Easiness and amount. Contribution of digitalization to the act of listening and its possibilities

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on the social-spatial relationship between device and subject and identifies the possibilities that digital technology lets listeners perform as listening modalities, such as individual listening, mobility, and multimedia listening. Analyzing the most relevant specialized literature, this work explores the socio-technological origins of current possibilities of listening to classify them as ‘innovative change’ or ‘substantial improvement’. A sound reproduction device timeline and their contributions determine what the enrichment of the digital era to the act of listening is and what reasonable future trends are to be expected.

The digital era does not add any new possibility to the social-spatial act of listening itself. Nevertheless, the digital era has prepared the technological basis for a new leap that would tend toward hyperpersonalization and the maximization of operative easiness. This research shows how digital has made great progress ‘inside’ devices functioning, but not so much ‘outside’ them.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital
• listening
• media archaeology
• technology
• music

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘listening’ could be interpreted as the whole human listening experience, but it is necessary to note that this research deals only with ‘technologically mediated listening’ in a specific moment.

2 For example, a Walkman forces individual listening, does not allow collective listening as a general rule, and, thanks to its portability, facilitates listening on the move.

3 Therefore, there is no reference to the “nature” or “essence” of listening, nor to the “experience” of listening since these terms can incorporate many dimensions and factors, from social to psychological to cultural, etc. (Fritz 2017; Peñaranda 2022, 18; Hennion 2002, 95, as cited in Detry 2016, 8), which are unattainable and unnecessary for the purpose of this work.

4 This clarification is important to avoid confusion: this research looks into how digital technology has influenced only “the act of listening” –that is, the social-spatial moment, the act. Not the selection or distribution of the music we listen to.

5 Michael Bull goes further and highlights that this isolation of the listener with his or her own music selection is like the privatization of the public space, the retirement to a private world of personalized music, which Bull qualifies as “total mediation” and “toxic pleasure” (Bull 2010, 56-58).

6 This point of view avoids analyzing only the algorithm experience (AE) (Freeman, Gibbs and Nansen 2023) as a collection and processing of data.

7 As an illustration, smartphones, smart speakers, or AI-generated playlists introduce new features, but any of them create a new possibility of the act of listening or alter substantially its socio-spatial modalities (individual, on the move, multimedia).

8 For instance, under the effect of a substantial improvement, a listening act does not become mobile if before it was not; or with a substantial improvement, it is now not possible to listen individually if this intimate possibility had not been set before. Specifically, a shared playlist, as an example, although it is a great advance, does not affect whether we listen walking or statically on a sofa, individually, or collectively (understanding it as listening in the same space and time).

9 In the same way that we also do not show the evolution of the transistor or other internal components.

10 Division of historical eras according to Taylor, Katz and Grajeda (2012, 12).

11 This trend had already begun with the phonograph, gramophone, and player piano (Roquer 2014, 85).

12 While we have just reviewed these lines, Neuralink confirms this trend with the implantation of the first Telepathy chip in a human brain.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Torras i Segura

Daniel Torras i Segura is a senior lecturer at TecnoCampus (UPF). Director of the research group SSIT (Sound, Silence, Image, and Technology) and executive editor of the Journal of Sound, Silence, Image, and Technology (JoSSIT). Diploma of Higher Studies in Neuromarketing, PhD in Communication and Humanities, and MA Degree in Political and Social Sciences. Teaching social theories on communication, the history of communication, and sound studies. His research interests are audiovisual silence, music and persuasion, and sound reception in the new enunciation context. He has published in The American Journal of Semiotics, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Journal of Film and Video, and much other academic journals.