Space, embodiment, and relationality in headphone listening

Jacob Downs

My doctoral project explores the phenomenal experience of headphone listening across a wide range of recreational and professional situations. It merges (post-)phenomenological empirical methods with philosophical approaches to

the study of technology-mediated perception. The research focuses on the peculiarities of headphone-listening experiences (from the quotidian to the extreme) and poses questions that probe the inherent contradictions embedded within the messy relationship between listeners, technologies, and wider ecologies. The aim is to shed

light on a technology that reconfigures the nature of private and public space in contemporary life, and to address its impact on the social reality of listening.