The town of Skagen is situated on the northernmost tip of Jutland (i.e., mainland Denmark). This is a remote and crisis-stricken area by Danish standards: the capital, Copenhagen, is eight hours away by train, the County of Northern Jutland has the highest unemployment rates in Denmark, and in recent years the region has been the target of several development projects financed by European Union funds. However, geographically, Skagen's position is quite central in Scandinavia. Ferry routes connect the nearby port of Frederikshavn (40 kilometres/25 miles away) with such relatively large Scandinavian cities as Oslo (9 hours away by ferry) and Gothenburg (3½ hours away). The town can also be reached from the south of Norway via the ferry route between Kristiansand and Hirtshals (also 40 kilometres/25 miles from Skagen). By these and other routes, tourists from Norway and Sweden, as well as from other parts of Denmark, regularly invade the town, in the summer season roughly doubling its 15,000 population.

This is the space age. Not just for sputniks and moonshots but also for hi-fi. We have ‘space’ conveyed through stereo sound – if we can find space for that extra stereo speaker. The theory that space is limited is nothing new to the average housewife. (HiFi Review, April 1959, p. 49)

Hip hop culture originated during the mid-1970s as an integrated series of live community-based practices. It remained a function of live practice and congregation for a number of years, exclusive to those who gathered together along NYC blocks, in parks, and in select clubs such as the now famous Harlem World or T-Connection. Early MCs (or ‘rappers’) and DJs, graffiti artists and breakdancers, forged a ‘scene’ entirely dependent upon face-to-face social contact and interaction. Indeed, the event itself, as an amalgam of dance, dress, art and music, was intrinsic to hip hop culture during these years. As one might expect, the art's earliest years went largely unrecorded and undocumented. However, in 1979, Sugarhill Records, a small label in New Jersey, released a single entitled ‘Rapper's Delight’. It was an unexpected event for many of hip hop's original proponents, those pioneers immersed in the art's early live scene. Grandmaster Flash comments:

I was approached in '77. A gentleman walked up to me and said, ‘We can put what you're doing on record.’ I would have to admit that I was blind. I didn't think that somebody else would want to hear a record re-recorded onto another record with talking on it. I didn't think it would reach the masses like that. I didn't see it. I knew of all the crews that had any sort of juice and power, or that was drawing crowds. So here it is two years later, and I hear ‘To the hip-hop, to the bang to the boogie’, and it's not Bam, Herc, Breakout, AJ. Who is this? (quoted in George 1993, p. 49)

The vast majority of all music ever made is played by ear. To make music by ear means to create, perform, remember and teach music without the use of written notation. This is a type of music-making that has been little observed by musicology, which has mainly been devoted to notated music. Even in the research on folk and popular music, which has expanded in the last twenty or thirty years, questions of musical practice when you play by ear are rarely treated: how do you learn to play an instrument, how do you make songs, how do you teach and learn songs and how do you conceive of music theory?