Whose memory? Whose music? Background music as an egalitarian auditory experience and the issue of the memory
In “Dezain suru ongaku” (Music that designs) published in 1966 Kuniharu Akiyama wrote: “Mood music, from the first instant you hear it, already does not belong to you. And precisely because it is someone else’s music, there is no responsibility involved. Even as you acknowledge its existence, you also fail to hear it.”
After many years, the reverberations of calling Muzak and similar sounds-like-music phenomena as “other people’s music” (Roquet 2016) are being reinforced by evolving technologies for digital music distribution and recommendation, and the accompanying changes in modes in which music is listened to, or rather used.
One of the basic criteria defining the ambient listening is memory. As a curiosity for the art music world, this particular feature of memory not only underscores the role of the mental exercise of memory in experiencing music, but also indicates the direction we are most likely to take as mass listeners, or rather as end users of the mirrored digital predictive models of ourselves bred by the music service providers who perform the memory exercise for us.
In my talk, I’d like to focus on what it means to listen to “other people’s music” in the context of memory, and to explore some of the key issues related to the dynamic evolution of music distribution platforms and related issues.
Keywords: ambient listening, memory, music, design
Biography
Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. Author of the book ‘Ambient. Cultures of Listening and Techniques of Sound’ (2024) and co-editor of ‘Musical Cultures – Listening Cultures’ (2020). Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for the ‘Polish Ambient Music’ project (2023). His research interests include listening as a cultural practice, music anthropology and sound epistemologies (sociology, anthropology, philosophy, neuroaesthetics, media and communication studies, and sound studies), especially with regard to experimental, drone and ambient music, as well as background music phenomena.
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland – piked@amu.edu.pl