What do whilst listening to music?

[JonG]

One of my favorite websites, popmatters.com, ran an article yesterday that touches on this. The article talks about how we consume music and how that is based on the technology used to store and play it back. Some excerpts:

...every individual who currently lives in the mainstream of Western popular culture has grown up in a particular era of musical consumption. These “eras of consumption” determine, to some degree, how, where, and when we consume music. I spent my own formative music-listening years in the era of physical media, which includes any timeframe where music was listened to in a physical form (CD, LP, tape, etc.)... [The] feature of control has, quite obviously, taken on a whole new importance in the digital era of musical consumption, in which a nearly limitless (compared to previous eras) number of tracks can co-exist on a single device at any given time, allowing the consumer to skip, cycle through, and rearrange these tracks to his or her liking.

As music is defined less and less by its physical nature (whether in the form of LP, tape, CD, or any other corporeal object), the presence of any particular piece of music on our cognitive state becomes less and less significant. In the era of physical media, any particular piece of music was inevitably associated with a physical artifact. In order to listen to a piece of music, one had to engage with the physical medium associated with that piece of music. This physical medium included images (the album covers), text (the liner notes), and equipment (musical devices required to play music, including turntables, tape decks, etc.).

This process of conceptualization also extends to the physical environments in which we listen to music. After all, our experiences of listening to music do not occur in a vacuum. Instead, the music itself is related, in our minds, to other components of our physical environment, including the time and place of listening, as well as our own mental state. In the digital era, music is increasingly becoming portable, diversifying the environments within which we listen to music. Once again, this change is a matter of degree; although the Walkman helped to make music portable, music has only become more portable in subsequent eras. This portability, as with so many other innovations of the digital era, expands our possibilities for listening to music. It also, however, renders the music itself only a small part of a more expansive cultural gestalt. We may continue to listen to music, but we do so while walking, talking, driving, working, or some combination thereof.

I think several people replying to this thread are "fans" of music instead of "critics". They prefer to isolate the music from everything around it instead of putting it in a larger context. Which I think is perfectly fine. I myself love to trace the lines of the web that connect every artist and music piece to another. This encourages me to listen to a great deal of music so I don't like to sit still and listen to music under headphones. I want to be reading about the music / music culture as I listen so I can learn more about where it is coming from.