I’m spending an awful lot of time with headphones on these days, and I’ve been thinking quite a lot about how divorcing yourself from the acoustic environment that surrounds you changes your perceptions of the world.
It’s something that Michael Bull talked a bit about at his presentation about iPod use at the Technology Symposium yesterday.
Bull referred to Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis – the investigation into the way that people interact with public spaces with respect to their experience of time. In other words, how your experience of where you are is influenced by your rhythms of routine, the rhythms of the clock, and the rhythm in your head.
With the headphones on (and, for Bull, with an iPod plugged in at the other end), the rhythm of the street is superimposed with the listener’s own personally supplied rhythm. In that respect, your perception of the world becomes more intentional – and less passive.
Rather than just experience the world as it’s presented, you project your own soundtrack over the top, and create a new experiential world with the sounds you’ve brought to it.
In the case of mp3s, the listener engages in a micromanagement of this soundworld through the construction of playlists. Not simply a different storage and playback medium for your record collection, the iPod is a new way of using music.
It’s the Nick Hornby High Fidelity dream box: an endlessly recategorisable library of music that charts the personal musical history of the device’s owner.
Of course, not everyone picks a ‘morning‘ playlist, a ‘public transport‘ playlist, a ‘getting ready to go out‘ playlist or a ‘depressed after a break-up‘ playlist (though it’s amazing how common those themes are). Some people simply default to shuffle mode for the element of surprise.
Interestingly, those who do ascribe an incredible prescience to their machines:
“The i-Pod just knows what I needed to hear at that moment…”
“I’d never have thought to play this song after that one, but it works so incredibly well…”
“It just seems to understand me so well…”
That sort of thing.
And of course, that shuffling recontextualises the outside world in completely unexpected ways (though, of course, not in ways that are completely alien to the listener – it is their collection, after all…).
One thing I thought was particularly interesting though, was that iPod users report that in their own solitary audio world, their sense ratio is completely altered. They can bump into people without noticing so much. Touch takes on a lot less significant role in communicating spatial information to the brain.
This is pure McLuhan. Extend one sense, and the others have to give – completely restructuring your experiential world in the process.
Fascinating stuff. Can’t wait for Michael Bull’s book to come out (give it a few months, apparently…).
It did frustrate me slightly that when I chatted to him over coffee at the symposium, he seemed to have misinterpreted (or perhaps misremembered) McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool media – but I think it was just an idea he was messing around with rather than any central part of his findings.
Hardly a criminal offense – McLuhan thrived on misinterpretation.
As he puts it when he stops by to help Woody Allen out with the annoying guy in a cinema queue in Annie Hall (1977), “You mean my whole fallacy is wrong?”
Incidentally – while we’re on the topic of mp3s and their increasingly ubiquitous players – I read an interesting blog post about one guy’s gradual acceptance of the technology despite its audio fidelity shortcomings.
Again, this was essentially another report of the technology suggesting new ways of approaching music and the need to negotiate a response to it. It’s over at Blogalive.
Also worth a read – and a bit of a click-fest to follow all the recommendations – is the new post at the Tofu Hut, which does a round up of the best of the mp3 blogs out there.
There’s a lot to listen to, and – to be honest – I’m happy to forego some use of my other senses in exchange for an extension to my auditory life, if that’s what it takes.
Thankfully these AKGs are very comfortable.
Oh… and please excuse me if I bump into you on the street – I wasn’t listening where I was going.
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58. Edmund Cake – Downtown Puff Lil Chief 2004
59. U2 – How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb Interscope 2004
60. Danilo Perez – PanaMonk Impulse! 1996
I’m quite interested in the way people listen to music on headphones, mostly traveling to and from work. Most people I know like to turn the volume up to shut out the outside world. I like to keep the volume down a bit so that the environment adds it’s own ‘wildtrack’. I think this habit may come from my work on tv & video at University. Even when you are shooting something that you intend to edit to music you record a ‘wildtrack’ to mix with the music to give the viewer a sense of location and space. Of course you can deliberatley strip all ambient sound and just add soundtrack but this gives a very different feel to the sequence.
When I listen to music the thoughts it tends to inspire in me are visual. I find that the music I am listening affects my ‘gaze’. I like to feel as if I’m directing my own little sequence to the music by changing how I look around me, how long I linger on one object or area of my vision almost as if I am performing an edit based on the elements I have imediatley available to me. I find that the music also affects my physical interaction with the space around me. For example changing my pace or stride, placing my hand on a handrail or even stopping for a moment.
In a sense, I think you’re deliberately doing what I suspect most people with headphones do unconsciously: a discrete form of dancing. And it seems that’s an idea that works really well with the Lefebvre stuff.