Syncing Cities: The iPod and new Urban Culture

syncing cities The iPod and new Urban Culture

Adam McFall

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introduction This essay outlines the cultural impact of the iPod and how the device has changed our perspective on a number of social matters. Firstly I will discuss the iPod with regards to the individual: how the device has changed the way we behave and act, particularly in a social setting. I will then place the individual and their iPod in the wider setting of the city and discuss how our perception and experience of the urban environment has changed.

The release of the iPod was a commercial success for many reasons: the timing, its simple design and the dawn of digital media distribution defined the eye of the perfect marketing storm. It would be trivial to parse the many factors which lead to the success of the iPod, so it should be made clear that within the confines of this discussion the most important overarching feature of the iPod is that it is a sensory device: one programmed to manipulate our sense of hearing.

PART I - ipod and i The iPod was built for one purpose: music. Every aspect of the design - its software, earbuds and scale were finetuned for an optimal and portable listening experience.

Although marketed as a device for anyone with a love of music the price point and storage capacity (up to 2,000 songs in the first edition, with figures growing exponentially in further releases[1]) meant it was tacitly aimed at the serious collector; those who had amassed thousands of CDs and wanted a way of freeing their music from the restrictive disk format, those who were used to taking a couple of CDs with them to play in their cars or on their Walkmans - to them the prospect of releasing their music from the clunky material body of the CD into a massless series of digits which they could take anywhere was extremely attractive.

After the release users began to share their switchover experiences with other adopters and prospective customers on blogs. Writer and critic Dylan Jones writes about his journey from analogue to digital stating that

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his music consumption patterns had changed significantly.[2] As an avid collector of music in many formats, Jones relished the opportunity to collate his musical library, and to be able to take it anywhere was a previously unimaginable freedom. However when he begins describing the cull of tracks from albums and his reliance on the shuffle function it is difficult not to sense the loss of music tradition. The sanctity of the album as a curated piece to be listened through in the order the artist intended, was cast aside for the whim of the listener. Previous formats had propagated the tradition of the album by trapping it within a physical object which the user had to mediate. If you wanted to listen to anything else you would have to invest effort in actually interacting with a mechanical system: lifting the stylus, rewinding the tape - these formats came with rituals which grew to be indissociable from the music and the way it was received. The erasure of the physical barriers caused by these formats has enabled a freedom where the user is under complete control.

This sense of control is only an illusion though, as Jones perfectly illustrates: with innumerable songs available instantaneously he relies heavily on the shuffle function to consume content which would otherwise be ‘lost’.[3]This entirely random and almost nomadic method of listening to music is a regression which was to some extent predicted by Baudrillard. In ‘The System of Objects’ Baudrillard outlines ‘advertising’ as an instrumental enabler of irrational and regressive behaviour.[4] Where the behaviour he is alluding to is profligacy, the mechanism is the same: new technology as the impetus for a change in conduct. Consumer society saw the rise of the desire to posses, just as the iPod has cultivated a musical solipsism.

Although it is concerning how quickly we embrace freedom at the expense of tradition, what are the wider implications of such behavioural patterns? First we must outline exactly what has been cast aside in the transition to digital media: the physical objects which once stored our music. Garner states that ones own copy of any given album is special to the collector: they are tokens of memory - objects bound to people and places specific to the individual.[5} There is also an art to musical media. LPs in particular are objects of curiosity; as a source of analogue sound they have the music literally pressed into

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them. Regardless of the format the ritual of approaching a shelf of cases or sleeves and navigating by hand, negotiating with the packaging and reading the insert are lost in the digital age[6]. The abandonment of these fine objects signals a move in how we treat music; in stripping each disk and LP of its essence and putting it onto a device which can accompany us anywhere, music has developed the character of abundance: listening to music is not something we set aside time to do anymore, it is an overlay activity, one which accompanies anything and everything we do.

