For my final essay, I will be expanding on my previous autobiographical essay. Before reading, please queue up “The Sky is Crying” by Gary B.B. Coleman linked below.
The essay is formatted to fit the entire duration of this song. The song should end somewhere in the last couple sentences of the conclusion.
Our discussion group is mainly based on Francisco Lopez’s “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. In Lopez’s article, he suggests a new approach to understand the sound environment that we situate ourselves in, where instead of identifying an environment by the individual elements inside it, we should instead evaluate it as a whole. At the beginning of the class, I asked the class to listen to two clips of audio, one being an audio clip of rain rainforest, another being rain on a night city street. The main difference between these two soundscapes was the difference where the rain was falling. After listening to the two clips, I asked the class to evaluate on how they differentiated the difference between the two soundscapes. Some identified the difference being how the rain hitting the difference surfaces on the city streets made different sound effects than the rain hitting the leaves in the rainforest. Some class mates also identified the sound of people and cars on the city street as opposed to the sound of birds and other wildlife in the rainforest.
After this brief activity, I introduced the theory and philosophy of Lopez’s article, where the approach was to instead of the current method of listening, such as the sound of people or cars on the city streets, we should identify the environment by taking the bioacoustics of plants and wildlife as well. For example, the sound of rain hitting leaves is as much about the rain or wind as the sound of the leaves themselves. To better facilitate the analysis of sound in an environment, I proposed Lopez’s theory about evaluating the soundscape holistically, which is by combining all the sound elements, sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements together. The medium that the sound travelled through, such as the humidity of the air of the night city versus the rainforest, or the sound-modifying elements such as the quality of the headphones that we were hearing the audio clips, can significantly affect how each person’s analysis of the sound can be different.
Lastly, I talked about technology and live music, and how technology affects society’s view on music. I showed the class different examples of modern technology and its effect on manipulating sound to the listener, such as noise-cancelling headphones and microphone. I compared the advancements of modern music technologies such as improved microphones, highly controlled environments such as studios and the use of new software augmentations such as autotune to traditional live music. I asked the class to compare these two modes of music and asked them their preferences on each one and explain their reasoning behind it. Most of the class preferred live music due to the environment that they encapsulate themselves in. My classmates pointed out that the environment that we listen music to is also very important, referencing live concerts where the importance of the sound of people around you, the ambiance of the dark concert hall as well as going to the event itself adds much meaning behind the music and the emotional impact on the listener. I agree with some of the classmates where it depends on the music and the listener’s preference. Some music might be better suited to be appreciated in a live setting, where some are better heard in your bedroom through your headphones. On that, I concluded the discussion group saying that music and sound depends on each person and personal preference changes our views on such opinions and how each person perceives sound.
Our discussion group focused on Michael Bull’s, “The Audio-Visual iPod” to convey the way we listen to music or sound in our everyday life. Each member of the group picked one song to present to the class. Max picked “Efterklang – Dreams Today”, Ryder picked “Xiu Xiu – (Kanuku)”, and Sophie picked “Lucrecia Dalt – Atmospheres Touch”. The night before our presentation we sent these songs to the class with the instructions to either walk around outside/inside/or do any mundane task they would normally do. Keeping in mind where their imagination was taking them. Furthermore, if they can relate any of these sounds to an experience and a specific setting? We created a small visual slideshow to give the class a general summary of Michael Bull’s, “The Audio-Visual iPod” and all three songs to give everyone an opportunity to listen to each. Ryder started off with our introduction, she argued Bull’s point that the use of an iPod “enables users to create a satisfying aestheticized reality for themselves as they move through daily life” (pp. 198). Furthermore, Ryder discussed that iPod use mediates urban experience and that iPod culture is another form of “othering” that individuals use in everyday life. Max continued the discussion into the first song, “Efterklang – Dreams Today”. Max included the importance of keynote sounds used in the recording of the song. The recorded track was based on the lead singer running on a wooden dock, from there common instruments were introduced. Ahmad Alkhatib is one member of the class that chose this song, he recalls listening to it in the car on his way to work. The surround sound in his car canceled out all foreign noises produced by a car. With the initial sounds of running on a boardwalk, it brought his imagination to an outdoor