Monthly Archives: October 2015

The Technology of the Listening

4 Replies

Asher Bean

Sound and Society

10/4/15

Professor Brennan

The Technology of Listening

   The ear is a technology used by the brain to hear and process sounds. The podcast “The Technology of the Listening” reflects this idea through the sounds of recorded in my everyday life. The first sounds, “Roses” by Outkast, is not only my alarm in the morning but also an mp3. An mp3 is a form of sound that is compressed and emptied, creating a smaller file size. Jonathan Sterne states, “An mp3 takes an existing CD-quality digital audio file and removes as much data content as possible, relying on listeners’ bodies and brains to make up the difference” (Sterne 832). This implies the ear notices the emptiness within the mp3 and signals the brain to produce the missing sounds or the ear amplifies the surrounding noises making it possible to miss these certain sounds.

   The following sounds heard in the podcast, “Roses” , the shower, the zipper, the water fountain, the falling of the weights, the second shower, the clicking of keys, FIFA, and even the light switch all are sounds produced by technology. However, this only demonstrates nine sounds, indicating that one sound is missing; talking while eating at restaurant. Although this is not produced by modern technology, it is perceived differently based on the technology that is ears, and produced by the technology that is our voices. In the article, The Energetic Ear by A.J. Hudspeth, Hudspeth talks about the physiological way our ear is able to listen. The ear is composed of multiple different elements. The most important part of the ear to signal translation is the small hair-like structures located inside of the ear, known as the cilia. When a sound wave enters the ear, the cilia stand up in specific quantities based on the amplitude of the noise. In more simple terms, the more cilia stand up, the louder the initial sound is. When the cilia stand up they open pathways for electrical signals to enter allowing the brain to process the waves providing us with hearing (Hudspeth). The ear is composed of several intricate parts working together to accomplish a specific function, in this case hearing. This concept can also be applied to the production of the voice. Ultimately, Hudspeth’s view of the ear from a physiological perspective supports the idea that the final sound of the voices in a restaurant was actually produced by technology, just as the other sounds were.

   The sounds produced in the “The Technology of the Listening” also contribute to Hudspeth’s idea of listening being an active process. Hudspeth states, “As discussed above the active process is an example of positive feedback. Moreover, like many manmade feedback systems, the active process exhibits gain control: it can be turned up or down as circumstances dictate,” (Hudspeth 50). Hudspeth claims that the ear is able to amplify certain sounds and decrease others depending on the situation. This is exemplified in all of the sounds listened to but is most evident during the sound clip of me at the restaurant. In a normal situation when talking to someone at a restaurant, the conversation one is involved in is amplified while the surrounding conversations and noises are decreased. Through recording, the process in which these sounds are amplified or decreased is changed. Since the microphone can’t necessarily filter the same ways an ear can, the sounds at the restaurant are heard differently due to the lack of filtering.

   The “The Technology of the Listening” follows the themes of technology and how the ear itself is technology all while taking the listener through the sounds of an average day for me. By looking at the ear as a form of technology it can provide humans a new way to view the world and the sound within it.

 

Bibliography:

  • Hudspeth, A.J. “The Energetic Ear.” Daedalus, The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences(2015), 42–52.
  • Sterne, Jonathan. “The mp3 as Cultural Artifact .” New Media And Society(2006), 824–42.
  • Big Boi. Andre 3000. Roses. Outkast. © 2004 by Sony Music Entertainment. mp3.

My Day

2 Replies

When we were first assigned this project, I started to hear the sounds of my everyday life differently. I began to notice the sounds that reoccured throughout my day. The ten sounds that I chose to include in this project are the ones that I found occurred the most, and have become the soundtrack of my daily life here at UVM. I chose to not have all my sounds be one minute long because I wanted them to be as authentic and representative of my real life as possible.

The second sound in my podcast is the sound of me getting out of bed. As you have heard, my bed creaks like an old basement door. When getting into or out of bed, or even when sitting on it, every spring can be felt, and definitely heard. The vibrations of each spring’s creak ripples through the cotton-polyester blend and into the body of whoever has sat down. I felt that this was a good demonstration of the vibrations that make up sounds, as we read about in Hearing Vibrations. Instead of just hearing the vibrations like we do with the majority of sounds we hear, when it comes to my bed, you can feel the vibrations that make up the sounds as well, proving, and reminding who ever sits on it, that sound is in fact vibration, which was the main point that Shelley Trower was trying to get across.

