected music over it using a mobile playback device and earphones. Yet, the choice over music within a sound environment does not overrule all variables of the sound environment. The per-ception of the space can change, but the space and its characteristics remain. The pres-ence of other elements remains unchanged.

The variable of music within sound environments is itself a constant negotiation. Music at malls may only feel imposed upon listeners when it is interpreted as invasive. Similarly, choosing music within a sound environment (such as a mall) does not erase the ‘invasive-ness’ of other variables that compose the space. Rather, it offers listeners the ability to change their perception over these variables. In the following extract, Sascha provides a list of his everyday listening practices, in relation with the space where they occur:

I listen to music in the bathroom, I listen to it in my bedroom, generally through my Mac Book, also in the car, the public transport, I like having earphones in because people are so irritating. When I’m studying because I get distracted easily, so anything will have to shut me down into that, that’s why I listen to things like the soundtrack of Battlestar Galactica, because there’s no




words in it to distract me. I listen to music at work, generally the radio … When I’m doing something that appeals to my attention or when I’m travelling.

(Sascha, 23, Bachelor degree student)

Clearly Sascha surrounds himself with music he wants to listen to. The profusion of music technologies at his disposal enables him to define his sound environments in the various spaces of his everyday life. He provides two reasons for wishing to control the music in his sound environments: first, that ‘people are so irritating’ and second, that he gets distracted too easily. Music therefore wraps him into a ‘cocoon of sound’ (Bull, 2007). When travelling on public transport, Sascha limits the ‘annoyance’ of other peo-ple by plugging in his earphones. He then no longer hears the conversations of other people. But this control over his sound environment – by choosing the music he listens to – is also relativized by the social aspect of the space, which remains no matter what technological artefact is mobilized to limit it.

The addition of the increasing omnipresence of music in everyday life and the availability of technologies that bring music into different spaces is what makes music take a ‘spatial turn’ (see Thrift, 2006). The profusion of sound environments is made clear by the presence of music through various spaces. Listeners’ responses to music embed it within its environments of diffusion and listening. The space of sound environments is not the only variable that alters the perception of music and its meanings. Time also accounts for the diffusion of music within everyday life and its environments.

Time

The variable of time mediates listeners’ engagement with sound environments. Music is a medium that accompanies their different everyday practices and is mobilized in rela-tion to particular expectations and moods. While Hesmondhalgh (2002) critiques the overuse of ‘everyday life’ without any proper definition, and as implying ‘ordinary prac-tices’ over ‘systemic, structural processes’, the variable of time accurately accounts for the mediation of both variables – that is, individuals’ subjectivity and structural pro-cesses. In the following extract, Thom talks about interactions with music and ‘space’ and then particularly in relation to everyday activities (‘time’):

Interviewer: Concretely in your daily life, how and when do you listen to music?Thom: Well on the commute, it’s pretty important; it’s always there. I listen to

music when I write, often. I listen to my own music [Thom is a musi-cian], playing when I work on it obviously, so it’s there. I also try to sit down and listen to music as an activity, like sit down and just listen to it, especially when I’m excited, it’s a new record, etc. I also love listen-ing to music when I’m reading magazines or newspapers: the idea of just sitting down, or laying down in my bed, putting on a record and reading a magazine, the music is pretty much as good as it gets for me.

(Thom, 32, Postgraduate student)




Thom listens to music within particular practices – writing, working on his own music, sitting down and focusing on music, reading. These everyday practices greatly depend on what time of the day it is. For example, Thom commutes to his university according to when he wants to, or needs to, be there. The time of the day impacts upon his sound envi-ronment in that it will accordingly change the composition of the space (for example, the number of other people who commute alongside Thom). But Thom also lists many listen-ing practices that occur in the environment of his home. Music helps him to write and read. But he can also listen to it and simply focus on it. His cognitive process during these various listening practices is altered by his everyday activities that accompany his listen-ing practices and define his sound environments. His response to music is subsequently modified. Indeed, music can improve his concentration while reading, help with his pro-ductivity when writing, or simply be enjoyed for its sonority when focusing on it.

Time changes the perception of music in sound environments because it induces eve-ryday practices that both accompany music listening and alter listeners’ mood and expec-tation of music. For example, interviewee Nina differentiates the music content she mobilizes to define her sound environment according to different moments of the day:

Interviewer: Can you tell me how you listen to music on a daily basis?Nina: Yeah, it actually alternates. Sometimes in the morning, I’ll wake up

and I’ll put some music on that’s really charming, it’s just like a voice of a woman chanting, and there’s not many sounds or instruments, it’s just very calming. Sometimes I wake up and I put that on. When I drive, I listen to music as well. At home I don’t listen to much music, I do but not as much as when I’m driving.

(Nina, 23, Bachelor degree student)

Time is a variable that Nina composes with to define her sound environment. Her choices of music to define her sound environment then come into relation with her mood, her biological clock and how she thinks music will be in phase with her body. Sound environments differ according to time because they are intertwined within specific eve-ryday activities that individuals engage in. It results in the association and fragmentation of music to different moments of everyday life. The different activities of everyday life also induce different bodily patterns, which is the subject of the next section.

Body

DeNora (2000) notes that music is a device used in association with the body. Within sound environments – which are primarily defined by the variables of space and time – listeners develop bodily postures and gestures in reaction to both the sound that comes to their ears and to the other variables of the sound environment. Dancing, for instance, is a set of bodily gestures that is certainly encouraged within particular spaces and times (for example, in a dance club on a Saturday night) and discouraged in others.

