Disruptive Urban Sounds: When Mobile Phones Become Portable Speakers

Imagine four young men on a commuter train south of Madrid, chatting together while a hip-hop tune plays from one of their phones. When the chorus hits, they pause their conversation and sing along. In Retiro Park, two middle-aged women sit on the grass facing each other, a mobile phone lying between them playing Romanian songs. A man in his thirties weaves through pedestrian traffic, his footsteps synchronised to an upbeat pop track blasting from his jacket pocket. Other passersby catch only a few stray notes.

After school, teenagers crowd together on a park bench, playing pop and dance music while they chat and joke. A skater resting on a concrete square in central Madrid watches his friends and listens to electronic music from a phone on the ground beside him. A Dominican woman in Lavapies describes how she sings along to Reggaeton from her phone's loudspeaker every morning while showering.

How mobile phones reshape urban listening

These ordinary scenes reveal something deeper about how people use mobile phones to engage with public space. Whether on trains, in parks, at stations, or walking through city streets, individuals play music through their phones — often without headphones — and in doing so they share their chosen sounds with everyone within earshot. Smartphones playing loudly can be held in a hand, left in a pocket, or placed somewhere near a group of listeners. People attending to the music may also be talking, walking, cycling, daydreaming, watching a video on the same device, or even kissing and caressing a partner.

In these moments, the tunes reach not only the phone owner and their companions but also involuntary listeners — strangers who display varying degrees of attention or indifference. This contributes to the production of present-day acoustic spaces in cities. A young man waiting at Atocha station plays an electronic dance music track; another man approaches and says, "Great track — what is this? I think I've heard it in some club." A bald man in his mid-thirties wearing a suit gets on a commuter train at Sol station, a phone in his hand playing rock music. As he sits down, a young couple nearby exchange disapproving glances: "If he was a kid, I could understand — but a proper grown-up!"

Mobile phones so used are part of a long history in which sound fidelity gives way to portability. They revisit earlier devices such as the transistor radio, the boom box, the personal stereo, and the boom car. In each of these past forms, portable music listening has been a way of engagingurban spaces and enacting territoriality through sound.

Portable urbanism

Spanish architect Roberto González (2013) conceptualized this entanglement of the digital, the urban, and the online as portable urbanism. González originally applied the idea to location-based hook-up apps, which allow intimate strangers to reconfigure their experience of the city by overlaying traditional maps with geo-localisation. These apps make visible what might otherwise go unnoticed — including traces of non-normative sexualities — and thereby contribute to shaping urban politics. When men make their sexual encounters public, they and their presence in urban public space also become public in a political sense. The increase in sonic presence from playing music loudly on mobile phones works through a different sensory register: hearing rather than sight.

Three intertwined threads matter here: making something public, making oneself public, and making the public itself. Unlike listening with headphones — which projects no music outward — playing music aloud broadcasts a choice into the world.

What airlwork over city sounds reveals

The ideas presented below arise from ethnographic field study in Madrid carried out between 2010 and 2015, supplemented by online observation of social media discussions about this practice. Field observations, over repeated periods averaging two months per year, took place in locations such as Retiro Park, the streets and squares of Lavapies, the commercial area around Sol square, Atocha station, and on public transport (commuter trains, buses, and metro lines). During these sessions, informal interviews were conducted with people playing music, including questions about why they chose not to wear earphones in public.

Listening on mobile devices is embodied activity; we hear with whole bodies rather than just ears. Attunement can be external and visible — a dance, a coordinated step — or invisible and internal. Ethographic work requires both seeing and hearing to grasp how people listen, and it demands attending to how these listening practices contribute to the shaping of acoustic spaces. As part the researcher's path, one tunes into local ambience — the atmospheric resonances that accompany interaction in public.

