Sound Moves

iPod Culture and Urban Experience

Michael Bull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134516988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative study opens up a new area in sociological and urban studies: the aural experience of the social, mediated through mobile technologies of communication.

Whilst we live in a world dominated by visual epistemologies of urban experience, Michael Bull argues that it is not surprising that the Apple iPod, a sound based technology, is the first consumer cultural icon of the twenty-first century. This book, in using the example of the Apple iPod, investigates the way in which we use sound to construct key areas of our daily lives. The author argues that the Apple iPod acts as an urban Sherpa for many of its users and in doing so joins the mobile army of technologies that many of us habitually use to accompany our daily lives.

Through our use of such mobile and largely sound based devices, the book demonstrates how and why the spaces of the city are being transformed right in front of our ears.

1
Sound moves, iPod culture and urban experience

An introduction

My iPod goes everywhere with me. It’s like my digital Sherpa for information and entertainment.

(iPod user)

I store my ‘valuables’ on the iPod. I completed three screenplays, which I data warehouse on my iPod. If the house burns down, I am not worried, because the iPod has the family jewels.

(iPod user)

When I leave the house I check my pockets for four things: my wallet, my keys, my mobile phone, and my iPod. I never go out without all four on my person.

(iPod user)

Spatial structures are the dreams of society. Whenever the hieroglyph of any such spatial structure is decoded, the foundation of the social reality is revealed.

(Kracauer 1995: 30)

The media do not simply occupy time and space, they also structure it and give it meaning.

(Livingstone 2002: 81)

The Apple iPod is the first cultural icon of the twenty-first century, representing a sublime marriage between mobility, aesthetics and functionality, of sound and touch – enabling users to possess their auditory world in the palm of their hand. It has sold over 100 million units worldwide since its introduction in 2001, and has spawned its own commercial eco-system with more than 4,000 accessories made specifically to accompany its use at home, in the automobile or on the person. The iPod is the cultural equivalent of the Citroën DS, written about so elegantly by Roland Barthes in 1957:

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

(Barthes 2002: 341)

From Gothic cathedral to Citroën DS to the Apple iPod represents a Western narrative of increasing mobility and privatisation. The Gothic cathedral: immobile, massive and austere, an entirely public edifice magnifying the glory of God whilst reducing the size of the individual to a mere speck on the horizon. Gothic cathedrals were the largest man-made structures in Europe at the time, just as the pealing of the cathedral bells was the loudest man-made noise that the population regularly heard.

Barthes, in his analysis of the Citroën DS, had already reduced the scale of the cultural icon from the size of a Gothic cathedral to that of a five-seater automobile – and, of course, one could inhabit and privately occupy the Citroën in a way that you could not inhabit the cathedral – the DS was something not merely to be looked at or desired, it was something to be owned and travelled in – an icon of social and physical mobility. Barthes discussed the enveloping nature and tactile sense of the automobile – the leather seats, the suspension, as well as the sleek external lines that make the Citroën appear to slide through the air, like a slip of paper, effortlessly.

Barthes’s interpretation of the Citroën DS is of a domesticated icon. This icon, however, is largely a visual and tactile-orientated one, just as Barthes’s brief description of Gothic cathedrals is visually based. Yet a parallel cultural history can be developed from Barthes’s sharp insights into Western aesthetics – an acoustic history of increasingly mobile privatised sound.

For Gothic cathedrals were not merely to be looked at or to be entered for silent prayer – they were also cathedrals of sound in which sacred vocal music reverberated through the spaces of the church. The populace invariably went into these spaces not merely to pray but to enter envelopes of sound resounding through their bodies, amplified by the great arches of the cathedral.

By the 1950s, even as Barthes was shrinking the scale of our cultural icons to five-seater auto size, so our acoustic envelopes began to shift. First, hi-fi began to train its post-war listeners to demand deeply private, acoustically intensified, almost entirely non-resonant ‘fidelity’ sound. With the invention of the miniaturised transistor and the hand-held, battery-powered radio it made possible in the 1950s, a new culture of personal mobile sound emerged, re-imagined in the 1980s with the Sony ‘Walkman’ (equipped with privatising earphones) and ghetto boom-boxes (outfitted with loudspeaker-quality sub-woofers). Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the culture has shifted again. No longer prey to the whims of corporate radio, our sonic envelopes, our cathedrals of sound, exist in the personal play list of the iPod. In the head and mind of the iPod user the spaces of culture have been redrawn into a largely private and mobile auditory worship. Technology, precisely in its miniaturisation – the whole digital world in your hand – acquires a magical quality. As one enthusiastic yet typical New York user commented:

The design is just flawless. It feels good, to hold it in your hand, to rub your thumb over the navigation wheel and to touch the smooth white surface. It looks nice, I’m proud of owning such a device. It represents and holds an important part of my life, so I don’t want an ‘ugly’ package around it. I have never cherished anything I bought as much as this little device. When I was a child, I used to watch a kids’ show called ‘The Music Machine’ and I always dreamed of having something like that. A device that plays any song there is. The iPod comes pretty close to the fulfilment of this childhood fantasy.¹

The iPod – more even than the Barthesian automobile with its multi-channel car radio – offers the user the unfettered auditory freedom of movement from home to street to automobile to office. Time is woven into a seamless web of controlled sound and space, as another urban user comments:

I now listen to music any time I can. Walking to and from work, at work, on vacation, on a train or airplane, even at home when I don’t want to disturb my partner. I have any song I want to listen to at my fingertips at any particular moment. That amazes me. It truly is my own personal jukebox, and puts the soundtrack to my life in my pocket and at my fingertips.

