Tag Archives: Hudspeth

Converse Style

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The Day in the Life of a College Student: Converse Style
By Lindsay Chaplin

Hearing is an ability that we all take advantage of; we consider the slight rumbling of trucks and mechanical hums of a heater to be a nuisance, when in fact they’re a blessing in disguise. Within Sound and Society, various texts such as “The Voice of the Grain” by Barthes, and “Open Ears” by Schafer have open my eyes (and ears) to how sound has impacted my daily life. In fact, my perspective now has caused me to become more appreciative of all vibrations. With this new-found perspective, my classmates and I have the task to record ten prominent sounds here at the university and explain not only the significance of the sound, but also to contextualize it with our readings from class.

Waking up in the frigid rooms of Converse, nothing sounds more appealing than a nice hot shower. Just by reading the word “shower,” you can already imagine the sound of the hissing water panging against the floor. Similarly, the tapping of footsteps, a creak and lock of a door and the murmuring of voices in a library are all something that we are familiar with; it’s just a matter of how much we pay attention to it. In Hudspeth’s “The Energetic Ear” he states: “Moreover, like many manmade feedback systems, the active process exhibits gain control: it can be turned up or down as circumstances dictate,” (Hudspeth, p. 50). This leads to the idea that despite the ability to focus on particular sounds, we won’t always have the ability to isolate ourselves from sound. As I write this paper I can hear people locking their doors, the bass of music through the floors, and murmuring voices in the background all at once. Yes, it can be an annoyance, but without those sounds my life would be filed with unbearable silence. We all have to face it: we all want what we can’t have. There will always be a constant battle between what is considered to be “noise” or “sound,” and it all has to do with how you decide to perceive it.

In the piece, “Senses of Vibrations: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound,” Shelly Trower discusses the idea that hearing is not just one sense, but a full body experience for individuals. Looking from this perspective, many vibrations can be a pleasant experience. For an example, listening to ringing of the phone until a loved one answers is a comforting moment as they greet us with a warm “hello.” A particular song can also cause a swelling of emotions, whether that is of happiness or sadness. Within my Podcast that I created, I used the theme song from Scrubs because, although it is short, it brings me joy knowing that I can relax and unwind to a great comedy. In addition to this, “The Grain of the Voice,” by Roland Barthes, the idea of “the grain” illustrates the presence (or lack thereof) technicality, uniqueness, and mind and soul of the performer in their piece; each individual can experience a sense of pleasure or emptiness towards music, it is just a matter of having a connection. The song “Hello, I’m in Delaware,” by City and Colour, is a song that I would consider to have “the grain” regardless of when or where I listen to it due to the numerous emotions it evokes.; it grabs my attention, the singer relaxes me with his soothing voice, but yet my mind wanders from a distance thinking about my past in relation to the lyrics.

Each of the examples that I have presented all hold value to me, regardless of how small the sounds are. Similar to Schafer’s ideas in terms of how our history has been influenced by both opened and closed ears, as students at University of Vermont, we have the power to not only change how we view vibrations as a whole, but impact how our peers view campus sounds.

 

Citations

Trower, Shelly. “Introduction: Hearing Vibrations.” Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 1-12. Print.

Hudspeth, A. J. The Energetic Ear. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 50. Print.

Scrubs the Complete Season Seven. ABC, 2007.

Barthes, Roland. The Grain of the Voice. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

City and Colour. Hello, I’m in Delaware. 2005. MP3.

My Day

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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.