“Anahid Kassabian offers us a way of thinking about listening that is dynamic, unique, timely and original. Kassabian reimagines listening for our age; she constructs new objects and asks fresh questions. Ubiquitous Listening offers a new foundation for understanding music in contemporary life .”–Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Origins of Sound Reproduction

“[This work] is an important study of a phenomenon that has a wide-ranging significance… [Kassabian’s] approach to the subject incorporates insights and poses challenges to existing paradigms in a range of interconnected fields, and is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship at its most innovative.”–Steve Waksman, author of Instruments of Desire: the Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience

“A leading light in the burgeoning field of sound studies, Anahid Kassabian has richly expanded the field with the many insights of Ubiquitous Listening. Brilliantly comparing and contrasting how we hear ubiquitous sound with how we listen to music, Kassabian deepens our understanding of affect, technologies of attention and distributed subjectivities. A must read for those of us doing critical theory in these times.”–Patricia Ticineto Clough, editor of The Affective Turn

Anahid Kassabian is the James and Constance Alsop Chair of Music at the Institute of Popular Music and the School of Music at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music.

Ubiquitous Listening

Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity

By Anahid Kassabian

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27515-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii,
Introduction, xi,
1. UBIQUITOUS LISTENING, 1,
2. LISTENING TO VIDEO ART AND THE PROBLEM OF TOO MANY HOMELANDS, 20,
3. “BOOM!” IS THE NEXT BIG THING, 33,
4. MUSICALS HIT THE SMALL SCREEN, 51,
5. IMPROVISING DIASPORAN IDENTITIES: ARMENIAN JAZZ, 73,
6. WOULD YOU LIKE SOME WORLD MUSIC WITH YOUR LATTE?, 84,
Conclusion, 109,
Notes, 119,
Works Cited, 135,
Index, 149,

CHAPTER 1

Ubiquitous Listening

MUSIC NOT CHOSEN

There are many kinds of music that belong in this book, given that its topic is all those musics that we listen to as secondary or simultaneous activities, often without choice. These include, of course, film and television music (as discussed in chapters 2 through 4), but also music on phones, music in stores (see chapter 6), music in video games, music for audiobooks, music in parking garages, and so on. Jonathan Sterne’s “Sounds Like the Mall of America” (1997) long ago confirmed my suspicion about that music: we hear more of it per capita than any other music.

The 21 October 2000 issue of The Economist had a graph showing annual world production of data, expressed in terabytes. According to researchers at the University of California–Berkeley’s School of Information Systems and Management, about 2.5 billion CDs were shipped in 1999. Music CD production far outstrips newspapers, periodicals, books, and cinema. And most of the music is being heard often, if not most often, as a secondary activity. If we then add cinema, television, and video games in as partially musical media, then stunning amounts of music are created and produced in any year, and the vast majority of it is not destined for attentive engagements.

MUSIC TO FOLLOW YOU FROM ROOM TO ROOM

In the early days of the new millennium, by most reckonings, the capacity to listen to music anywhere and everywhere was a trend that would continue to increase for some time to come. One mark of that might be Bill Gates’s ideas for the “house of the future.” All residents would have unique microelectronic beacons that would identify their wearers to the house. Based on your stored profile, then, “Lights would automatically come on when you came home…. Portable touch pads would control everything from the TV sets to the temperature and the lights, which would brighten or dim to fit the occasion or to match the outdoor light…. Speakers would be hidden beneath the wallpaper to allow music to follow you from room to room” (CNN.com 2000). The Cisco Internet Home Briefing Center imagined a similar musical environment: “Music also seems to have no boundaries with access to any collection, available in virtually any room of the house through streaming audio. A Digital Jukebox or Internet Radio eliminates the limitations of local radio, and can output music, sports and news from around the world.” (Cisco n.d.).

These ideas are among the most basic and least radical in the field known as ubiquitous computing. First articulated in the late 1980s by Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC (Weiser 1991; Gibbs 2000), ubiquitous computing became a very active field of research. It was concerned with “smart rooms” and “smart clothes,” with the seamless integration of information and entertainment computing into everyday environments. This would be akin to the penetration of words, or reading, in everyday life. Texts were first centrally located in, for example, monasteries and libraries; next, books and periodicals were distributed to individual owners; now, words are almost always in our field of vision, on labels, bookshelves, files, and so on. Written language is ubiquitous, seamlessly integrated into our environments.

From the perspective, for example, of the Broadband Residential Laboratory built by Georgia Tech in the late 1990s, these “stereo-piping tricks of ‘smart’ homes … [are] just a starting point” (as quoted in Gibbs 2000). Their Aware Home had several audio and video input and output devices in each room, and several outlets and jacks in each wall. The MIT Media Lab, as Sandy Pentland said, went in a different direction. They “moved from a focus on smart rooms to an emphasis on smart clothes” (Pentland 2000: 821), because smart clothes offer possibilities that smart rooms don’t, such as mobility and individuality. For example, the Affective Computing Research Group “built a wearable ‘DJ’ that tries to select music based on a feature of the user’s mood” as indicated by skin conductivity data collected by the wearable computer (Picard 2000: 716).

