Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice Edited by Marta García Quiñones, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi (review)

Ubiquitous music does not belong to any one genre or style; rather, it is defined situationally, consisting of “those musical events that take place alongside other activities” (p. 7), and are largely unattended to by those who experience it. Examples from the collection under review, Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice, include classical masterpieces piped into New York’s Penn Station, Bollywood hits played over cell phones in Mumbai, the thumping dance music that pervades a fitness center in Italy, or more generally, film soundtracks or anything heard through the headphones of a portable music player in the course of going about one’s daily routine. As these examples suggest, this music owes its ubiquity to electronic mediation; the technological means by which this music is disseminated and experienced thus figures prominently in the volume.

The collection’s nine essays, contributed by an international group of scholars drawn from communication studies, cultural studies, film studies, musicology, and elsewhere, are evenly placed into three broad units: history, technology, and space. The three essays of part 1 (“Histories”) are largely situated in the pre–World War II era. Lawrence Kramer’s opening piece offers a wide-ranging meditation on the history of ambient music, and usefully cites pre-electronic examples drawn from William Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy, connecting them to the aforementioned classical music that wafts through the open spaces of Penn Station in the present day. The chapters by Tony Grajeda and Christina Baade dig deep into the archives to uncover how sound recording and radio were deployed in the United States (by Thomas A. Edison, Inc.) and in England (by the BBC) to influence listeners’ moods and attitudes.

Part 2 (“Technologies”) offers case studies by Amit Rai, Tim McNeils, Elena Boschi, and Marta García Quiñones that focus on three distinct modes of mediation: mobile telephony, film (specifically, as it depicts recording technologies such as phonographs and boomboxes), and portable digital players. The collective value of the essays is to demonstrate how the characteristics of these different mediating technologies shape our emotional and bodily engagement with music. In part 3 (“Spaces”), contributions by Jonathan Sterne and Serena Facci consider two types of space—retail stores and gyms—and the ways in which the unseen hand of ubiquitous music is intended to spur listeners to action: in the former case, to drive loiterers to leave the premises and in the latter, to motivate fitness center users to exercise harder and longer. Franco Fabbri’s closing piece addresses the issue of music attention (and inattention), calling on researchers to develop more nuanced theories to explain and differentiate our manifold experiences of ubiquitous music.

In a sense, Ubiquitous Musics itself is a call to action. Although modest in size, this impressive collection is ambitious in its scope and goals, and by offering a sampling of the history of ubiquitous music and the technologies and spaces through which it is mediated, we are—in the best sense—left wanting more. Indeed, this volume is joined by co-editor Annahid Kassabian’s monograph Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (2013) and more recently by the massive two-volume Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (2014). Clearly, ubiquitous music—and Ubiquitous Musics—is worth our careful attention.