setting with minimal distractions. Ahmad agreed with Bull that iPod users prefer that no external sound seep into their world, so as not to distract them from “their dominant and dominating vision.” (199). Jin said he noticed his heartbeat a lot more and the music made his focus shift more inward, onto himself than the world around him. For Ryder’s song, 3 people listened to it; 2 were doing dishes, 1 was organizing files. The listeners experienced time constriction (i.e., “Wow, I’m done with this activity already?”) and a nostalgic mood brought on by the music. One listener said listening to the song made him feel spaced out, in turn causing the world to disappear or seem as though it was not there. All three people who listened to the song reported the feeling of nostalgia; one peer said he used to work as a dishwasher, so the nostalgic feeling captured by the music made him feel as if he were back in the kitchen he used to work at. Others reported that the nostalgia invoked a sense of longing for pre-COVID times when the library was open and homework could be done for hours at a time while listening to lo-fi music in a public space (cafe, library, etc.). Overall, the general feedback from peers supported Bull’s key arguments, but a couple of comments did contrast with Bull’s vision of iPod users engaging in the act of aesthetic colonization (Jin’s response). Lastly, Sophie talked about the final song, “Atmosphere’s Touch”. Although time was cut short, she discussed the ways in which this song exemplified how influential sound is in your environment because many people who listened to it began to feel tense or stressed due to the type of music being played. It reminded some people of music from a horror film where suspense is amplified by the soundtrack. To conclude, we were able to incorporate some discussion questions and relate them back to our topic. Unfortunately, we were pressed for time and had to cut the discussion short. Overall, the class was able to give meaningful feedback on the songs presented and topics discussed.
Our discussion group focused on William Whittington’s discussion of Sound Design & Technology in Pixar Films from his ‘Sonic Playpen’ chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. We decided to break up the reading into three sections: Sound in early animations, the limitations of early CGI animations, and Pixar’s ability to tell a story without dialogue. We created a slideshow presentation to aid our discussion before class, which we supplemented with various clips from Pixar animations to serve as examples and a visual impetus for class discussion. Zach introduced our group and provided a brief history of Pixar before jumping into the first section we wanted to talk about – sound in early animations. He spoke on the differences between traditional films and early animations, noting several differences between the two. Zach also focused on production recording during his presentation. He talked about how the lack of a physical presence in animation forced sound designers to get creative with the sounds they placed into their animations. He used the short animation ‘For The Birds’ as an example of this creativity, linking it back to the reading and before providing an example of the ways sound designers use sounds to alter the dynamics of early animations. The class listened to the animations first, and then quickly shared what they had heard. They then rewatched the film, noting this time how the sounds were used in the animation. We used the chat section on Zoom to allow for anyone to comment on any sounds they heard during the video and we talked about how those sounds were used creatively to evoke images of comfort and familiarity. From that point, Jin picked up where Zach had left off talking about the limitations of early CGI animation.
Zach provided Jin with an easy transition from his focus on sound presence and its subsequent creative methodology that was utilized in animation rather than traditional films. For his section, Jin decided to focus on the specific characteristics that marked the emergence of computer generated animation while giving rise to the digital age and the correlated creation of the company Pixar. He first introduced a couple of key concepts that the Pixar founders used to emphasize character and genre driven stories. This style was made to combat the limited shapes and designs of early CGI and to create familiar tropes and scenarios, so that the viewer could more easily understand and become invested in these limited shapes and sequences. Oftentimes, this method was exhibited in familiar bodily noises, music, and animal or nature sounds. As a class, we followed these points by watching and then commenting on our own observations of how this Pixar style was exemplified in the company’s first film: ‘The Adventures of Andre & Wally B’. The main debate here was centered around how effectively Pixar was able to compensate for the shortcomings of early animation through the employment of these techniques. We really enjoyed the comments from the class in support of Pixar’s efforts, however, while reflecting on our presentation, we thought there also might have been some space to promote a dialogue on how Pixar might not have combated these animation limitations particularly well in some aspects of their filmmaking – the opposite side of the argument. After a brief reflection and some concluding remarks on this Pixar style, Jin passed it over to Alex to continue the presentation by expanding upon various styles of animation, including the technique of storytelling without dialogue.