Additional online observation covered digital spaces and Facebook groups such as MEMPEC (from "Métete el Móvil por el Culo" or "Shove your mobile up your ass"), "Odio a la gente que cree que el móvil es un radiocassette" ("I hate people who think a phone is a boombox"), and a petition petition targeting a ban: "Que se prohíba escuchar música sin auriculares en el transporte público" ("Ban music without earphones on public transport"). One YouTube video from Spanish filmmaker Helio Valero called Auricumán imagines a travelling comm- comm subst way superhero disrupting mobile loudspeaker usage and enforcing earphone compliance

these reactions and campaigns underline the strong resentment the practice incites and demonstrates that mobile listening can rival loudspeaker technology as "disruptive ambi ent" music.

Territoriality, disruption, self

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These three territorial modes, as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari and observed in our ethnography, correspond with Christian Licoppe’s analysis of musical ringtones as an early use of mobile phones for music playback. Beyond their function as summons, musical ringtones represent an “invitation to be listened to” and broadcast the owner’s musical preferences. In both instances, they function as self-expression projecting individual tastes into public space, and as auditory “treats” that boost comfort and pleasure (Licoppe, 2011). For involuntary listeners, however, this treat can easily sour into irritation. Consequently, the musical overture from mobile users—a “deliberate strategy of affiliation” in Licoppe’s phrasing—can be perceived as territorial transgressions: forms of sonic intrusion, obtrusion, and interruption that vividly illustrate the sociability paradox Goffman identified. With ringtones, the brief duration of the music is central to the pleasure or treat offered by this affiliative strategy.

In mobile phone music playback, this fleeting quality can be observed when people walk past carrying phones playing loudly, but not, for example, on public transport or in other public settings where involuntary listeners feel compelled to endure the sound for extended periods. Such situations provoke the most controversy and anger, as seen in online social media complaints and evaluations of this practice. Occasional expressions of annoyance from fellow commuters and bystanders also surfaced during fieldwork. These displays are frequently silent but not invariably so. On one occasion, aboard a commuter train between Madrid and Aranjuez, a middle-aged White man in cycling attire used his bike as a protective barrier while watching and listening to a Metallica concert on his smartphone. Fellow passengers stared with displeasure and disbelief. As one alighted, he looked at me and said loudly and clearly, “One has to listen to it, like it or not.”

Playing music with your mobile and listening to it in urban public spaces can exemplify what French musicologist Peter Szendy (2008) terms sharing and signing a listening: the capacity to mark and sign a sound event that can be shared. Any particular interpretation of a musical piece constitutes a signed listening. DJ mixing, remixes, and music sampling likewise serve as ways of signing a specific listening. Curating a playlist and sharing it also represents a signed listening. Fans’ forums and music discussions on social media provide another avenue for signing and sharing our listening by exchanging evaluations and classifications. Szendy emphasizes that technological mediations of musical reception—the phonograph, recording, and digitalization—have enabled and amplified this ability to sign and share what we hear. These are means of making listening audible to third parties. The boom box of the 1980s, explored by Schloss and Boyer (2014), and today’s practice of loud mobile listening with smartphones are not merely forms of music playback but ways of presenting and sharing one’s listening. This can also serve as a means of signing a space: of fleetingly marking a territory within the city by blending the sounds of a tune with those of the location. In these ways, music lovers listen to their chosen tracks, sign their listening, and share it with everyone within earshot, whether they welcome it or not.

As with the mobile listeners studied by Bull (2000), this practice can be seen as a strategy for managing time and experience by constructing sites of narrative and order in particular urban settings and moments, thereby negotiating urban fragmentation. However, instead of filtering out the mixed flow of urban sounds and reducing public presence, a distinctly different modulation of presence emerges. The implications of this mobile listening are vastly different from the aesthetic control over public experiences and spaces afforded by Walkmans and mp3 players used with headphones (Bull, 2000, 2007; Hosokawa, 1984; Simun, 2009; Thibaud, 2003).