Revealing the commercial music infrastructure that supports her listening habits, this ‘jukebox’ owner believes in the individuality of her life’s ‘sound-track’. It is a hyper-post-Fordist culture in which subjects construct what they imagine to be their own individualised schedules of daily life – their own daily soundtrack of media messages, their own soundscape as they move through shopping centres, their own work-out sound track as they modulate the movement of their bodies in the gym. With its enveloping acoustics iPod users move through space in their auditory bubble, on the street, in their automobiles, on public transport. In tune with their body, their world becomes one with their ‘soundtracked’ movements; moving to the rhythm of their music rather than to the rhythm of the street. In tune with their thoughts – their chosen music enables them to focus on their feelings, desires and auditory memories.

The iPod puts them in tune with their desire to eke out some aesthetic, cognitive and social control as they weave through the day. Enclosed within a zone of immunity and security, enveloped in what they imagine to be their own reality as they move through the city, each holding an Apple iPod – twenty-first-century icon and acoustic metaphor.

Mobile sound universalised

For the first time in history the majority of citizens in Western culture possess the technology to create their own private mobile auditory world wherever they go.² iPod culture represents a world in which we all possess mobile phones, iPods or automobiles – it is a culture which universalises the privatisation of public space, and it is a largely auditory privatisation. The Apple iPod stands as both example and metaphor for a culture in which many of us increasingly close our ears to the multi-faceted world through which we daily move.³ The erasure, or reconfiguration, of the spaces that we move through is primarily an auditory reconfiguration. It is the price that is paid for the often intense private auditory pleasure of listening or talking. iPods are a sonic technology, whilst mobile phones remain primarily sound-based artefacts.

The Apple iPod is symbolic of a culture in which we increasingly use communication technologies to control and manage our experience of the urban environment. iPod users, in the present analysis, are followed as they move through daily life, listening to their iPods, using their mobile phones and driving their automobiles. These three mobile technologies have transformed the meaning of what it is like to live in an urban culture. iPod culture represents a fully mediated culture in which increasingly large parts of our experience are constructed through the use of these mobile communication technologies. It is a culture of auditory mobility in which the privatising impulse of Western culture has come to a state of maturity. The present work uses the example of the Apple iPod to shed light on the nature of contemporary urban experience. Media Studies and Urban Studies become intertwined in the present analysis. Media use is increasingly amorphous and mobile, whilst urban space is largely mediatised. It is no longer possible to adequately understand the nature of urban culture without also understanding the nature and meaning of the daily use of mobile communication technologies.

The dialectic of mediated isolation

Sound moves focuses primarily upon the isolated, yet mediated, urban subject. This is not to deny, or indeed to suggest, that collective forms of behaviour, whether it be in the home, the street or elsewhere, are not important, merely that the trend towards ‘mediated urban isolation’ is of growing significance. Marc Augé has called for the need to develop ‘an ethnography of solitude’ (Augé 1995) in order to understand the nature of urban experience. He argued for this ‘need’ against a backdrop of what he perceived to be the experiencing of and development of ‘non-spaces’ of urban culture, by which he meant new shopping centres, airports, motorways and the like – spaces with no historical narrative attached to them. These urban spaces supposedly alienated the human subject as they passed through them. In the present analysis, in contrast to Augé, I argue that all urban spaces are potentially ‘non-spaces’. In iPod culture we have overpowering resources to construct urban spaces to our liking as we move through them, enclosed in our pleasurable and privatised sound bubbles. Today, such an ethnography of solitude must be one of a technologically mediated solitude – we are increasingly alone together.

Focusing upon the solitary individual is justified empirically by the daily mobility patterns within urban culture. Solitariness and the daily movement of people through the city are two dominant hallmarks of contemporary urban experience. This solitariness is not necessarily enforced. Sole occupancy is often the preferred mode of travel in automobiles throughout Europe and America (Brodsky 2002; Putnam 2000). The desire for solitude in the automobile is mirrored in the desire for solitude in the street and the home as many retreat into the most private spaces of their already privatised home, accompanied by the sound of the television, radio or their music system (Livingstone 2002). Privatising the street is itself conditioned by the privatising of the home (Bauman 2003). The intimate nature of an industrialised sound world in the form of radio sounds (Tacchi 2004; Hendy 2000), recorded music and television increasingly represent large parts of a privatised everyday lifeworld of urban citizens. iPods are by their very nature primarily a privatising technology, whilst mobile phone users intermittently fill the urban spaces of the city with their ‘own’ reassuring noises (Puro 2002), in effect privatising it.

