• 1 It is based on two, quite different, texts (Anthony Pecqueux, “Tempesta sonora o Fuoco di campo son (...)
• 2 John Dewey, Art as experience, London, New York, Perigree trade paperback edition, 2005, p. 245-246 (...)

1In this article,1 I intend to use a socio-anthropological approach to the systems (digital, for the most part) we currently use to experience music, focusing on listeners and their use of listening devices. The first part will provide the framework of my approach, and the second will put it to the test using an ethnographic study of nomadic listening through portable systems. This approach relies on a pragmatic epistemology of sound, in which sound represents the effects of activities,2 and as such, events that can be studied. The current models of listening that establish hierarchical and normative differences between hearing/ listening are not suited to this kind of epistemology, which requires, on the contrary, a certain pluralism.

• 3 For the development of an ethnographic example, see: François Debruyne, « Faire et (se) défaire (d’ (...)

2Before progressively outlining these elements, we will begin with a first example that sums up an everyday occurrence in today’s public urban spaces. Four young adults, that display a few outer signs of the underprivileged French banlieue (clothing, overall look, movements, techniques, etc.), take over the sound in a metro carriage. They listen to rap turned up as high as possible through a mobile phone on speaker. The low quality of the mp3 file competes with the oversaturated bass to produce a sound that is quite painful to listen to for most of the people in the carriage (even for fans of the music). Fellow passengers look at one another in exasperation, and when the group leaves the carriage at the next station, the passengers talk to one another out loud about them.3

• 4 Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, New York, The Free Press, 1963, p. 43.
• 5 Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, New York, The Free Press, 1963, p. 44.
• 6 Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, New York, The Free Press, 1963, p. 49.

3My next example takes us back to the early sixties (1963), and chapter four of Erving Goffman’s Behavior in public places, dedicated to accessible engagement in public through the level of attention paid. The American sociologist details his precise conception of situational attention and involvement using a number of concrete examples. They are often sound-related, as when he outlines the distinction between main and side involvement: “humming while working and knitting while listening are examples.”4 While this distinction is linked to the individual’s capacity of splitting their attention according to whatever the situation is and requires, another distinction, between main and side involvement, is more ‘social’.5 In fact, it is linked to the individual’s social obligation within a given situation. When outlining the notion of dominating and subordinate involvement, and the cultural and temporal evolution in these rules, Goffman examined North American teenagers who had, at the time [1963], more freedom in terms of their language and informal conduct in public places than previous generations. “At the same time, the vogue of the portable transistor radio has guaranteed a source of absorbing subordinate involvement that can be carried into a multitude of different situations.”6 To prove his point Goffman includes one of his inimitable footnotes, citing an article from Reuters dated 1961, about the banning of transistor radios by Félix Kir, the mayor of Dijon, after a number of his constituents complained and a trip he made himself to the local swimming pool: “I had to leave”, he said. “I could not bear the cacophony of all the radios, it was like a fairground.”

• 7 See the beautiful photo book by Lyle Owerko, The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the (...)

5Between the 1970s and the 1990s, we had battery-operated boomboxes or ghetto-blasters, oversized tape and radio players (that later played CDs also) with huge side speakers, that often came with chrome hardware and were carried on shoulders by young people as they wandered around the city.7 In New York, they rapidly became popular among young people who were, at the same time, discovering rap, dance music and hip-hop culture in general (punk culture also came into play). The ghetto-blaster became a symbol of this culture. The double whammy of portability and powerful sound meant it allowed kids to listen to music and to dance wherever and whenever they wanted to, and, it must be said, to ‘scare passers-by’ with decibel levels and sounds they did not ask for, adding a subversive aspect.

• 8 These elements are inspired by Jacques Cheyronnaud’s pioneering work on the subject and my conversa (...)
• 9 Anthony Giddens, The consequences of modernity, Stanford University Press, 1990.
• 10 It is a question of highlighting relatively typical situations, and to observe effective situations (...)

8Indeed, these different innovations must be placed in the context of modern culture’s long line of technological attempts to counteract the unrecoverable nature of sound. A sound cannot be touched, as soon as it is made it is gone. From the invention of the phonograph in 1877, to the current digital format through which music increasingly tends to be experienced, the miniaturization of sound is ongoing. Throughout cultural history, these miniaturizations can be seen as so many ‘ruptures’, or more precisely auricular ploys to ‘re-present’ sound or music without the need to carry it around: we no longer need to have an orchestra in our living room to be able to listen to it.8 From the transistor onward, three factors came into play: music became portable everywhere; listening became individualized (in one’s room, with earphones, etc.); but also its potential for publicization increased (through sharing earphones with a friend but especially on speaker). These three factors shape the current dynamic through which technologies that privatize music listening are ‘re-located’9 in public places. Any study should therefore include an analysis of all of the aspects of these plural and often overlapping dynamics; in particular, if we look at the example of two practices that appear to be similar and the contrast in perception (and levels of social disapproval) they lead to, which are firstly, listening to music in public as (for example) rap fans on public transport, and secondly, other ‘young people’ listening to music in other public places, like a public park or garden. The disapproval of the former is almost unanimous; there is a lot more leeway for the latter and even a certain amount of approval for what could be seen as a positive sign of young people socializing. This turnaround in terms of perception and evaluation can be explained in a number of ways: in a public park, sound is not enclosed like it is in a metro carriage, it is diluted in space and volume in the open air. The people present, the other park users, are not obliged to stay as close as they are in public transport. Finally, beyond the issue of potentially different types of music, the social background (even ethnic background) of those involved is not the same; to caricaturize the situation, there is a difference between ‘students’ and ‘underprivileged kids from the projects’.10

• 11 Jean-François Augoyard, “Une sociabilité à entendre”, Espaces et sociétés, n° 115, 2004, p. 25-42.

