Personalising a Sense of Place with Headphones
Music is something that connects us all. Our tastes may differ but everyone on the planet can relate to some form of music. It is a universal human trait and can be found in all cultures. Something that is important to realise that it is embedded into everyday life, all of our rituals of the day can revolve around music, whether it is listening to the radio whilst cooking the dinner or jamming out to your favourite tunes on the bus, it is there constantly. People use music to express their identity, which also gets shown in the landscapes they live in. With the digital age, music can be pretty much consumed anywhere and can be produced and consumed at the same time. It is important to remember that music is part of the production and consumption of place.
A sense of place is developed through visiting places personally or by getting to know them through mediated sources such as the news or other people’s views. It is defined as the feelings and perceptions you have about a place and it is created by the characteristics of a place. This articles aim is to discuss how headphones can be used to adapt your sense of place and make it even more personalised, when visiting a place. The artificial generation of emotions can alter how place makes us feel and equally how we feel about place.
With the ability to merely press skip and listen to a new song, you can alter your sense of place within seconds. Using this “superpower” you can match your mood to your music, and therefore linking a mood to a place. For example, if travelling through a historical area, putting some period music on will help to bring out curiosity and imagination as it brings the place to life. The sense of place that you pick up will be much more vibrant as it is being amplified through the use of music. Alternatively, headphones can be used to distort the original sense of place, making somewhere completely unlike what is actually is. Music can equally produce a bodily response and evoke certain emotions, whether positive or negative (Anderson, 2004)
An example I like to use when discussing this with people is walking down my local high street in Exeter. Just like other high streets in the UK, or in fact the world, it is bustling, busy with shoppers, street performers earning a living, almost chaotic. Putting headphones in takes you out of this world and places you within your own. No longer do you smile at people, spare change for the homeless or stop and watch the street performers. Playing something happy with a cheerful beat can make the drab background of the highstreet seem far less bleak. Equally, switch to a downcast song and perhaps the cheery faces of the other pedestrians fade away and negative connotations arise from this place.
This isn’t a modern concept either. Ever since 1979, when Sony released their Walkman (Cool Material, n.d.) people have wanted to listen to what they want, wherever they want, whenever they want. People have been creating personalised senses of place for decades but unlike before them these were far more multi-sensory than before (Kinayoglu, 2009). This concept has been occurring over such a long timescale it could be linked with the idea of keeping up with a national identity. Keeping up with everyone else has led to nearly everyone having the ability to change their sense of place rapidly. Furthermore, with the advent of globalisation headphone prices have dropped due to manufacturing abroad. Now any one and everyone can listen to music on the go, compared with back in the early 80s when it was a luxury.
Headphones allow individuality and anonymity (Petrusich, 2016) that helps us to feel unique and develop our own identity. Hearing is by far one of the most important sense in the entire body. This is suggested because we cannot close our ears, unlike our eyes and mouths which we can shut (Tuan, 1990). Using auditory sensory to alter the way place makes us feel is one which is highly complex as mixing the emotions of what we can see and what we can hear can lead to a mixture of far more complicated emotions. Even one’s favourite place in the world, may present itself as hostile or unfriendly if the correct music has been chosen.
The main area that the concepts I am talking about concern largely pedestrianised areas such as high streets or shopping centres. Studies have also been carried out on music’s effect on pedestrian mobility. It is shown that listening to music with a steady beat can impact the rhythm to which we walk (Fairley, Sejdić and Chau, 2010). This has the implications of unconsciously walking at a certain speed. It increases overall flow of pedestrian walkers, but in contrary it is dependant on the type and tempo of music. In theory, not everyone has to be listening to music to have a high pedestrian flow, as long as a multitude of people have headphones the crowds will move fast enough. On the other hand, music can be a distraction in these environments. Not only will our attention be drawn away from the dangers that face us in our everyday but music also takes us away from paying attention to what is going around us. Being taken away from what is really there by missing out on the architecture, culture and history, the sense of places that we personalise to our tastes may in fact be fake. What we experience may be nothing like what is in fact there to be experienced. Music is making us blind to the inequalities that surround us by distracting us from homeless or people much lower than us in society. Although, music will be creating a positive personal sense of place, by doing this through the exclusion of negative ideas, is creating more inequalities than before.
Headphone users can sometimes seem like “millennial zombies”. Unlike psychogeography which is defined as how the environment makes people feel, headphone users are affecting how place feels to others. This is the locale of a place which is made up the physical characteristics, events and character of somewhere. Rather than focusing on how the individual feels, we need to focus on how the sense of place of other place users is affected by these people. From personal experience, headphone users seem to walk into me a lot more than unplugged people. To people on the outside of this technological bubble, it is seen as rude and inconsiderate. It even causes their own sense of place to be neglected by other people, allowing negative imagery to rise due to minor anti-social behaviour. At the extreme end of the scale they can be seen as taking us out of society. By plugging in they are retreating out of the chance of social interaction. Headphone users are never asked questions such as directions or information about a place (Mills, n.d.). The simple use of headphones could be generating a new disjoined version of society all due to the select few who wish to adjust how place makes them feel.
Creating this personal bubble of your own sense of place also brings with its isolation from the outside of the world. This aural self — isolation also enables the music to have the biggest impact us. By not letting other people influence us, and choosing the right soundtrack, we can be the hero in our own lives. Whether you are feeling like the underdog or the champion, listening to music can alter how you feel within a place (Petrusich, 2016). Isolation can also be perceived as loneliness or segregation. Perhaps on second thought, we shouldn’t frown down on headphone users but welcome them with open arms into our modern communities?
The trick is knowing when and when not to have headphones in. In today’s society it is perfectly acceptable to walk down the street with your headphones in listening to the latest release. However, to know when it is more worthwhile and take them out and immerse yourself in a place is a skill to develop in itself. Furthermore, with the knowledge of how to use music to your advantage, it can be used to magnify the sense of place you have. After a true sense of place has been developed, using music to increase this feeling can be achieved. What we can deduce though is that your sense of place is now more personal than ever before.
References
Anderson, B. (2004). Recorded music and practices of remembering. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), pp.3–20.
Cool Material. (n.d.). The History of Headphones. [online] Available at: https://coolmaterial.com/roundup/history-of-headphones/ [Accessed 16 Nov. 2019].
Fairley, J., Sejdić, E. and Chau, T. (2010). An investigation of stride interval stationarity in a paediatric population. Human Movement Science, 29(1), pp.125–136
Kinayoglu, G. (2009). The Role of Sound in Making of a Sense of Place in Real, Virtual and Augmented Environments. Ph.D. University of California.
Mills, P. (n.d.). Are headphones making us anti-social? — Beats Booster. [online] Beats Booster. Available at: http://beatsbooster.com/are-headphones-making-us-anti-social/ [Accessed 16 Nov. 2019].
Petrusich, A. (2016). Headphones Everywhere. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/headphones-everywhere [Accessed 16 Nov. 2019].
Tuan, Y. (1990). Topophilia. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.8,9.
