RJDJ

For my Project 1 book review, I wrote about Michael Bull’s book Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (London: Routledge, 2007). Bull argues convincingly that sound in Western culture has followed a trajectory of increasing privatization and mobilization, which can be traced from Odysseus’s sailors using wax to block out the sirens’ song to the present proliferation of white earbuds in urban centers (and non-urban places) the world over.

In Bull’s view, the sonic privatization of public space through iPod use allows users to exert control over increasingly chaotic urban soundscapes and the oppressive rhythms of capitalism. Users claim a sense of power over their individual soundscape, which is often likened to a personal soundtrack to the film of one’s life. This control, though, is at least partly illusory, taking place as it does within a highly structured framework of consumption and branding.

Both Bull and Paul Virilio (as cited in Matthew Tiessen’s essay “Uneven Mobilities and Urban Theory”, in Steinberg and Shields’s What is a City?, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press) discuss the complex interactions between mobility, power, and technology. Both find deep faults with the increasing digital mobility of society and the power that it promises to bestow. Virilio warns us of the possibility that mobility is, “in fact, breeding physical inaction and willed disability (i.e., immobility)” (Tiessen, p. 119), and Bull cites denial of the “ ‘physicality’ of urban relations” (p. 28) and “fear [of] unmediated experience” (p. 155) as two undesirable outcomes of the spread of musical mobility.

I have a feeling this nifty iPhone application might cast those arguments in a new light (oops—visual metaphor!):



This video also brings up questions of control in design. Yes, the experience of walking in the city listening to (or through) RJDJ is still mediated experience, absolutely. But it seems to me that getting your iPhone to spit out re-interpretations of your acoustic surroundings is a different matter than attempting to cushion your experience of grating urban noise with a soundtrack of your choosing. RJDJ prompts you to cede some control of your personal sonic bubble to a predetermined framework; after you choose the “scene” through which the application filters the sounds of urban (or non-urban) space, the rest is up to the urban environment that surrounds you.

The soundtrack it creates might not foster a feeling of invulnerability, like Bull identifies among iPod users. Rather than feeding sound from your iPod to block the city from your ears, RJDJ constructs a porous filter for urban sound that feeds the city to you through one of many possible acoustic fun-house mirrors. As the gentleman in the video explains, this connects “the outside world to your acoustic perception” rather than protecting you from it entirely, albeit in a manner that’s still structured, still tied to the rhythms of consumerism.

There’s a lingering strangeness about RJDJ that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the tension between spontaneity (the unexpected and unpredictable nature of the urban surroundings that determines the sound in your earbuds, and that may have prompted you to insert them in the first place) and structure (the preprogrammed “scene”, the iPhone interacting more intimately with the urban environment than a standard iPod would). In terms of design, it sits in an interesting place: the application was designed to let the (urban) environment design your personal soundscape. Maybe it’s the slightly eerie comparison drawn in the clip between RJDJ and a “digital drug.” RJDJ opens up a fascinating way to experience urban environments, but hopefully not at the expense of listening, unmediated, to the sounds that make this experience possible in the first place.