Private music

Desde hace años el concepto de burbuja me ha parecido no sólo algo interesante, sino algo muy cercano por diversas razones personales, por eso no es de extrañarse que lo haya abordado en diversos textos e incluso el podcast Soma. Esas mismas razones hacen al capítulo Private Music del libro How Music Works de David Byrne algo irresistible.

Comparto un fragmento, libre de la traducción que hace que algunas ideas se pierdan de su contexto original.

"The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it,C allows us to listen to our music wherever we want. Previously, recording technology had unlinked music from the concert hall, the café, and the saloon, but now music can always be carried with us. Michael Bull, who has written frequently about the impact of the Walkman and the iPod, points out that we often use these devices to “aestheticize urban space.”4 We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film.

Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same. That said, the twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, ever the complainer, called this situation “accompanied solitude,” a situation where we might be alone, but we have the ability via music to create the illusion that we are not.5 In his somewhat Marxist way, he viewed music as an opiate, especially popular music. (I’ve met some serious Wagner fans, and I’d be wary of limiting the accusation that music is an addictive palliative solely to pop.) Adorno saw the jukebox as a machine that drew “suckers” into pubs with the promise of joy and happiness. But, like a drug, instead of bringing real happiness, the music heard on jukeboxes only creates more desire for itself. He might be right, but he might also have been someone who never had a good time in a honky-tonk. 

Private listening could be viewed as the height of narcissism—these devices usually exclude everyone else from the experience of enjoying music. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a drug called soma that blissed everyone out. It was like taking a holiday, and you could regulate the length of the holiday by the dosage. Has technology turned music into a soma-like drug? Is it like a pill you take that is guaranteed to generate a desired emotion—bliss, anger, tranquility?"