An acoustic setting does not address a homogeneous listener. Tarvainen and Kytö approach urban background music through aural diversity: ways of hearing, interpreting and negotiating sound that depart from culturally normalised expectations. Sound diaries and interviews do not merely collect judgements about agreeable or disagreeable music. They capture the small strategies through which listeners maintain orientation, attention and agency when sounds are imposed by commercial or shared environments. Borrowing and adapting the idea of small agency, the authors describe listening as transactional and situational rather than an isolated sensory capacity. A background track chosen by a venue may obscure cues needed by someone navigating without sight, while the same environment may afford another listener familiar rhythms or orientation. The methodological operation is to make ordinary auditory adjustment reportable without defining participants by deficit. Its importance crosses ethnomusicology, disability studies, cultural geography and environmental psychology: exposure is shared neither equally nor innocently, and the agency to alter an acoustic setting is unequally distributed. Its diary-based evidence should not be converted into an objective acoustic dosage measure.
