UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Finally, if initially recording and music were accused of removing the sound from its source, 160 the
digital lives of music files seem to have removed the physicality of music entirely.
Music can be encountered either at/as a live performance, heard on the radio or from a playback
device. It inhabits the space for a designated period of time and cannot exist outside time and
space. To hear the music or to listen to a song means to be permanently on the verge of losing it,
until it is over when it is gone completely. Still, its traces may not wear off that easily: the listener
is not entirely ‗free‘ from its grasp. Rather, one is left with stirred emotions, bubbling mental
images of oneself or someone else in/from another place or another time. During the ‗musical
intake,‘ the music participates in creating a decidedly intimate, private space-time continuum. The
duration of the sound series, the melody and the lyrics consumed in a particular time and space
create a specific soundscape which is ‗fatally‘ related to the psychological constellation of the
listening individual, her position in a historical, social, cultural environment and not least to the
whim of a moment. The soundscape created by interweaving of melody, rhythm, lyrics and the
surrounding environment, and the memories and representations invoked by and while listening to
a song, renders an extremely fertile ground to be invested with individual‘s feelings, visions,
thoughts. In sum, consuming music can be understood in terms of fusion and convergence of the
song in all its dimensions with the individual‘s inner world, in all its dimensions.
Here Michel Chion gives a useful approach in conceptualising the role of popular song in cinema:
in his The voice in Cinema, Chion writes about the specific characteristics of a pop song—
materially, it is delimited by the capacity of a circular single record to just about three minutes;
formally, it has an overture, peak and ending; and most importantly, the form is repetitive.
Repetitive (think of the round shape of the record, circularity breeding repetition) in the sense that
it can be played again and again, and also in that the structure of the song is repetitive and
contingent itself: it may have a beginning, middle and end, but the very structure of a song
(couplet, chorus) yields to filling the structural slots with different lyrics. 161
Different words (that fit the same melodic structure) and melody thus can be consumed infinitely.
What is more, this randomness facilitates different parts of the lyrics, or in fact entirely new
(personalised) lyrics, to be applied and re-applied, in one‘s mind, to this open musical structure. 162
The dramatic structure of the song is interspersed with a refrain, which breaks the temporal
linearity to establish an impression of a circular repetition, of a neverend. In a way the song thus
160 See Ruth Benschop, ―Memory machines or musical instruments?: Soundscapes, recording technologies and
reference,‖ International Journal of Cultural Studies 2007, 10, 485–502, 488.
161 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.
162 Ibid.
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