The seventh sound in my podcast is the sound of the fan that sits next to my desk. When I recorded that sound, I was doing homework with the window open, and although you cannot hear it in the recording, I could hear the sounds of people walking through the pebbles outside of Harris-Millis. I hit record in the hopes that my phone would be able to pick up those sounds, as well as those of people walking up and down the stairs outside of my dorm, and people talking outside my window. To my ears, those sounds were just as loud, if not louder, than the sound of the fan that is so prominent in the recording. I chose to keep this recording and include it in this project because it shows the difference between what human ears can pick up and what technology can, as was discussed in The Sounds Around Us: An Introduction to Field Recording. This example also connects to Hudspeth’s The Energetic Ear, because my ear was able to pick up and focus on the sound of people’s footsteps outside, even though they were seventy-five feet away, and the sound of people walking up and down the stairs even though there was a thick door between us. Even though the sound of the fan is what is predominant in the recording, that was more of a background noise to my ear, allowing my brain to unconsciously focus on the new sounds that were being produced around me.

This project made me slow down in my busy every day life and listen more closely to the sounds happening all around me. I noticed small things such as people talking behind me in class, or the sound of longboards going over the cracks in the sidewalk as I’m walking to class that I would’ve disregarded previous to this class and this project. I also contemplated sounds’ deeper meaning, with Hillel Schwartz’s quote, “Noise may be unwanted or incomprehensible sound; it is never insignificant sound,” in the back of my mind. In the past month, these ten sounds have become most familiar to me, and in hindsight, have been essential to me adjusting to my new life away from home, here at UVM.

Citations:

Trower, S. (2012). Introduction: Hearing Vibrations. In Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (pp. 1-12). New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group.

Schwartz, H. (2011). BANG (a beginning). In Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (pp. 17-35). Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Hudspeth, A. (2015). The Energetic Ear. 42-51.

English, L. (2015, February 8). The sounds around us: An introduction to field recording. Retrieved September 24, 2015.

A Musical Existence

3 Replies

 

Zack Bochicchio

 

Ever since I was a little kid I have always had this unexplainable affinity toward music. Because of this, I constantly am trying to fill my life with music. A world with music is a world that I understand. Because of that, the theme of my podcast is the musical sounds that I here throughout a given day in my life. The first sound is the song “Interlude 2” by Alt-j. This is a quiet sweet instrumental that appears on their first LP called An Awesome Wave. This song is my alarm. Thus, the first sound I hear every morning is a musical one. The next sound you here is me doing interval training. You can hear me mumble, “minor third, octave, perfect fifth, minor seventh.” I use a specific website that will play me two notes and from there, I have to identify what the second note is relative to the first. After the notes play I usually repeat them to myself and then say what it is outloud and then click on the correct answer.Interval training has proven to be extremely helpful with music theory and with figuring out complicated songs just by ear. In the third sound, we hear John Mayer talking. This clip is taken from a short documentary called “This Will All Make Perfect Sense Someday.” This documentary was filmed during the making of Mayer’s first major studio album “Room for Squares.” Though I do not listen to this particular video everyday, I find it extremely important to listen to interviews and similar media from my favorite artists talking about their musical beginnings. Success in the musical world is my biggest and strongest passion and dream. In my mind, listening to what these people have to say is almost like taking advice from someone who i actually trust to tell me the right thing. But because I am not one of these famous people, instead of just listening to one person’s stories and views, i try to cast a wider net. This is why my next sound is a snippet from an interview with one of my other favorite guitarists, John Butler. John Butler has a much more avant-garde way of playing which is why he is one of my greatest inspirations with my acoustic guitar. John Butler made the acoustic guitar make sense to me. After Butler talking, the next sound is me tuning my guitar. When I tune my guitar the most frequent question is “why do u change the sound so much?” as you can hear from how much some of the stings change. This is because on a guitar unlike most other instruments, there is a freedom to have the strings be any pitch you want them to be! Most guitars are tuned to EADGBe or standard tuning. But because of this freedom, you can change the strings and pitches and juxtaposition of notes to create completely new sounds! This sound is me tuning from standard tuning down to open C. Open C is defined usually as CGCGCE but sometimes the high E can be dropped to a D. In this case it remains an E for me. The tuning is supposed to represent the part in my day where I start to play music which is why the tuning bleeds into this next sound. The next sound is me just doing a little jam in G major. I am playing in 6:8 time which is one of my favorite time signatures to play in. For this backing track, I am using a loop pedal to get the effect of multiple guitars when really this is just me and just one guitar. The next sound is a little bit funny to me. This is something i always do when i fiddle around on the guitar and I put it down on my lap and just kind of start slamming away and get some cool sounds. I never considered this a “song” but whenever i play this for people they are always amazed and love to hear me play it. So by virtue of that, this has become one of my most popular original songs when i play live. I felt like if I were to try to make the recording perfect, it would take away from the daily life aspect of this podcast. Mistakes are prevalent. The next piece is a song by John Mayer called “BIgger Than My Body.” This song means the world to me because it is about having that feeling of knowing exactly what you want to do and how you are going to get there but knowing it’s not going to happen overnight. These things take time and it’s a song about having patience, but thin patience at that. This song is a reminder to me that it’s okay that I’m not making a record yet or that I’m not currently touring and playing shows for thousands of people and that I need to take small steps and if I keep stepping, those steps will add up. The last and more important sound is a snippet from the song “Covered in Rain” off of “Any Given Thursday.” This song constitutes as possibly being my favorite song of all time. It is definitely the most important song to me and is the reason I have such a drive for success. The first time I heard this song changed my life forever. I remember the first time i heard it. Before the song I was just a kid. A normal teenager who just loved music. But something happened to me during that song and by the end of it, my dreams and ambitions became clear. That song made me realize that all i want to do in this world is that. Just play music for as many people as I can.  in “The Grain of the Voice” by Roland Barthes he talks about a particular grain that singers have that does not just talk about their timbre or volume, but the ability to hear the teeth, lips, throat and tongue while they sing. Barthes goes on to say that that “grain” can be heard as well in instrumentalists. In my mind, Covered in Rain is a perfect example of that grain being expressed through instruments. These are all sounds that themselves occur throughout a normal day for me, or represent elements that are present musically in all of my days.

