In the space of only four decades, digital audio and digital recordings have grown from portable CD players and attempted to bring music out of the private space, to immensely small, highly designed mp3 devices that have made music more mobile than ever. Without any doubt this mobility in music has had and continues to have a considerable impact on how we, as social beings, experience music and particularly spatiality in association with music. Digitally mediated music as the piped background music makes public spaces a unique digital locus of the contemporary western culture. The phenomenon of piped background music is quite recent and is defined as prerecorded, usually easy-listening music played through speakers in public places and some workplaces to create a soothing atmosphere. These public spaces are defined as areas or places that are open and accessible to everyone. Although prima facie the notion of public space seems simple in definition, anthropological studies have shown that in the contemporary western culture, space can be a very complicated condition. Since space (as a territory where we inhabit) is crucial for our existence and furthermore we (as intellectual beings) are interested in the relation of space to our intellectual progress, I address the question: How can piped background music in public spaces be part of the construction of (self)identity?
Each time we enter a public space, we also enter a digital space, which opens up through the piped background music. Paraphrasing Frith, who argues that “music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers”, piped music can also construct our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers to the body and sociability; experiences that enable us to place ourselves in imaginative digital cultural narratives in digital space. The experiences taking place, while in the digital space, can be understood as the various signals that we receive from and of the digital space through others being in the same space (signals that are associated with cultural memory which is also part of one’s identity). This perception of signals opens up through the space. It is an experiential process that, paraphrasing Frith again, is best understood as an experience of the self-in-process-through-other. That is, digital space (enabled by piped music) has the capacity not to merely reflect meaning but to construct it, to construct identity.