Sound Shelter: Ease of Listening as a Way of Dwelling

This article seeks to track an “ease” of listening back from today’s comforts of playlists, headphone immersion in music, and omnipresent streaming. It reflects on the functions of comforting music such as easy listening that paved the way to today’s networked and distributed homes and subjectivities. Through considerations of how easy listening shapes the domestic interior and experience, the article then moves to join the ideas of Anahid Kassabian with the art of Jamaican artist Michael McMillan as a way of thinking a diasporic sonified space that represented a pioneering twist on the comforts of easy listening long before the apparent ubiquity of networked society and the spread of portable media.