The freedom to listen to our own music whenever we want appears to be innocent enough, but because of how easy it is to plug your headphones in when working or walking to a store an odd cultural phenomenon has set in: the culture of silence.[7] Where before the default overlay activity was often interacting with other people, the iPod has severed the serendipitous connections between people: friends on the street, coworkers, even parents and children, iPod users are ‘plugged in’ to a self-perpetuated reality of their own design. It’s hard not to see the appeal: the modern city is loud and uncontrolled, and the iPod affords the user an escape. To extend on an analogy used by Geisler, it is like a child playing a video game.[8] The child’s body and movements exist in our conscious, physical world but their mind is captured in a superimposed reality, one in which the technology of the video game regulates their mood and feelings.

This new power to negotiate our own realities is far more damaging than the casual musical genocide occurring in the early adopters library, but it is key to note they stem from the same thing. In both cases the new technology acts as a filtering device - realigning our threshold for what we will and will not tolerate.

As an individual we may find the ‘plugged in’ culture refreshing; appealing even, but as we move to the macrocosm, to imagine a society of isolated, selfregulating beings suspended in their own aural reality, a dystopia comes into focus.

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art of the obsolete The vinyl sleeve is a canvas for the musician to express themselves visually. Many vinyl owners see the sleeve as indissociable from the music: an extension rather than an addition. CREDIT: ADAM MCFALL

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part ii - ipod and us To expand on the theme of the iPod as a projector of alternate realities, it would be appropriate to analyse this testimonial from a New York user: ‘I enjoy having a soundtrack for New York streets. Having my own rhythm. I commute two hours a day. When I’m on the subway people listening to music on headphones often surround me. We each inhabit our own realities.’ [9] When one calls to mind New York a maddening image of speed and intensity appears. It is a vibrant city defined by its sensory experience - however the description of a modern New York commute appears quite the reverse - it is a recount of the culture of silence. It is more than that, though. Users are subverting the natural soundtrack of the city with their own self programmed versions, with each individual existing on their own frequency. This could be seen as liberating and poetic: the individual can code their day through a music playlist which is entirely detached from the spaces the individual may find themselves in.[10] The individual is essentially the architect of their own city; crafting pockets of emotion and response through what they hear.

There are two problems with this, though. The first is the negation of the architecture of the city in favour of an aural overlay. To what extent has the architect lost control over the impact their design has within the urban environment? To put it glibly, the architect has been forced to relinquish one of senses. Many architectural works take advantage of the environment and careful use of material to funnel or direct sound to a particular end. In my design of a municipal library in Rome located in a busy market square, the user was to experience a palpable sound pressure difference on entering the building: the frantic market and the oasis of calm which pooled in the centre. If an iPod user had been listening to their music throughout their journey to the library, and continued within it, an entire design intention has been annulled. Furthermore, in reacting to their own rhythm, are iPod users as aware of their visual surroundings? Can a piece of music have such a powerful effect on the listener that they stop reacting to visual stimuli?

The second problem can be exemplified with a second testimonial:

Thick walls of silence: in-situ cast walls would have created a powerful sound barrier.

CREDIT: ADAM MCFALL

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‘Sometimes it seems to look a lot more hectic and almost like I’m in my own slow world, going only at the speed of the music I’m listening to. The lack of day-to-day sound effects totally changes living in the city, so listening to the iPod sometimes makes me feel like I’m missing something when I’m walking alone.’ [11] This testimonial addresses the issue of withdrawal. In an exchange which is biochemically similar to the use of drugs the iPod user is a quasi-alchemist, creating playlists to release endorphins at particular points throughout the day, even if that wasn’t the explicit intention.

Indeed, users have reported feeling irritated and even violated if they are forced to turn off their iPods in public.[12][13} Michael Bull posits the theory that this irritation comes from the realisation that the virtual world constructed by the iPod user is very fragile and their illusion of control can be shattered at any time.

[14} But what of the long term effects? In negating the material city one becomes increasingly detached from it to the point where their contrived digital worlds are more familiar. Bull cites the urban theory of the warm and chilly where the ‘warmer’ we make our private social spaces, the colder the public realm appears because of the differential.[15] In this model the spaces a user could warm would have been limited to the home and other familiar surroundings, however these parameters disappear for the iPod user. With the option to personalise the urban environment, the user extends the warmth of their own home wherever they go, thus leading to a lack of exposure to the social ‘cold’. In the event that a user’s iPod is unavailable, the shock of the facing socially chilly spaces unarmed could be devastating.

