Abstract

The focus of much research in the social sciences when it comes to music has been divided between on the one hand the use of music to manipulate, control or alter people's spaces and their actions/thoughts in these spaces through music or on the other hand how sub-groups have (re)claimed their own space(s) through the deployment of group approved music. In this chapter we want to look at what happens when the space to be manipulated shrinks to a single person's interior and mobile technology offers 100% personal control of the soundscape without any external input. In other words, space and place merges and music offers an unprecedented immersion in ones own world, regardless of geographical location or the surrounding social world.

By viewing mobile music as a technology of the self that no longer needs to take into account the wider social world, we will look at how mobile music can be used to either augment/enhance the situation one is in, or more often, how it is used to transform a given situation into something more pleasurable/acceptable. This intensification/negation of situations/spaces carries the cost of not being fully involved the current time and place which means that the user is inevitably ‘removed’ from engagement with immediate surroundings. We consider some situated examples of this phenomenon in terms of its political, practical and ethical implications.