Abstract
This chapter explores the ways in which sensory perception comes to render music as both knowable and pleasurable through the interplay of bodymind with materiality—that is, through the complementary interactions with surface, weight, touch, feel, smell, size, and so forth. The author argues that the changing notions around corporeality, knowability, perception, and materialism come to reshape our relationships to the physical objects of music, and this then shapes listening pleasure more broadly. Following Bartmanski and Woodward (The Vinyl: The Analogue Medium in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Journal of Consumer Culture 15 (1): 3–27, 2015), the author emphasizes that the role of touch and materiality maintains a critical, yet redefined, position in music listening culture despite the emergence of digital music as the dominant listening mode. This approach is then synthesized with a theoretical framework of sensorial somatechnics.
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Notes
- 1.
I exclude gustatory, interoceptive and vestibular sensory systems.
- 2.
MP3 is short for MPEG-1, Layer-3. MPEG refers to the Motion Picture Experts Group, a consortium of engineers (Sterne 2012, 829).
- 3.
Elsewhere, I have explored this conversation by way of a cyberethnography of Reddit users (Glitsos 2017).
- 4.
For example, pop culture website Buzzfeed laments late twentieth century music listening in the article “35 Music Experiences You’ll Never Have Again” (2013), which includes activities like “waiting outside record stores for midnight releases”. See Tanner Greenring and Jack Shepherd. 2013. 35 Music Experiences You’ll Never Have Again. Buzzfeed, August 16.
- 5.
Jon Stratton covers this history in detail. See The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (2001).
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Glitsos, L. (2019). Materiality, the Bodymind, and Music Listening. In: Somatechnics and Popular Music in Digital Contexts. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18122-2_2
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