Any sound can be music if you listen to it the right (or wrong) way. Living in the Farm to Table living/learning community at the University of Vermont, I am constantly surrounded by musical people (who knew so many wonderful people could love both food AND music!?). In this podcast, I have collected 10 sounds from my daily life which I consider to be music. We begin with the noises I wake up to, such as the box fan in my window, and progress through my daily life until the last things I hear before going to bed. Additionally, you may notice that the music in my life starts out as an individual experience each morning, and slowly builds to include our whole community by the end of the night. Each and every sound can be found within the Farm to Table house. Some of these noises are indeed actual songs that can be played, but others are fragments of noise which inspire me to create and connect to other people.
- Box fan – Each morning, before my alarm even goes off, my brain registers the sound of the fan in the window of my room. The sound is constant, and always in the background of my daily life.
- Book Pages – Books are a huge part of my life, whether I am reading them for class or just for fun, I have always loved the sound of crisp pages turning.
- Pencils drumming – A tick similar to tapping a foot, I often tap my pencil in my room while thinking of an idea (or sometimes out of boredom).
- Feet on the Stairs – Every person has a unique, distinct walk. The acoustics of the stairwell outside our suites carry the pounding of feet up three floors, so we always know when people are home.
- The Laugh – One of the members of my suite has an amazing, deep, bubbling laugh. Whenever I hear it, I can’t help but smile.
- Food Song – While hiking with five other people from my house this past weekend, I was introduced to a song by one of the other members. He taught us this song which he sang while in high school, and we sang it before our lunch at the top of the mountain. Later that evening, we taught it to the parents of one of the other members.
- Eating – Oftentimes I come back to my room to find my beautiful roommate spread out on the floor, eating pretzels or other snacks.
- Percussion Jam –Spontaneous jam sessions often happen on the third floor of A Mid, such as this percussion circle from a week or so ago. One person started with a beat, and slowly everyone else (about 20 people) added in their own rhythm until we were all clapping, stomping, and shaking trashcans as one.
- Night Music –Nightly music adventures make our community ever stronger. Sitting around in a circle, singing and playing music together allows us to bond as a community. We are no longer each our individual selves trying to do the best we can, but parts of the whole machine that work to achieve a common goal.
- Deep breathing/absence of sound – After everyone goes to sleep, this quietness seeps through the suite like a blanket, quieting our minds until we wake up to the sounds of a new day.
The way we perceive sound, and thus music, is highly individual. However, the act of hearing is also a cultural phenomenon. As explained in “BANG (a beginning),” our culture and language greatly influence how we hear. In the article, Schwartz states that “just as noise is what we make of certain sounds, the meanings we assign to noise are no less consequential than the meanings we assign to other sounds” (Schwartz, 28). In that case, I consider all of the noises in my podcast to be music, so therefore they are. Additionally, my observation of Farm to Table as a whole has helped me find each individual’s own voice. As Barthes states in his article “The Grain of the Voice,” “the voice is not personal… it is not original… and at the same time it is individual” (Barthes, 182). This is the essence of Farm to Table. Though we all come into the house with our own voice and personality, there is a constant give and take between us and the music we create together. To me, it seems that at the end of the night our voices all together make up one singular new grain.
Picking 10 sounds that exemplify my life with Farm to Table caused me to thing about many things, but most importantly it made me realize that sound is a communal experience. In choosing which noises to include on the list, I was required to ruminate on what I personally consider music, and why. I have decided that, for me at least, music does not need to have an established rhythm or melody, but just something that strikes a chord in my heart, and brings me back to a specific place or time. These 10 sounds will forever remind me of Farm to Table, a place that I have come to call home.
Bibliography:
Bathes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 179–89. Noonday Press, 1977.
Schwartz, Hillel. “BANG (a Beginning).” In Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & beyond, 18–36. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2011.
I really liked how in your podcast and essay you didn’t consider your sounds noises, but as music. I think thats really interesting that you thought of that since music to most people is strictly defined to what you hear on the radio or on their ipods, etc. It really had me think about my podcast and the sounds in my life and made me realize that they are the sound track of my life. I found your quote from Barthes interesting too because nothing about the noises/sounds are exactly original, but they are very individual to everyone. For example, your sound of the box fan is not an original sound. Box fans are very common and many people own them but for me, there is not a box fan in my room so the sound is individual to you. This is cool to think about because sounds that may be super common in your life may not be in others.
Overall I really liked your podcast and think its very unique and interesting! Its cool to show that your L/L community is very musical despite it not being a music community.
To answer your question: I do not believe that there is such a thing as natural complete silence. It my be possible to create a complete silence, such as in the soundproof rooms where you are able to hear your own body. I also don’t think that this lack of silence is solely because of today’s technology, there has been and will always be background noise. What I meant in adding the lack of sound to my podcast was not specifically to say that there is a moment where everything is silent, but that at some point the noises do reach a much lower level and that there is an absence of many of the noises I find familiar, though I find a different familiarity in the half-silence.
Abra,
Just like tneubaue has stated above, you are one of the only people in the project that has used the absence of sound to your advantage and I highly respect that. I though it was clever for you to focus on sounds pertaining to UVM. Other sounds I have heard in other projects relate to life at school but could also be heard either at home, or any other location. You on the other hand, brought in sounds that you learned here, and focused on new sounds which I thought was very clever. Yes, some of the other sounds (box fan, pages in book, laughter, eating, etc.) could be heard anywhere. But the use of your new song you learned (Food Song) and the nightly music you partake in along side with the percussion jams only pertain to you here, living in the Farm to Table living/learning community. Your essay made me rethink some of the sounds I’m listening to in my audio field here at UVM because some of them may only be sounds that can be heard here, and those sounds should be appreciated much more. Overall, I found your topic of sounds heard at the Farm to Table living/learning community to be unique to you and I thought that was really special that some others may not hear some of the sounds that are available to you.
You are the first person I have read/ listened to their podcast that has included the absence of sounds. I think this is pretty important while discussing hearing. This “quiet” while people go to sleep is pretty important, I think. In our technological world, do you think there really is such a thing as complete quiet? I don’t think that there is. Overall this is an awesome piece. It was interesting which sounds you associated with your learning community.