 

Work Cited

 

Barthes, Roland. The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Print.

 

Newman, Joe, perf. Interlude 2. Alt-J. 2012. MP3.

 

Mayer, John. Bigger Than My Body. John Mayer. 2003. MP3.
Mayer, John. Covered in Rain. John Mayer. 2003. MP3.          

Morning Ritual

7 Replies

My guitar teacher once told me, “don’t rush your mornings. If you rush your mornings, you rush your day, and if you rush your day, you rush your life.” I stand by those words, because too often mornings are a constant scramble to get things done and get out the door. At the end of the day, it’s a “thank god that’s over,” but that should never be your mindset. From this, I acquired a sort of “morning ritual,” in which I make an effort to take my time in the morning with whatever I am doing, exercising a sort of calmness and intention that I try to carry with me throughout my day. This time for myself in the morning plays a tremendous role in clearing my head and setting a tone for how I feel throughout the day.

Though my sounds may seem standard of any daily routine, they each hold meaning in the flow of my mornings. I wake up to “Free” by Mission South, a local band who are alumni from my high school. The sounds of my coffee machine (not peeing), keyboard, and printer account for my morning coffee while finishing homework. The wall shaking alarm is the exit door next to my room that sounds if you hold it open for more than 10 seconds, something people manage to do all the time. Showers are always essential for washing away the grogginess, and the crunching can be attributed to the most important meal of the day, mini wheats. I say good morning to my parents, I play guitar without the worry of bothering my suite mates, and I’m out the door and on with the rest of my day.

I am usually alone in my suite in the mornings, and so I think of it as peacefully quiet. Relatively speaking, it is quiet. Yet, as I recorded these sounds, I found that my environment is not at all quiet; my morning is filled with constant subtle sounds that I regularly tune out. I let my mind wander and the sounds around me go unnoticed. These sounds have been woven into my routine, serving a background to my thoughts. They lack significance, and thus blend into what I would consider background noise. 

As I gradually recorded my ten sounds, I became increasingly aware of this background noise. Not solely the sounds featured in the podcast, but my soundscape in its entirety–the buzz of the refrigerator, the door closing down the hallway, and the pipes in the room next door. This demonstrates writer Shelley Trower’s idea in her piece “Senses of Vibration,” in that these sounds, or amalgam of vibrations rather, exist everywhere even though we are not always conscious of them. The constant humming that accompanies my morning provides an example of the persistent vibrations that exist within our society, yet are often so discreet that they are deemed meaningless and ignored entirely. 

