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A lot of the sounds we recorded and placed in our sound-map were sounds that we usually consider as background noise. I doubt that most of us listen to these sounds consciously. But because now they were presented in our sound-map, I had no chance but to pay attention to them. While exploring our sample sound-map, I found it interesting to hear how some areas sounded the same, while others were completely different. I even paid extra attention to areas that we would normally think about as “silent.” For example, my recording was done right outside Rich, and when I was recording, there wasn’t much sound, or so I thought. When I listened to the recording, I discovered there was a faint chirping in the background. There’s a good chance that I didn’t notice the bird when I was recording, and I even remembering being upset that there was no sound around me, nothing interesting to pick up.  

In Westerkamp’s soundwalk, the verbal descriptions and the sounds enhance the aural environment. She is paying very close attention to not only the sounds, but how the visual aspects of the environment affect the way we hear things. Something else I noticed in Westerkamp’s soundwalk is how technology allows us to manipulate sound. I’m not sure how she went about recording these sounds, but it’s a very clear and crisp sound; there is nothing else that’s disrupting the sounds she are focused on. At a point, she also talks about how we can escape the city by entering a studio, as its purpose it to block outside sounds. We have found ways to pick up some sounds while erasing others.

After reading Stoever’s introduction on the sonic color line and the listening ear, I think I’ve furthered my understanding of Douglass’s piece, particularly the ending. I thought it was odd when Douglass mentioned Northerners using song as a way to prove a slave’s contentment/happiness, and this was mainly because the white Northerners would have more access to language and be able to literally understand the lyrics, as opposed to Douglass and other enslaved people who may or may not understand what the words were actually saying. But after discussing the listening ear, this made a lot more sense. The white Northerners were not hearing the same things that the enslaved people were, they were accustomed to hearing song as a release of joy, not pain. White Northerners’ cultural context of the acoustic environment made it so that the enslaved people’s pain couldn’t be found in their singing, while Douglass’s listening ear gave him access to the deep rooted sadness of the songs he and other enslaved people sang despite not always understanding what the lyrics meant. It’s strange to use Stoever’s book, published 171 years after Douglass’s narrative, to contextualize what Douglass was discussing, but this is only further proof for Stoever’s claim of sound’s presence in racism and racial dynamics.

“I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs… The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness.”

This particular quote made me think of the king in Calvino’s story, and how the meaning of the conversations around him was lost to him. Douglass is not analogous to the king, except for the fact that he could not understand the lyrics of the songs he sang. For me, these two quotes show the power of language in communicating emotion without needing meaning. Douglass says it himself, whenever he heard the songs, he would be filled with a sadness, but this doesn’t have anything to do with the lyrics, but the feeling that is conveyed through the sounds the enslaved people produced. For Douglass, his listening ear provided him with enough context to access the true meanings of the songs he sang.

Question: what about songs made it accessible to enslaved people to express their sadness?

https://youtu.be/Bjm920Fyo34     Taeyang (original)

https://youtu.be/DwDLjPLMJls    AKMU (cover)

*these videos are the lyric videos so that people can see where the lyrics were changed

 

During freshmen year, I could never quite figure out why I liked Akdong Musician’s (AKMU) version of “Eyes Nose Lips” more than Taeyang’s original song. After listening to both songs on repeat for this blog, I think I started formulating why.

Taeyang’s “Eyes Nose Lips” begins with an ominous piano as Taeyang apologizes to the lover addressed in the song. His voice comes off firm, upset, remorseful. About a minute in, the chorus starts, and Taeyang’s voice becomes desperate as he describes the “eyes, nose, and lips” of his lover and how he misses her. AKMU’s version starts with the same lyrics, but already the feel of the song is different as a more acoustic version plays, accompanied with drums and guitar. Paired with that is Chanhyuk’s voice, which sounds softer and more innocent, giving the sound more of a first love feel compared to Taeyang’s version which sounds like a deeper, longer relationship. Chanhyuk splits the first verse with his sister, Soohyun, whose sweet voice contributes to a more innocent, first love feel to the song. The introduction of another voice also makes the song sound as if it were sung from two points of view. The lyrics are the same up until the second verse. In the original, Taeyang focuses on reminiscing about his lover and wondering if he’ll still be able to run into her once and a while; it’s a verse about longing. Chanhyuk, however, echoes the end of the chorus “I’ll call you a memory,” and seems to advise himself to not let the break up consume him. Before this assignment, I wasn’t aware that AKMU had changed the lyrics, but it feels like their style so much more, musically and just experience wise as Taeyang is about ten years older than the brother/sister duo.

Crawford is the first of the essayists to bring sound studies into the 21st century, so already she is making connections that we haven’t thought of as much, most notably, the new meanings she brings to voice, sound, and listening.

