The last time I was in a sound bubble was probably today, on the train with my noise-cancelling headphones on. I create my own auditory space within the public space of the train. I don’t want to hear other people. Instead, I want to focus on my own world of a book, work, or my thoughts. This world is virtual - it exists only because I manipulate the sonicity of my environment to adjust to my needs. Visually and physically, I’m still on the train. However, my auditory self creates their own space. Something is happening here between my body, mind, and with my powers of creation.

Mobile technologies

Our power to impact the auditory environment and create individual soundscapes while moving through public space started with mobile technologies. The media scholar Michael Bull has argued:

“Urban subjects increasingly move through space in their auditory bubble, on the street, in their automobiles, on public transport. In tune with their body, their world becomes one with their “sound tracked” movements; moving to the rhythm of their music rather than to the rhythm of the street.”

With both earpods or headphones and a screen, we declare the world around us different from our own individual space. If we take ourselves out of this personalized soundscape, we experience the world around us in a very different way. Just last month, Bas Grasmayer experienced this:

“Now, I just have to deal with whatever Berlin throws my way sonically. The terrible elevator music in stores, the sound of someone coughing their lungs out in the next street as I approach the corner, and every word of the conversation of the Dutch tourists sitting near me in the cafe. Surprisingly, I’m loving it.”

Especially the part about the sound of something you don’t see yet around the corner provides a very different experience of space and place. Suddenly, that corner isn’t just a visual obstruction as you traverse your own sonic space. Instead, it grows into a part of your auditory world through a simple cough.

Mobile technologies may have provided us with ways to understand (hi Maps) and move through public spaces with more ease. Yet, they also gave us the opportunity to disconnect from this world and withdraw into our own sonic worlds. Moreover, by staring at Maps to navigate our way, we also don’t look up and miss all of that architecture and plenty else of the world around us.

Rhythms

We all have our own rhythms of everyday life. We also all have our own soundtrack to our everyday lives. As I move through my own city or any other place with my headphones on, I move to my own beat - or at least I feel I have this agency. I block out (un)wanted sounds and feel in control of my environment. This goes beyond these mobile technologies of headphones and mobile phones. Think about humming while doing something or playing with a random thing on a table while listening to someone. The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his book Behavior in Public Places, divides our activities into ‘main’ and ‘side’ involvements. The former carry our whole attention. The latter:

“is an activity that an individual can carry on in an abstracted fashion without threatening or confusing simultaneous maintenance of a main involvement. Whether momentary or continuous, simple or complicated, these side activities appear to constitute a kind of fuguelike dissociation of minor muscular activity from the main line of an individual's action.” (p.43)

What Goffman shows here is how what we think of as a very modern and current era ‘problem’ of auditory dissociation from everyday life is actually a deeply embedded human action. We have always influenced our immediate surroundings through sonic actions. Previously, these were more directly bodily. Nowadays, they are mediated through mobile technologies.

The body is an instrument

Of course, our body is a literal instrument - just think about our singing voice. But our body is also an instrument of influence on our environment and rhythms of everyday life. What’s more, there’s a strong dynamic between our body, our mind, and the moment of creation. As we move through our everyday lives, we create the world around us as much as we are created by it. This harks back to my thoughts on ethics last week. If we accept this dynamic interaction, we start to understand music differently - and basically all sound as well.

When you’re in an anechoic chamber, you hear two distinct sounds. One’s high-pitched, the other is low-pitched. The higher pitched one is the sound of your nervous system. The lower pitched one the sound of your blood circulating through your veins. Here, in its bodily essence, is where we find the beginning of the musical body.

Our bodies generate sound and resonate with the world around us. We’re just not always aware of it. Nor can we influence this the way we think. Just putting on those headphones doesn’t give me control of my environment - it only allows me to create a manifestation of control. In a visual metaphor, this would be a visage. Perhaps, then, we can call it an ‘ausage’ or ‘audisage’.

