Musical listening and social boundaries: framing ‘public’ and ‘private’ social life through sound

This thesis explores how the social boundaries contained in musical listening are used to manage the ‘interaction order’ of everyday life (Goffman 1959; 1983). It draws on Erving Goffman’s approach to social interaction and contends that, through the management of sound, individuals strive to maintain and reinforce an unambiguous definition of social situations (Goffman 1959: 254). Because individuals perpetually listen throughout everyday life, and are unable to literally ‘close’ their ears, compensation for this is achieved through the act of framing social situations with musical listening. By framing experiences of the auditory, individuals respond to and anticipate the variability of sound across everyday life. Framing is taken to be the cognitive ability to separate and demarcate perceptual phenomena from one another, to open and close individuals to parts of the world around them (Goffman 1974). Frames, though often associated with tactile and visual phenomena, are shown in the current study to be also fundamental to how the auditory dimensions of everyday life are experienced. Through framing social activity with musical listening individuals attain heightened control over how social situations are defined. Individuals form personal territories around themselves that function to protect the exposure of the person during the course of everyday interactions. Territories are used by individuals to register forms of encroachment, and this is evidenced in the context of sound by the formation and management of ‘sound-space’ (Goffman 1971: 46). Sound-space is the immediate territory around individuals that, although widely fluctuating depending on location, defines an acceptable sound level for individuals. This threshold level represents for listeners the difference between being exposed and comfortably experiencing everyday auditory phenomena. The notion of sound-space is shown in the current work to be directly connected to the use of musical listening as a framing device. Musical listening is shown as a way listeners shape, limit and define the scope of their sound-space. This confirms and builds on Goffman’s contention that sound-space is a type of ‘sacred’ territory of the self that individuals aim to keep unperturbed throughout everyday life. Musical listening is one of the ways that individuals maintain their auditory preserve. This thesis argues that when framing social situations through musical listening, individuals provide themselves with principles of organisation that govern events and those individuals’ involvement in them (Goffman 1974: 10-11). In the case of the home, this thesis finds that music is used to organise the activity of cooking, cleaning and other domestic duties; in office situations, it is used to construct suitable auditory working conditions; and during commuting to and from work, listening acts as a social resource used to configure the experiences of public and private travel. In each of these social situations of musical listening, I observe that musical listening is linked with how interpersonal interaction is undertaken and how social situations are coherently defined by social actors. I conclude by suggesting that the framing device of musical listening helps to shape social boundaries and therefore plays a crucial role in ensuring the coherence of public and private modes of social behaviour.