mediated intimacy

One morning in November, I woke up to a private message from Polish music scholar Maciej Smółka. Maciej and I initially met at the Purple Reign conference at the University of Salford in 2017. In the years since, we regularly touch base to keep up on what we’re listening to and working on. [Of note, Maciej recently published The Sound of a City, a much needed work on the relationship between certain styles and their locale, eg Nashville country, Seattle grunge, and San Francisco psychedelia.]

Maciej’s note pointed me to a recent blog post of his wherein he digested Laura Veirs’ latest album, Phone Orphans. Having some familiarity with our project on musical intimacy, he thought it may be of interest. He was of course, correct. 

Veirs’ recorded her latest album completely via the voice notes app on her phone. As Maciej puts it, the album provides the listener sonic entry into Veirs’ intimate world. Despite the implicit invitation, Phone Orphans feels like a sonic breach of privacy to Veirs’ personal, sonic space. Maciej’s post is well worth reading, and I don’t intend to rehash his insight here. But it did get me thinking about Phone Orphans as exemplary not just of intimacy in terms of the recording’s sonics, but the album’s framing, and how that necessarily primes our own experience with the record. 

More specifically, Maciej’s post brought to mind the relationship between intimacy and technology. Central here is a seeming contradiction. By definition, mediation implies distance (geographic or otherwise), which would seem to work against any sense of intimacy (or closeness). Yet mediation has long been a conduit for intimacy in the absence of physical co-presence. Introducing their collection of essays on intimacy, Levinger and Raush (1977: vii) note the palpable tensions between our continued desire for closeness and intimacy alongside the increasing social distance from one another. As modern social, cultural, and economic forces encouraged such distancing, the rise of electronic mass media offered means for us to at least perceive the closeness and intimacy that were otherwise becoming more difficult to achieve. [Brenton J. Malin’s book Feeling Mediated is an especially rich examination of these tensions, and goes well beyond concerns of intimacy to understand the interplay of media and emotion.]

Scholars have covered mediated intimacy as implicated by a variety of technologies, including radio (Arnheim 1986; Douglas 2004; Hilmes 1997; Horton & Wohl 1956; Jarman 2013; Loviglio 2005; Scannell 1996), podcasting (Sienkiewicz & Jaramillo 2019; Spinelli & Dann 2019), YouTube (Berryman & Kavka 2017; Burgess & Green 2018; Jerslev 2016; Johnston 2017; Lee & Watkins 2016), and A.I. (Brooks 2021; Devlin 2018). Following analog examples such as love letters, the telephone provides one of the earliest manifestations of technologically mediated intimacy, and this is reflected in both scholarship and popular culture.

Carolyn Marvin (1990) notes the telephone’s capacity for intimacy at a distance, for example, while John Durham Peters (1999) contends with its history as an inherently erotic medium. AT&T underscores telephony’s intimacy in its long running marketing campaign that beckons consumers to “reach out and touch someone,” a slogan the company continues to evoke in marketing its wireless data plans. As this body of work suggests, neither physical distance nor technological mediation necessarily diminish opportunities for intimacy formation and maintenance. Indeed, the telephone has a good deal of historical baggage here. As a point-to-point/one-on-one technology, the telephone harnesses users’ voices. As we discuss throughout Musical Intimacy, the human voice is intricately bound up in matters of identity and expression - voices are uniquely “ours.” Although the telephone’s disembodiment of the voice forces us to cede some control here, its promise to discreetly deliver our voice to the intended party makes this an acceptable concession. Be it asking for dates, maintaining long distance relationships, or phone sex, the telephone is not by any means a direct substitute for co-present intimacy, but it may be the next-best thing under particular circumstances. 

Throughout the 20th century, popular music served as an especially rich domain for expressing and cementing the telephone’s role in intimacy and the cultural imaginary. Lisa Colton’s (2014) chapter on Lady Gaga does a fantastic job of surveying this body of work with particular attention to how these songs construct gender, and how the telephone serves as a conduit for romance in their lyrical narratives. In Chapter 4 of Musical Intimacy, we analyze Prince’s 1982 B-side “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore.” Without giving away too much of that analysis, the Prince song is interesting from a lyrical perspective in that rather than embracing the intimate affordances of the telephone, the song’s emotive power rests on a failed intimate connection, as the narrator pleads for his love interest to call (“If what we had was good / How come you don’t call me anymore?”).

