CommentStreams:460ce0af9899ba9edc1b6742b064ea28

I also think this is super interesting and a nice example of something that is rather unexplored. Reminds me of how Jonathan Sterne talks about how the mp3 is designed for imperfect listening (Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3 : the meaning of a format.Sign, storage, transmission. Durham: Duke University Press.). Obviously the same is true with ANC as it is designed for mobile listening and in environments where we don't control the sonic environment. As Katya, I also wonder to which degree this can be discussed as a contemporary techno-cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, listening to noise as a musical component has been a component at least since Russolo's "The Art of Noise" and developed through musique concrète, distorted guitars, sampling and glitch. ANC is both the reversion of this - now we can listen to noise rock on our ANC headphones rather than listening to our noisy cityscapes as musik - and a continuation of the history of compression and information theory that Sterne writes about. This of course relates to the mobilisation of media and platforms, that all fit within our pockets. As Katya points to it simultaneously relates to the filtering and profiling that we now from platform culture. All in all I see a lot of relations to contemporary platform/interface culture, including the fact that it is an interface which hides its production process, which is also true of social media, GenAI, etc.