Background Music Cultures in Finnish Urban Life

This Element shows how Background Music Cultures view background music processes as music cultures.

Heikki Uimonen (Author), Kaarina Kilpiö (Author), Meri Kytö (Author)

9781009374675, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 May 2024

84 pages
23 x 15 x 0.5 cm, 0.133 kg

This Element focuses on how music is experienced, articulated, and reclaimed in urban commercial environments. Special attention is paid to listeners, spaces, and music, co- and re-produced continuously in their triangular relationship affected by social, legal, economic, and technological factors. The study of the historical development of background music industries, construction of contemporary sonic environments, and individual meaning-making is based on extensive data gathered through interviews, surveys, and fieldwork, and supported by archival research. Due to the Finnish context and the ethnomusicological approach, this study is culture-sensitive, providing a fresh 'factory-to-consumer' perspective on a phenomenon generally understood as industry-lead, behavioral, and global. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. Introduction
2. Mapping background music as a phenomenon
3. Scholarly approaches to background music
4. Historical context: cultural, societal, and infrastructural characteristics
5. Around the drawing board: providing background music
6. Behind the till: background music as a tool for service work
7. On the town: contesting background music
8. Discussion
References.

Subject Areas: Music [AV]