We here refer to the body as a system that intertwines mind, senses and corporal movements. The body inscribes music in the moment; it is the receptacle of all that




individuals perceive and sense in relation to music. Writing about seizing the musical moment, Hennion, Maisonneuve and Gomart maintain: ‘The difficulty is to understand that music isn’t an “object” but a mediation; it does something [to listeners] and makes [them] do something, in a particular situation and in relation to the body, through media and devices, thanks to other actions and other mediations’ (2000: 247).2 In the following extract, Robert mentions how he chooses music technologies according to how he can bodily react to music:

Interviewer: So you use your iPhone, your computer, car stereo …Robert: Yeah my iPhone as well, because I’m always on iTunes.Interviewer: So how do you choose between your computer and your iPhone? For

example if you’re home, how does it happen?Robert: It depends where I am in the house and what I’m doing, like some days

I just can’t be bothered to roll over and open my laptop, because if I’m lying in bed, that’s quite uncomfortable to get the pillow right and the right position, whereas the iPhone, I can just lay down …

(Robert, 28, retail assistant)

The profusion of music technologies at listeners’ disposal does not only trigger sound environments in relation to various everyday spaces but also enacts listening practices within bodily gestures. Robert then counts on the convenience of his iPhone (small and light) in order to listen to music with earphones in a way that requires minimal bodily gestures. He can lie down, move and roll over without knocking the device, for example. To Hennion (2003, 2007), the bodily gestures that listeners adopt aim to improve the pleasure they feel in their interaction with music. If Robert can adopt a posture that suits him thanks to technological artefacts and when listening to music, then he becomes more emotionally receptive to music.

These gestures and postures mutually define, and are defined by, the other variables that compose the sound environment. They then partake in the shaping of musical mean-ings. The example of listening to music while exercising illustrates how bodily gestures and music can be intertwined:

Mike: I like to listen to music when I work out.Interviewer: And what do you listen to when you work out?Mike: I have a few workout playlists with mostly techno and trance music. I

find that it helps me to get into it, to push my body further.Interviewer: How come?Mike: The rhythm of the music suits the activity pretty well, and when you

forget about anything else, you can just hear the music and do the movements that the workout requires.

(Mike, 27, chef)

Lucy: At the gym I try to listen to something very upbeat or fast that I can run along to.

Interviewer: Does it help you?




Lucy: It does, it really does, my gym has TVs everywhere and if you watch them, you tend to slow down. But if I have my iPod and a fast beat going, I can get more into it.

(Lucy, 23, bachelor degree student)

Mike’s and Lucy’s respective interpretations of the music that they use to compose their sound environments when exercising illustrates how music provides them with support to focus on their physical activities. In this instance, music allows the listeners to develop a corporeal relationship to it. Body is the mediation through which music is made sense of, reacted to and eventually becomes adequate for the context in which it is being used. Listeners interpret music through their bodies, and their subjective and contextualized accounts of music within sound environments can be explained by their moods, gestures or postures. The system of interactions that characterizes any sound environment is ulti-mately correlated by the variable of the body, in that music is heard, perceived and sensed through listeners’ bodies.

Conclusion

In this article, we have conceptualized the notion of the ‘sound environment’ as a new theoretical and empirical model for understanding the everyday omnipresence and importance of music. In emphasizing how everyday sound environments are character-ized by a system of interactions that includes space, time and body in relation to music, we aim to effectively account for the contextualized, differentiated, uncertain, and yet ultimately ‘social’ meaning of music. The sound environment places the perception of various social elements into the core of the diffusion of music within everyday life.

The concept is therefore a new way forward for understanding the everyday importance of music. In the course of this article we have outlined a series of ground rules for an analysis of sound environments as these inform listeners’ everyday lives. As such, there are clear limits to the scope of this article, particularly in relation to issues such as gender, race, eth-nicity or the political dimensions of music in everyday life, which also clearly need to be explored in relation to the concept of the ‘sound environment’. Indeed, the concept offers new avenues for the exploration of how these social variables impact upon, and are impacted upon by, the broader system of variables that comprise the sound environment.

The sound environment is thus a significant innovation in our understanding of the sociological significance of music. It accounts for the complexity of musical diffusion in everyday life in contemporary societies and its multiple forms in relation to its different spatial and temporal contexts.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. It is significant in this respect that, despite often being associated with the subcultural studies canon, Willis’s Profane Culture does not, in fact, utilize the term ‘subculture’.




2. Free translation by one of the authors.3. Here, Robert means that he listens to the 30-second preview available on iTunes.

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Author biographies

Raphaël Nowak is an adjunct research fellow in Cultural Sociology at the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Recently graduated with a PhD in Sociology, he works on questions related to music consumption in the digital age and to the articulation between music technologies’ materiality and listening practices.

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He has authored and edited numerous books including Music, Style and Aging, Popular Music and Youth Culture, Cultures of Popular Music, Remembering Woodstock, and Music Scenes (with Richard A. Peterson). Bennett was lead Chief Investigator on a three-year, five-country project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled ‘Popular Music and Cultural Memory’ (DP1092910). He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

analysing everyday sound environments: the space, time and corporality of musical listening

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