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ecomes a ‗world‘ of its own, a space which an individual may ‗populate‘ with mediatised images
and personal renditions of realities, past and present. Importantly, this aids the creation of an
audiovisual landscape, which significantly informs the way an individual perceives of the song,
and consequentially of the surrounding environment and the wider historical, social and cultural
milieus in which the song is inscribed through the listeners own ‗bodily‘ and symbolical
inscription into space and socio-cultural constellations. Not unimportantly, the song is thereupon
also inscribed into the memory of the listener. As Karin Bijsterveld and Jose van Dijck argue,
[S]ound and memory are inextricably intertwined with each other, not just through
repetition of familiar tunes and commercially exploited nostalgia on oldies radio
stations, but through the exchange of valued songs by means of pristine recordings
and recording apparatuses, as well as through cultural practices such as collecting,
archiving and listening. 163
A remnant of the past, with its malleability and openness of interpretation, a popular song
transgresses embeddedness on the individual level of the performer/listener onto the level of a
collectively shared social experience. Listening to a song on the radio is a completely different
experience as is listening to the same song on your hi-fi, iPod etc. Knowing that other people are
listening to it at the very same time not necessarily facilitates a collective experience, but it surely
posits the listener within the wider, collective audio environment.
Moreover, simultaneously a highly private experience and by means of participation-in-listening a
decidedly social one, music captures, reflects and produces feelings and ―music‘s ability to elicit
highly personal emotions and associations seems to help people to relieve their past over and over
again.‖ 164 For example, it is common, when listening to a dear song related to one‘s past, to relive
at least some of the feeling (and with its contextual experience and personal and more collective
past as well) experienced while listening to that particular sound and lyrics in a personally
significant environment, time, mood. And it is just as common to redefine and reinterpret the
feeling every time the song is heard. The collective aspect of listening to music, the Victor
Burgin‘s simultaneity of collective reception, posits the music in a way so as to inscribe the
individual‘s experience into a broader social picture. This however, does not imply that listening
to music is conducive to forming/maintaining a collective or a community. Still, as Philip
Auslander argues, ―the sense of community arises from being part of an audience, and the quality
of the experience of community derives from the specific audience situation, not from the
163 Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, ―Introduction,‖ in Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck (eds.), Sound
Souvenirs, Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2009, 11.
164 Ibid., 13.
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