| dc.description.abstract | Throughout this thesis, I argue how the loudness war has affected our listening experience,
through affect and attention, when listening to ubiquitous music. This is done in order to show
that music is an ever changing activity. This means that how we understand music and
consume it, can never be fixed. In the theoretical framework, the loudness war and ubiquitous
listening are linked together through the concepts of listening experience and listening
formation. The loudness war is a conflict in the ongoing history of sound reproduction where
music is getting more compressed in order to achieve louder sounding music. This is in line
with the demands of music consumers, but this goes against the grain of audiophiles.
Ubiquitous music is a concept which says that music is becoming more ubiquitous and
therefore requires a less attentive listening mode. Despite the fact that ubiquitous music
requires less attention, it still produces affective responses. Listening formation ties this all
together because it theorizes the shared listening experience. The case study of this thesis,
which is a musical analysis, shows how the theoretical framework works in practice. Here,
two albums of Oasis are discusses, first through contemporary reviews from 1995-2000. This
is in order to show how music is generally reviewed and show the listening formation of the
time that the albums came out. Secondly, I have showed my own listening formation by
performing a new musical analysis. Because I am not a part of the same listening formation as
the contemporary reviewers, my methods, observations and outcomes are different. All
together this thesis shows how our understanding of listening experience affects our opinion
on music | |