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT MOST OF THE MUSIC WE HEAR?

Music scholarship across the disciplines is utterly unprepared to think about such practices, even ten years after I first published a version of this chapter. There are few studies of the music that follows us from room to room, variously called programmed music, background music, environmental music, business music, functional music (Gifford 1995; Bottum 2000). One landmark study is Joseph Lanza’s book Elevator Music (first published by St Martin’s Press in 1995, expanded in a second edition from University of Michigan Press, 2003). Elevator Music is first of all a history of music in public space, and secondly a defense of the intramusical features that were part of elevator music in its prime: lush strings, absence of brass and percussion, and consonant harmonic language. The book is an invaluable resource, and it makes some fascinating arguments; for example, Lanza suggests that elevator music is the quintessential twentieth-century music because it focuses, as do many of the century’s technologies, on environmental control.

Sterne’s “Sounds Like the Mall of America” takes another tack. Commoditized music, Sterne argues, has become “a form of architecture—a way of organizing space in commercial settings” (1997: 23). Not only does the soundscape of the mall predict and depend on barely audible, anonymous background music of the “Muzak” type, but it also shapes the very space itself. The boundaries between store and hallway are acoustically defined by the different music played in each space: “To get anywhere in the Mall of America, one must pass through music and through changes in musical sound. As it territorializes, music gives the subdivided acoustical space a contour, offering an opportunity for its listeners to experience space in a particular way” (31). For Sterne, the issue is one of reification—music has become a commodity relation that supplants relations between people and that presupposes listener response.

Ola Stockfelt offers yet another perspective on listening and context; in “Adequate Modes of Listening” (1997), he argues that modes of listening develop in relation to particular genres—he calls these “genre-normative modes of listening”—and the style itself develops in relation to its listening situation. He says: “Each style of music … is shaped in close relation to a few environments. In each genre, a few environments, a few situations of listening, make up the constitutive elements in this genre…. The opera house and the concert hall as environments are as much integral and fundamental parts of the musical genres ‘opera’ and ‘symphony’ as are the purely intramusical means of style” (136).

In Stockfelt’s argument, modes of listening, listening situation, and musical style coproduce each other. In terms of background music, this helps explain the musical parameters we all know. What Stockfelt calls “dishearkening” has produced a particular set of practices for arranging background music. (The word he uses in Swedish is literally “to hear away from,” which shares with “dishearken” a rather higher implication of agency than I think is useful.) There is a focus on moments of pleasant “snapshot listening” rather than development over time, and a focus on comforting timbres (legato strings) over vivid ones (brass).

None of these studies, however, can cope with the world of ubiquitous computing proposed by Xerox PARC and the MIT Media Lab, nor with some of the developments that came from those early projections, and certainly not with what is in the process of becoming. Prevailing scholarly notions of listening, subjectivity, and agency, even in the most innovative works, will not account for the music we wake up to.

I call the music that first began with radio and the Muzak corporation (originally called Wired Radio, Inc.), the kind of music that we listen to as part of our environment, “ubiquitous music.” Muzak in particular, by broadcasting music into commercial spaces, established that music could come from “nowhere” and invisibly accompany any kind of activity. Mark Weiser’s description of ubiquitous computing was the best description of this phenomenon I’ve ever seen, even though he was describing something that hadn’t been developed until sixty or more years after Muzak’s first broadcast.

WHERE DID THIS MUSIC COME FROM?

I lead a happy life. Every day I wake in the best of possible moods and dance my way around the room as I get dressed. Then, while I prepare a pleasant breakfast in my tiny kitchen, several happy bluebirds land on my windowsill and twitter cheerfully. Outside, a tall man in coat-and-tails tips his hat and bids me good-day. A half-dozen scruffy children chase a hoop down the street, shouting gleefully. One of them cries out, “Mornin’ mister!”

Ah yes, life is wonderful when you live in a musical from the fifties. Now, perhaps you’re wondering, “How could this possibly be true?” Well, I have the unspeakable good fortune to live directly behind my local supermarket and each morning I wake up to a careful selection of merry tunes which easily penetrate my thin walls to rouse me from my slumber. (Schafer n.d.)

So does Tokyo resident Own Schafer begin his eloquent, elegant think piece about Muzak. Sedimented here is a trace of one of functional musics’ siblings, that is, film music and musical theater. To tell functional music’s history, one might begin with music hall, or even earlier. Another trace could be followed to radio, and from there to music in salons and gazebos. Or from workplace music to work music and chants. Strangely, these remain untold histories of the omnipresence of music in contemporary life in industrialized settings.

Two histories are told—an industrial one and a critical one. The former begins with General George Owen Squier, chief of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and creator of Wired Radio, the company now called Muzak. This history, best represented by Lanza’s book and Bill Gifford’s FEED feature “They’re Playing Our Song,” continues through shifts in technologies and markets, to Muzak’s “stimulus progression” patents, to the 1988 merger with small foreground music provider Yesco (Gifford 1995), bankruptcy, the rise of competitors such as DMX, and ultimately satellite radio.

