Hold Music

The notion of sonic intimacy has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but less well-established has been what it means for a sonic encounter to be non-intimate. This essay proposes an opposite to sonic intimacy, namely sonic estrangement, and argues that hold music-music played to callers when they have been placed 'on hold'-effects sonic estrangement in three ways. First, through its timbral quality, which in its lack of fullness and the fragility of signal creates a sense of distance and disjuncture. Second, through its function, which is to address the caller as an anonymous consumer, thus setting up a depersonalised relationship between caller and receiver. Third, in the way it shuts out the caller from their desired point of contact, thus symbolising an excess of demand, exclusion, and a lack of care. These three forms of estrangement counteract sonic intimacy-and can therefore be considered oppositional to it-in that they undermine three components of intimate sonic encounters: the proximate, the personal, and the attentive

Diverse Music Education Insights · Psychology