Music in the Air: Street Music, Serendipity, and Urban Experience in Barcelona

Abstract

This study explores street music as a form of serendipitous cultural encounter in Barcelona. It asks how listeners experience street music in public space, under what conditions passersby become listeners, and why such encounters may have cultural value. The research is based on field observations and short interviews with engaged listeners across different city sites. The study builds on existing research showing that street music can shape urban ambiance and everyday urban experience. Its contribution is to examine street music specifically through the lens of serendipity: as a form of cultural experience that people do not fully choose, plan, or seek out in advance. In this sense, the value of street music lies not only in exposure to particular genres, performers, or cultural expressions, but also in the unexpected mode of encounter itself. Street music keeps open the possibility of being interrupted by live culture in everyday urban life. The findings show that this value is not automatic. Music may change the ambiance of a place, but it becomes culturally meaningful only when it attracts attention and enables engagement. Field observations showed that engagement depended on a combination of conditions, including audibility, amplification, scenic or leisure-oriented settings, the possibility to stop or gather, audience formation, and performer visibility. These conditions helped turn passing exposure into moments of attention, where listeners felt they had come across the music by chance. The study argues that street music has cultural value because it creates moments of openness in public space. It can expose listeners to music, performers, atmospheres, and forms of public life they did not intentionally select, while also making them more receptive to music outside their usual preferences. It also offers a low-threshold form of live cultural experience outside concerts, personal listening, and algorithmically mediated choice. At a time when many cultural encounters are increasingly planned, personalised, or predicted, street music preserves the possibility of serendipity: an unexpected and “undeniably human” encounter with live culture in everyday urban life.