chodo

October 23, 2018 by chodo

Earth’s Playlist

From our understanding of Michael Bull’s “Audio-Visual iPod”, we are better able to understand the economy to public and private sound. In the advent of the iPod, sleeker, more personal audio equipment was made accessible to a wider base of people. At a price, people were able to purchase iPods, earbuds, and music in order to create a privatize their auditory experience. This allows for people to alienate themselves from the public soundscape around them. As they listen to music, Schafer’s soundmarks and Blesser and Salter’s earcons are oblivious to the iPod user. Listeners, in this way, have purchased the right to become desensitized to aspects of their environment as they seek to focus, meditate, or distance themselves sonically from those around them.

Through exposure to authors like Schafer, Bull, and Blesser and Salter, I have experienced a heightened awareness of the soundscape of Davidson College. Although I often use my earbuds to de-stress (Davidson is harder than I thought it would be!), I find myself taking off my headphones to listen to a different kind of music. I hear the of thick foliage of autumn leaves crunching under the nimble footsteps of grey squirrels. I am attuned to the ballad of songbirds in the afternoon. On walks to the Union or practice, I witness the gusts of air that open up the branches of the deciduous trees that line the campus. As I give ear to the soundscape, I open up along with them. In the midst of midterms, an arduous football season, and the discomfort of being 1,068 miles away from home, I am surprised to find a natural comfort in the North Carolina soundscape that is perhaps greater than my earbuds.

September 16, 2018 by chodo

“Good Good Father”

Good Good Father by Chris Tomlin (Original)

Good Good Father by Anthem Lights (Cover)

Chris Tomlin, a well-known Grammy-nominated gospel singer, has had plenty of success in his career in producing some of Christian music’s most recognizable songs. One of these songs, entitled “Good Good Father”, went platinum last summer and won the Dove Award for “Song of the Year” in 2016. This song has been a mainstay in the worship services of churches across America as well as inspired several covers. Anthem Lights, a four-man band known for its covers of popular songs, pays homage to Chris Tomlin’s song by creating a cover for the K-LOVE Fan Awards (because it was also chosen as “Song of the Year” at this awards show). Anthem Lights, true to their own style, strips back Tomlin’s instrumentation. Tomlin’s use of an acoustic guitar, a shaker, the piano, a banjo, and his voice is simplified to the use of a piano and four voices. The cover’s tempo is slower and employs a wider range of vocals/harmonies and switches in between solo singing and chorus. With this, Anthem Light’s boy band “glow up” of “Good Good Father” emphasizes the vocal abilities of the individual members and may take away from some of the “worship” qualities of the song. However, Because of the sacred nature of a worship song, (and the fact that it is used to honor Chris Tomlin at a Christian gathering) the cover shields it from much backlash.
When choosing to create a cover song, one is allowed a great degree of freedom. The instruments, tempo, and even the music itself are often changed in order to bring out the individuality of the coverer. This is often appreciated when it pays homage to the ”spirit” of the original – as in William Shatner’s cover of “Rocketman” and that of Anthem Lights. However, when that “spirit” is ignored, the cover is subject to backlash by lovers of the original (i.e.Taylor Swift’s cover).

September 10, 2018 by chodo

Tuning Into Twitter

Crawford’s piece, much like influential writings of sociologists, gives us a new framework by which we can come to understand the complexities of social media. By comparing one’s social media activity to a “voice”, we see that our voice and views can be further projected by the frequency in which we post on Twitter as well as the amount of people that see our “vocal manifestations” in the form of these tweets. Given such a social media platform, Crawford points out that there is an apparent demand for dialogue from user, politicians, and even corporations (85). However, dialogue is not always present as many view social media to serve the purpose of their consumption as opposed to projecting their voice. Crawford points out that these less active/inactive users are not “lurking” in the doldrums of social media websites, but they are listening (as active or as inactive as they please). Much like a radio, these participants may tune into and out of the “idle chatter” of social media – determining what is tweet/re-tweet worthy by their attention (83). This attention is what many corporations, politicians, and social media stars are after as they endeavor to engage these people to listen and advocate their causes with their voice.

Social media is ever evolving and has done just that since Crawford’s piece in 2009. Twitter, in specific, has doubled the character limit per tweet, allowed for embedded videos, as well as to quote tweets since that time. These changes have allowed people to have greater freedom in expressing their voice and given politicians and corporations more “tools” by which they can persuade their audience.

September 4, 2018 by chodo

Reading Beyond the Lips

Bad Lip Reading, although meant for the mere comical amusement of its listeners, can bring perspective to questions surrounding sound and voice. In these dubbed clips of culturally recognizable events/scenes, we are presented an outlandish rendition which is far what is known to be the true recording. However, as we listen into the recording for long enough, we find that we cannot imagine the characters to be saying anything else. Especially if the video is our first exposure, the combination of visual imagery with this audio lock in this version as somewhat viable. This is due to the fact that linguistically, much of the oral movement we make are similar across varied speech – and therefore, can be easily fabricated.
Through our discussions surrounding Aristotle’s thoughts on sound and voice, we have come to define voice as a utterance, or vibration of the body in which the soul is the catalyst. In this way, the sounds we create in communication not only meaning, but the will, emotion, and intentions of the speaker. The introduction of technology that has made Bad Lip Reading and Lyrebird make us to hypothesize if the “grain” of the voice, as Cavarero defines it, could ever be synthetically manufactured. Could the fervor at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a speech or “spunk” in Michael Jackson’s viral songs be replicated? Could “live” footage be dubbed without an audience’s knowledge? Would we welcome such in our society? Our current technological advancements in the audio-visual demand that we look at these questions proactively as a society and draw resultant boundaries

August 22, 2018 by chodo

Music to Whose Ears?

The boom of the cannon reverberates over the thick humidity of the early morning. This sounds echoes through the trees, sends birds to flight, and startles children, startles women, starles me. This sound is held in reverence for moments – only to ushered out by equally powerful explosions into the African sky. The “twenty-one cannon salute”. It ushered in the morning and it soberly ushered out my grandfather and the village as they transported his body to its final resting place adjacent to the family house.

If Lucier identifies himself as a musician, then “I Am Sitting In A Room” must be digested by the audience as a concert piece with his voice, the recording equipment, and the room itself as the instruments that create “music” to evoke a certain feeling in his audience. As we give ear to the “disappearance” of Lucier’s monotone repetition, we are able to hear the evolution of Lucier’s speech irregularity into a dissonant series of esoteric tones. (atleast to the human ear) Even though it is an experiment, the figurative application of this event to Lucier’s personal opinion of his speech impediment interests me. I wonder if the disappearance of his impediment is what we ethically desire – or even what he desires. The awful, discordant noises that I heard in the comfort of my dorm, may have been euphonious to him because it removed his stutter.