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Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life
On buses, trains, and streets over the past decade and more, youths in particular but increasingly older people as well tune into their personal stereos and tune out city sounds. Why? What does the personal stereo mean to these people and to urban culture more generally? Does it heighten reality? Enable people to cope? Isolate? Create a space? Combat boredom? Far too commonplace and enduring to be considered a fashion accessory, the personal stereo has become a potent artefact symbolizing contemporary urban life.
This book opens up a new area of urban studies, the auditory experience of self and place. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of the role of media and technology in everyday life. Urban, cultural and anthropological studies have been dominated by explanations of experiences drawing upon notions of visuality. But culture always has an auditory component that shapes attitudes and behaviour -- perhaps nowhere more so than in the city where sound is intensified. This book challenges strictly visual approaches to culture by proposing an auditory understanding of behaviour through an ethnographic analysis of personal stereo use. The author reformulates our understanding of how people, through the senses, negotiate central experiences of the urban, such as space, place, time and the management of everyday experience, and examines the critical role technology plays.
This book will be of interest to anyone seeking a fresh and incisive approach to urban studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, or media and communication studies.
This book opens up a new area of urban studies, the auditory experience of self and place. In doing so, it enhances our understanding of the role of media and technology in everyday life. Urban, cultural and anthropological studies have been dominated by explanations of experiences drawing upon notions of visuality. But culture always has an auditory component that shapes attitudes and behaviour -- perhaps nowhere more so than in the city where sound is intensified. This book challenges strictly visual approaches to culture by proposing an auditory understanding of behaviour through an ethnographic analysis of personal stereo use. The author reformulates our understanding of how people, through the senses, negotiate central experiences of the urban, such as space, place, time and the management of everyday experience, and examines the critical role technology plays.
This book will be of interest to anyone seeking a fresh and incisive approach to urban studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, or media and communication studies.
- GenresMusicAcademicNonfiction
216 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
35 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 21, 2025
Long before CDs, MP3s, Napster, and streaming apps made us virtuosos of curated playlists, Michael Bull’s Sounding Out the City embarks on a scholarly, almost forensic, investigation into the smallest technological revolution: the personal stereo.
Bull interrogates what headphones do beyond piping pop into your ears – how they negotiate our mundane routines, sculpt our psychic landscapes, and allow us to survive the urban jungle without making eye contact with strangers.
Bull boldly rejects the ocular obsession of urban studies, proposing a moral geography where contingency, avoidance, and asymmetrical human interaction reign supreme. He treats our ears with the seriousness usually reserved for city planners or tax auditors, arguing that sound, not sight, may dictate how we inhabit space.
We learn of a woman who struts through rainy streets as the tortured heroine of her U2 epic, commuters who deploy their Walkmans as shields against unwanted conversation, and users for whom the device is a pacemaker, life-support machine, or daily existential talisman. One respondent captures the essence of the experience perfectly: “I just disappear.” Another casually sacrifices train schedules to linger in a sonic reverie.
Bull’s ethnography unveils hilarious contradictions. Tokyo designers assumed miniaturized anonymity would charm consumers; instead, urbanites preferred bulky, wrap-around headsets, announcing to the world: “I am inaccessible, thank you very much.”
Personal stereos function as mobile newspapers, escape pods, mood regulators, flirtation shields, and occasionally as instruments of performance art – two friends share headphones for a Bjork-fueled patio dance, delighting in the neighbors’ straight faces.
Technologically mundane objects reveal themselves as profound agents of control, narrative, and self-fashioning. Bull captures how music transmutes space, time, and identity, turning sidewalks into cinematic stages and subway rides into private rituals.
This is a treatise on the audial architecture of human experience, scholarly yet sly, rigorous yet delightfully absurd, and deeply convincing.
I will never look at headphones, or the people wearing them, the same way again. Ordinary technology emerges as a key to understanding the complex relationship between humans, machines, and urban life.
Hilariously virginal, wonderfully incisive, and profoundly resonant, Bull reminds us that even the tiniest invention can orchestrate a symphony of human behavior.
Bull interrogates what headphones do beyond piping pop into your ears – how they negotiate our mundane routines, sculpt our psychic landscapes, and allow us to survive the urban jungle without making eye contact with strangers.
Bull boldly rejects the ocular obsession of urban studies, proposing a moral geography where contingency, avoidance, and asymmetrical human interaction reign supreme. He treats our ears with the seriousness usually reserved for city planners or tax auditors, arguing that sound, not sight, may dictate how we inhabit space.
