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