What happened to the headphones?
Since the advent of the iPhone, it seems to me that more and more people are projecting their music into the environment around them, rather than in their ears. By the way, I hear it everywhere: in the gym, at the airport, in the reliever near my house where I walk, I constantly find the personal bubbles of Beyoncé or Bieber.
- I could talk about how technologies.
- Like small speakers.
- Simply reveal the self-absorption already present in the heart.
- But I will not.
- But there is a parable here that I want to study.
- A parable that describes the difference between how we tend to listen to music individually and how we should treat music in the church.
Custom soundtracks
These projected musical spheres illustrate the fact that, for many people today, music is a kind of personalized soundtrack for our lives.
Why do you listen to the music you listen to? The reasons are probably multifaceted and sometimes unconscious. To some extent, most people’s aesthetic choices are intuitive: you like it because you love it. But musical preferences are also influenced by where you grew up, what your parents heard, what your parents wouldn’t want. I let you hear and, above all, what your friends hear. And these preferences can change over time radically or discreetly.
What you hear also depends on how you feel and what you want to feel. If depressed, melancholy music can lead to catharsis. If you’re exercising, you want your blood to keep pumping at full speed. Whether you’re working or studying, you probably want music that eliminates distractions, without becoming a distraction in itself.
And what you hear depends on the company present, hence the eternal struggles, in some families, to control the sound of the car.
What’s the big question here? In late Western modernity, and increasingly for the rest of the world, music works for many as a cinematic score: it indicates the cultural niche of the characters, creates the atmosphere and intensifies the action.
That music works in this way is more or less a reality of today’s life, but it is not a fact of nature, the consumption of personalized music is only possible thanks to the technology and commercial structures that make it viable, basically, before the advent of music. In the mass media, most people’s musical experience was like that of all their neighbors: they listened to and sang their people’s songs, whispered popular songs, a common heritage of several generations, while they plyed the fields and made bread. On the other hand, the cornucopia of options that characterizes musical consumption today is a novelty of advanced capitalism.
It doesn’t hurt. But this means that we must be aware of certain instincts programmed by the habit of personalized consumption and that they may have to be deprogrammed when we enter the church on Sunday morning.
Because?
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See the rest of the development of the text by reading the full article:
This article is part of the March/April 2014 issue of the 9Marks Journal.
Translation: Vin-cius Silva Pimentel. Review: Vin-cius Musselman Pimentel. © 2014 Faithful Ministérium. All rights reserved. Website: MinistryFiel. com. br. Original: In the Church, leave your musical preference outside.