UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

of sound (albeit initially for different purposes than we usually think today) on an unprecedented
scale causing the enjoyment and consumption of music to become considerably different, and
everyday life as well. 169 As the playback devices came rather expensive in the early days, the
development of radio technology and listening practices seemed to have unravelled within a
setting where sound (music, news) could be listened to/consumed collectively, only to be
collectively forgotten and remembered. It is precisely the radio as a device that enabled the
collective sharing-in the musical experience that caused the emergence of that special feeling one
gets when hearing a particular song on the airwaves, knowing that many remote others are
probably also sharing-in this very same experience, at this very same time. The verses by a
Slovenian poet Janez Menart and sang by one of the famous singers and songwriters from the
former Yugoslavia, Arsen Dedić, adequately subsume the experience:
Noč bo že, glej, zdaj sva sama / Već je noć, gle sad smo sami [It‘s night already, look, we‘re alone now]
tiho radio igra / tiho radio svira [Quietly, the radio‘s playing]
in, nad pesmijo, med nama / i and pjesmom, meĎu nama [And on the waves of the song, from me to you]
od src pa do srca / od srca do srca [From my heart to yours]
blodi mehka bolečina / brodi naša bolest laka [Wades our joyful malady]
ki ji sreča je ime / kojoj sreća je ime [Called happiness]
ki zaljubljence spomina / koja zaljubljene sjeća [Reminding lovers]
vsega kar si žele / onog što si žele [Of their desires] 170
If in the music culture before recorded music listening was an ephemeral experience, it in the
(analogue) recording culture became a repeatable one. Now, in DME, the third, post-recorded (i.e.
digital) musical culture has emerged which relegates listening to music as a practice of listening to
fragmented and recontextualised bits and pieces, of remixed samples, and frequently to less
attentive music engagement.
If in the ‗good old days‘ of the vinyl the object-/carrier-/record-centred listening experience
revolved around first buying a record, and then playing it and listening to the tracks, usually with a
couple of friends, ‗unrandomly,‘ i.e. consecutively, the story has changed somewhat with CDs.
The CD enabled random/shuffle and repeat functions and programming of track order (pretty
much impossible with vinyl records). It could be argued that the need of the listener to ‗physically
engage‘ with the machine to replay, rewind or skip a track kept her closer to the practice of
listening to music. On the other hand, mp3s (and inevitable playlists) on the digital end of storing
169 See Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New.
170 This is a rough translation from the Slovene and the Croatian.
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