Music conjures spaces: churches, theaters, roadhouses, arenas, pubs, dance halls, living rooms, festival tents, and all sorts of clubs, from tenement basements to cabarets to giant warehouses. Those are social spaces, where musicians perform together and audiences gather to share the sounds — and to flirt, dance, get high, sing along. To somehow connect.

On live recordings, those spaces may have been real; with studio recordings, they have long been a crafty, inviting illusion.

Yet through the 2010s, many of pop’s sonic spaces grew more isolated, barren and claustrophobic. They were places where a moan or a whisper was all a singer chose to project. Where the idea of a stable, long-running band has been all but supplanted by a songwriting gig economy of temporary hookups; how many hits “feature” someone the lead singer hasn’t actually met?

Music’s implied spaces have shrunk to the size of a bedroom, or a pair of laptop speakers, or a set of earbuds. Those are private places, intimate places, often lonely places. In the internet era, they are also places that can be solitary workshops for sounds and images. There are cameras and microphones in those digital bunkers, and musical starter kits online; antisocial collaborators don’t have to interact at all. And SoundCloud and YouTube are wide open to the results; the loner’s laptop can be both a recording studio and a broadcast booth.