Alex began his presentation by outlining the specific section his arguments would relate to, and how we would contextualize these arguments further, outside of the readings, as a class. He introduced Whittington’s discussion of the making of Pixar’s ‘Monsters Inc.,’ specifically detailing the great amount of work that went into creating the characters and personas of Sully and Mike Wazowski, the film’s two main characters. Pixar was able to enhance the overarching story and plot of their films by introducing character quirks, idiosyncrasies, and a broad display of dynamic vocal performances. In this manner, Pixar promoted this notion of telling a story without a steady dialogue, making the audience work for their meal and finding great success doing so, with films like ‘WALL-E’. They also stray away from Disney’s traditionally more music-driven approach to filmmaking. A short clip portraying a scene from ‘WALL-E’ was shown, and Alex instructed students to pay attention to ways in which Pixar advances plot and character development with sounds, quirks, and emotion. We wanted to encourage discussion from students at this point, and we noted that a lot of students mentioned that they thought the background music was pivotal to the emotion of the scene. Before the presentation, we had presumed that most people would touch more specifically on the characters and their performances, rather than the music, so this was interesting to us. We wrapped up our presentation by taking the argument outside of the context of the reading. Alex discussed how Pixar’s approach to storytelling reaches the intrinsic problem-solver in each of us, and drew a metaphor of Pixar’s no-dialogue storytelling to a human’s attraction to a newborn baby or adorable puppy. To conclude, we briefly brought the argument back to the reading, before quickly touching on the Discussion Questions left on Sakai by others in the class. Unfortunately, we were a bit time-pressed at the end of the presentation and we would have liked to have a bit more time to talk about some of the questions that we thought were really interesting, but we felt content knowing that Professor Ma had been able to touch on some of the Discussion Questions already in the class before our presentation.
All Media used can be found on youtube.
By Amahd Alkhatib and Flannery Daley-Watson
In Michelle Hilmes’s work of “Radio and the Imagined Community,” she introduces how the radio’s creation was revolutionary for American culture. The sudden leisure of spreading media was introduced, and Americans were immediately drawn to it. Although this creation has benefited many individuals in the past, it seems that the radio has become obsolete. Radio consumption has become the last opinion of media consumption as if the car BlueTooth or Aux is not working, and the radio is the only resort as music and news consumption have changed from the radio as it is a more convenient platform. The idea of convenience has improved with the increase in technology use.
Additionally, previously, the radio was used to bring families closer and allowed for a feeling of connection with others because they are listening at the same time. As seen in one example is FDR’s fireside chats, where he would speak directly to the families at home. As asynchronous media use has become the norm in society today, radio less so brings families together and, more so, brings communities together. For example, KEXP is a Seattle-based radio station. The KEXP studio is located inside a local cafe, which creates an environment for fans of the radio station to discuss the music. Although KEXP is an exception, the new community building spaces have moved almost entirely to social media platforms for public spaces, which connect back to societies focused on convenience. Music streaming platforms’ technology has added to the comfort by creating subscriptions to avoid ads and freedom to listen to almost every song procured. Radio created an environment for people to enjoy media at the convenience present at that time but today, as technology has increased, so has the opportunities for convenience. To some extent, the connection created by the radio may feel lost. The wide array of content available on music streaming platforms makes up for a large part of community engagement lost with the radio.
As online music sights have become the norm in society today, we have begun shifting the communities we form from real-time radio broadcasting to non synchronous media platforms that are now used to distribute and share online music and media. Now we no longer wait for the radio share media consumption. Instead, whenever we choose, we can play a song or share a playlist.
Online music sites have become socio-technical communities. Individuals participating in these sites have represented that reputations could be altered and identities fictional. When speaking upon music communities, I refer to such sites: Acidplanet.com, Apple Music, Soundcloud, and Spotify. These musical communities are seen as previous radio shops/communities. However, the difference is mainly seen in reputations and identities.
When examining reputations, it is crucial to understand that an online music community involves in-person contact, so individuals must build a reputation based on their work when focusing on this. Artists promote themselves by the work they produce and the routes they take to network their work. Looking at AcidPlanet and Soundcloud, reputations are built by the amount of engagement an artist receives. For example, a fundamental way to understand reputation is by focusing on comments, likes, and reviews.
The other side of musical communities is that identities can be fictional. Previously an artist will be performing their work in person, but in the present day, most interaction is done through online music communities, and these online communities require an account. Artists are now able to fictionalize their online profile to anything they would like. This opens a new door of using fictional accounts to publicize their work. An example is seen from the Oxford Sound Studies book with Sonic Epiphany flirting with what he seemed was an online girl but was just an alternate identity of one of his male friends.
Lastly, an interesting discussion that has been introduced from updated online music communities is engagement. AcidPlant.com was one of the pioneers of the online music world, and it was created mostly for the use of artists to share their work and criticize others. However, now, online music communities such as AppleMusic, SoundCloud, and Spotify have welcomed all people to their community. These present-day music communities foster artists and ordinary individuals.
