Sound Moves

In an interview on The Ethnography of Music

Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience looks at the effect of personal music devices on the people who use them. Tell me about the book.

Michael Bull is a very influential writer in a new field called sensory studies. Scholars of sensory studies examine the social and cultural aspects of the human senses and sensations. Here the study of music takes a very strong embodied turn. This book, in a way, is thus less about music and more about aurality and hearing. This book is a classic in this field, especially because of the remarkably contemporary topic. Bull’s argument and findings – again based on ethnographic research – point to the ways in which people create personalised urban soundscapes through their portable music players. The city, in this sense, becomes a very unique soundscape that each of us can choose.

Is it a good thing that iPods allow us to escape our immediate reality into the world of music any time we choose?

I am incredibly old fashioned about these things. Personally, I always like to tune into the soundscape as it comes, rather than craft one of my own. To a great degree it has to do with where I live. I live on a very small island, populated by few people who tend to live quite apart from one another. With the exception of the occasional seaplane humming over my head or the ferry horn when the boat leaves, all the noises I hear on a daily basis are natural: birds, the winds, and things like that. So when I go to a city I like to feel like I’m escaping. It’s an adventure, really. I wonder if I’m going to last the day in Vancouver – or some other metropolis – or if my ears are going to blast before I’m due to go back home to my soundscape heaven. So what I’m trying to say is that whether I love it or hate the soundscape that I’m in is always fascinating to me.