LEGOfied Sound

Abstract

This paper argues that the album/playlist LEGO White Noise, released on Spotify in 2021, can be understood in relation to various other kinds of self-care oriented audiovisual media that have proliferated online in recent years, such as ambient, sound-healing, and ASMR. Beginning with the making of LEGO White Noise, this paper also looks at several non-LEGO-affiliated examples of these various categories on YouTube, tracing a common suggested mode of use characterized by creative, embodied, playful experimentation. Drawing on the work of post-Autonomist Marxist theorists, this paper interprets this underlying orientation via the concepts of free labor and immaterial labor, arguing that LEGO’s attempt to strategically situate itself relative to this broader trend on audiovisual platforms emphasizes the central role of networked and computational media as the common means by which individuals living in postindustrial settings not only perform different kinds of labor but also pursue different forms of self-care, comfort, and pleasure. What LEGO White Noise also demonstrates is the unique propensity of audiovisual platforms to produce aesthetic forms that, in their more ambiguous and indeterminate aspects, resist easy categorization, which therefore complicates any attempts to capitalize on or appropriate them. In addition to tracing a number of common habits, behaviors, and orientations between LEGO users of various ages and audiovisual platform users, this paper also stresses the need for more nuanced critical appraisals of the latent social and political potentials surrounding similar platform-based content.