UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

which required more ‗action‘ to get the music playing and in a way a more intimate, sensual
‗getting to know‘ the music. At this point, it seems fair to ask what music-memory function the
abundance of ‗historical‘ music may or can play? Is it the act of downloading that in a way gets
the user into Menart‘s radio waves of sharing/connecting over a song, and no longer the act of
listening to the music? Or have the listening habits changed so as to make human ear and mind
attentive to the more general soundtrack-like musical backgrounds?
It would seem that the act of downloading has taken on at least some of that feel, as it is in the
precise moment that the user is ‗connected,‘ on-the-fly, not only to the blog and the blogger, but
also to the several hundred-thousand-big community of people who have previously connected to
and shared-in their own experience. Although rarely expressed, the absence of experiential textual
accounts can be generically ‗filled in‘ by user‘s own ideas of what the others‘ motives for coming
to the blog are. Not insignificantly, this idea is co-created with the music. The visitors all seem to
share-in at the point where music is the cause of affect, a trigger to agitate the user into visceral
look into the past that others have at some point also had the opportunity to take. And when it
comes to listening, the playlist on the level of the device-induced immediate aural environment recreates
the musical soundscape of the past. Thus it not only ‗connects‘ the digital listener to other
temporally displaced people who downloaded the same music, but also to people who have at
some point listened to this music in the past. Here it seems perfectly reasonable to paraphrase
Burgin and introduce the idea of ‗asynchronous collective reception‘ of music.
However, if blogged music is to be available globally and over longer periods of time, these
privately created, maintained and curated archives need to be sustainably maintained and safe
from the finitude of archivist‘s life, interest, the limitations of her resources, or
ephemerality/expirability of links at remote storage sites etc.
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