I also found that my mood greatly effects what I listen to and what I tune out. For instance, if I wake up in a bad mood or I am stressed, it seems the undesirable noises around me are amplified. Though it’s not actually true, my mental state is reflected in what I am hearing, and all of the unpleasant sounds around me I begin to perceive as “noise,” rather than sound. The coffee machine is amplified, the pipes next door are excessively irritating, and the printer is suddenly louder. This change in consciousness ties into the idea entertained by Lawrence English in his article “The Sounds Around Us: An Introduction to Field Recording.” English writes that “what we hear is not always what we listen to,” meaning that our hearing is never objective and our mind and body are deeply interconnected, an idea that is strongly rooted in the sounds of my morning (English 3). 

The sounds that accompany my mornings are subtle, yet play a large part and are vital to the start of my day. Whether it’s the strum of my guitar, the stream of coffee, or my dad’s voice, they are all sounds that I did not give attention to before but now attribute great significance to. 

Mission South. Free. 2013. MP3.

Trower, Shelley. Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound. New York: Continuum, 2012. Print.

English, Lawrence. “The Sounds Around Us: An Introduction to Field Recording.” The Conversation. 8 Feb. 2015. Web.

Sounds of Everyday Life

3 Replies

Michael Greenberg

TAP: Sound and Society

3 October 2015

Soundtrack 2 My Life

Everything we know is founded upon the human body’s ability to process sensory information. Of these senses, hearing is one of the most fundamental and important to our accumulation of knowledge and our understanding of the world. Sound is vital to sharing information, interacting with other people, creating art, regulating schedules, and countless other aspects of life. The ten sounds that capture but a fragment of my life are a glimpse into such necessities with which sound privileges the human race. These recordings display how sound acts as a regulating factor in my life, as well as cultural, and social aspects.

Similarly to how the body follows biological rhythms such as the circadian cycle, I follow the rhythms of sound. Every morning I wake up to the song Pink Matter by Frank Ocean. The first five to ten seconds of the song draw me gently from my slumber, and hurtle me into the next monotonous aspects of my morning routine. Relieving myself, showering and brushing my teeth soon follow suit. The sounds of my mornings are interesting because they are paired with physical stimulus, not just hearing. My alarm vibrates while it rings, the water in the shower plops against my body, and the bristles noisily polish my teeth. Jonathan Sterne explains, “Sound is a product of perception, not a thing ‘out there’ – the only thing ‘out there’ is vibration which the body organizes and stratifies into what we call sound” (Sterne, p. 834). Sound as we know it exists because our brains are able to translate those vibrations into intelligible noises. Each aspect of my morning routine utilizes this two-fold, not just in the normal process of turning vibration into conscious thoughts, but also because each vibration affects me physically, amplifying the auditory experience.

The sound of coffee gurgling through the brewer is enough to wake me up just a little bit more. Subtle as it is, the sound of note taking in my textbook and turning pages represent the highlight of the next sound, the deep, peaceful quiet of the Billings Round Room. Often, silence can be deafening. As Schafer notes, “myriads of books [are] written in silent rooms and read in silent libraries” (p. 35). The acquisition of knowledge is often done in silence, which I have personally experienced. Such silence is especially beneficial to learning and thought. The reverberations in my life from this silent learning is metaphorically loud, rather than literally noise generating.

The droning of footsteps, the chattering of students, and the jingling of keys encompass the sounds of walking back to the dorm after class. The jolting sound of the next recording (which Schwartz would most likely define as noise) is my skateboard against the pavement. Noise is a sub category of sound, but is has a highly fluid definition. I would strive to define it as irritating stimuli as perceived by the listener, such that all sounds aren’t universally considered noise. Socrates, according to Schwartz, delighted in the buzzing of cicadas, whereas most people find their clamor corrosive. (Schwartz, p. 19). While the harsh sound of hard rubber on concrete may be a nuisance to others, the sound elicits feelings of happiness and freedom for me.

Metal on ceramic and the voices of friends define lunch for many students at UVM, and is a vital recording to include. Music defines much of the sound here, and a little soul in my dorm is uplifting and helps vitalize my energy to prepare me for each night’s workload. A quick Netflix break to watch The League is all too common during my days. The echoing of rubber ricocheting off of wooden walls and heavy footsteps comprise the quick paced game of squash. Friends and quiet music ease the stress of college life at the end of most nights.

