Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don't Always Notice is a recent addition to Ashgate's influential Folk and Popular Music series. Editors Marta Garćia Quiňones, Anahid Kassabian and Elena Bosch have assembled a collection of nine essays, each of which deals with some form of ‘ubiquitous music’. So, what is meant by this phrase? Starting with a day in the life of an ‘average’ person, the editors show the numerous situations in which this person will be surrounded by some form of music – alarms, at the coffee shop, in the gym, and so forth (pp. 1–2). The editors reach the conclusion that the concept of ‘ubiquitous music’ cannot be described effectively in terms of a style (e.g. muzak) or a genre (e.g. a common setting); rather, it is best conceived as ‘musical events that take place alongside other activities’ (p. 7), a definition that takes its cue from Kassabian's previous work in the area.

This definition also creates an open-ended framework, in which many musical contexts may be explored. This theme of exploration is prominent throughout the book. Having shown where and when music appears in our daily lives, the editors note, ‘despite their pervasiveness, the everyday situations just described have so far largely been neglected by music scholars’ (p. 2). The problem, they argue, is that the study of music has been grounded in the ‘aesthetic paradigm’ whereby the musical work sits at the centre of the discussion, and listeners are expected to afford their full and uninterrupted attention to that work (p. 3). While this collection does not necessarily seek to overturn this paradigm, each contribution pursues areas that have hitherto passed under the academic radar. The contributors thus deserve praise for this expansionary approach to the academic study of music.

The book is divided into three sections, each comprising three essays of moderate length (ca. 15–20 pages). Lawrence Kramer opens the first section, ‘Histories’, with a rather virtuosic ‘genealogy’ of ambient music (p. 17). His essay begins with three texts and contexts – Caliban's Island in Shakespeare's The Tempest, the recurring segments titled ‘On the porch’ in Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Penn Street Station, New York – in which music surrounds the characters of each setting. With short diversions into the worlds of Browning, Berlioz and Wagner, Kramer suggests that the historical transition from early modernity to postmodernity is reflected in the changing nature of ambient music: where the music had a magical and cosmological presence in The Tempest, the ‘piped-in classics’ of the train station ‘[model] the orderly movement of the crowd in space and an underlying condition of calm, choreographed motion’ (p. 28).

The following two chapters are narrower in their historical focus. Tony Grajeda outlines a fascinating experiment undertaken by the Edison Company in the 1920s that sought to document the precise effects particular styles of music may have on a listener's mood. Worried and nervous? No matter; just reach for ‘Ave Maria’ (to paraphrase an actual suggestion made by the company; p. 43). Grajeda makes the insightful point that these experiments were reflective of the ‘general movement towards greater rationalization of both work and leisure in the early twentieth century’ (p. 37). Christina Baade also addresses issues of musical functionality in her essay on the BBC's promotion and dissemination of classical music during WWII. This represented an attempt to unify the British populace under a common culture of ‘great’ music (p. 50). Baade documents the broadcaster's strategies through this era, including the implicit formation of a ‘popular classics’ canon, the use of educational radio programmes, and the promotion of ‘swung classics’. Pace Adorno, Baade explores the tensions that arose through these strategies between, on the one hand, mass audience engagement and, on the other hand, the commodification of ‘serious’ music.

The second section starts with Amit S. Rai's ‘sort of science fiction of sound in India's new media assemblage’ with a focus on the growing presence of mobile phones in India (p. 75). This essay stood out in the collection, unfortunately because of its, at times, impenetrable prose. This was a shame, as there were interesting ideas within the essay, such as the displacement of ‘voice telephony’ as the mobile's primary function for people in urban centres (p. 78); too often, though, these points were lost in a sea of cultural theory jargon. The following chapter by Tim McNelis and Elena Boschi is much clearer in outlining the importance of visual playback technology in films. This chapter offers a slightly different take on the standard assessment of how music shapes a film's meaning; through six case studies, the authors convincingly demonstrate how seeing the actual mechanisms for producing music (e.g. a boombox) may provide further insight into the narrative. Quiňones concludes this section with a shorter essay that focuses primarily on the act of listening and engagement for iPod users. She argues that despite the agency involved in listening to an iPod, given one's access to a library of music, there are parallels with conceptions of ‘ubiquitous’ music, insofar as iPod users tend to listen and move, literally and figuratively, concurrently.

The final section, ‘Spaces’, opens with Jonathan Sterne's investigation into the music played at the front of shops to discourage loitering. Sterne reaches the forceful conclusion that the ‘non-aggressive music deterrent’ represents an ‘attempt to manage outdoor, urban and other public spaces to make them hospitable to the kinds of consumers that stores and cities hope to attract’ (pp. 134–5). Sterne is critical of this type of social engineering and suggests we seek a ‘better and more egalitarian’ form of sonic architecture (p. 135), although he is less specific about what this might entail.

The final two chapters bring ethnographic methods to their discussions. Serena Facci documents the optimal musical qualities required by Italian fitness instructions for their gym classes (based on interviews), and relates these ideas to broader biological and psychological theories. Finally, Franco Fabbri's chapter is concerned with the notion of ‘attention’ and Adorno's hierarchy of listeners. He brings these ideas into contact with situations in which listening to music, for various reasons, may be considered ‘taboo’ – driving, working, and having sex. Fabbri does an excellent job of challenging and blurring the fundamental ideas of this book. To offer one example, he tells of a musician who found performance in the bedroom difficult while listening to Bach, because ‘their mind was so captured by the logic of contrapuntal writing that they could not care about anything else’ (p. 172). Amusing as this anecdote may be, it also raises the intriguing question of whether, in this case, Bach is an example of ‘ubiquitous’ music? As per the formulation put forth in the book's introduction, the music is meant to be taking place alongside another activity; and yet, the attention paid to the music (rather than the partner!) suggests that this condition of ubiquity is removed. Fabbri concludes by calling on musicologists, anthropologists and cognitive scientists to further their understanding of attention and listening, with these scenarios offering useful testing grounds. And, one might add, he wonders if there are any volunteers for participant observation.

At the start of his essay, Kramer states that he hopes to ‘float some answers in the air’ (p. 17). This approach seems to encapsulate Ubiquitous Musics, which often gives the reader fragments of or introductions to ideas and theories; it may be that more definitive conclusions emerge in later academic texts with further case studies. Nonetheless, Ubiquitous Musics takes important steps in this direction and, in the process, presents a number of fascinating insights on a range of subjects. The editors are to be commended for compiling such a diverse range of essays, and I anticipate that readers from many academic disciplines will find something within these pages to which they will want to give nothing less than their full, undivided attention.