Mobile Music Listening: The Users and their Art of Making Do Lionel Detry

Abstract

Research on mobile music listening lacks empirical data to provide a good understanding of the practice. My ethnography of mobile listeners aims at investigating the act of listening by taking into account situational and technical dimensions of the practice. In this paper, I support a theoretical position to consider the listening environment when investigating the practice of mobile music listening. By looking closely at the affordances and constraints of the situation of use and of the technical device, it is possible to determine how these aspects configure the practice. My interpretations, based on Antoine Hennion’s (2002) concept of ‘performance’ of listening, confirm the idea of listening as a product of the ecology in which it takes place. Further interpretations can lead to detail the more creative practices of the listeners and develop a typology of users.