The Mobile Solo Auditor: Personalization and Located Listening

Abstract

The author considers personalization and located listening as tendencies of new audio media and sound art, particularly works using social networks and geographic user data.

Sound and media art practices harness new modes of listening: auditory habits shaped by current technologies. Innovative artworks engage individual mobile listeners, who freely navigate their own space and participate in the aesthetic completion of the piece.

Individual, personalized media is everywhere, with mobile communication devices allowing users to act as both consumers and producers. Access to global networks is parceled into ever-smaller ports, whose interfaces are increasingly customized: from online searches weighted by predictable habits to tailored social network sharing. Content is user-generated, growing exponentially and reconfigured to mediated perceptual preferences.

Consider the effect on music consumption. While privatized listening environments are not new and have been extensively discussed in sound studies [1], the degree to which we control what meets our ears via personal audio devices is unprecedented. In addition to a wealth of music in reach are countless new instruments at our fingertips (e.g. apps). Means of creative audio production and broadcast are prolific. Whether it be playing, coding, sampling, hacking or recording, present technologies facilitate active participation in shared musical production and reception, enabling the production of real-time creative exchanges that need not be conducted in person.

These dynamics of participation and sharing, drifting ever further from listening structures such as concert hall performances, also link into upcycling/DIY culture and surging interest in repurposing. Hacking and the experimental scene could be read as the folk music of a generation: they open up musical practice for those without “traditional” expertise who are willing to break it apart and mix it up. Self-releasing unfinished or creative commons works meant for others to reprocess further encourages participation and sharing. Established musicians have also recognized potential here, as is seen with Brian Eno’s app Scape (2012), which allows listeners to recompose his music.

Alongside personalization and participation, mobility and virtual position are definitive aspects of listening today. Sound is available almost everywhere, anytime. While musica mobilis [2] has been around for generations, we no longer need to bring music along, we can simply draw it out of the cloud. No transport of stored audio required: just our hub. Meanwhile, digital music resources are for more than accessing sound files. They suggest soundtracks, respond to moods and broadcast taste, enable peer-to-peer sharing and make recommendations along lines of social connection (including geographic proximity, effectively reconnecting physical location to virtual listening position).

The technological resources and aspects of personalization, mobility and the dis- and re-connecting aspects of shared listening—whose effects are clearly evident in changing music consumption—have also influenced artistic practice in sound art. Sound art uses and investigates sound as well as “the processes by which it operates” [3]. New works respond to transformations of form, structure, medium and comprehension of the auditory, exploring degrees of individualization, real-time participation and auditory relations to both real and virtual space.

Many works engage these topically, such as sound installations based on live data feeds or social network updates, or generative works filtering and sonifying information flow (e.g. the piece #tweetscapes by HeavyListening, which tracks regional tweets across Germany audio-visually, in real time [4]). Other works are made specifically for solo mobile listeners, such as mapped or mobile sound compositions, audible within specific locations and available through mobile devices. Such pieces demand a degree of agency from an embodied listener-participant to complete the composition. This is the case with the walking/instructional works of Ligna and also with Janet Cardiff’s series of audiovisual tours. Some of these works resemble sound designs for urban spaces, i.e. audio accompaniments for a city. Radio Aporee, founded in 2006 as “a global soundmap” [5], has had a series of initiatives exploring sonic cartography and new forms of listening: In RadioOrtung, radio plays are composed for individuals walking through the city [6], and in Music from the Cloud (2013) sound artists created pieces only audible via smartphone at specific, culturally significant spaces...