This form of music listening does not create a protective bubble that limits one’s accessibility. First, mobile listeners in this mode can still hear and notice what occurs in their surroundings. Their approach consists of explicitly participating in the urban sonic choreography, granting themselves the option to attend to their music as either foreground or background relative to other audible sounds. Second, they do not retreat from their environment but instead amplify their sonic presence. The aestheticization and theatricalization of urban space in which they engage are not hidden, unlike the Walkman effect described by Hosokawa.

As Sterne (2005) reminds us, the acoustic shaping and design of public spaces carry political and ethical dimensions—a sensory experience and an assertion about who and what can make sounds, listen, and be listened to.

Thus, the engagement with the city through music enacted by these music lovers and their smartphones can be understood as a way of giving a “new tonality to the streets” (Thibaud, 2003) and a form of atmospheric attunement—an “intimate, compositional process of dwelling in spaces” where “things matter not because of how they are represented but because they have qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements” (Stewart, 2011: 445). Playing music loudly with a mobile phone in public places exemplifies ambient intimacy (Hjorth et al., 2012), where personal comfort is provided by the phone while on the move, enabled by the pleasurable experience of listening and connecting physical surroundings with familiar, loved sounds and the resonances of past listening.

Yet this same phenomenon can also produce a different atmosphere for involuntary listeners: noisy, annoying, and unpleasant. This underscores the affective dimension of portable urbanism in relation to ordinary mobile phone uses for emotional and aesthetic ends. This affective aspect of mobile-mediated atmospheric attunements points to the enhanced capacity to affect and be affected when agency is shared or distributed with mobile phones (Lasen, 2013).

Therefore, signing and sharing a listening also represents personalization as a mutual stylization between people, devices, and places. The mobile phone is personalized by the tunes it plays and stores; the owners are personalized and presented in public by the tunes their phones play (Licoppe, 2011). Urban auditory territories are challenged and reconfigured by these personal listening and sounding practices, offering a clear instance of what Labelle (2010) calls individual sonorities produced by boom boxes, mobile phones, or personal stereos—ways of personalizing movement by adding ingredients to the regulatory humdrum of the street and its management. These sonorities reshape or supplement urban street infrastructures and their audible contour. They enact a mediating dialogue between individual bodies and the larger structuring sounds generated in the city. This dialogue can also become conflict, a clash of sounds, between the loud music from the phone, ordinary urban noises, and the sonic expectations of those nearby regarding appropriate public sonic behavior.

Disruptive ambient music

Ambient intimacy aligns with the first and third examples of territorial activity described by Deleuze and Guattari, as this music listening is employed when one leaves home. It is a way to open the circle of the self’s territory, sharing one’s listening with those in the vicinity and risking the territorial paradox that connects bonding with disturbance: by sharing their listening, they trespass upon others’ territories of the self, disrupting the conventions of negotiating such territories in public.

These modes of music playing and listening in public involve varying levels of attention to both the sounds and the person carrying the loud phone. This can be seen as a contemporary digital version of French composer Erik Satie’s concept of furniture music (musique d’ameublement)—music that creates a background for other activities rather than being the primary focus of attention, capable of blending with surrounding noises and taking them into account.

Different tunes can become furniture music in particular listening contexts. In this case, mobile phones and their owners, acting as music selectors, provide musical furniture for public places and activities. They contribute to the mood and ambiance of a space during a specific period. Furniture music affords rhythmic accompaniment to everyday chores and activities. Interviewees confirmed that mobile music listening in public enables them to enjoy and focus on the music, rather than fulfilling particular social conventions or worrying about behaving appropriately as strangers (Hirschauer, 2005) among strangers in public. This is also facilitated by other mobile phone activities—talking, messaging, or playing—which offer distraction and entertainment, allowing for distinct rhythms of attention and inattention to physical space and the auditory space generated by the phone (Bassett, 2003).