9Sound, as such, comes with a number of important dimensions in society as a whole; the example above shows how social, situational and spatial data can interact in a decisive way in the emergence of sound-related disruption, even the way our senses react. It also shows how the way these sounds are qualified fluctuates: noise by some, music for others, or the sign of sociability to be heard.11

• 12 Anthony Pecqueux, “Pour une approche écologique des expériences urbaines”, Tracés. Revue de Science (...)

10In the next part of this article, I will build on the groundwork I just laid, and put it to the test with an ethnographic study that takes a pluralist approach to music listening. The study in question examines ‘walking listeners’, by which I mean users of miniaturized, portable music devices, ordinary urban-dwellers who listen to music through earphones or pods as they move around. I attempt to trace their musical mobility using an ecological approach to their experiences,12 which means describing the interactions between, on the one hand, the walking listeners, and on the other, the places (in this case urban) that they pass through while listening. I carry out a participatory observation of their daily journeys, such as between home and work, tailing them ethnographically and cut it with interviews on the experiment and my own notes – that I refer to as the (post-) commented journey method.

• 13 David Sudnow, “Temporal parameters of interpersonal observation” (1972), in Jean-Paul Thibaud (dir. (...)
• 14 Emanuel A. Schegloff, “Body Torque”, Social Research, vol. 65, n° 3, 1998, p. 535-596.

14We can account for the various reactions to sound distractions by the glance13 in direction of where the noise is supposedly coming from: for example, in the direction of a car that has just blown its horn while the walking listener is about the cross the road. These glances and reactions depict an instability between a number of sensory engagements: between listening to music and paying attention to one’s surroundings but also, at times, between, on the one hand attention to the environment, and on the other, listening to music as well as reading a newspaper, and handling a mobile phone (playing games, writing texts, checking a diary…). The common trait of instability between a number of sensory engagements allows us to group these various reactions to noises under the general descriptive structure of sensory torque, borrowed from Emanuel A. Schegloff’s term ‘body torque’.14 For him, a body torque occurs when, during a conversation with someone you are facing with your body, an event occurs that causes you to turn slightly in another direction, then you come back to your original position or change positions relative to what the event leads you to do. Here, the absence of trust in the reliability of peripheral hearing due to music listening results in the surrounding sounds being all the more obvious, in as much as peripheral hearing is not in a position to ideally prepare the walking listeners by providing them with clues that signalled their occurrence in one way or another. This means that, if they erupt in the ears of walking listeners to such an extent, then the sounds of the city create a sensory, perceptive response that takes these ‘noises’ into account. These different glances also share the fact that they cause a reorganization of the individual’s attention and activities, due to a tangible grounding in the shared world of the public space at the sound of a noise outburst in the environment. The reorganization of activities lasts but a moment in general, as long as the glance itself: once the normality of the surroundings has been checked and categorized, the activities of listening to music and reading (or other activities, reading being one example) can continue. The reorganization can last longer, in particular if the noise heard leads to a change in the journey; this said, even if this is the case, the sharing out of the individual’s attention between activities tends to progressively go back to exactly what it was before the noise outburst and sensory orientation occurred. If we use the vocabulary we have been using up until now: a number of sensory engagements cohabit, with a measure of instability relative to the one that is dominant or subordinate.

• 15 Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture, Selected Writings, Sage Publications, London, 1997, p. 115; For Si (...)
• 16 Colin Cherry, “Some experiments on recognition of speech, with one and with two ears”, Journal of t (...)

15Speaking of the auditive operations of selection leads us to slightly modify one of Georg Simmel’s sociological statements (and that of other thinkers also), according to which the ear is “condemned to take everything that comes into its vicinity”15, unlike the eye that comes with an eyelid. In the case of walking listeners, the selection comes from the fact that while they potentially define all urban sounds as noise, which means sounds that negatively affect their music listening, nevertheless, they still find some of these noises relevant. This is notably, and typically true of collective announcements over the loudspeakers in public transport. The resulting selection process occurs in two stages: the first is the potential relevance of the announcement among all the other urban noises; and the second is the categorization of the relevance or not of the current announcement (some are routine announcements, some are aimed at other passengers, etc.). These selective auditory operations are aimed at establishing the equivalent of what psychologists refer to as the ‘cocktail party effect’16 through ethnographic material: in other words, that in a noisy environment, and when our hearing attention is focused on one source, we remain capable of treating other sources and reacting to them, at least when it comes to important information like a warning. We can thus come back to the hypothesis presented at the start of this part, of a double auditory issue for listeners during their urban journeys. This means, on the one hand, auditive (and relative) isolation from the urban sound surroundings for optimum comfort in music listening; and on the other hand, a permeability to certain urban sounds seen to be potentially relevant to the journey in progress.

• 17 Michaël Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-critical Philosophy, Chicago, University of Chi (...)

16In order to carry out operations of auditive selection well, one must use all of the practical part of the potentially changing structure of perceptive attention, between focused and peripheral grasp.17 Ideally, if listening to music is truly their main engagement (it can also be subordinate to reading a novel at the same time), the listening walkers focus on listening to music, while remaining permeable, at least peripherally, to the surrounding urban soundscape. An outburst of sound provokes a disturbance in this hierarchical structure of varied length: focus on surroundings/ shift of music to background. To operate this reversal, the walking listeners rely, for the most part, on auditive adjustments. These include changing the volume on their device or pressing pause. Adjusting earphones reveals itself to be even more crucial, one or both in the ears, just one or both resting on top of the ears.