Thulin, Samuel (2013) Moving beyond the auditory bubble:apps, gestures, and musical participation. In: TEM 2013. Canadian Communication Association.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This article examines users’ relationships to mobile devices, their surroundings, and music by concentrating on three interconnected aspects of some recent sound/music apps for the iPhone: 1) the way they suggest a form of musical participation that challenges the separation of listening and performance; 2) how they expand on musical performance gestures to involve larger-scale movements such as walking; and 3) how this occurs in public space. After briefly contextualizing the apps by looking at the player piano, which also blurs the line between playback and performance through gesture, I move on to consider the promotional discourse around the apps, particularly ideas of immersion and personalization. I argue the actual functioning of the apps potentially challenges these ideas as well as the notion of the auditory bubble that has been attributed to mobile music devices. I draw attention to the multidimensionality of gestures involved in the use of mobile devices and how gestures are interconnected with digital, physical, public, and private spaces.