These mobile music practices produce a form of atmospheric attunement and ambient music—not because the sounds and musical parameters of the tunes from phone loudspeakers correspond to Satie’s vision, but because of the kind of listening enacted and the ability to accommodate “different levels of listening attention, without enforcing one in particular” (Eno, 1978). Rock, pop, hip-hop, or dance tunes played on smartphones become ambient music through how they are listened to. Different types and degrees of listening attention can elicit varied forms of dancing, singing, and humming in public. Those carrying the phones and choosing to play music move through different levels of attention to both the music and the people around them: friends, fellow commuters, or pedestrians. They all produce diverse rhythms of attention and inattention rather than a fully immersive sonic media experience. These practices generate a variety of positions, views, listening modes, and perceived moods. The tunes played do not provoke the same affects in the phone owner as in bystanders. The reactions of the latter—enjoyment, indifference, approval, discontent, hostility, anger, and so on—contribute to setting the mood of the place where these sounds are audible. While the intention of a loud music-playing phone owner may be to make a place or journey more enjoyable and fun, it can elicit the opposite reaction from listening fellow commuters or pedestrians. For instance, a couple of young Dominican women I spoke with in a square in Madrid’s Lavapiés area stated that listening to music on the subway or streets during their long commute to and from work is “entertainment,” a way to make a boring and time-consuming routine “more pleasant.” They listen to their tunes while monitoring fellow commuters for reactions and seek less crowded spots on the train. However, a third woman who joined our conversation said that “this entertainment” was genuinely a nuisance for her. Instead of creating a pleasant mood on the subway, she found the sounds stressful. The other women could not comprehend this: “If you don’t like my music, play yours.”

This example illustrates how mobile listening can function as disruptive ambient music, likely to spark controversies and territorial conflicts over appropriate and expected public behavior, revealing the inherent, contentious politics of urban public spaces shaped by plural and divergent practices, concerns, tastes, and sensitivities (Jaque, 2011). Several interviewees noted, for instance, that a subway security guard asked them to stop playing music loudly. Heterogeneity and the potential for contentious politics in urban public spaces become particularly evident when considering their acoustic features, which often give rise to disruptive spatiality.

Acoustic space provokes annoyance and outrage while also affording opportunities for dynamic sharing and knowing the other. It is striking what is considered disturbing about this mobile phone practice: not only, or primarily, being forced to listen to loud music, but also the poor sound quality, the music style, and the attitude ascribed to phone owners.

Unlike technical mediations that amplify bass range—such as boom cars and large ghetto blasters—this case involves lo-fi sound reproduction, entailing a loss of bass and a kind of treblification of sound, or treble culture (Marshall, 2014). The suboptimal sound quality does not appear to be a significant issue for those who practice this listening, as it is compensated by parallel listening. Research participants reported that poor audio quality was not a problem because they were familiar with the tunes. They listen to the actual sounds produced by their mobile phones while simultaneously incorporating sonic memories from previous listening occasions. This constitutes a form of self-deception and, simultaneously, a completion inherent in the listening process, highlighting the enacted nature of listening.

Mobile listening is a form of active listening that remembers or imagines the missing bass sounds. The listening enactment does not occur solely in the moment but carries its own history and complex temporality, composed of ephemerality and resonances that connect this territory of the self in public space to other personal territories in listeners’ everyday lives—related to the music played and the listening situation. However, only those who know, play, and share an appreciation of the music can participate in this enacted listening. This may explain why poor sound quality was a primary reason this practice was described as annoying in online ethnography, whereas listening to others’ music in public generally was not.

Playing music on a mobile phone in public sometimes involves a degree of defiance regarding public interaction and territorial tactics, or is at least perceived as such. It has even been labeled sodcasting: “Sodcast [noun]: Music, on a crowded bus, coming from the speaker on a mobile phone. Sodcasters are terrified of not being noticed, so they spray their audio wee around the place like tomcats” (Pascal Wyse, cited in Hancox, 2007). The conflict between this music-listening practice and the written and unwritten norms of public behavior generates online and offline debate, raising issues of class, ethnicity, and age (Hancox, 2007; Marshall, 2014). This identification of the loud mobile listener with subaltern traits—youth, low social class, foreignness, or non-Whiteness—also emerged in online ethnography. This attribution is more of a misattribution than an accurate representation of the diversity of loud mobile listeners I encountered during observation in Madrid: women and men, young people and adults, White and non-White. Judging by most opinions and online complaints encountered, this practice is generally seen as typical of the “other”—“the brats,” “the cani” (a Spanish term similar to chav), or migrants. “This is not my music.” Such complaints resonate with a long tradition of complaining about the urban noises of lower classes (Sterne, 2005).