Charlie: Americans and western culture keep death as one of the ultimate taboos. It’s impolite to talk about death casually and to bring it up is seen as abrasive or rude. However there is a hypocrisy to our attitude about death when it comes to recorded music and voices.“Any contemporary account of the death imagery surrounding sound recording must attend to the difference between late-nineteenth-century attitudes about death. “What sex is to the victorians society death is to us: the ultimate but inescapable taboo”. Indeed, it’s true that we stigmatize death in all aspects, except for the use of dead people’s voices in entertainment or more specifically when making money. The use of dead voices can be found in the distribution of records and in television with the prerecorded laugh tracks that we so commonly hear in sitcoms. The use of the deceased voices in media is so normalized we applaud and desire more. In the example of the use of Tupac’s hologram performing at Coachella it’s clearly evident that Americans will stigmatize the dead and make it a taboo to talk about dead people but use their image and voices in all parts of entertainment for the sole purpose of making money.
Sam: During our group discussion we spoke about music and the dead. In specifics
qe touched on how the music industry “cans” music for profiteering and marketing purposes. During our presentation, an example of canning and keeping the dead in hip-hop culture we showed to the class was Tupac’s 2012 Coachella performance where he appeared
live as a hologram. We also spoke on rappers who have recently passed, such as Pop Smoke and Juice Wrld, and how their music has been canned by executives at record labels. Juice Wrld, who is a multi-platinum artist, passed away shortly before the end of the
2019. It was reported by his label, Interscope and Grade A, that he has roughly two thousand to four thousand songs stored in a vault. Many of his fans speculated what his label would do with his music. While his unreleased music is currently being canned,
many of his fans believe that all of it should be released – as they are timestamps in his career that represent his artistry and things he was dealing with at certain points in time that millions across the world could relate to.
The second reading of our group discussion focused on sonification, being the transformation
of data into sound. We spoke about the three categories of sonification which are: alerts and notifications, auditory icons, and audification. Fire alarms, sirens, and the beeping of certain objects are all examples of alerts due to the fact that they notify
and signal specific things. Auditory icons are usually involved with computing, so an example would be the sound one hears when they toss a computer file into the trash icon on their desktop. Other examples of applications and objects that deal with sonification
include: clocks, navigation, and speed alarms in certain motor vehicles.
Site-specific sound installation, 2010. Click on the image to visit project web site
Is there more to the voice than the words we say? This was the theme of our discussion on voices, which we wanted to dissect for its nonsemantic meaning. We began by summarizing one of this week’s readings—an essay written by contemporary Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero—which explores, and perhaps answers, just this question.
In her essay, “Multiple Voices,” Cavarero begins by breaking down postmodernist writer Italo Calvino’s “A King Listens.” This is a story of a king who is acoustically attuned to the inherent timbres of the voice, and seeks to find meaning within them—a challenge in the political sphere. One night, when he hears the voice of a woman sing from beyond the walls of his palace, he finally hears meaning within the voice, and this meaning is uniqueness and a “self-revelation of the existence” (reminiscent of Derrida’s idea that we develop our notion of self through our voice). The king then tries to sing with her, but finds he cannot sing, as true singing would have communicated his uniqueness that “infects the other” and creates a reciprocal manifestation. Trying repeatedly to in a duet with the woman’s voice, the king finally sings, recognizing the truth of his humanity. Upon learning this, it is implied, he finds that being king means nothing.
Cavarero summarizes her main points to be this: that voices are unique—that they exist to be relational and communicate uniqueness, relationality, difference in gender, and age. Her essay, however, also asserts that the uniqueness of voices has gained little attention in study of the voice. Philosophy, she argues, not only ignores the voice, but also renders it insignificant as philosophical tradition ignores uniqueness in general. It fails, she says, to recognize the plural reciprocal communication of voices, and does not recognize meaning in the vocality of the speakers. Next, Cavarero mentions Paul Zumthor’s revolutionary inquiry into the voice as separate from speech in his distinction between orality and vocality, the former characterizing the “bearer of language,” and the latter being the vocal properties that belong to the voice independent of language. He gives us this notion that when we take away the directionality of speech, we are left with a voice that has its own meaning. She then proposes that we need to take on Roland Barthe’s perspective to understand speech through grain rather than language. Unlike Barth, however, she does not support a vocality that consists of power relating to speech. Instead, Cavarero concludes that it is not enough to be attuned to the sonority, bodily pleasure, “song of the flesh,” and rhythmic drives of the voice—we must escape the linguistic’s ignorance of relationality, and make primacy of the voice, separated from speech, an end for relationality in and of itself.