The iPod poses many questions for the future of architecture in the urban sphere. As the pressures of life in the modern industrialised city mount, to what extent will its inhabitants filter out what they perceive to be unpleasant? With reference to music as mediator between the individual and the city, Adorno states ‘The greater the drabness of existence, the sweeter the melody’.

[16] In this modern culture of unhappiness, what other modes of escape will become available through the advancement of technology? The artificial, digitalised reality depicted in ‘The Matrix’ is arguably the absolute

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manifestation of a system generating an entirely false world for those ‘plugged in’ to it - but how far off is the iPod and other modern technologies from this?

The Oculus Rift headset, a device currently under development, is a head-mounted display capable of tracking real world movements and mapping them onto a (for now) video game world[17]. It represents a curious shift from the third to first person: in previous video game technologies actions were inputted representationally. A sequence of button-presses would represent an in-game action in a signified-signifier relationship. Oculus rift is a departure from this, as the physical action of looking around connects directly to looking around in-game.

Is it the role of the architect to track these new cultural phenomena and design with them in mind?

Perhaps the architect of the future will have the task of detailing these virtual worlds which are currently in their infancy. For now though, it is important for the modern architect to evaluate their waning influence on the landscape of the city and to understand these filtering technologies as a possibility for a new interface between the city dweller and their surroundings.

Oculus Rift technology. Will devices such as these replace material architecture?

CREDIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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references [1] L. Kahney, The Cult of iPod, (San Francisco, 2005) p. 10 [2] D. Jones, iPod Therefore I Am (New York, 2005) p. 23 [3] ibid p. 22 [4] J. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, in M. Poster ed., Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (Cambridge, 2001) p. 13 [5] A. W. Garnar, Don’t Delete these Memories: iPod and Materiality, in D. E. Wittkower ed., iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch, (Peru, 2008) p. 31 [6] Compliation of eight vinyl covers, illustrated on p. 4. Photo credit: A. McFall [7] J. C. Pitt, Don’t Talk to Me, in D. E. Wittkower ed., iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch, (Peru, 2008) p. 162 [8] L. Kahney, The Cult of iPod, (San Francisco, 2005) p. 139 [9] M. Bull, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience, (Abingdon, 2007) p. 29 [10] ibid p. 30 [11] ibid p. 29 [12] ibid p. 31 [13] J. C. Pitt, Don’t Talk to Me, in D. E. Wittkower ed., iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch, (Peru, 2008) p. 162 [14] M. Bull, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience, (Abingdon, 2007) p. 36 [15] ibid p. 8 [16] ibid p. 7

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[17] Oculus Rift page on Kickstarter: http://www. kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-riftstep-into-the-game [Accessed January 2014]

bibliography Baudrillard, J., The System of Objects, in Poster. M. ed., Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, (Cambridge, 2001) Bull, M., Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience, (Abingdon, 2007) Garnar, A. W., Don’t Delete these Memories: iPod and Materiality, in Wittkower, D. E. ed., iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch, (Peru, 2008) Jones, D., iPod Therefore I Am, (New York, 2005) Kahney, L., The Cult of iPod, (San Francisco, 2005) Linzmayer, O. W., Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colourful Company, (San Francisco, 2004) Pitt, J. C., Don’t Talk to Me, in Wittkower, D. E. ed., iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch, (Peru, 2008) Pye, G. ed., Trash Culture: Objects and Obsolescence in Cultural Perspective, (Bern, 2010)

image credits [p.4] Vinyl Covers: A. McFall. Credit to J. I. McFall for allowing me access to his record collection. [p. 5] Sketch from the design of Biblioteca Comunale di Trastevere. A. McFall [p.7] Oculus Rift: http://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Orlovsky_and_Oculus_Rift. jpg?uselang=en-gb [Acessed January 2014]

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NOTES [1] Text body: 2,086 words