The ‘Creative Listener:’ Internet, Music, and the Computer-Bodymind Somatechnic

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the Internet as a technology of music listening as it is accessed exclusively through fixed-point personal computers. The author is concerned with how the listener actively and creatively produces their own listening experience as it is mediated through the fixed-point personal computer. It is asserted that the coupling of the bodymind and the personal computer produces a unified field of relations, an artefact which we can examine through the lens of somatechnics. This unified field of relations, what is referred to as the ‘personal computer bodymind,’ or for short the PCBM, realigns and reconstitutes listening pleasure in unexpected ways because it enables unique and creative listening practices contingent upon the functional nature of Internet-computing technologies and they are expressed in the interactive Web 2.0 culture. The chapter argues that the PCBM produces a new ‘type’ of listener: the creative listener.

The human body interacts with machines in many ways. Many of these ways are obvious, but none are ever simple.

Rawdon Wilson (1995, 240)

It is the freely imaginative mind that is at the core of all vital music making and music listening.

Copland (1952, 7)