2000_01_01_archive

The iPod, the City and Changes in Space

An iPod can save your life. You could be waiting at a traffic light,

waiting for the little green man so you can cross the road. Just when

he appears, the button you press (why don't these damn things have

proper names?) starts to make that high-pitched beeping noise. If

you're not paying attention, you might just step off the curb when the

beeping begins - for the other crossing.

Well, not when you're listening to an iPod. You'd be lucky to hear

anything. That's the first thing I noticed when I started wearing my

iPod around the city. The background noise that forms part of the city

experience - disappears. It feels like I've stepped one pace slipways,

into a neighbouring world. Slipped through the looking glass - only is

it I who have changed, or the city? Alice was still Alice, but her

world was different. I suppose I am still myself, but experiencing my

surroundings in a different way. Reflexively, the world around me

experiences me moving through it in a different way. I and my world

are shifted slightly around a normative axis, different in relation to

each other - exactly, in our relations.

Tell me that you can walk through the city at dusk in a black

overcoat, listening to the theme from 'The Sopranos' and not

experience the city differently. (RIP Joe Strummer, you're already

missed.) Speaking of The Clash - of which Joe was lead singer - I've

found that it's great marching music. Rocking in at around 112 beats

per minute (White Man in Hammersmith Palais), it keeps a great pace

for striding down George Street's dark concrete and dodging tourists.

I've never completely adapted to the noises of the city, having come

from a much quieter small-town background. I still look up at the

planes (isn't it wonderful how we've replaced the stars with ones that

move?) and pay close attention to the sirens. But all it takes is a

small white-silver lump of plastic, chrome and circuitry to break the

sonic chain of the city.

All of a sudden, my eyes work better. Perhaps it's just that I'm

relying on them more - something I wouldn't have thought possible. I

have been taking more time to study the street before crossing it. I

have to, because the noise of the engines (even those of buses) has

been deleted. These tiny little grey buds wedged deep into my ear tube

(yes, that's a medical term) have completely altered my perception.

It's especially noticeable on public transport. Music makes the ride a

bit more bearable. No longer must I be forced to sit there in silence

and endure the whining of a five-dollar slapper in cheap clothing

(unless I want to listen to Avril Lavigne - sorry, soft target). And

the city responds differently. Shop assistants smile but they don't

bother with the banalities. The only time I am approached and asked

for directions is when I remove my earbuds to untangle their cords.

The headphones say, "I am not here. I am busy, I am listening to

music. Not available."

Is this mobile music any different to, say, a Walkman? Or a personal

radio? We can dismiss the personal radio as being similar - it's far

too implicated in the electromagnetic field bathing the city. Its

content is often too local, too emplaced. There's also a difference

between my all-music iPod (or even if I'm listening to a spoken novel)

and listening to disc-jockey patter: the singers and narrators are

talking to me, for me - I am the audience, not the city.

But a Walkman? I say it is remarkably similar in its effects. Of

course, it doesn't have the battery life, interface or capacity of an

iPod (battery life is negotiable, AA cells are plentiful after all)

but these are mostly matters of degree. Still, the quantitative

difference in how quickly I can change my music is large. Instead of

being stuck with a small number of tapes, each of which must be played

or skipped through in a linear fashion, the iPod lets me make radical

traversals over a diverse musical terrain. The look of the city and

the mood of the listener changes immensely between Cyndi Lauper and

the Cruel Sea.

There's a logic of connection at work here. Somehow, through musical

and technical intervention, the city and I have become reoriented with

respect to one another. Like Mckenzie Wark, whose 'great outdoors

becomes an addressable space' (1) beneath the gridding gaze of global

positioning satellites, and himself a coordinate point within a

circular error, I am experiencing a change in space through the

addition and subtraction of certain sounds. The glass facades of the

evening city, western aspects splaying sunset into my eyes, are a

thousand times more romantic while listening to the Cure.

I suppose that I am far more involved with the city than I am normally

aware. The city and I are bound up in each other, although I

experience its wholeness far more than it experiences me. Perhaps

that's why I'm not aware of it - because its presence is always felt

in the same way. Unless there's a disjunction, something which throws

this stability into question, which highlights that there's an

activeness in our relationship - highlights that I'm individuating

myself, as (I'm told) Simondon would say (2). The iPod is that

disjunction, replacing the sonic aesthetic of the city and its

incipient affect. All of a sudden I'm thinking about myself moving

through the city, moving in a rhythm that's in time with a beat only I

can hear, remembering just in time that it's going to look weird if I

start dancing at the Cenotaph - shifted out of place, but not so far

that I forget where I am.

Just as well.

References

(1) Wark, McKenzie (2002) 'excerpts' from Dispositions