Music In Common Places: Ringtones and Tools
Music doesn’t have to be the main protagonist or serve as a soundtrack for some great story, music can also be ambient, cues, and tools for the every day life. This is an interesting aspect of music, because it shows how important music is to us as human beings that unless you are completely isolated fro the world, music will be a part of your day, even if you don’t intentionally listen to music.
Music in Everyday Life
The day begins and the alarm sounds, that’s the first melody, then at work you go to the elevator, and there is music in the elevator, you walk through the office and you hear someone whistling, a phone rings, and on and on it goes.
You listen to hundreds of different songs while walking on the street, ringtones, message notifications and more.
The pace of technological change has accelerated further during the past 20 years or so, and these fundamental changes in the nature of musical experience and value have arguably become even more pronounced (…) the Internet, and other media, it is arguable that people now actively use it in everyday listening contexts to a much greater extent than hitherto. They are still exposed to music in shops, restaurants, and other commercial environments without active control: But they also control its use in the home, in the car, while exercising, and in other everyday environments.
“Uses of Music in Everyday Life”
Melodic Tools
Music has been used as tools for many instances such as announce phone calls, alarms, cues for little things like social network messages and sound effects. Some may say that this is not music, and maybe it’s like that, but these little things come from the same place.
When you go through your favorite game in your phone and browse through the menu before the game even starts, there are sounds coming from every tap of the screen, which was carefully placed by someone with a keyboard or a music work station on their computer. The world without these little sounds would be very silent and lifeless. There is also the useful side of things, as stated earlier with phones, alarms and messages, which make our lives a lot easier.
Ambient
There is music that sets the tone for the whole context of a moment, for example, imagine a party without music, a bar without music, a wedding without music or a birthday. If you take away the music of certain places and events, it loses half of what makes people want to be there, even though music is not the reason why they go.
Music may be just as important as law (e.g., legal ownership of physical space) when it comes to creating spaces for meaningful action. At the very least, music imbues shared places – public squares, parks, or protest encampments – with greater meaning. In semiotic language, music ‘encodes’ space with cultural meaning.
Mark Pedelty
Every interaction with music or melodies makes us feel something, even if we don’t actively pursue it, this even happens with cellphone notifications, it makes us happy that someone sent us something, that you matter in somebody else’s life, and we start making associations with the melodies that work as alerts.
The point of reading about this is not to find some great revelation or learn something very important, it’s just to remember there is someone behind every artificial sound, someone that took the time to make these everyday sounds and someone that made music for specific places and specific moments of everyday life. The point of this article is to remember that music is a very human thing, and even if you don’t search for it, melodies will find you always in many different ways.
