Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity

How does the constant presence of music in modern life - on iPods, in shops and elevators, on television - affect the way we listen? In this title, the author investigates many sounds that surround us and argues that this ubiquity has led to different kinds of listening. "Anahid Kassabian offers us a way of thinking about listening that is dynamic, unique, timely and original. Kassabian reimagines listening for our age; she constructs new objects and asks fresh questions. Ubiquitous Listening offers a new foundation for understanding music in contemporary life ."—Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Origins of Sound Reproduction "[This work] is an important study of a phenomenon that has a wide-ranging significance... [Kassabian's] approach to the subject incorporates insights and poses challenges to existing paradigms in a range of interconnected fields, and is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship at its most innovative."—Steve Waksman, author of Instruments of Desire: the Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience “A leading light in the burgeoning field of sound studies, Anahid Kassabian has richly expanded the field with the many insights of Ubiquitous Listening. Brilliantly comparing and contrasting how we hear ubiquitous sound with how we listen to music, Kassabian deepens our understanding of affect, technologies of attention and distributed subjectivities. A must read for those of us doing critical theory in these times.”—Patricia Ticineto Clough, editor of The Affective Turn How does the constant presence of music in modern life - on iPods, in shops and elevators, on television - affect the way we listen? With so much of this sound, whether imposed or chosen, only partially present to us, is the act of listening degraded by such passive listening? In "Ubiquitous Listening", Anahid Kassabian investigates the many sounds that surround us and argues that this ubiquity has led to different kinds of listening. Kassabian argues for a new examination of the music we do not normally hear (and by implication, that we do), one that examines the way it is used as a marketing tool and a mood modulator, and exploring the ways we engage with this music.