Erik Satie dreamed of his music being played everywhere. Today we listen as we go about our business.

Portable, pre-recorded audio allows us to “tune” the environment we inhabit. This creates a first-person, user-defined sonic ambience or ‘furniture music’, that can accompany or facilitate other activities that one might be involved in.

*Simon Killer* [2012] dir. Antonio Campos

Headphones untether us from fixed speaker systems and computers. They allow us to augment our everyday embodied experience with a private, internal soundtrack.

These private and portable modes of listening can intensify the feeling of one’s own sense of subjectivity, leading to a unified, self-centric ‘soundtrack-to-my-life’ experience. In the 2012 film Simon Killer, the central character wanders the streets of Paris in his own private musical world, his headphone music functioning as a playlist of non-diegetic score for the film.

Sound vibrating in the cavity between the headphone ear-speaker and the ear masks the acoustic activity of the space one physically inhabits. Noise-cancellation technology seemingly eradicates it. Consequently headphone technology soundproofs us from the surrounding world. Michael Bull writes in Sound Moves:

“iPod culture concerms the seamless joining together of experiences in a flow, unifying the complex, contradictory and contingent nature of the world beyond the user […] Users report that iPod experience is at its most satisfying when no external sound seeps into their world to distract them from their dominant and dominating vision.”

Sound in the headphones vibrates in the private space of the individual listener. Conversely, sound in the cinema vibrates in the shared space of the congregated audience.