Author Archives: Cynthia Wang

I’ve lately been missing New York City a lot. In class today, we talked about Arkette’s idea of audio enclaves, where it is different per location (ie: In LA, you sort of want people to hear the bass you’re pumping through your car, where as in NYC, your audio enclave extends to your own ears buried in headsets or earphones).

There are certain songs that I listened to incessantly when I was living in NYC – and listened to particularly while walking around the city or on the subway. Some are standalone songs, some are albums of artists I like. One is even the Jersey Boys album.
In any case, two artists I particularly associate with NYC are Alfa (http://alfa-music.com/) and Jennifer Lee Snowden (http://www.jenniferleesnowden.com/). I’m listening to her song “Drowning in Bright Lights” as I’m blogging this.

The musical road clips (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QWKljfV9qc) that we watched in class reminded me of a project in Stockholm to attempt to get more people to take the stairs rather than the escalator:

Schafer’s book, “Soundscapes,” is not only an insightful and enjoyable read into the history of sound and music, but is also written beautifully and poetically, drawing not only on the works of previous academic scholars, but from the arts, music, literature, and mythology. The narrative of sound from the rural and pastorale to the modern and urban not only told the story in terms of time, but also in terms of sound layers and the transition of sound as modernization progressed, and how rural sounds were replaced by urban sounds. And sadly, it does not seem like we can reverse the effects of the urbanization of sound in a city – we cannot turn New York City back into the rural place it was, the hi-fi place it was in the early 1800‘s. It is not as if we can strip away the sounds of modernization and find the layer of hi-fi pastorale sounds of nature underneath. The sounds of nature has effectively been eradicated by the citification of urban spaces.

The act of reading Schafer in itself was an act of active listening. The book seemed to rupture the veil we place between our conscious thought process and what we subconsciously hear every day. It turned what we hear into an act of listening, but ironically the act of listening was not done in the moment, like how experiencing sound actually is, but was done through the process of remembering, for example, what cicadas sound like. Through reading Schafer, we recall the sounds of cicadas, or birds, or the flow of water, and assign significance to those sounds from within our memory – significance that probably would not have been assigned had it not been analyzed and called to our attention in Schafer’s writing, which, ironically enough, are visual symbols of the English language – words and letters – rather than auditory signals. Hence, the assigning of significance to these sounds occur through time and space. Unlike the *real* act of experiencing sound, which emphasizes the present moment in which the sound occurs, the simultaneity in time and space, the reading of it assigned significance, but not in the here and now, but what we remember.

Ok, I think that got a bit too philosophical. But my point, to put it in simpler terms, was that Schafer’s discussion of the sounds of nature, of the flatline electric sounds of modernity, makes the readers more conscious of these sounds, even if they are not hearing them right at this point. This meta-level perspective of the reading illuminates the difference between audio/sounds and visual/writing. The visual can be transferred through time and space, but sounds cannot (unless they are recorded).

I found the part about how sounds of the city indicated time, with the town crier and the bells, particularly resonate for me, given my current interests in questions of time and how time has become structured in our modern-day society. Even now, the tick-tock sound of the mechanical clock is a trope for the passage of time. Because sound is so tied to the present, sound only occurs with the passage of time. Sound can only exist through the movement of time.
Another interesting bit that Schafer illuminates is that the authority to decide what is noise and what is not privileges certain kinds of power, while those who are able to make noise and get away with it also have power. Would it be accurate to say that the concept of noise only arose through the process of modernization and socialization? It seems like flatlining happened through technology. Is this when we started thinking of noise as a nuisance, a subliminal positioning of power, rather than the previous obvious and upfront display of power, with church bells or the town crier, or a king’s trumpet or hunting horns?

In the Behind the Scenes feature for Castle Season 2 (on the DVD), Nathan Fillion interviews Joe Foglia, the sound mixer. Joe has an interesting something to say about sound in movies…on how it’s really important:

“I just wanted to tell you, though, how important sound is to any motion picture or movie or TV show, is when you go on the airplane, the movie is free, you have to pay for the headsets.”

You know that whole Amy Chua “Tiger Mother” scandal? Check out Jen Kwok’s take on it. http://jenkwok.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Jen-Kwok-Tiger-Mom-Rap.mp3

I had dinner with a close friend of mine today who does voiceover acting work, and one of the interesting points of conversation that came up was that when she told people she does voiceover acting, people would say, “oh, that’s not REAL acting.” “Real” acting in this case as on-camera acting, where the actor’s body is visibly present.

