The Community Listening Project seeks to provide a communal listening experience for the city of Bloomington and beyond. The group meets twice a month, in my humble living quarters here in the heartbeat of America. Participants are asked to bring a piece of recorded music to share within a group setting. As a student of ethnomusicology, I am hoping to use this site as a way to learn more about the everyday listener of recorded music. Normally, ethnomusicologists look to the performer of music as a reference point of their research. By doing so, they hope to identify the meaning of music within a specific cultural setting. However, this project believes, along with Plato, that: “The parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the user of them.” So, in this group setting, I will be participating, observing, interviewing participants, and writing extensively about what I see and hear about the user of recorded music. People actually make a living doing this- I am not even joking. The folks in the ivory tower call this type of approach “ethnographic research.” However, I intend to experiment with the environment in which people talk about and experience music as a group. Therefore, with my “heavy handed” involvement, this would not be considered a traditional ethnographic research site, but can be considered a method of “design research.” Within this blog site, I will disclose my observations while staring at my screen, waiting and hoping to receive your questions and comments.