racrane

It is difficult to draw a line between public and private sounds because no sound can be one or the other all the time. The nature of sound is that it permeates its surrounding area and often cannot be stopped from incorporating people or things. Therefore, a sound may be private in one moment (ex: the sound of your own breathing) but then as long as one person draws near enough to hear it the sound becomes public. Walkmans, iPods, and smartphones allow people to choose the music they listen to and tune out the world around them. This seems to be the most common idea of private music. Hosokawa discusses three kinds of public music. He focuses specifically on urban life. One type is the music that seems to drown into the overall sounds of a city environment. The second is the street musicians who have the power to unite a group of people that are caught in the space reached by the music. The third kind is someone who is choosing the music based on what he or she wants to hear but is still playing it out loud so that others can hear as well.

 

Since reading the different theorist for this unit, I have found myself paying more attention to the keynote sounds in my environment. I have tried to identify the sounds around me that have become so routine, I have forgotten they were there. I also have found myself analyzing the difference in how I view the world with my headphones in vs. with my headphones out. I find that with my headphones in I am focused on various other things and not only tuning out the acoustic environment around me but also the visual/physical environment around me.

Jennifer Stoever in her book The Sonic Color Line unpacks how white people often feel they have the authority over the “acoustic environment” and therefore black people do not have the same rights to contribute to that environment if it offends someone else. She says, “Without ever consciously expressing the sentiment, white Americans often feel entitled to respect for their sensibilities, sensitivities, and tastes, and to their implicit, sometimes violent, control over the soundscape of an ostensibly ‘free,’ ‘open,’ and ‘public’ space.” She gives the example of the young black man being shot because of a fight with a white man you thought his music was too loud. I had not thought about racism as something other than visual because it is most often talked about in the context of someone’s skin color. It is interesting to realize that people have ways of categorizing others based solely on the way they sound. This not only applies to race but also to gender, and sexuality. For example, hearing Big Freedia’s voice in a song about black femininity is shocking because it is not the stereotype that people typically assign to a woman’s voice. These ideas beg the question is there a way to eliminate the stereotypes that are built around voices? And is this something that we want to do?

https://www.wri-101c-f18.andrewrippeon.com/blog/blog-09/665/

The Boxer – Simon and Garfunkel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3LFML_pxlY)

The Boxer- Mumford and Sons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAl-vZsswb4)

 

“The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel was recorded and released in 1969. This ballad about a young poor man’s journey in a new city trying to build a life for himself has a melancholy tone to it. The softness of the singers’ voices underscores that the song is meant to be a sad one. The most energy that comes from the song is when they are repeating the chorus “lie la lie.” In 2012, Mumford & Sons released a cover of “The Boxer.” The two bands share the same genre so the folk elements of the original song were still echoed in the cover version through the instruments used. However, this band adds more voices and therefore more energy to the chill original. They remove the fourth verse which talks about growing older. This could be to place more emphasis on the last verse which talks about the making of a boxer and the fighter within the young boy. Mumford & Son’s version seems to add more energy to the idea of the man as a fighter by increasing their volume when they sing about it and adding more instruments to accompany their voices. Simon & Garfunkel’s original seems to put more emphasis on his journey as a whole being a sad one rather than on a specific piece of the journey as the cover does. They do this by keeping the volume of their voices relatively the same the whole time, and there does not seem to be a build up from the instruments that there is in the cover. It is interesting that the same song telling the same story can have two different takeaways. Adriana Cavarero talks about the importance of the uniqueness of the voice. She says “The voice, however, is always different from all other voices, even if the words are the same.” The two songs are an example of that idea because while the words are the same the way they choose to use their voices emphasize different words, creating a different narrative.

In her piece, “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media” Kate Crawford describes how the rise of social media has affected how people communicate with one another. Crawford focuses on the idea of listening and using one’s voice as it applies to social media. Crawford using these words to describe online experiences is not a novel idea. In fact, it is how most people would refer to their interactions on social media. It is interesting to use auditory language to describe something that is almost completely visual. As Sterne says in his introduction, hearing is inescapable but seeing can be selective. Crawford seems to be describing a type of “listening” that is selective. She seems to define listening as someone who is engaged in reading social media posts (ex. on Twitter) and interacting (by liking or commenting.) These small things are mimicking an in-person conversation. People not interacting with posts or just browsing through a few posts on their feed are engaging in “background listening” this is the kind of listening that is more selective. She describes it as someone reading pieces of tweets or just opening the social media page and drifting to and from it as you do other things. This is the equivalent of being present with someone talking but focusing on other things–you are only picking up on pieces of the conversation. She also talks about the idea of using your “voice” on social media. She describes how often when people say they want to use their “voice” on social media it has a political charge behind it. She seems to think that thinking about voice in this way is impersonal. This reminds me of Cavarero’s argument that says the words that people say are not unique but the voices that speak them are.

All of the things that Crawford described in her 2009 piece are still true in 2018, just worse. People are more distracted than ever because social media is more prevalent than ever. I find it interesting that she finds it impersonal when a politician or celebrity posts something on social media, and this is most likely because she is coming from a time where the most popular way for those people to communicate was on the radio or tv, but to me these famous people posting on social media feels like a personal connection to their followers.

There is an interesting contradiction that arises after both listening to and reading Scott’s work. The written text uses eloquent language that is perfect in its ability to pinpoint the exact meaning of what he is trying to say. However, the performance of his text is very imperfect. His consistent stutter brings something child-like to the high-level vocabulary that he uses. In his performance, he seems to be forcing the words out of his mouth. There is not the ease that typically comes with a performance accompanied by music. To a few of our theorists, this imperfection of presentation is even more interesting than just the written words. Barthes is interested in the sound that the air of one’s voice makes against the friction of the body. He calls this phenomenon the “grain of music” He writes “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. If I perceive the ‘grain’ in a piece of music and accord this ‘grain’ a theoretical value (the emergence of the text in the work), I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation which will certainly be individual…” (p. 509) The ‘grain’ of Scott’s music is what makes the intersection between his performance and written words so interesting.

(1) I sat only a few feet from the stage, in front of some of my favorite musicians. Their use of piano, synthesizers, guitar, drums, and voices brought tears to my eyes. I marveled at their ability to change the feeling in the room, bring back a memory of a time or transport me to a place.

(2) As the recording repeated over and over again, I found a parallel between the quality of the recording itself and the words that the speaker was saying. From recording to recording as the frequencies grew louder the words started to blur into the background. At the same time, the words repeated many times begin to lose their meaning as a complete thought and instead become just sounds. Another thing I found interesting was the way that the recording came to sound more and more like music. At first, it was almost like spoken word, then you began to hear only the rhythm of his voice (as he points out would happen), then a sort of gong sound, then a harp playing a song sound. Finally, it becomes so high-pitched that it sounds like wind chimes bumping into each other.