Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don't Always Notice (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear. In addition to the three main authors, there are chapters contributed by Lawrence Kramer, Tony Grajeda, Christina Baade, Amit S. Rai, Tim McNelis, Jonathan Sterne, Serena Facci and Franco Fabbri. Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear. Marta García Quiñones is a PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona, where she is preparing a thesis on music listening. Anahid Kassabian is a past editor of Stanford Humanities Review and of Journal of Popular Music Studies. Elena Boschi is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Visual Communication at Liverpool Hope University. Publisher's note Cover 1 Contents 6 List of Figures and Table 8 Notes on Contributors 10 General Editor’s Preface 14 Foreword 16 Acknowledgements 18 Introduction: A Day in the Life of a Ubiquitous Musics Listener 20 Part I Histories 32 1 Caliban’s Ear: A Short History of Ambient Music 34 2 Early Mood Music: Edison’s Phonography, American Modernity and the Instrumentalization of Listening 50 3 Radio Symphonies: The BBC, Everyday Listening and the Popular Classics Debate during the People’s War 68 Part II Technologies 92 4 Sound, Perception and Mobile Phones in India 94 5 Seen and Heard: Visible Playback Technology in Film 108 6 Body and Context in Mobile Listening to Digital Players 126 Part III Spaces 138 7 The Non-aggressive Music Deterrent 140 8 An Anthropology of Soundtracks in Gym Centres 158 9 Taboo Listening (or, What Kind of Attention?) 180 Bibliography 194 Index 214