Observations at the Interface - On Mediated Sound and Smartphone Aesthetics

The fifth volume section – DIGITALIZING – listens in as sound, voice, and music travel from ‘real life’ to online spaces and virtual interactions. Drawing on a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists, Sruthi Venkateswaran muses on the smartphone as a ground-laying and ground-breaking mediatory interface. Zooming in on specific aspects of smartphone technology – including the phone’s screen, the earphones plugged into the gadget, and Spotify as a sample application – Venkateswaran considers the ways of seeing, listening, touching and metaphorically ‘tasting’ the world through the medium and the medium as the world.