Category Archives: Podcasts

A Musical Existence

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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.          

Table Music

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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.