Page 27 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

18 Cultural change and ordinary life

Another important study that shows the role of music in everyday life in
a different way was written by Bull (2000), who in general argues that ‘there is
no contemporary account of the auditory nature of everyday experience in
urban and cultural studies’ (p. 2). Bull deploys a detailed consideration of the
role of personal stereos in the everyday lives of listeners, with a conceptualiza-
tion of everyday life that draws on aspects of the work of Lefebvre and the
Frankfurt School. His argument and research cover a wide range of issues.
Most importantly, his detailed research on the way in which respondents use
personal stereos is then used as a basis for the re-theorization of everyday life
to take full account of the auditory dimensions.
Bull explores a number of aspects of personal stereo use (for a summary,
see Bull 2000: 186–90) and the most significant are introduced here to illumin-
ate the general trend of my argument. First, Bull discusses at some length how
music users construct narratives – ‘they enjoy playing a tape that reminds
them of something in their own narrative’ (p. 188) – to give pleasure to dull
routines and how the personal stereo is used to manage the anxieties of urban
living. He says the users’ lifeworld ‘is a lifeworld filled with potential anxiety
concerning the threat of decentredness within a world of contingency in
which the technologizing of experience becomes a successful antidote’ (p. 43).
‘Users often describe putting their personal stereos on as soon as they leave
home with the purpose of “clearing a space” for themselves’ (p. 189). For some
female users personal stereos are used to create a space where they feel that
they will not be so bothered by others – ‘Personal stereos are visual “do not
disturb” signs’ (p. 189). Second, he carefully considers the complexities of the
ways in which personal stereos enable the ‘escape’ from that which surrounds
users, and how they go into ‘dream worlds’, which Bull sees as like films that
the users construct drawing on bodily and visual experiences. In one sense, the
personal stereo provides a soundtrack to the filmic transformation of everyday
life on the part of the user. This is part of an argument that Bulls deploys
concerning the interaction of aestheticization and technological change. Thus
the technology of the personal stereo enables aestheticization that ‘creates the
world as an imaginary space, a projection of the desire of the user formulated
within the cultural remit of the stock of their imagination which is mediated
through the attendant sounds listened to’ (p. 188). In an argument that has
resonances for some of my own earlier (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998)
arguments and which will be further developed later in this book (see Chapter
4), Bull argues that ‘personal-stereo users do not project themselves onto the
world but rather construct the world narcissistically as projection of their own
“mediated” sound world’ (p. 188).
A key strength of the ethnographic work that Bull deploys and his
interpretation of the results is that it shows how aspects of the mundane and
the individual constitution of imagined spaces work in ordinary life. The
mundane nature of that ordinary life is well captured in the following:

City life is often experienced as repetitive and users are often consumed
with their oppressive routine. They describe taking the same journey to
work every weekday, forty-eight weeks of the year. They might also be
fed up and bored with their job, their routine and their journey. They