Creating and ending a public listening experience

This article seeks to analyze what it describes as the "uncertain collective potential" of music listening. It documents the forms of listening that occur in various urban public spaces, based on an ethnographic survey conducted in France and Australia on the public musical experience. From concerts to music stores to urban public spaces, we move from situations where indexicality safeguards the ability to have a focused musical experience to situations where music listening is much more directly impacted by the constraints of publicness. The public and musical aspects of the experience do not appear to be inherent to all of the forms of listening studied: they depend on the degree of commitment associated with the public listening practices. The establishment of a shared social world through the act of listening is revealed to depend on certain conditions, with contrasting results.