Although most criticism links this mobile music practice to the arrogant attitude of those wanting to enlarge their personal territory and lacking respect for others, this is not the intention of most loud mobile listeners I spoke with (though the interview context may have shaped their responses to some degree). Some are so passionate about their music that it is hard for them to imagine others not enjoying their “invitation” (to use Licoppe’s term) and preferring silence or the usual urban sounds.

Nevertheless, most interviewees stated that they pay attention to the reactions of those around them and try to adjust the volume accordingly, or that they only play music on public transport when no one else is present. Some young people expressed the belief that in public spaces—such as public transport—no one has the right to be annoyed by what others do, as these places are not governed by personal views and considerations; one simply has to tolerate whatever happens. The observed gradual decline of loud mobile listening on public transport suggests that defiant territorial tactics are not typical of this practice. Disruption can occur, but is not always intentional.

The debates and complaints reveal conflicts over musical taste: which music deserves to be heard in public, how to handle these differences and controversies, and what are the appropriate ways for fans of various music to share their listening publicly. However, online inscriptions of these controversies—such as the many Facebook pages created when this practice first emerged—are now less common, as loud mobile listening is found less often on public transport and more frequently in parks, squares, and streets, where auditory expectations differ. The more or less silent expressions of annoyance from fellow commuters, as well as advertising campaigns by public transport companies in Madrid and other cities urging people to use earphones and avoid loud music, have certainly contributed to the decline of this listening mode. Thus, playing music on the phone has not followed the trajectory of other mobile phone uses considered disruptive when they first appeared, clashing with unwritten rules of public behavior, but which later became common, banal, and virtually unnoticed once mobile phone use became ubiquitous and widespread—such as having personal conversations on public transport, in bars, or restaurants (Lasen, 2005).

The intricate and controversial mobile performances described here relate to the pub‑

The boundary between public and private listening, moreover, extends beyond Williams’s (1974) concept of mobile privatisation. Private listening through earphones, whether at home or via mp3 players, reinforces invisibility by sharing music only with oneself (Bull, 2000, 2007). These listeners can therefore tune out their surroundings and care less about how they publicly perform – a central aspect of what is called the ‘Walkman effect’ (Bull, 2000, 2007; Hosokawa, 1984; Thibaud, 2003). Yet playing music loudly, whether on a historic boom box or a contemporary mobile phone speaker, modulates presence in an opposing manner: it amplifies visibility, or more precisely audibility. These music fans increase their sonic presence and "do being a stranger" (Hirschauer, 2005) differently – by heightening chances to share and be seen, and by boosting their ability to provoke reactions and spark encounters, both positive and negative. Through musical aestheticisation of daily routines, they gain an increased sense of comfort, yet this comes hand in hand with greater vulnerability because they draw bystanders’ attention (Licoppe, 2011). Such is the consequence of choosing to make oneself public: amplifying one’s sonic presence by broadcasting musical tastes for all to hear.

### Conclusion

Using a mobile phone as a portable sound system might seem radically different from mainstream activities like conversation, texting, or location-aware online connections. Yet broadcasting music on a phone in public shares common ground with those everyday uses. These similarities include using the device to gain personal comfort while on the move, the role mobile phones play in how we invest or withhold attention in public settings (Bassett, 2003), the multisensory relationship that combines touch and hearing, personalisation as mutual styling between user and device, the carving out of a personal space or territory in public, participating in public performances of self-presentation, and influencing how we interact as strangers in public.

