In an era before recording technology, the only way to hear music was to be present where it was being performed. Egyptian priests shook the sistrum in prayer to Isis, and in the temples of Mesopotamia hymns were sung to the accompaniment of lyres. Music was the ritual instrument that bound gods to humankind.

Yet music was never confined within temple walls. At the Greek Festival of Dionysus, thousands gathered in the amphitheatre to hear choral performances; in the marketplace, wandering musicians sold their songs. The West African griot transmitted oral history in song; across East Asia, folk songs were sung alongside agricultural rites. They left no written record, but music was always present in the people's public square.

In medieval Europe, the spaces of musical listening fell into three broad categories. The first was the cathedral. Gregorian chant reverberating beneath stone arches was a distinctive acoustic experience shaped by long reverberation times, and musical notation was invented precisely in order to transmit these chants accurately. In East Asia, Jongmyo Jeryeak (Royal Ancestral Shrine music) played the equivalent role; in the Islamic world, the sama ceremony of the Sufi orders served the same function.

The second was the marketplace and the tavern. European troubadours toured villages singing tales of heroes; on the Korean peninsula, gwangdae performed pansori at market fairs. West African griots carried tribal history in melodic oral transmission. These musics left no written record — yet song was always present in the daily life of ordinary people.

The third was the court. From the Renaissance onward, kings and nobles employed their own ensembles to provide chamber music at banquets and ceremonies; Bach and Haydn served as court Kapellmeisters. Most of what survives in the written record is the music of court and church, but musical listening itself observed no distinction of class.

In the late 18th century, public concerts appeared where anyone who paid admission could attend. Mozart and Beethoven — instead of serving noble patrons — gave subscription concerts, selling tickets directly to the general public. Large concert halls opened in the major cities of Europe throughout the 19th century, and the Großer Musikvereinssaal in Vienna, inaugurated in 1870, delivered the grandeur of the orchestra to its citizens through superb acoustic design.

The emergence of a ticket-buying mass audience drove the symphony towards ever greater scale and drama. At the same time, the spread of the piano in middle-class homes exploded demand for sheet music, forming a new axis of domestic performance. It was an era in which the oral folk music of the marketplace and tavern coexisted with the score-reading civic music of the concert hall.

In the early 20th century, musical listening spilled out of the concert hall and into the streets. The cabarets of 1920s Berlin were night theatres where satire and music mingled; at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York, the Duke Ellington Orchestra swung every evening. Music was no longer something you sat still to hear reverently — it was something to be consumed while your body moved and conversation flowed around you.

From the 1930s and '40s, jukeboxes spread to diners and bars across America, allowing anyone to select and hear a song of their choosing for a single coin. This was the first experience in which individuals could choose what they listened to. The jazz clubs of 52nd Street in New York in the 1950s were the scene of the bebop revolution of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. In the narrow, smoke-filled underground spaces, the distance between performer and audience was no more than an arm's length.

In August 1969, 400,000 people descended on a farm in Bethel, New York. It was Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Santana performed in the mud, and the audience ate, slept, and steeped themselves in music for three days. Seat numbers and dress codes vanished entirely. Musical listening had become a collective experience and a declaration of a generation.

The Beatles' concert at Shea Stadium in 1965 was an event in which the music was swallowed by the screaming of 55,000 fans — and that limitation catalysed the revolution in mega-PA systems. The call-and-response between Queen and 70,000 audience members at Live Aid in Wembley in 1985 was the apex of collective communion that the stadium concert could achieve.

Studio 54 opened in New York in 1977. Beneath the mirror ball, the DJ mixed records all night, weaving an unbroken current of music. It was the first moment that the designer of the listening experience was neither composer nor band, but the DJ. After the disco era subsided, the Warehouse club in Chicago in the 1980s gave birth to house music, and Detroit's underground clubs produced techno.

In 1988, acid house and rave culture exploded across Britain. Thousands gathered in abandoned warehouses or open fields to dance until dawn. The listening experience of the club was fundamentally different from the concert. There was no division between stage and audience; the music was not something to appreciate but something to inhabit physically. Turntablism transformed the record into an instrument, and the DJ became the priest of the ritual that the club had become.

The Sony Walkman, launched in 1979, transformed the act of listening to music from something done sitting still to something done while walking. The combination of headphones and a pocket-sized player transported the listener into a state of acoustic isolation even in the midst of a noisy subway. The eyes faced the crowded city, but the ears were sealed inside a perfect private chamber.

In 2001, the iPod pushed thousands of songs into that chamber. Users came to live surrounded by their own personal soundtrack as they walked. The centre of gravity in music consumption shifted from the living-room speaker to personal listening through earphones, and music was no longer tethered to any place.

The active noise cancellation built into wireless earbuds — epitomised by the AirPod — cancels external sound with inverse-phase audio waves. The murmur of a café, the roar of an aircraft engine: both are erased, and a physical vacuum is created inside the ear canal.

What fills that silence is delegated to the algorithm. Spotify's Discover Weekly analyses listening patterns and generates a new playlist every week: what you replayed on a melancholy night, which BPM you preferred on the morning commute — all of it is learned. We consume far more music than any audience in an 18th-century concert hall, yet we may be consuming it less as an act of immersed attention and more as a lubricant for daily life.