Sounding out the City-Michael Bull

The ‘Site’ and ‘Horizon’ of Experience

1. Personal stereo use reorientates and re-spatializes the users’ experience with users often describing the experience in solipsistic and aesthetic terms. Personal stress appear to provide an invisible shell for the user within which the boundaries of both cognitive and physical space become reconstructed. (P.31) 
2. The environment is re-appropriated and experienced as part of the users desire. Through her privatised auditory experiment the listener gets ‘more’ out of the environment, not by interacting with it but precisely by not interacting. Actual environment, unadorned, are not normally sufficient for personal-stern users. It is either populated with people or merely mundane. Music listened to through personal stereo makes it ‘what it is’ for the user and permits the recreation of the disked space to accord with the wishes of the user. (p.37) 
3. Personal stereos can be constructed as functioning as a form of ‘auditory mnemonic’ in which users attempt to construct a sense of narrative within urban spaces that have no narrative sense for them. The construction of a narrative becomes an attempt to maintain a sense of pleasurable coherence in those spaces that are perceived to be bereft of interest. (Mnemonic: a system such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations which assists in remembering something.)

The Management of Cognitive Contingency 

1. The user repeatedly plays his or her own favourite track of ‘the tape of the day’ so as to sustain the chosen mood. The same favourite or ‘successful’ track will be multiply recorded onto the tape and played continuously. This not a too infrequent activity amongst those users who wish to maintain a static mood whilst being physically mobile. In the above examples mood is sustained through a series of complex social manoeuvres. The external environment is perceived as an obstacle to be surmounted.  
2. Users often describe the transformative function of listening to music through personal stereos in terms of energy… “If I’m in a bad mood I listen to different sorts of music . I turn it up louder. I don’t want anyone else to put me in a bad mood. If I’m in a bad mood I have to block everything out so nobody else can put me in a bad mood. If I’m in an O.K mood it puts me in an even better mood. But it won’t get me out of a bad mood. (Gemma: Interview number 24) (p.46)  
3. This continuation of mood from home to street is achieved by bridging these spaces with music. In doing so, the distance from leaving her house to arriving at her destination is negated or overlaid by the use of her personal stereo…If, for example, a user is merely going to work, then use might change their mood into one that is more suitable, successful and appropriate for the tasks of the day. 

Aestheticising Everyday Life: A Critique

Aestheticizing; to depict as being pleasing or artistically beautiful; represent in an idealized or refined manner. 

Bull uses the final chapter to discuss the negative more contentious aspects of personal stereo usage. The chapter aligns perfectly with my own ideas on ‘Soundtracking’ and the fabrication of ones experience when using personal stereos and noise cancelling technology. I persoanlly feel that Bull and other writers lack definitive definition of this activity, therefore I prepose’Soundtracking’. The listener situates themselves with the sonic environment while in the ‘theatre’ i.e public space and uses the sounds as a platform for  escape. The same way a soundtrack situates itself within a film and the theatre and helps guide the audience into the story. 

1. Aestheticization is a strategy embedded in the use of a range of communication technologies…modes of aesthetic appreciation concerning looking at a painting or in listening to a piece of music need to distinguished from aestheticising the practices of everyday life. (P.171) 
2. “But when I’m out I’m looking for things that I see—in the world, human, interaction—beautiful things that I think can touch my soul—you know, that certain sound at a certain time and it will just move me to tears—an it is filmic…But because I’m listening to music thats’ really tender it moves me even more. (Jay: Interview number 33)—Jay aestheticises her experience through musical accompaniment. The experience is described as having pathos in the same way as if she were watching a film or television programme on poverty from the comfort of her home. Implied in the above description is that if the music is not right, then somehow the woman in the street, who is really there, will not have the same presence. The situation is ‘real’ if it is filmic. 

The above is crucial for my argument