Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity by Anahid Kassabian (review)

Despite the profound transformations of music recording and distribution since the advent of digital audio encoding, critical discourses around music still tend to value a Gilded Age conceit: encounter with a work. In Ubiquitous Listening, Anahid Kassabian, a leading figure in popular music studies and known best for pioneering research on music and the moving image, offers an alternative framework for how to understand music and its reception.

Kassabian starts with a logical argument. Building on the concept of pervasive, or ubiquitous, computing, promoted by researchers at Xerox in the late 1980s, she asserts that music today similarly follows us everywhere in our daily lives, emanating “out of the wall, our televisions, our video games, our computers, and even out of our clothing” (xii). Moreover, instead of demanding the kind of concentrated aural attention expected of concert music, this ubiquitous and ambient music is more sensed than heard, often becoming meaningful in ways that emphasize affective potential more than semiotic decoding. This inattentive but affective stance, facilitated through what Kassabian calls “ubiquitous listening,” creates “distributed subjectivity,” a condition that is non-individual and “not simply human” and that renders “identity” as an always emergent node in a constantly shifting field of sound and affect.

The body of the book comprises a series of essays (some already published over the last decade) that together function as case studies for the theory. Through analysis of her own experiences of listening, for example, to videos by Armenian filmmakers, musical episodes of TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and programmed music at the Olive Garden restaurant chain, Kassabian shows how listening, attention, affect, and subjectivity are linked. Her approach in the chapters is fundamentally theoretical; she is less interested in proving an argument with evidence than with asserting its plausibility. Kassabian goes further, though, by intentionally using the book’s entire form to reinforce the content of her theory. At first, the chapter essays appear confusingly unrelated to music or to each other. As Kassabian jokes in the conclusion: “She says what? Based on thinking about TV musicals and Armenian jazz?” She subsequently explains that she intended the book’s chapters to mimic the theory of distributed subjectivity by forming “the field on which I theorized” (111–12). Thus, despite a typical monograph structure, the book works as a distributed field of ideas, with each chapter an emergent, suggestive bundle of meaning.

This emphasis on a “distributed field” is a fascinating way to think about what it is we do when we listen to music. In fact, Kassabian challenges readers to explore whether the very sentence construction “when we listen to music” is even the right way to think about contemporary musicality. Since the nineteenth century, Western cultural understandings of music have been shaped around the work of producing sound, supporting discourses of composition, performance, and talent. Kassabian suggests that in a world in which sound is already everywhere, disarticulated from its performance source, music must become instead about affective experience, supporting discourses of technology, attention, and subjectivity. Listening is not an act of receiving or decoding meaning, but rather an emergent aural subjectivity, “a range of engagements across human bodies and music technologies” (xxi). Kassabian’s radical de-reification of music casts a bright light on the limits of text-based disciplinary approaches for assessing culture in the contemporary world.

Yet, despite offering the promise of reconceiving music reception, the logic of her theory does not always hold up. Ubiquity, for example, has enormous power as a given in her thought, creating the multivalent “field” that enables the possibility of distributed subjectivity, but it is not clear, exactly, how one would measure such a “field.” How and when is musical ubiquity a recognizable condition in history? Kassabian argues for the rise of twentieth-century mass media as a seminal moment, but she briefly juxtaposes this turn only with the concert-based auditory culture of the late Victorian period that immediately preceded...