1. Introduction: Listening Through the Body

The introductory chapter elucidates the nature and direction of this book and lays out the primary assertion: That technics situate and produce the body in the world, and the book focuses on this process in relation to music listening in popular music culture. In order to explore this argument, the introductory chapter outlines the ways in which we can deploy the language and theoretical tools of somatechnics in understanding the relationships between bodies, technologies, and music listening, that is, as a way that the body is wrapped up and ultimately entangled with those technologies. At its core however, somatechnics seeks to expose the invisible nature of the way technicities produce and are produced by the bodymind, thus, the integration of popular music studies with somatechnics presupposes a political aspect to this project.