Deconcentrated listening makes perception of a musical whole impossible

Evidence

But if the film as a whole seems to be apprehended in a distracted manner, deconcentrated listening makes the perception of a whole impossible. All that is realized is what the spotlight falls on - striking melodic intervals, unsettling modulations, intentional or unintentional mistakes, or whatever condenses itself into a formula by an especially intimate merging of melody and text. Here, too, listeners and products fit together; they are not even offered the structure which they cannot follow. If atomized listening means progressive decomposition for the higher music, there is nothing more to decompose in the lower music. The forms of hit songs are so strictly standardized, down to the number of beats and the exact duration, that no specific form appears in any particular piece. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 95

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘deconcentration’ — the perceptual activity that reduces music to spotlight-highlighted fragments — a key toolkit term for the reader’s own analysis.
• XREF: The ‘listeners and products fit together — they are not even offered the structure which they cannot follow’ is a pure standardization-pseudo-individuation mechanism, matching Benjamin’s distracted apperception of cinema. — connects to: Capitalist commodification of music causes listeners’ hearing to regress psychologically to infantile passivity. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 578; Modern canned sound degrades the general ability to listen, forcing composers’ audibility.