Future Bodies, Future Music

Abstract

This chapter reflects on several practices of music listening which have emerged in the past decade and which integrate virtual or mixed realities such as TheWaveVR and 3D mapping at live shows. By doing so, the chapter focuses on where music listening is located and, moreover, where it may continue to venture towards. The author proposes that popular music culture is seeing an emerging trend toward virtual and mixed reality technologies in music listening which play upon notions of ‘the real’ and a general concern with ‘immersion’. Most importantly, this work expounds on what this concern might tell us about the bodymind in the music listening experience and how this is experience continues to be produced by techné. The chapter offers that next-generation virtual reality and ‘mixed reality’ technologies reconstitute the somatechnic capacities of bodymind dynamics in listening practices in a way that foregrounds the site of the body as the ‘ground zero’ of all experiential exchange.

Music is prophecy … It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future

Attali (1985, 11)