Disruptive ambient music: Mobile phone music listening as portable urbanism

Abstract

This article explores the use of mobile phones as portable remediated sound devices for mobile listening – from boom boxes to personal stereos and mp3 players. This way of engaging the city through music playing and listening reveals a particular urban strategy and acoustic urban politics. It increases the sonic presence of mobile owners and plays a role in territorialisation dynamics, as well as in eliciting territorial conflicts in public. These digital practices play a key role in the enactment of the urban mood and ambience, as well as in the modulation of people’s presence – producing forms of what Spanish architect Roberto González calls portable urbanism: an entanglement of the digital, the urban and the online that activates a map of a reality over the fabric of the city, apparently not so present, visible or audible.