ABSTRACT
While making music is a common part of all cultures around the world, listening to music is also a ubiquitous human phenomenon (Boschi, Kassabian, & Quiñones, 2013). In Western industrialized society, technology enables us to be listening to music in virtually any situation. Boschi et al. outline a fictional “average person” whose day might begin by being woken by a spaghetti-Western-themed polyphonic ring tone, getting a coffee on the way to work from a café accompanied by suitably selected exotic music, working at her desk to the accompaniment of iTunes, shopping in a department store surrounded by arias like “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot, working out at the gym to carefully selected appropriately paced music, having dinner with friends in an Indian restaurant with Bollywood music playing, and later going to see a film with a carefully matched soundtrack. In the course of a given day, the average Western listener will be experiencing a bewilderingly wide array of different kinds of music, some self-chosen, others chosen more for the environment than the music, and still others entirely unchosen; some alone and others shared.