The other documented history is a counterhistory, a story of how a music came into being that could be confused with functional music, but is of course nothing like it—ambient music. That history begins with Erik Satie’s experiments in the teens and twenties with “musique d’ameublement” (furniture music), soars through Cage’s emphases on environmental sound and on process, and leads inevitably to—Brian Eno, from whose mind all contemporary ambient music has sprung. (For versions of this story, see any of the scores of ambient websites, and especially Mark Prendergast’s The Ambient Century, 2003.)

This history goes to great pains to distinguish ambient from background music on the grounds of its available modes of listening. As musician/fan Malcolm Humes put it in a 1995 online essay: “Eno … tried to create music that could be actively or passively listened to. Something that could shift imperceptibly between a background texture to something triggering a sudden zoom into the music to reflect on a repetition, a subtle variation, perhaps a slight shift in color or mood” (Humes 1995). What is important to defenders of the faith is ambient music’s availability to both foreground and background listening. But since the mid to late 1980s, background music has become foreground music. In the language of the industry, background music is what we call “elevator music,” and foreground music is works by original artists. While background music has all but disappeared, you can now hear everyone from Miriam Makeba to the Moody Blues to Madonna to Moby in some public setting or other and quite possibly all of them at your local Starbucks. (See chapter 6 for a discussion of music in Starbucks, coffeehouses, and retail spaces more generally.)

Foreground music seems to make talking about music in public spaces impossible—and perhaps it should be. Certainly there is a several-decades-long history of debate about the dissolution of public space and the public sphere. As Japanese cultural critic Mihoko Tamaoki has argued in her work on coffeehouses, Starbucks transforms customers into not a public, but an audience. Moreover, she argues, “Starbucks now constitutes a ‘meta-media’ operation. It stands at once in the traditional media role, as an outlet for both content and advertising. At the same time, it is actually selling the products therein advertised. And these, in turn, are themselves media products: music for Starbucks listeners” (Tamaoki n.d.: 4). This is Starbucks’s genius as a music label; it is a meta-media operation that produces its own market for its own product all at once, in what once might have been public space. But if we focus too closely on the distribution of recordings, we will not fully address the problems foreground music poses to contemporary listening.

HOW DO WE LISTEN TO FOREGROUND MUSIC?

If one attends to public and popular discourse about music in business environments, it has hardly registered the change from background to foreground. By and large, most people talk about music in business environments as annoying and bad, and there are frequent references to Muzak and strings, as if there has been no change whatsoever. The reason, I want to argue, is that they are not discussing music, but rather a mode of listening about which most of us are at best ambivalent, thanks in no small part to the disciplining of music in the Western academy.

In the wake of Michel Foucault, critiques of music’s disciplinary practices have been well argued. We have discussed canon formations, architecture, and training; we have argued about analysis and we have talked about transcription. We have discussed, at length, the expert listening held in such high regard by Theodor Adorno and so carefully cultivated by Western art music institutions such as the academy and symphony orchestras. It is perhaps primary among the forces that produce and reproduce the canonical European and North American repertoire.

But in all these discussions, we have not taken our own collective insights quite seriously enough. Logically, if expert, concentrated, structural listening produces the canon, don’t other modes of listening produce and reproduce other repertoires? (While a bit of work has been done in this tradition on the rock canon, I think we have a long way to go before the critique of canonicity is widely spread throughout art music scholarship, much less popular music studies and ethnomusicology.)

This is, I believe, Stockfelt’s most important point. Through a study of changes in arrangements of Mozart’s G-minor Fortieth Symphony, he argues that different settings, different sets of musical features, and different modes of listening are coproductive. Text, context, and reception create each other in mutual, simultaneous, and historically grounded processes. But as foreground music programming has increased, this combination or mutual dependence seems less and less consistent or predictable. When anything can be foreground music, does it still make sense to talk about a specific background music mode of listening?

DO WE HEAR OR LISTEN?

One possibility is to think of this most disdained activity as hearing rather than listening. This idea appears repeatedly, including in the sales literature of programmed music companies. But the distinction poses some interesting problems. In Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, each term is defined by the other:

hear vt

transitive verb

1: to perceive or apprehend by the ear

2: to gain knowledge of by hearing

3a: to listen to with attention: heed b: attend <hear mass>

4a: to give a legal hearing to b: to take testimony from <hear witnesses>

intransitive verb

1: to have the capacity of apprehending sound

2a: to gain information: learn b: to receive communication heard from her lately>

3: to entertain the idea—used in the negative hear of it>

4: often used in the expression Hear! Hear! to express approval (as during a speech)

listen

transitive verb

archaic : to give ear to : hear

intransitive verb

1: to pay attention to sound <listen to music>

2: to hear something with thoughtful attention: give consideration <listen to a plea>

3: to be alert to catch an expected sound <listen for his step>

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