Creating this podcast forces me to actively listen to my surroundings and consider the modes in which I interact with sound. Many sounds that fill my environment go completely overlooked, especially the impact they have on my life. Such minute sounds such as highlighter on paper represent so much more, but are routinely ignored. Other sounds, chiefly music, have a heavier burden of influence on what defines me as an individual, my culture, my experience socially, and my interaction with my surroundings. Being forced to observe the auditory stimulus around you helps generate a better understanding of yourself, acquisition of knowledge, and the perceptions of sound.

Works Cited

channel ORANGE. Perf. Frank Ocean. CD.

Dark Side of the Moon. Perf. David Gilmour, Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Richard
Wright, and Nick Mason. LP.

“Ebdbbnb.” In The League. The Fox Broadcasting Company. November 12, 2014.

Schafer, Murray. “Open Ears.” Journal of Acoustic Ecology 4.2 (2003): 25-38.
Print.

Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond, Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books;, 2011

Stern, J. “The mp3 as a Cultural Artifact.” New Media and Society, 2006, 825-42.

The Best of. Perf. Mavis Staples. 1986. CD

 

 

 

The Little Things

2 Replies

I’ve always been told to pay attention to the little things in life and to appreciate the things that you tend to overlook, which is why I made my podcast of the ten daily sounds that give me tranquility and happiness. I started my podcast in the way I like to start my mornings, with the sound of someone running on the treadmill, a shower, and a Keurig machine making coffee. The next sound, of a door opening, is supposed to resemble a person holding open the door for the next. The sound of my little brother’s voice always brings me happiness and is definitely a sound that I enjoy hearing every day. The following four sounds are sounds I experience at the end of the day. Starting with that feeling of relief, my sixth sound is of a pen crossing of homework from my planner. My next three sounds are of popcorn popping, brushing my teeth, and the theme song to Grey’s Anatomy. All three of these sounds are at the end of my day, when it is winding down and I can finally relax. At last, my final sound, which I fall asleep to every night, is the sound of our fan.

In “Making Noise” by Hillel Schwartz, he references how as a society, we believe that silence is what we want, but in reality once it all goes silent, we go crazy. Looking back on our class conversation about how machinery is manufactured to have sound, I noticed how quiet life would be if the objects I recorded functioned in complete silence. I realized that even though all day I cannot wait to go to sleep and get some peace and quiet, yet I always go to sleep with the fan on for the “white noise” effect because like Schwartz said, many of us think we want silence but truly cannot be comfortable without some type of noise.

When talking about the passive ear, Bull and Back state, “we increasingly fail to listen to the natural sounds of the world and that this inattention could have dire consequences.” I found it interesting, that when looking back at my list of sounds, none of them are natural. However, trying to think of, and more importantly, obtain natural sounds for my podcast seemed to pose even more of a challenge. It was very surprising to realize how heavily my daily life and the sounds that I hear and acknowledge revolve around manmade items.

In English’s, “The Sounds Around Us” he explains that the non-cognitive microphone lacks the ability to zone into a particular sound or filter out undesirable sounds. This became apparent when I was recording the sound of my fan, which turned out to be extremely difficult to capture, even when using a high tech recording device. Along with the sound of my fan, almost all the sounds turned out to be more challenging to record than I anticipated.

While making this podcast my eyes were opened to so much about recording devices and the way in which I go through the day hearing different sounds. I recognized how dependent and focused I am on material objects as well as how difficult these sounds can be to capture.

Bibliography:

Bull, Michael, and Les Back. Introduction: Into Sound. n.d.

Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. n.d.

English, Lawrence. “The sounds around us: an introduction to field recording.” , n.d.

Let the Sounds Serenade You

4 Replies

Beams of light strike my eye as the cacophony of sound that is my alarm wakes me up for the day. I hop out of bed and head over to the bathroom where I take my morning shower, a daily routine which helps me wake up and prepare for what is in store for me. Once I am all clean, my headphones make their way up to my ears until they are in and the music has taken over. This time, its Madvillain’s Accordion that takes me away to a place where all that concerns me is my music. I crack my knuckles, something I have been doing everyday since I was a kid, and put pencil to paper taking notes and erasing mistakes while listening to lectures. Classes end and I swipe my card to open the door to the stairwell where I make my journey up the stairs to room 509, my humble abode. The needle drops and lets loose the beats of J Dilla, whose music always manages to find its way into my life at just the right time. He has inspired me to go grab my guitar and start my daily jam, something I have been doing since middle school. I get up and go to the bathroom again, but this time to brush my teeth; the sound is only recorded once, but I promise I brush twice a day. I crawl into bed and watch as the Always Sunny in Philadelphia theme brings laughs and entertainment after a long day.

