'Sonic Havens: Towards a Goffmanesque Account of Homely Listening' by
Michael James Walsh and Eduardo de la Fuente in (2019)
Housing, Theory and Society comments
Drawing upon Goffman’s notion of the interaction order we propose that home and homeliness pertain to the degree to which we can control our auditory involvements with the world and with others. What we term “homely listening” concerns the use of music to make oneself feel at home, in some cases, through seclusion and immersion, and, in others, through either the musical ordering of mundane routines or the use of music to engage in sociality with others. Drawing on 29 in-depth qualitative interviews concerning mundane instances of musical listening, we propose the home is a complex sonic order involving territoriality as well as the aesthetic framing of activity through musical and non-musical sounds. We argue the home represents a negotiated sonic interaction order where individuals skilfully manage involvements with others and activities through their musical and other sound practices.
The authors note
This article offers an analysis of a phenomenon we term “homely listening”, and the social and material relations that underpin it, via a framework primarily derived from the microsociology of Erving Goffman. As Manning (1992, 154) observes Goffman’s approach is to transform ethnographies of places, such as the Shetland Islands, hospitals, asylums, and sidewalks into ethnographies of concepts, such as presentation of self, encounters, face-work, territories of the self, etc. As such we aim to contribute to the socio-cultural study of urban sensory ecologies via an ethnography of the phenomenon of homely listening. Our argument is that homely listening may or may not coincide with the strict physical boundaries of the home; and, in any case, the latter gives rise to a range of private and shared modalities of listening. In short, the home is fundamentally a negotiated socio-material, as well as complex sonic order. We follow the foundational efforts of sociologists and other socio-cultural researchers interested in music’s role in everyday life such as DeNora (2000, 2003) and Bull (2007). We also concur with Nowak and Bennett (2014, 375) who suggest that studying musical listening requires a focus on “sound environments”: meaning the spaces, temporal orientations, bodily states and choice of technologies, that enable the consumption of music in everyday life. Our approach therefore focuses on one central sound phenomena within the home: the use of music as a means of aestheticizing and manufacturing domestic sonic havens. This approach provides our argument with an empirical anchorage point, allowing for the exploration of how music and its placement within the home responds to and signifies the presence of a finely balanced auditory interaction order.