After providing this summary of Cavarero’s essay, we discussed as a class how her ideas relate to those of Barthes, and how we may apply her main ideas of vocality to our lives. We asked if voice, without linguistics, carries meaning in and of itself and if messages, separated from the voice of their producer, always carry the same meaning. Our aim in these questions was to point at things such as a text message or reading something with a disembodied voice. Is there a miscommunication? Is the intentional vibe lost? Does the speech and inflections of a voice convey something that gives context to the meaning of a message that is then lost upon its transformation into symbols? The group consensus on this was an agreement that understanding the true meaning of a written message is sometimes difficult because, in speech, vocal inflections, speed, emphasis, and pitch assist the listener in decoding a message. We miss these auditory cues when reading the spoken message.
This brought up questions relating to Dolare and vocal inflection: If linguistics is binary, what are the binary factors between a voice and the face it’s attached to? What is the role of technology in this exchange? This prompted other questions addressing the role technique plays in grain, if in fact, it plays a role at all—can technique and/or filters create an uncanniness that hides one’s grain? With modern technology, Yes. Vocoders, for example, hide grain fairly well. Grain can also, in a sense, be appropriated. People do Billie Holiday impressions and sound like Billie Holiday—you don’t see them, but you hear “their” voice and think of them. This is perhaps evidence that technique can shape a voice as much as its grain. As a group, we also speculated that perhaps the reason why many artists within pop music sound similar these days lies within the technology many similarly use, such as autotune, which seems to have an effect of multiple people sounding like the same artist. We hypothesized that with the advance of technology, we may eventually be able to apply a vocal filter of a certain artist to mimic their sound.
After this discussion, we played a game, based on the hit television show, The Masked Singer, where everyone was asked to listen to three different artists’ covers of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” and determine, through their unique vocal styles, if they could identify at least one of the artists they were listening to. This forced those participating to draw inferences about who they were hearing, that connect the voice to the person without seeing their face. This brought up the question: Do our bodies as listeners play a part in the equation in recognizing voices? Culture and relativity was brought up as well in terms of how each listener’s past experience plays a role in their interpretation of sounds. The consensus in this conversation was yes—how we hear, interpret, and connect information is relative to the sounds that we have been exposed to throughout our lives. Part of our lack of understanding and guesswork in the activity can also indicate that modern singers, the ones in the activity, did a poor job portraying grain.
Billie Holiday’s vocality is expressive of racial injustices, which align with how Cavarero defines vocality as an expression of the body which includes gender and race. The nexus between Barthes and Cavarero is the human body as a grounding for audio and social interaction (singing and listing).
The main takeaway from the discussion and Caverero was that we as listeners should read closer into geno-text, as it relates to speaking and singing voices, to gain more information about what someone is saying to us and become better listeners. Not only should we take semantics into account, but also what the body is saying. If, according to Marshall McLuhan, the “medium is the message,” then the body, the medium of our voice, will always be a part of our message.
Based on the Intro to Sound Studies class discussion on voices which occurred on September 17, 2020.
Rose claims that “rap lyrics arc a critical part of a rapper’s identity, strongly suggesting the importance of authorship and individuality in rap music” (95). This idea makes me think a lot about the messages in rap music. There’s definitely a collection of rap out there that has a lot of lyrics that are focused on sex or drugs or are misogynistic. But as we discussed in class, there is certainly, and especially in the last few years, a lot of rap that focuses more on social issues. I liked Soren’s idea of it is being this trend of “moral rap” that stands out from what rap is often mistaken for as a genre as a whole. Thinking about this in relation to Rose’s quote, it shows that a lot of rapper’s are passionate about what’s going on in the world. They’re challenging the stereotype of rapper’s being only interested in sex and drugs. A good example of this is “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy. It’s not the most current example, but it certainly is an important and relevant song in relation to what’s going on today and it makes an important statement of resistance. With rap today, do audiences mostly listen to it for the sound, the message/lyrics, the general feeling of it? Aspects like race, gender, class, and sexuality can obviously make someone have different feelings towards a rap song. So it’s interesting to think about how someone’s personal traits, upbringing, or current place in the world can effect how they experience rap music.
Fight the Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PaoLy7PHwk
INTRODUCTION TO SOUND STUDIES 