- The Walkman effect is an essay concerning the rise of people wearing Walkmans when walking though a space.
- This essay came out just when Walkmans where on the rise, and it shows some good insight into how listening technologies can shape everyday sound experiences
Key Concepts
The key concepts that I noticed when reading this essay where how portable listening was reshaping public spaces. It shows how the listener creates a bubble of audio, that’s a private soundtrack that overlays into the public world, which in turn changes the simple act of walking into a performative art. I think it’s important to notice how much this had become a norm within the modern world and how our own playlists or music can shape the way we interact with public and private spaces.
From a sound artists perspective
When listening to your own music in a public space, I think you start to notice how sound maps into the space around us. This gives us a spacial layout of sound that can feed and change from where we are and what music we are listening to. Also, it takes note that when we listen to the same song in a different environment it can change the way it is heard and vice versa. I think another big part of this for me is the sonic isolation that accuses from listing in these formats. It could be an idea as a sound artist to redesign sound in a way that can make it important to engage with people environment. Maybe the challenge now is to find is too suggest new ways to privatise the world sonically. For those of us in sound arts, Hosokawa invites us to think about how sound shapes our space and environment.
How listening shape our relationship to the environment?
I find that personal listening reshape our own environments, we live through and filter out our surroundings with the sound we choose to listen to. Depending on what we are listening to it can make the city feel alive, calming or even sad. The downside of this is that it makes us loose touch of the natural acoustic ecology in the world around us and it in turn looses its texture that gives this place its identity.
Is the “Walkman effect” a positive or negative change?
Personally I would say it is both. These is some positive waves of being able to be the author of your own world and to use this creative empowerment and emotional regulation. However the downfall of this is that it isolates listeners and makes them oblivious to the acoustic ecology that goes on around everyone. I think it sits on that fine line, on one hand its great to give you feel free. However as a sound artist it can contradictory as it takes you out of the communal experience of being in a certain place.