Mobile Listening, Disruptive Ambient Music and Public Art Projects in Madrid

Abstract

Since the second half of the twentieth century, a tentative history of mobile listening in the city could be drafted around an articulation between market, portable technologies and sound disruptions and dissidences. With the commercialization and adoption of personal stereos, walkmans and MP3 devices, a certain disappearance of collective music listening took place in urban public spaces in Madrid, until the emergence and massive adoption of smartphones with loudspeakers and the growing popularization of portable speakers with bluetooth. Though this collective and shared listening through mobile phones in public places has been attributed to migrants and youngsters, especially those from working-class suburbs, it is now a ubiquitous aural practice.

Facing increasingly strict sound regulations in urban spaces, which led to silencing bars and streets of the city centre, a vast repertoire of ordinary resistance practice emerges. Examining cases such as La Romería de los Voltios (The Pilgrimage of the Volts)—an event of ludic claim and vindication gathering every year more than 30 art collectives from Madrid in a kind of cult and celebration of the portable sound systems—this chapter draws on current research about these art collectives and their uses of mobile loudspeakers, that follows the visible and audible threads connecting these recent art projects with ordinary social practices enacted in the city. It proposes a reflection around the relational sense of listening in public places and its contribution to the configuration of urban spaces and ambiences. It takes into account the contextual agency, and the experimental and performative abilities of listening, which are mobilized through the use of mobile digital devices, in order to claim and perform the sounding presence of marginalized, forgotten and excluded collectives in the production of urban social (and sound) spaces.