Today’s challenge for the understanding of music in the society and everyday life is a new issue: music is omnipresent due to the availability of dissemination and storage technologies. Therefore, attention should be paid to the effects of accessible music, i.e. both to the increased availability of a variety of musical forms and styles, as well as to the apathy in the reception of music as an object of special attention. In contrast with technological determinism, we, along with Chion, expose three dominant technicist myths about high fidelity, reproduction, and the technical management of music. Regarding the relationship between sociology and musicology, the author offers—as one of the possible solutions—an older notion of socio-musicology, as a relevant interdisciplinary approach to the research on music, to which more productive sections of sociology and ethnomusicology— and the dilemmas of both— refer. The text focuses on this issue in more detail. Building on the conceptualization of the four modes of listening by Pierre Schaeffer, the author argues for a revaluation of listening to all sound events on a general level, taking into account the listener’s confusion, and the passages from one listening to the other. The structural role of well-theorized music in the film could be a convenient way for questioning the role of music in everyday life, also in the case of muzak, which, on a fully functional and economic level, supplies and, in various transformations, still co-structures modern daily life. The essay is a call for a wider focus in the studies of music as has been the case in particular in western academia and traditional science.
