ABSTRACT
Introduction In focusing this study on music listening in everyday life, I focused on a type of music listening that has traditionally been characterized as singular and homogenous. For example, scholars have argued that everyday music listening experiences are passive, that everyday music listeners are inattentive, and that everyday music listening experiences lack meaning.1 In the past decade, a few scholars have begun to question the homogeneity of everyday music listening experiences as well as the rather pejorative aforementioned characterizations.2 So far, I have already delineated ways in which the participants’ mobile music listening experiences can vary. In the last chapter, I mentioned how sometimes the participants said that they audiate while listening to music on their devices, at other times they bop their heads to the music, and at other times they do not engage with the music in either of these ways. These accounts alone seem to indicate that mobile music listening, as a subset of everyday music listening, might better be characterized as a heterogeneous experience rather than a homogenous experience.
