ABSTRACT
London and uses her personal stereo throughout this time. She likes to listen both to the radio and to taped music on her machine. She listens to music habitually, waking up to it and going to sleep to it. Her description of listening sheds some light upon the connections between technology, experience and place. Using a personal stereo appears to constitute a form of company for her whilst she is alone, through its creation of a zone of intimacy and immediacy. This sense of intimacy and immediateness . . . appears to be built into the very structure of the auditory medium itself. The headphones of her machine fit snugly into the ears to provide sound which fills the space of cognition. The ‘space’ in which reception occurs is decisive, for just as the situation of the television in the home changes the structuring of experience there, so the use of a personal stereo changes the structuring of experience wherever it is used. Mandy describes herself as being where the music or the DJ is. She constructs an imaginary journey within a real
Geography 5 (2004): 3-20; and Karin Bijsterveld’s “ ‘The city of din’: decibels, noise and neighbors in the Netherlands, 1910-1980” in Osiris 18 (2003): 173-93.
