Musical consumption, self-control and smartphone addiction: a dual-systems theory perspective and evidence from a survey study

PurposeIn the past decade, smartphone adoption has reached almost 100% in industrialized countries, which is predominantly due to advancements in capabilities. Given the increasing number of people who are addicted to the smartphone and the significant growth of people who consume music via the smartphone, the purpose of the study is to explore the underlying mechanisms through which musical consumption affects smartphone addiction.Design/methodology/approachBased on dual-systems theory, a research model was developed to determine the impact of System 1 (emotion related to music) and System 2 (self-control) on smartphone addiction. A partial-least-squares approach was used to test the model with 294 survey participants.FindingsThe empirical data confirmed the research model. Regarding System 1, musical emotion positively influenced smartphone addiction through musical consumption and musical response. Moreover, musical preference significantly affected musical response. Regarding System 2, self-control negatively predicted smartphone addiction.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is limited, as the participants were college students who are not representative of all populations.Originality/valueThe study extends the literature on the dark side of information technology use and complements a research agenda by Gefen and Riedl (2018) on consideration of music in information systems (IS) research.

Toward a Utilitarian Theory of Consumer Response to Advertising Music

It is surprisingly difficult to know whether a piece of ad music will have its intended effect on consumers. A model developed by the author and a colleague (Craton & Lantos, 2011; Lantos & Craton, 2012) consists of four broad variables (listening situation, musical stimulus, listener characteristics, and listener’s advertising processing strategy) that interact to determine attitude toward the advertising music (Aam), a multidimensional construct that captures the many cognitive and affective elements of a consumer’s experience of ad music. Emerging research on negative emotional response to music, brand avoidance, and “mixed emotions” is consistent with predictions that Aam’s valence can be negative or a mixture of positive and negative (ambivalent). This literature also has implications for how to measure Aam and clarify its structure—specifically, the relationship between overall musical response and Aam’s many subsidiary elements. The present chapter reviews this emerging work, discusses its implications for the model, and suggests how the model can be extended by adding a layer of diverse psychological processes (“mechanisms”) that mediate between its four broad causal variables and Aam. The theory is “utilitarian” in the sense that the proposed mechanisms evolved to perform practical, biologically important tasks not specifically related to music processing.

Queer Music in the Queen’s Hall: Teleny and Decadent Musical Geographies at the Fin de Siècle

This article examines the significance of music and musical performance in Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), an anonymous pornographic novel attributed by some scholars to Oscar Wilde. It draws upon historical material on late-Victorian concert venues, queer literary sub-cultures and sexology to illuminate the representation of musical spaces in the text. Teleny exists in two different versions: an English text, which is set in Paris, and a French text, which is set in London. The opening section of the article suggests that Teleny’s dynamic engagement with cosmopolitan cultural exchange between Paris and London is brought into sharper focus by situating the musical performances in the novel in the precise built environment of London’s Queen Hall. The second section explores the novel’s concern with queer geographies (the Orient, Eastern Europe) in the context of other texts that address music and homosexual identity in the period. The third section examines the significance of space in the novel’s presentation of musical listening, arguing that its focus on the materiality of sound and the haptic transmission of desire responds to sexological conceptions of embodied musical response by homosexual subjects. The significance of this sensory experience of listening is understood in the light of Sara Ahmed’s theorization of ‘queer phenomenology’. Finally, the article traces the significance of musical allusions to songs by Franz Schubert to show how they form part of the novel’s broader concerns with the spatial articulation of same-sex desire and the representation of queer urban geographies.

Reflection

The Metaphysics of Notation (2008) is a 72-foot-wide, hand-drawn pictographic score divided into twelve continuous panels.1 It is accompanied by no instruction regarding its interpretation. The work aspires to elicit a musical response from a performer, but despite its profusion of concrete, detailed glyphs it advocates nothing specific about the nature of their aural realization. Furthermore, I heard no sound in my head while composing the piece. This is a radical departure from the approach to composition I was taught, in which the composer’s job is to imagine—preferably with exacting resolution—a sound object, and then, through the deft application of the most relevant notation (whether traditional or invented—but if the latter, surely a defined one) to produce a specification from which a performer (burdened or invigorated by a marginal or essential role as interpreter) can realize this imagined sound....

The Angel of Lucknow, the Hero of Halifax: A Nova Scotian Musical Response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58

Although only a minor conflict from today's perspective, the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857–58 inspired a massive outpouring of popular culture responses in Victorian Britain. One of the most frequently used texts was the legend of Jessie Brown, a Scottish maiden who became a heroine during the siege of Lucknow. This fabulous tale was retold and memorialized throughout British theatres, music halls and private homes. Jessie Brown also inspired ‘Dinna You Hear It’, a little-known parlour song that was composed by James Ross and Louis Casseres and published by E.G. Fuller in Halifax, Nova Scotia, around 1858. This article examines the historical circumstances that led to this song's creation and the appeal that this text would have held for the residents of a small colonial city. Halifax may have been a remote corner of the Empire, far removed from the battlefields of India, but Nova Scotians nonetheless shared Britons’ horror and intrigue over the Mutiny – a fascination that was heightened by the fact that Nova Scotia could claim a distinct connection to the victory at Lucknow. By examining the creative and commercial factors that led the authors of ‘Dinna You Hear It’ to produce their own musical setting of the Jessie Brown legend for the Halifax public, this study of a rare Nova Scotian music publication asserts the important role sheet music played within the process of cultural exchange that bridged colony and metropole throughout the nineteenth century.

Socrates: Mark Morris on Death and Dying

Mark Morris's choreographic depiction of absence in Socrates (2010), set to Erik Satie's austere musical response to Plato's retelling of Socrates's death, poses important questions about the nature of Morris's expressive gesture – its origins, proceedings, and implications. In this essay, I examine the technical inner workings of the text, music, and dance and argue that Morris provides a frame for depicting loss that can help articulate something fundamental about Plato's text and Satie's score. If the notion of dance invites us to listen to the text and music in a different way, it also encourages us to reconsider not only the interrelations between text, music, and dance but also how expressions of death and dying play out in contemporary culture through Morris's nearly thirty-year study of Plato's text and Satie's score.