In the polyphonic tradition of the BaYaka Pygmies of Central Africa, music cannot meaningfully be a private event. Nor can it be cleanly separated from the full range of activities that constitute it. Composition, performance, and listening together form what Christopher Small calls musicking, a total social act too often stripped down by ethnographers and musicologists into what can be fixed on paper or tape. BaYaka musicking is intricate and expansive, referring to the natural, the human, the supernatural and all its confluences—this is its spatial and temporal context. One may approximate such an event by reading about it, hearing a recording of it, or seeing it represented, much as one approximates a painting through photography or a symphony through radio. Yet these are all approximations within reproduction, not the event itself. To listen to recorded albums of BaYaka music, then, is not to participate in musicking. It is instead an instance of what I would call atomistic listening: a mode of attention that isolates musical fragments from the larger structure, occasion, and social world that give them meaning. Likewise, to hear music in radio terms is to encounter it as a detachable, transmissible object, severed from the communal and temporal conditions of its making, and received as a sequence of consumable parts rather than as an event.
In A Social Critique of Radio Music, Adorno writes of this consequence from the most prominent form of mass reproducibility of the time — the radio — as ‘a tendency to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth as if it were a set of quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth.’ Atomistic perception rejects perception of the whole, and here is the fetish-character of listening is revealed: music divorced from its context—whether that is the context of harmonies beyond the melody, or larger, the spatial and temporal contexts of the event of musicking, such as the opera house, or the forests of Congo-Brazzaville — is music commodified.
Today, mass consumption and a higher degree of accessibility far beyond the lauded ‘democratization’ of art exist in the peculiar irreal space of the internet. In many ways, the internet has only this fetish-character; the dissolution of albums into singles as the unit of pop music, the rise of ‘vocalists’ as definitive measures of artistry, and nowhere more so than the permanent quantification and display of consumption which ails nearly all forms of activity quite beyond music. See thus, the niche of ‘social curation’ apps such as goodreads, alltrails, letterboxd. Last.fm, a data quantification site promoting its core function of ‘scrobbling,’— the record of users’ music-listening habits — provides the ripest ethnographic space to observe contemporary radio and its expression of atomistic listening.
What is unique to last.fm in the progression of music consumption is precisely its quantification — more specifically, its public quantification. Adorno’s ruined farmer, who despite everything, defends the order of things with a private Toscanini on the radio, now must negotiate with the fact that his equally ruined neighbor records and displays all his consumption, and has listened to Toscanini more than him and earlier than him, and listens also extensively to Karajan and Shostakovich, which is again, proudly displayed. Public quantification tips the scale over from art as a sublime expression to art as commodity; the fetish-character incorporates now a fetish of quantity and, with regards to the culinary aspect, the quality of the internet renders that the consumer consumes not only what’s easy, but eats more of it.
Quantification is also what links mass consumption to the anxious project of constructing taste, of proving one’s taste “good,” “better,” “useful,” or “broad.” Much of this labor concerns what has been consumed: how many artists one has scrobbled, how many total scrobbles one has accumulated, the Sword of Damocles hanging over the digital panopticon. Far less attention is given to how art has been consumed, which is most often on solipsistic, half-blind radio terms, as a private event emptied of the social and temporal contexts of the symphony hall, the Hamburg club, or even the simple record player in a crowded room. This may be a prejudiced judgement, if not for the so-called ‘tastes’ being validated through either public quantified displays—such as last.fm—or through conversations evaluating the merits of pop artists in respect to aesthetics. Again, the ‘how’ in consumption returns always to atomistic listening, and none move beyond the fetish-character.
The presence of many unimaginably large statistics speaks to the weight quantification occupies within its users in that they imply a myriad of strategies to ‘game’ the system. In conversations with various users, manual scrobbling—using a third-party site to instantly record scrobbles without having to connect and utilise streaming sites—remains a popular method, as well as the convergence with Spotify users in simple stream farming. Other instances of poor specificity in last.fm’s scrobbling algorithm, particularly in its inability to record more than one artist on multi-artist tracks reveal further consciousness of quantification in users when one takes to manual scrobbling to address it; that is Fripp & Eno, or Reed & Cale are not natural occurrences in the last.fm ecosystem—in fact, the care inherent in manual curation is itself another manifestation of the fetish-character and commodity listening.
Public quantification facilitates the rendering of music into a means to an end. Today BaYaka Pygmy music can be streamed, can be scrobbled, far removed from any of its political and cultural context, and fitted neatly in the imported and arbitrary idea of the album—itself another cog inside the iron system of the culture industry. Even before digital accessibility, BaYaka Pygmy music was already an image of a sound wherever not immediately accesibly—most clearly in ethnographic writing, though not claiming to be sound—but what is listening now, when one is able to produce such contextually textured creations, anywhere and wholly detached? If we have slowly and unfortunately progressed from musicking to listening, and with radio, listening to atomistic listening, then in the advent of even greater ‘democratisation’ so to say, of digital mass media, atomistic listening perhaps erodes simply to swallowing.
