The Interaction Order and Musical Sound: Shopping with Erving Goffman

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative interviews and extending insights provided by Erving Goffman (1983, 1971), this article argues that music plays a crucial role in the interaction order of retail environments. I suggest music permeates these locations of consumption; shoppers are presented as perceiving musical sounds as both “territorial offenses” and sounds that can also represent an “intimate ally.” Crucial here is the nature of territoriality that manages an individual's exposure through the symbolic and literal placement of boundaries around the self, covering and protecting the self while navigating public space, tacitly securing rights in relation to others, and minimizing encroachments upon the “territories of the self.” I contend that when shopping, participants can feel “at home” in these locations thanks in part to the role of music but also in other cases actively avoid these situations, using privatizing music as a means of regaining auditory discretion. The contribution of this article extends Goffman's formulation of the interaction order, accounting for the dual role that music represents, as both a territorial offense and an intimate ally for shoppers.

The sonic framing of place: Microsociology, urban atmospheres and quiet hour shopping

“…In previous work, one of the authors (Walsh, 2011: 142–54) used this aspect of Goffman’s work to suggest in an ethnography of spatialized listening practices that whether specific retail spaces (a theme we will return to) were encountered as welcoming or threatening was partly a question of whether the ‘music encroache[d] on the territory of the listener’. And central to perceived territorial encroachments was volume: ‘The perception of loudness is one key dimension of…territorial offense.…An extreme example is sonic torture’ (Walsh, 2019: 59). While the use of sound reproduction technologies to ‘blast prisoners with a continuous noise at peak loudness in order to coerce cooperation’ (Hill, 2012: 218) may appear as an extreme form of territorial assault, arguably, loudness plays a role in all intrusions on what Goffman terms sound space and territorial command.…”

“…The ambient qualities of sound are evident in how, for example, ‘nightclub DJs can alter people’s moods during the course of the night through shifting musical choices’ (Steadman, et al, 2021: 138). But the much-discussed visceral qualities of sound (Duffy and Waitt, 2013) also mean that the sonic can be an important source of interactional or spatial ‘incongruity between the projected ideal customer and actual listener’ in a given retail setting (Walsh, 2019: 13). The strongly felt nature of shopper reactions to sonic environments, where ‘music can be both sonically overwhelming and in other instances affirm shoppers’ (Walsh, 2019: 8), points to the dual nature of sound in retail sensory atmospheres.…”