Another example of the hegemony of vision. You’re not a “real” actor unless your body is visibly on camera. Because your voice, your SOUND just isn’t enough. Just isn’t authoritative, or legitimate.

On Thursday, Josh instructed us to go outside on campus for 20 minutes and just listen. I agree with Chris in that we should be doing this exercise every day. It’s relaxing, meditative. And made me realize how much of our listening life is passive listening, where we really don’t listen (something Classical Albums Sunday is attempting to rectify). Even in music, we always multitask. We’re studying, or driving, or using it for background music during dinner.

During those 20 minutes, I noticed, well, many things. But one thing in particular was how some people would walk scraping their feet along the ground, and some people wouldn’t. It’s not like I didn’t notice this before, but this was the first time I actually consciously noticed it, and started thinking about why that would be? Was it the kind of shoes? Their mood? Just their natural gait?

It’s like reading Soundscape (by R. Murray Schafer — a more in-depth response to the book will come later). Ironically, reading about sound makes me consciously think about sounds I have heard and stored in my subconsciousness (like insects) whereas before, I would simply gloss over them.

On a more personal level, I finished a new song. Something about running between raindrops. It’s way too long (7 minutes), but I don’t think it’s going to be cut down any. And no, I’m not trying to be Don McLean. I haven’t found a good way to record music on my computer. A trip to get a good mic might be in store. Or I may settle for an MP3 recorder to record rough cuts (and make sure I’m not forgetting anything). I find that writing music is very present. And I don’t write musical notations down. I write the lyrics, which means every time I sing it and play it (at least when I’ve first written something and am in the process of learning it), it’s different. Sometimes (on bad days), I would completely forget how a melody goes. This is why, I think, an mp3 recorder would be useful not just for the sound mapping project for this class. I’ve been thus far, been using my iPhone.

It is interesting, though, how words (lyrics) can trigger a melody. Even if I can’t exactly remember a melody, I still remember sort of how I wanted it to sound. It’s also frustrating when you can’t recreate the same melodic line because you didn’t write down musical notation. I used to (back in undergrad…and once or twice at NYU) have bursts of song that pop into my head during the most inopportune times (ie: during class). In those moments I would either jot down some quick musical notations (my background in music theory still comes in handy sometimes, surprisingly!), or I would use numbers. 1 for do, 2 for re, 3 for mi, and so on and so forth. That worked ok, but didn’t capture the rhythm or length of notes. Which would confuse me later when I sat down to try and elaborate on it.

This is the most disjointed post ever. I’m sorry. My brain isn’t functioning at even 50% right now.

It’s fantastic what one hears on NPR at 12:30am. After an enjoying evening at USC’s Visions and Voices (http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/visionsandvoices/) event – The DNA Trail reading (http://www.srtp.org/productions.html) by Silk Road Productions with Dawen (http://dawen.us/), I drop Dawen off, and hear about Classical Album Sundays on the radio.

Classical Album Sundays is this event at a space in…London (?) where people come in and listen to albums in silence (http://londonist.com/2011/01/classic-album-sundays.php). They cannot text, multitask, even go to the bathroom. They must sit in complete silence and do nothing but listen. How many of us multitask while listen to music nowadays? How many of us will spend the time listening to a full album of songs, in our day of iPods, iPhones, Pandora, and multitasking, and do nothing but listen?

Definitely food for thought about how “listening to music has become a passive activity” in our day and age, as Talia in the Londonist (link given above) says. And what it means to really actively listen to music, to understand it, to experience it on a deeper level than just something that fills the silence as we go about doing other stuff.

I am actually blogging from the q&a session of the DNA trail, which was performed at USC tonight. A quick thing I noticed was that the production, which was more a reading than a play, was that, whereas there is sound, no composer or sound person was credited in the program. Maybe it goes under stage manager. Someone just mentioned that the pieces should bs published into a book, which was followed up by a statement that it should be put on DVD so people would hear the actors’ voices. Ok, more later. It’s hard to type on a small device. There was someone sitting behind me who kept laughing right in my ear. Piercingly.