ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the mobile listener negotiates the relationship between his/her body, the shifting context and the music. It discusses particularly mobile listening outdoors that is, mobile listening in public spaces. While the bodily aspect of mobile listening is presented in commercials in a passionately exaggerated way, iPod users often leave their bodies and the bodily aspects involved in the question of mobility out of their stories. As a result of the new compression techniques of digital audio data, digital players are able to store thousands and thousands of music files. The television commercials also presented black silhouettes, dressed in different youthful urban styles, wearing iPods and dancing or moving around frenetically to the rhythm of the most diverse musical styles. Although these adjustments would conventionally be interpreted in terms of cognitive engagement, recent neurobiological research has demonstrated that they are regulated instead by the neurological mechanisms that control our bodily movement.
