Materiality, the Bodymind, and Music Listening

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which sensory perception comes to render music as both knowable and pleasurable through the interplay of bodymind with materiality—that is, through the complementary interactions with surface, weight, touch, feel, smell, size, and so forth. The author argues that the changing notions around corporeality, knowability, perception, and materialism come to reshape our relationships to the physical objects of music, and this then shapes listening pleasure more broadly. Following Bartmanski and Woodward (The Vinyl: The Analogue Medium in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Journal of Consumer Culture 15 (1): 3–27, 2015), the author emphasizes that the role of touch and materiality maintains a critical, yet redefined, position in music listening culture despite the emergence of digital music as the dominant listening mode. This approach is then synthesized with a theoretical framework of sensorial somatechnics.