Music became spatialized rather than an object offered for contemplation

Evidence

MTV above all can be taken as a spatialization of music, or, if you prefer, as the telltale revelation that it had already, in our time, become profoundly spatialized in the first place. Technologies of the musical, to be sure, whether of production, reproduction, reception, or consumption, already worked to fashion a new sonorous space around the individual or the collective listener: in music, too, “representationality” — in the sense of drawing up your fauteuil and gazing across at the spectacle unfolded before you — has known its crisis and its specific historical disintegration. You no longer offer a musical object for contemplation and gustation; you wire up the context and make space musical around the consumer. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 655

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s ongoing thesis that spatialization is a constitutive trait of the postmodern cultural dominant; also resonates with the reader’s goal of tracing how economic conditions produce aesthetic forms. — connects to: Music made entirely of treated found sounds raises the question of objects singing — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 337; Musical space can function as a compositional component rather than a retrofitted edit — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 485
• DEFINE: Clarifies the distinctive meaning of ‘spatialization’ as applied to music — wiring up context versus offering a representational object.