Let the sounds of your daily life take you away, let them show you what they have to offer. While recording my sounds I found that it really made me appreciate all of the seemingly miniscule sounds that I hear every day. Listening to these all made me think of what Schafer described as the “deafness of others” (Schafer p.25) in the sense that these sounds which mean so much to me could literally mean nothing to someone else, or worse, they could just not even hear it.  It is all dependent on perspective, and I just find it so interesting how people perceive different sounds so uniquely. At the same I time I feel confused about whether the fact that nobody will ever perceive and enjoy a piece of music the same way that I do is a good thing or a bad thing. It makes me feel lonely to imagine that I am the only person, but at the same time it is a good thing for everybody to have their own experiences with music.

Music is something very near and dear to me and I think that is easy to tell based on the amount of music in my sounds. It is so easy to get lost in music and to find yourself listening for hours on hours, but with regular everyday sounds it isn’t such an easy thing. Why is it that people can’t find the attention span to sit and listen to ordinary sounds? What is it about music that regular sounds don’t have? I think that music gives the listener the chance to release emotions into the music and to really form a connection with it, whereas sounds don’t offer that same deal. It is easy to let the music take over your soul, body, and mind, but the challenge is trying to have that same feeling, that same emotion, with everyday sounds.

Bibliography:

J Dilla. Airworks. J Dilla, 2006. Vinyl recording.

Heinz Kiessling. Temptation Sensation. N.d. MP3.

Madvillain. Accordian. Madlib, 2004. MP3.

Schafer, Murray. “Open Ears.” (n.d.): 25. Web.

My Daily Playlist

1 Reply

It seems that the more I grow up, the more repertoire my life becomes.  When I was younger, I had no obligations.  The day was whatever my parents made of it.  One day they would take me to the playground, the next I would be following them to whatever errands they had planned.  As I become older I find myself walking through the same daily routine.  I wake up, go to class, complete my homework, and then even my extra-curricular activities at night are repeated.  I hear the same sounds as well.  If my day was recorded every day for a week, with the exception of weekends, all of the sounds recorded would be almost identical from the time I wake up, to the second my head hits the pillow at night and I fall asleep.

My day starts with possibly the most appalling sound on Earth, the alarm clock.  It is loud, obnoxious, and positively dreadful.  The alarm clock is the American staple of the beginning of the day.  It is how people in today’s society wake up.  Before this invention people had to be woken up in different ways, like church bells, sunlight, or even a rooster.  The alarm is an example of how life has progressed.  As Murray Schafer explains in his article “Open Ears”,  “there are also real flash points in history where something revolutionary was heard for the first time.”  The evolution of sounds in a civilization is a great way to learn about the culture’s history.

After turning off my alarm, scrolling through the latest instagrams that I had missed while sleeping, and contemplating whether or not I should even get up (I always do), I finally saunter out of bed and brush my teeth before my first class.  The scraping of the bristles onto my teeth is the first natural sound I hear every day.  After brushing, I quickly walk over to my favorite class, Spanish.  I am a Spanish major, and hearing Professor Ebratts’ Colombian accent is the ideal way to start my day.  It provides comfort, because learning Spanish is what makes me happiest, and I know that it is what I am supposed to be doing with my life.

With the little time I have in between Spanish and my second class, I spend it making the most essential drink for any college student, coffee.  I hear the Keurig in my room working its magic, shooting water through my pumpkin-flavored K-Cup, creating the liquid that will keep me awake for the rest of the day.  When my coffee has been made, I rush off to my next class.

I am incapable of walking to class without listening to music, and I always start the walk with my favorite song, “Time to Run”, by Lord Huron.  The reason this song is always the first played, is because it has what Roland Barthes would call “the grain of music.”  According to him, “The musical adjective [grain] becomes legal whenever an ethos of music is postulated, each time, that is, that music is attributed a regular – natural or magic – mode of signification.”  “Time to Run” embodies all of this.  The song starts off with the singer explaining to his listener why he has to leave them.  After about two minutes of singing, there is a two minute instrumental break that lets you process what has been sung.  After the beautiful instrumental, the final two minutes of the song explain the outcome of him leaving.  When I play this song, I always know that I am on my own journey to Geography class.