Let us revisit the questions about portable urbanism posed at the outset. The described mobile media practices enact portable urbanism by generating ephemeral sound spaces that help set the mood and atmosphere of the urban locations where they occur. Multiple mediations and remediations shape these sound spaces, involving different media as well as shifting meanings and practices. These collective activities encompass mobile phones with their music and video apps, the chosen tunes, device owners, nearby people, plus both the material and normative conditions of each urban setting. Such varied sources of agency can be conceived of as a choreography that produces these fleeting sound zones. Within these choreographies of spacing, territorial dynamics emerge through shared listening and sounding. By playing music loudly on their phones, blending their favourite songs with the situational sounds, people and their devices sign their personal taste and mode of listening onto space. It is also a way of staking out territory – of signalling a personal zone within the moving urban landscape.

Nonetheless, unlike forms of mobile privatisation (Williams, 1974), the sharing dimension of this performance broadens the circle of one’s personal territory outward to the immediate public. Becoming more audible and visible increases the potential for exchange and interaction, while also raising the likelihood of territorial disputes. Consequently, the territorial aspect of this portable urbanism creates a paradox: it can simultaneously provide comfort and cause disturbance. It can elevate both one’s public ease from listening pleasure and one’s capacity to violate prevailing expectations and –s both formal and informal – about appropriate behaviour, annoying those nearby who become involuntary hearers.

These practices truly demonstrate the ability of sound to "lend a dynamic materiality for social negotiation" and to generate "acoustic politics of space" (Labelle, 2010: xix). They offer another instance of the heterogeneous, inherently contested textures of urban dwelling and of urbanism itself. This mobilisation of acoustic portable urbanism involves a triple articulation of the public. First, it publicises the music – the selected tracks and aesthetic of the person playing the phone (making something public). Second, it increases the player’s sonic presence for those around (making someone public). Third, it disrupts and thereby reshapes public spaces along with conventional urban acoustic politics (making the public).

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Some aspects of this research are part of the project CSO2012-37027 Innovaciones metodológicas para prácticas emergentes: Controversias y desasosiegos en torno a lo público/privado funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity through the National Plan of Research.

Notes

1. Some aspects of this research, concerning listening as concept and practice and its methodological implications, belong to the project CSO2012-37027 Innovaciones metodológicas para prácticas emergentes: Controversias y desasosiegos en torno a lo público/privado (Methodological innovations for the study of emergent practices: controversies and disquiets around the public/private divide); research team: Elena Casado, Antonio García, Rubén Blanco, Laura Cassain, Héctor Puente, and Juan Carlos Revilla, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity by way of the National Plan of Research. 2. These secondary schools and cultural centres were chosen thanks to preliminary observations because they offered a greater chance of encountering mobile phone users in popular downtown zones. 3. https://www.facebook.com/MEMPEC; https://www.facebook.com/Odio-a-la-gente-que-cree-que-el-movil-es-un-radiocassette-37191268745/; https://www.facebook.com/Que-se-prohiba-escuchar-musica-sin-auriculares-en-el-transporte-publico-117483858349605; Auricumán, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HI5niIUFAM&t=57s. Some such Facebook pages launched ten years ago have already vanished, among them “NO al escuchar música sin auriculares en medios de transporte público” (NO to playing music without earphones on public transport), “Niñatos que van escuchando música a todo volumen en sus móviles” (brats who listen to music loud on their mobile phones), and “No me gusta que escuchen música con el móvil sin auriculares al lado mío” (I don’t like people near me using their phone speakers). Related groups in other languages include https://www.facebook.com/People-Who-Play-Music-Loud-Off-Their-Phones-Arnt-Cool-129868380390911/?fref=ts and the gone pages “People who play music loud on their mobile phones on the bus/train are annoying” and “Playing mobile phone music on buses or trains should be banned.” 4. This Italian word means “small return,” designating a refrain or short tune; it also applies musicologically to the return of the full orchestra section in Baroque concertos.

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