We don’t need a map of our body to understand it as an instrument. Just like we don’t need a map of a city to understand it as a place to live, work, entertain, etc. We intrinsically know our body is musical. We have all these technologies to help us generate more:

• more bodies through avatars

• more space through noise-cancelling headphones

• more visual or auditory elements through augmented reality and 3D sound

All this ‘more’ can be understood as creating evermore cohesive worlds where we’re in control of our surroundings. At the same time, it can be understood as creating ever more dissociation and dissonance with the everyday world around us. Stepping away from either endpoint of this spectrum allows us to enter the gray zone again. In this zone, we can take our bodies as instruments. Our musical bodies ground us, no matter how we optimize, amplify, or enhance our surroundings. Make sure you listen.

Share

Personal note: I’m taking a week off next week so I’ll be back in your inboxes or Substack feeds or where-ever you read this on 1 May.

Love, Maarten

LINKS

🔕 Quiet time (Reuben Son)

“In the age of platform capitalism, streaming services like Spotify pursue endless data-driven optimizations that are measured against metrics of engagement. The results are not desire paths, but instead resemble the horizontal escalators one finds at airports. But as we find ourselves in a state of perpetual transit across platforms like so many virtual airports, we might wonder what exactly it means to be half-listening to a Spotify stream; what is the half of us that is doing the listening, and to what end?”

✘ So much to enjoy about this piece by Reuben. It also resonates strongly with my own piece above although it didn’t end up in it, in the end. What he does brilliantly, is to show how listening is this embodied experience. We can’t untangle our body from the music we create and listen to.

✏️ How artists can get recommended more in ChatGPT and Claude (Carlo Kiksen)

“Crawler bots pull data from trusted, structured, and relevant websites. Artists should establish a presence on structured platforms and databases to boost their visibility in ChatGPT and Claude.”

✘ What Carlo describes here isn’t rocket science, but it’s important to understand how ‘search’ is moving away from the channels we’ve all used for years and towards LLMs. Hence, it’s important to understand how one can be found through these still relatively new channels.

🫂 Almost forgot this was the whole point (Sound of Fractures)

“That one message reminded me: the small connections are the ones that matter. The content that “doesn’t work” algorithmically is often the stuff that helps me find the right people—the ones who support the journey, the work, and the vision. This is such a head fuck cause how many views your content has has an external impact, to the industry and other people it still signifies success or status even if its not serving the purpose of finding people who love your music.”

✘ I know this. You know this. We all know this. Yet, we tend to chase those likes on whichever social platform we exist (and that includes Substack, too). It’s an always timely reminder to have someone tell you: one real connection is worth more than one hundred transient ones.

➕ More than metrics: Understanding the humans behind the streams (Sam Thomason)

“A more sustainable approach to fandom acknowledges that not everyone will be a superfan, and that’s okay. Building sustainable careers and lasting connections, means artists and labels need to look beyond the nascent superfan model, to the broader and more dynamic ecosystem of fandom. This means recognising different types of fans — ranging from casual listeners to deeply engaged community members — and engaging with them in ways that align with their motivations.”

✘ In a similar tone as the previous linked piece, Sam provides strong arguments to move away from a one-size-fits-all fan model towards an ‘ecosystem of fandom.’ Everyone who fails to do this will not find a healthy fanbase to work and interact with at all.

🪻 AI is evolving — and changing our understanding of intelligence (Blaise Agüera y Arcas & James Manyika)

“Machine learning involves tuning model parameters that are usually understood to represent synapses — the connections between neurons that strengthen or weaken through lifelong learning. These parameters are usually initialized randomly. But in brains, neurons wire up according to a genetically encoded (and environmentally sensitive) developmental program. We expect future AI models will similarly be evolved to construct themselves. They will grow and develop dynamically through experience rather than having static, hand-engineered architectures with fixed parameter counts.”

✘ This is a long-read, so perhaps bookmark it and read it later. It is, however, well worth the time to dig in and through it. The authors end up with a vision of AI that is more collective intelligence than singular monolith. It’s an enticing, if also always intimidating, notion.

MUSIC

Sherelle released her debut record With a Vengeance. It’s a blinder, it’s so good. If you’re at all into bass music - and even if you’re not - give it a spin. It’s got that jungle vibe with lots of footwork and a variety of other bass explorations. It gets me moving, every time I’ve put it on.