After I finish my day of classes, I finally get to go to the most looked-forward to part of my day, crew practice.  There is nothing better than hearing my coxswain shout out commands.  Following practice I watch an episode of Friends, shower, and then walk up to the dorm room full of my best friends on the third floor.  Every night before bed, a girl in that room named Cara plays us her guitar, and reads us a bed-time story.  Although not much of my day ever changes, I would not want it to.  I am surrounded by incredible people, doing things that I love.  The sounds I hear on a daily basis are just reminders of how lucky I am to have so many wonderful things happen to me from day-to-day.

Bibliography:

“I’ll Be There for You”, by The Rembrants

“Time to Run”, by Lord Huron

“The Grain of the Voice”, by Roland Barthes

“Open Ears”, by Murray Schafer

Table Music

4 Replies

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Eating – Oftentimes I come back to my room to find my beautiful roommate spread out on the floor, eating pretzels or other snacks.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

Meaning in Everyday Sounds Podcast

1 Reply

Paying attention to everyday sounds rather than moving through life with closed ears can provide significant insight to many aspects of life. It can allow a deeper observation and understanding of cultural norms, as well as give us insight into the workings of our own bodies and minds. An individual or culture can be observed in its most true nature by their preference of the types of sounds as well as the overall amount of sound in their life.

The gap between the sensation or auditory stimuli that the body takes in, and the perception of that stimuli the mind receives is known as the mind-body gap, and was illustrated in the Hudspeth reading. Two of the sounds I recorded of my everyday life serve as examples, or proof, of this dichotomy. The first, is a sound recording of eating lunch in the grundle. The background noise consisting of many private conversations can be heard as one overwhelming drone of sound, or the mind can choose to hone in on a specific aspect of that drone. If the mind were to focus on a single conversation, the noise of the others would cause only certain pieces of that conversation to be actually sensed by the body. However, the gap between sensation and perception would allow the mind to perceive the full conversation because the mind would be able to fill in any small gaps in the incoming stimuli. The other example of this effect is a sound recording of dinner at a nice restaraunt. At a first listen, the noise of plates being set down and utensils clinking can be heard over the background noise of people having conversations. However, if the mind is attuned to a specific background conversation, the mind can fill in most of the gaps that are not actually sensed, and make sense of the conversation. The mind-body gap, or the disconnect between sensation and perception is a vitally important phenomenon in sound studies as well as any psychological science.

The next four sounds are reflective of the differences in sound preference between collectivist and individualist culture. Individualist cultures tend to like progressive absence of sound in certain aspects of life whereas collectivist cultures tend to prefer a widening presence of noise. Although the U.S. is a highly individualist nation, many of my sound preferences reflect collectivist culture(I am uncomfortable in situations with little to no noise). One of the recordings is the sound of my pencil scratching on paper over the sound of classical music playing in the background to ease the mental tension of a near soundless environment. The next is the sound of my fan blowing at night, in order to make me comfortable enough to sleep. Similarly, the next is the sound of music inside my headphones in the gym, in order to keep me motivated. Lastly, the sound recording of the UVM symphony orchestra tuning is symbolic of a collectivist culture as well as a collectivist sound.

The seventh sound is a recording of a part of Eminem’s “Music Box”. For me, this verse exemplifies the “grain of the voice”, as discussed in Barthes’ article. The sharp, guttural tones made by mucus membranes and teeth in addition to the lungs are what make his words snap in your ears.

Two of the sound clips reflect ideas portrayed in the Schwartz reading. One of the clips is the sound of my longboard rolling over pavement, and the other is of my Keurig brewing a cup of coffee. The Schwartz explained how different sounds are regarded in drastically different ways in different cultures. The example he used was how the song of the cicadas was appreciated by certain greek philosophers because of how cicadas were regarded in their society, whereas others in different cultures despised the sound. These two sound clips exemplify sounds that I appreciate deeply because of their meaning in my culture and life.

The final sound clip is of an mp3 track being played in the shower. This reflects the ideas brought up in the Sterne article on mp3’s. The mp3 has a low level quality that would not be pleasant to the human ear, however the perceptive powers of the ear are able to supplement the track to make it detailed. The sound of the water over the track deteriorates the already sub-par quality of an mp3 track, however my ears are able to enhance the audio to a satisfactory level through perception.

In conclusion, the insight from the sounds we perceive in everyday life can provide great insight about the inner values of certain cultures as well as the workings of our own bodies.