In parallel to this privatising tendency within urban experience there exists a compulsiveness towards proximity and contact in daily life (Katz and Aukhus 2002). Bauman has noted, in relation to mobile phone use, for example, that for many ‘silence equals exclusion’ (Bauman 2003). In iPod culture we might adapt the Descartian maxim ‘I think, therefore I am’ to ‘I talk or listen, therefore I exist’. It is no accident that for Descartes identity was something constructed in silence whereas contemporary consumers invariably feel a sense of discomfort when confronted with silence (Bull 2000). The greater the craving for solitariness the greater the fear of being socially isolated. This contradictory desire for privacy and fear of social isolation is resolved through the use of mobile sound media.

The sounds of mediated we-ness

iPod users live in a world of mediated we-ness. The phrase derives from the work of Adorno, who argued that the consumption of mechanically reproduced music was increasingly used as an effective substitute for a sense of connectivity that modern cultures lacked. We-ness refers to the substitution of technologically mediated forms of experience for direct experience. Music, for Adorno, enabled the subject to transcend the repressive nature of the social world precisely by integrating him or herself more fully into the everyday, through the consumption of music. Music provides both the dreams and the chains for the urban subject. Mediated aural proximity constitutes states of ‘we-ness’ whereby ‘direct’ experience is either substituted or transformed by a mediated, technological form of aural experience. Music represents to the urban subject a utopian longing for what they desire but cannot achieve. Music substitutes that which is desired for itself, producing ‘an illusion of immediacy in a totally mediated world, of proximity between strangers, the warmth of those who come to feel a chill of unmitigated struggle of all against all’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 46). From the television set at the heart of family life to the iPod through which ‘the world, threateningly devoid of warmth, comes to him like something familiar, as if specially made just for him’ (Adorno, in Leppert 2002: 52)

The warmth of media messages is contrasted with the chill of the immediate and the inability of the structured forms of the social to satisfy the desire for proximity and warmth. Adorno perceived the urban subject as increasingly dependent upon forms of mediated company within which to live; ‘we might conceive a series leading from the man who cannot work without the blare of the radio to the one who kills time and paralyses loneliness by filling his ears with the illusion of “being with” no matter what’ (Adorno 1991: 78). Putnam, more recently, has commented upon the ‘false sense’ of companionship and intimacy created through the use of television (Putnam 2000: 242), as has Claude Lefort, who refers to these phenomena as a ‘constant illusion of a between-us, an entre-nous in which the media provoke an hallucination of nearness which abolishes a sense of distance, strangeness, imperceptibility of otherness’ (Lefort, quoted in Merck 1998: 109). Forms of ‘accompanied solitude’ thus become increasingly habitual in iPod culture. Yet compulsive mediated proximity does not necessarily endorse the ‘one-dimensional’ thesis of media colonisation, which collapses subjectivity into the objective structures of culture. A dialectical analysis of iPod culture points to a disjunction between the objective and the subjective moment of culture in which iPod users attempt to transcend the social precisely by immersing themselves in it.

Sound ideologies and iPod culture

The auditory self of iPod culture in which sound becomes ‘a way of perceiving the world’ increasingly inhabits acoustic space (Attali 1985: 4). We both increasingly move to sound and are simultaneously moved by sound. Tia deNora has pointed to the frequency with which the metaphor to be ‘transported’ has been associated with music. She argues, ‘music can be conceived as a kind of aesthetic technology, an instrument of social ordering’ (DeNora 2000: 7). The nature of this social ordering is both cultural and historical – what is true for music is also true for sound – the pealing of church bells in the nineteenth century was as much an instrument of social ordering as the sounds of a Monteverdi Mass in Venice in the seventeenth. Music itself performs an ideological role in the mediated household of the contemporary consumer. Adorno caustically remarked that the ‘greater the drabness of existence, the sweeter the melody’ (Adorno and Eisler 1994: 22), whilst Lefebvre concurred, stating that music ‘brings compensations for the miseries of everydayness, for its deficiencies and failures’ (Lefebvre 2004: 66). The consumption of technologically mediated sound, in the twentieth century, represents a significant mode of ‘being-inthe-world’. The self claims a mobile and auditory territory for itself through a specific form of ‘sensory gating’, permitting it to screen out unwanted sounds, producing its own ‘soundscape’. Media technologies are simultaneously private and structural: meaning cannot be isolated from the structural conditions within which it arises. The n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Sound moves, iPod culture and urban experience: an introduction
• 2 Sound epistemologies: strategies and technologies
• 3 Sounding out cosmopolitanism: iPod culture and recognition
• 4 The audio-visual iPod: aesthetics and the city
• 5 Interpersonal sound strategies and iPod culture
• 6 Mobilising of the social: mobile phones and iPods
• 7 Contextualising the senses: the auditory world of automobility
• 8 The auditory privatisation of the workplace
• 9 Bergson’s iPod? The cognitive management of everyday life
• 10 The nostalgia of iPod culture
• 11 Sound timings and iPod culture
• 12 Endnote: sound mediations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index