Jacob Kingsbury Downs

en

Jacob Kingsbury Downs is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Music at the University of Sheffield. His project, funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council via the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities, considers headphone listening through a phenomenological lens, with emphasis on individuals’ experiences of embodied space, mediated social relations, and the materiality of technology. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford.

research

research expositions

  • Acoustic Territories of the Body: Headphone Listening, Embodied Space, and the Phenomenology of Sonic Homeliness (2021) author(s): Jacob Kingsbury Downs published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    Can we describe certain sonic experiences as “homely,” even when they take place outside of a traditional home-space? While phenomenological accounts of home abound, with writers detailing a rich spectrum of the felt characteristics of the homely including safety, familiarity, and affective “warmth,” there is a scarcity of research into sonic experience that engages with such literatures. With specific interest in the experience of embodied space, I account here for what might be termed feelings of “sonic homeliness” as they emerge during headphone listening. After forming a conceptual model of homeliness that draws from phenomenological philosophy, I investigate its applicability to experiences of headphone listening. Through analysis of primary interview data, I consider how headphones may be said to territorialize space for listeners, analyzing how sonic “boundaries” are experienced in relation to the body, as well as how some listeners describe their experiences as interiorized, comforting, and “wombic.”
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