Mobile Music Listening Practices

This poster presents my PhD research about the appropriation of the practice of mobile music listening. Following an exploratory phase, I have described and interpreted some of the salient characteristics of that practice. It broadly shows that it is an automatic, background, unfocused listening used as an accompaniment to another activity. The music is therefore functional: it helps to relax, change mood, block unwanted sounds (or people), make non-places (Augé, 1992) more pleasant. This banal practice of mobile music listening can be described as an experience of ‘self-resonance’ (Rosa, 2012) from the listener. I argue that, besides this ‘art de faire’ (De Certeau, 1980), the technology of mobile listening affords another practice, at the extreme opposite, that stresses the creativity of the listener. This way of listening is characterized by a close attention to the music and the sound, a limitation of multitasking, a pre-listening preparation time, the playlist as a mean to appropriate a music collection, the use of random listening to discover hidden gems or unforeseen musical associations. A forthcoming ethnography of this practice will test this hypothesis and probably define new combinations of variables.