The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 ed. by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (review)

I had not thought of my baby blue iPod mini for a number of years. Nowadays, the little metal square lives in a box of beloved, but no longer used, items; it also carries some severe scratches from less-than-careful use through many quotidian or more extensive travels. I have taken it out now, testing to see if it still has forgotten playlists to remind me of specific moments in my own listening history, because of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. The scope of the book is vast; as the editors note: 'Many of mobile music studies' concerns have been taken up in such disparate fields as communication studies, literary theory, history of science, disability studies, and performance studies (in addition to music studies and sound studies). Mobile music studies is an intersection of a number of already existing fields and areas of inquiry' (p.26). Nevertheless, intimacy is ever-present throughout the two volumes, from personal or interpersonal relationships with mp3 players (Volume 1, Chapters 5, 14, and 15, for instance), to images of British adolescents listening to transistor radios (Volume 1, Chapter 6) or 'sodcasting' on public transportation (Volume 1, Chapter 10), to personal experiences of space through sound (Volume 2, Part III). These glimpses of individual experiences encourage examinations of both personal and societal practices of making, listening to, and understanding music, not dissimilar from my nostalgic return to my iPod mini. While the focus of the two volumes is rarely on the individual, personal experience is always implied, begging the question of what the role of the individual is in the wide and tangled web of mobile music, whether it is in terms of listening, music making, or relating to society more broadly.

One of the inevitable foci of the two extensive volumes is technology old and new, not only because of how significant technological developments have impacted upon mobile sound, but as material objects, and, perhaps most importantly, facilitators of experiences and practices of listening. The handbook addresses both the evident technologies which have impacted upon mobile music in both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, and technologies that may not be an apparent choice. I refer here to three chapters in particular: Mills's 'Cochlear Implants after Fifty Years: A History and an Interview with Charles Graser', Redhing's Of Sirens Old and New, and Neely's 'Ding, Ding!: The Commodity Aesthetic of Ice Cream Truck Music'. The first is one of a number of chapters in the handbook that would perhaps fit more clearly within a handbook of 'mobile sound', as music is not an apparent focus of it. It is, however, these types of chapters that add a quirky flavour to the book, at least for the few readers who will read both volumes in their entirety, rather than individual chapters. Redhing's work is an ideal example of this, examining the evolution of sirens from the mythological creatures of antiquity to twenty-first-century methods of crowd control, and finally examining their uses in techno music.

The perhaps more pervasive and personal technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are, of course, more prominent here, particularly in Volume 1. The iPod is one of the primary focuses due to its impact on twenty-first-century mobile listening, starting with Michael Bull's seminal work on the topic, represented both directly through his chapter 'iPod Use, Mediation, and Privatization in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (Volume 1, Chapter 5), and through various citations of his more extensive writing on it in other chapters. Beyond Bull's examination of private listening, the more social practices of children and adolescents are scrutinised in the works of Lever-Mazzuto (Volume 1, Chapter 10), Bergh, DeNora, and Bergh (Volume 1, Chapter 14), and Bickford (Volume 1, Chapter 15). The mp3 is similarly covered, starting...