How Music Matters: Exploring the Musical Experience, its attachments and its technologies

This thesis explores how music becomes important as a social and individual practice mediated by devices in everyday life. Through the guiding concepts of Attachments and the Musical Experience, the thesis focuses on the idea of music as a practice that acquires importance beyond the economic value through everyday practice from an assemblage and materialities perspective, guided by Science and Technology Studies. The data was generated from 41 participants and the Musical Experience History Method, which includes interviews around their musical practice and their past, while listening together with them and discuss valuable objects that they have selected in advance. This thesis orders the findings by abstract moments and elements of the creation of those musical attachments. The first chapter focuses on the Dispositions and Threshold moments, which explains the initial interest in listening to music, specific genres or practices. The second chapter attends to the flexibility of those elements as new moments of listening and negotiations take place to fit new music, practices and alignment with social and intimate identities, this is analysed through the concept of Re/Tuning. At the same time, the thesis explores the process of assembling meanings around musical objects and practices through the concept of Networks of Meanings. The final chapter explores the ongoing relationship of the listener with specific music, which becomes a material object that is at risk of becoming worn out and deformed, hence that demands to be looked after and constantly refreshed. To finalise the thesis highlights the importance of paying attention to the practices and devices of music and proposes the concept of Plasticine Music as a sensitizing concept to make sense of the flexibility but solid materiality of the musical object in everyday life that is transformed through its mediations.