We learn of a woman who struts through rainy streets as the tortured heroine of her U2 epic, commuters who deploy their Walkmans as shields against unwanted conversation, and users for whom the device is a pacemaker, life-support machine, or daily existential talisman. One respondent captures the essence of the experience perfectly: “I just disappear.” Another casually sacrifices train schedules to linger in a sonic reverie.
Bull’s ethnography unveils hilarious contradictions. Tokyo designers assumed miniaturized anonymity would charm consumers; instead, urbanites preferred bulky, wrap-around headsets, announcing to the world: “I am inaccessible, thank you very much.”
Personal stereos function as mobile newspapers, escape pods, mood regulators, flirtation shields, and occasionally as instruments of performance art – two friends share headphones for a Bjork-fueled patio dance, delighting in the neighbors’ straight faces.
Technologically mundane objects reveal themselves as profound agents of control, narrative, and self-fashioning. Bull captures how music transmutes space, time, and identity, turning sidewalks into cinematic stages and subway rides into private rituals.
This is a treatise on the audial architecture of human experience, scholarly yet sly, rigorous yet delightfully absurd, and deeply convincing.
I will never look at headphones, or the people wearing them, the same way again. Ordinary technology emerges as a key to understanding the complex relationship between humans, machines, and urban life.
Hilariously virginal, wonderfully incisive, and profoundly resonant, Bull reminds us that even the tiniest invention can orchestrate a symphony of human behavior.
March 20, 2018
El libro estudia el uso de los estéreos personales (tocacintas / walkmans) a mediados de la década de 1990 en Londres, UK. El contexto coincide con la explosión en el uso de los reproductores personales de música en la década de los noventas a nivel mundial. El Walkman si bien surgió en 1979, comenzó a abaratarse y a sofisticarse tecnológicamente durante la década de 1980, para la siguiente década su uso era ya cotidiano. Este contexto no lo menciona, lo cual es una crítica al libro, pero es importante para el estudio.
Michael Bull plantea las tres preguntas del estudio: ¿Cuál es la naturaleza e influencia del auditorio en la vida cotidiana? ¿Qué papel juega la tecnología en la construcción de la experiencia auditiva? y ¿Qué papel juegan los estéreos personales en la gestión de la vida cotidiana de los usuarios? Como respuesta a estas cuestiones, Bull sostiene que los esteros personales son instrumentos tecnológicos que les permiten a sus usuarios tanto modular sus emociones, como para utilizarlos de diversas formar para adaptarse al entorno urbano y social que les rodea, de tal forma que les permite administrar el espacio y el tiempo. De igual forma señala que el uso de los estéreos personales es una forma de mediación tecnológica del individuo con su entorno. Un instrumento que les permite re-estructura sus narrativas cotidianas dentro de la ciudad.
El estudio es de corte etnográfico(no en el sentido estricto), con muchas entrevistas, pero en la segunda parte, trata de reformular la teoría critica utilizando la metodología fenomenológica, para logra generar una explicación de corte dialéctico del uso de los estéreos personales y del sonido. Esta es la parte más valiosa del estudio.
Michael Bull plantea las tres preguntas del estudio: ¿Cuál es la naturaleza e influencia del auditorio en la vida cotidiana? ¿Qué papel juega la tecnología en la construcción de la experiencia auditiva? y ¿Qué papel juegan los estéreos personales en la gestión de la vida cotidiana de los usuarios? Como respuesta a estas cuestiones, Bull sostiene que los esteros personales son instrumentos tecnológicos que les permiten a sus usuarios tanto modular sus emociones, como para utilizarlos de diversas formar para adaptarse al entorno urbano y social que les rodea, de tal forma que les permite administrar el espacio y el tiempo. De igual forma señala que el uso de los estéreos personales es una forma de mediación tecnológica del individuo con su entorno. Un instrumento que les permite re-estructura sus narrativas cotidianas dentro de la ciudad.
El estudio es de corte etnográfico(no en el sentido estricto), con muchas entrevistas, pero en la segunda parte, trata de reformular la teoría critica utilizando la metodología fenomenológica, para logra generar una explicación de corte dialéctico del uso de los estéreos personales y del sonido. Esta es la parte más valiosa del estudio.
September 20, 2019
The most in-the-weeds academic book I've slogged through in a long time. I appreciate his research, but I could do with less jargon.
September 21, 2020
Interesting insights but this is positioned fundamentally as a critical theory intervention. Some of the theoretical discussions are less relevant to the actual topic at hand.
June 26, 2007
Thoughtful analysis of the way people use portable audio devices to color their experiences in cities. Critical Theory.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews