Train Listening: Music in the Spaces of the 21st Century

Abstract

Listening to music on the train is a microcosm of listening to music in the technologically enabled developed world of the 21 st century. This article engages discussions of listening in modern environments and the methods employed to do so in order to move towards a consideration of new modes of listening and existing alongside music. The failure of traditional functional categories in order to understand the role music is playing in modern society is put forward as is a move towards a radical shift away from the accepted subject-object paradigm of listening. Power structures present in the modern global age are used to emphasise the larger scope of the train carriage as a representative structure for an examination of listening as well as technological societal developments. Modern multitasking trends as well as the impact they have on the mind when considered in the light of certain cognitive hierarchical theories are examined and then placed alongside elements of the Nominalist school of ontological thought in order to establish certain pre-existing theoretical trends which are being re-applied here.