Fellow Minneapolitans The Replacements took a similar tack two years later in “Answering Machine” (from 1984’s Let it Be). In The ‘Mats tune, the narrator’s frustration comes not from a lover who won’t call, but one who can’t or won’t pick up their end of the line (“How do you say I miss you to an answering machine? / How do you say good night to an answering machine?”). Sonically drawing the point home, “Answering Machine” includes in its mix a phone company recording, the telephonic predecessor to a 404 page (“If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again / If you need help, hang up and dial your operator”). 

These vestiges of the landline era may seem antiquated in 2024. Advances such as email, text, and videoconferencing have diminished the telephone’s role in interpersonal communication and as such, intimacy. Or maybe the nature of that intimacy has changed. The phone may now be used less frequently for voice communication, asking a crush out on a date, or late night phone calls to a distant lover. But the intimacy of the telephone may simply have shifted from the communicative act to the technology itself. The smartphone is ultimately a personal object, and a personal archive. Our devices include contacts and text histories, and interface any number of data points about our behavior, including geolocation history, social media activity, personal calendar, and cloud file storage, to name but a few. 

Which brings us back to Phone Orphans. Although we encounter it as a commercially released album, the framing of these songs as voice notes from Veirs’ smartphone primes us to experience the album a certain way. Voice notes are most often personal notes to ourselves. Although our access to Veirs’ recordings is clearly consensual, as Maciej points out, it can be difficult to shake the feeling that we’re accessing something at least initially intended to be personal, private. That kind of closeness to Veirs’ creative process can convey an intimate, fly-on-the-wall perspective for listeners. Moreover, the sonics of the recordings on Phone Orphans further emphasize this sense of intimacy, demonstrating elements of sonic spatiality and inadvertent intimacies that we discuss throughout Musical Intimacy. For example, the acapella “Up is a Nice Place to Be” lacks much in the way of sonic density, encouraging listeners to focus on Veirs’ lyrics and voice. And her voice orients us spatially as well; this particular track is not especially high in fidelity, so we get a good deal of room noise, while Veirs’ voice reverberates slightly, as it might in a bathroom or a minimally furnished space. In other songs such as “Creatures of a Day” and “Tiger Ocean,” we can hear Veirs’ body interacting with her acoustic guitar, be it the percussive pluck of her calloused fingers picking out the melody, or the squeal of her fret hand as it slides across the strings. So while the telephone may not provide the same kind of narrative intimacy it did in past recordings, Phone Orphans invites us to consider how our phones are not now devoid of intimate potential, but rather, the nature of the intimacy that it affords has evolved with the technology - a storehouse of personal, intimate data rather than (or at least in addition to) a means of romantic connection.

-Zack

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References

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Berryman, Rachel and Misha Kavka. (2017). ‘I guess a lot of people see me as  a big sister or a friend’: The role of intimacy in the celebrification of beauty vloggers. Journal of Gender Studies 26(3): 307-320.

Brooks, Rob. (2021). Artificial intimacy: Virtual friends, digital lovers, and algorithmic matchmakers. New York: Columbia University Press.

Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. (2018). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Colton, Lisa. (2014). Who’s calling? Telephone songs, female vocal empowerment and signification. In Iddon, Martin and Melanie Marshall (Eds.), Lady Gaga and popular music: Performing gender, fashion, and culture. New York: Routledge (pp. 67-81).

Devlin, Kate. (2018). Turned on: Science, sex, and robots. London: Bloomsbury.

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 Jarman, Freya. (2013). Relax, feel good, chill out: The affective distribution of classical music. In Thompson and Biddle (Eds.), Sound Music Affect: Theorizing sonic experience. London: Bloomsbury. 183-204.

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 Levenger, George and Harold L. Raush. (1977). Preface. In Levenger and Raush (Eds.), Close relationships: Perspectives on the meaning of intimacy. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. vii-x.

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