In Crawford’s essay, social media becomes a platform to be heard and to hear. Now anyone can say anything they want, and anyone can find it. It’s no longer an limited circle of people who we can pick and choose to listen to us, although most social media platforms have an option to be “private.” Our circles have broaden all over the world, and as who’s listening to us has increased, so has the people we “listen” to, and Crawford brings up this point as she discusses the “conversations” we have on social media. She compares our Twitter feeds to the radio, a constant environment of sound that we can always have access to. It’s here that Crawford reimagines what listening is, because she describes our interaction with our Twitter feed as listening. And much like the way we sometimes listen to the radio, Crawford claims that we passively tune into our feeds. Instead of a constant stream of actual sound/noise, our Twitter’s provide us a constant stream of text, and in a way, we passively listen to it, letting the notifications pop onto our screens without focusing on them. Occasionally we will click on a post and read it, but it becomes “background noise” to us.

I think in some ways, this claim is still true, especially in the ways that social media has desensitized our generation by providing unlimited access to things. Hashtags for disasters are just a daily thing, to the point where sometimes it becomes a feeling of “oh, just another one.” For me, a lot of social media just becomes something I can go to when I’m bored or listless and want something in the background.

As a person who can’t read lips, I’ve always been unsettled with bad lip reading videos, and it’s because as I’m listening to the audio and watching the speaker’s lips, I can’t confidently say that the voice over is fake. It calls into question how reliable our senses are, particularly sight and hearing, and the relationship between those senses.

We’ve always been told that “seeing is believing,” and for some people, that’s led to a confidence in our sense of sight. In fact, if someone were to ask me whether I felt my sight or hearing was more “accurate,” I’d tell them that my sight was. Our ability to see things provides us with something that feels more concrete, something more tangible than soundwaves. But bad lip reading videos take away this sense of concreteness and accuracy. Suddenly what we are “seeing” as a person speaks is not what they are actually saying. The only “truth” is in the fake audio that is playing, and we start to “see” what we are physically hearing, or at least that is true in my case. The more I concentrate on the person’s lips, the more I can convince myself that what I’m hearing is what’s being said. And what makes the experience even more strange is that now we have this voice from a unknown source being put over these clips. The voice overs take listeners out of the context of the clip. Although after talking to Andrew, it seems like the ways this is accomplished is different for live videos versus cinematic footage. In the Star Wars bad lip reading, it was probably much easier to find scenes or clips that fit the song, especially because most of the video consisted of Yoda’s puppet speaking. As for the presidential debate, the person behind these videos most likely had to see what word he/she could fit into Trump’s or Clinton’s mouth.

In a way, bad lip reading makes me think of lyrebird and other forms of artificial voice. While the person behind the dubbing is a real human with a real voice, it is not the voice of the original speaker; it’s taking away what Aristotle saw as one of the distinguishing features we have as humans: our voice. This distortion brings in the long relationship that sound and sight have developed over the years of sound studies.  

https://beta.myvoice.lyrebird.ai/g/u9zbg1b0nx

Music, for me, has always been a series of memories and/or emotions; certain songs make me think of certain moments, like how “Love Like Woe” by The Ready Set makes me think of walking around my neighborhood with my friends on a summer evening as the wind blows against our faces, and the sun sets behind the bridge. Some associations I have with songs aren’t as pleasant, there are songs I can no longer listen to without being transported back to the worst of a past situation. These moments develop naturally, and most of the time, I do not realize them until I heard the song at a later date. Recently, however, I discovered that there are people who want to create or invoke these moods and memories, even if they aren’t their own. I observed this when one of my recommended songs on Youtube was “instagram” by Dean, but the title was “How Dean ‘Instagram’ would sound like with next door neighbors arguing + rain.” The uploader contorted the audio, muffling Dean’s voice, and added a track of rain and a track of an argument. The additional tracks gives the song a fuzzy feeling, one that I would compare to the static-like noise on a phone call, and it makes the song feel like it’s a tangible presence in the room. The rain and arguing give the song a more listlessness feeling. “instagram” always made me feel like it should be raining outside, but actually hearing it along with the song was a strange experience. By the time the song ended, the room felt quieter, more crisp, but also a little more empty.

The first few times Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” plays, I paid attention to what he was saying. But shortly after, the repetition made it easy to ignore the words and just hear white noise. This intensified as the audio started to become muffled. As a classmate stated, the long pauses, in a way, wipes the memory of the listener and clears the mind so that what the listener is hearing is new, which to a certain extent is true.

Around eleven minutes, the the audio sounded like a song. The beginning was similar to someone playing random notes, but about half way through the speech Lucier is giving, it sounds more intentional, like I can hear the music behind the muffled sounds. Around nineteen minutes, the audio just becomes sound, the voice unidentifiable. At this point, there is no way to hear the audio other than a strange music/just as rhythmic noise. Once I couldn’t understand the words anymore, the video actually became more enjoyable to listen to, which I think in part had to do with the fact that I was no longer trying to process the sounds as speech; my brain accepted them as noises, and I was free to focus on other things. When the video ended, it gave me a similar feeling to when Dean’s “instagram” remixed audio ended, a quietness.