Sonic Havens: Towards a Goffmanesque Account of Homely Listening

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon Goffman’s notion of the interaction order we propose that home and homeliness pertain to the degree to which we can control our auditory involvements with the world and with others. What we term “homely listening” concerns the use of music to make oneself feel at home, in some cases, through seclusion and immersion, and, in others, through either the musical ordering of mundane routines or the use of music to engage in sociality with others. Drawing on 29 in-depth qualitative interviews concerning mundane instances of musical listening, we propose the home is a complex sonic order involving territoriality as well as the aesthetic framing of activity through musical and non-musical sounds. We argue the home represents a negotiated sonic interaction order where individuals skilfully manage involvements with others and activities through their musical and other sound practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Erving Goffman
• Home-as-haven
• homely listening
• sound
• territory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the significance of textural approaches in sociology, see de la Fuente (2019).

2. In retrospect, one of the limitations of our study was that we did not ask our subjects whether – like the aforementioned sonic torturers – they actually ever used music as a sonic weapon. We readily acknowledge that any future interviews should perhaps tap into the “darker” motives that may underpin homely listening (e.g., whether “rebellious” or alienated teenagers relish playing their music too loudly for the comfort or taste of their “middle-class” parents).

3. As with Goffman’s microsociology our sample of interaction “data” is drawn from Western middle-class social practices. The latter is not, on the whole, favourably disposed towards unwanted sounds. As some commentators have argued “noise” is a relative term and could be seen as playing a “positive” role in community life’; where cultivating an appreciation is one of the major aims of the Positive Soundscapes Project in the UK (La Belle 2010, 83).

4. Something we have been unable to focus on here is how social actors use music to remember or engage in acts of nostalgia about “home” (as in country or region or city). This has been studied with respect to football fans and the sounds/music of the stadium as a performance of a type of “symbolic home” by Back (2003).