Author Archives: Cynthia Wang

At the roller derby right now. Thinking about sounds and sports. The announcer’s comments are so secondary in terms of what sounds take priority when you’re actually there. Whereas when you watch a sporting event on TV, the announcer is overwhelmingly the voice that you hear. Following that, that means that on tv, your experience of the event is shaped by the announcer more than if you were actually there. Attached is a short clip of the derby.

I’m sitting here trying to write my midterm paper before running around the continent next week. So naturally, I’m watching YouTube videos.

Raymond Lee singing “Long Train Ride” from Victor Woo: The Average Asian American

Erin Quill doing her own version of “Be Good to your Mama”:

Megan Lee and Raymond Lee dueting to “I See the Light” from Tangled:

I’ve always loved this guy.

Suisman’s book was fantastic. I found myself wanting to highlight almost everything (but I restrained myself). I actually wrote a paper (for Lisa Gitelman’s class at NYU) on piano rolls in the late 19th, early 20th century that probed the idea (that Suisman discusses) of interpolating people into the middle class by having player pianos and piano rolls. I was particularly drawn to the part about the phonograph, and Caruso’s recordings, especially with Victor’s Red Label in which hierarchies of cultural capital were constructed through the use of sound recording and playback technologies.

How very fitting that we read this book during the week of the EMP conference, whose theme was Music and Money, since Suisman gives a delightful narrative that tracks the commodification of music and sound. I was struck by the class implications for the player piano and the phonograph, as well as its power to disseminate information to the public in a sort of democratizing process. Suisman makes the point that before the phonograph, the only way one can listen to the opera is to have enough cultural and economic capital to attend a live performance. With the phonograph, “high Art” (with the capital A) is now more widely accessible to a greater number of people.

The part about Tin Pan Alley and songwriters as hands (or pens) for hire hit close to home for me this week as well. I was just commissioned to write a song for someone who is trying to win her girlfriend back. The feeling of writing this song is very different than what I write organically for myself. I think about the song less as an artwork, and more as an object. The process of songwriting in Tin Pan Alley demarcates the difference between music songwriting as artistic process and music songwriting as a craft. Tin Pan Alley is certainly the latter. And in my case this week, the song I write for someone else is more craft than art. Songwriting in Tin Pan Alley becomes a functional process (following the oversimplified idea that a piece of art is defined when one admires it for its aesthetic form over its utility as a functional object). The songwriters, and hence the songs themselves, serve more a function for capitalistic gains rather than the transcendental purpose of spiritual fulfillment that Art (with a capital A) purportedly forwards.

Another point I would like to make that seems to be an ongoing theme of this class is the fact that this book is about music and sound, and yet the way the information is given to the reader is through describing the sounds and music via texts and pictures. the visual hegemony of epistemological knowledge binds even a book about sound and music to its rules. We learn about music and sound thru text and pictures.

Went to Disneyland today to record some sound for a bigger project I want to do. Just a few disconnected thoughts:

– It feels creepy going in there with an audio recorder. As in, I feel creepy, because cameras are normal, but audio recordings are not. People probably thought I was a spy.

– sound mapping is challenging because of all the stuff that falls thru the cracks, simply because sound is so ephemeral, so in the moment. I can take 5 minutes of sound at a particular spot, but I’m missing who knows how much more at the time. Conversely, the Haunted Mansion is going to look a certain way for the entire day.

– In the Tiki Room, the animatronics are LOUD. It completely overwhelms the actual music recording that is played there. I have a sound recording of it.

My body is protesting right now. It’s been awake for way too long on way too little sleep and has spent 9 hours today cramped up sitting in chairs at UCLA for the EMP Conference. But the conference itself was awesome.
I think one of the things that inspired me was the first panel, moderated by Aram Sinnreich, that I went to, which was about being musicians outside a major record label. It made me want to pursue music more, which is probably not the best idea in grad school, but well, Ahmed Best said it the best – that he’s a musician – it’s not something he does. Everything else he does (like the business end of it) is independent of the fact that he’s a musician. As idealistic as that may sound, it was interesting to hear that he considers it a part of his identity. I went with no music for 2 years in college (when I quit playing piano because I was double majoring in film and biology, and before I taught myself guitar), and was miserable. I’ve been playing music nonstop since then, even if it’s not all intense all the time. It calms me.

Raymond Roker’s branding panel was also really interesting, and very different. What Redbull is doing with their music academy is very cool stuff though. And interesting points about how the person in charge of brand parties could just be choosing venues where he or she likes to party!

Then there was a painful panel where people read from their papers. And I’m not sure one of the panelists talked about noise in a very informed way…

The last panel on copyright was great. But I was losing steam fast. And getting hungry. Overall, very productive day.

I very much appreciated Martin Munro’s book, “Different Drummers.” Not only does it track the history of the meanings of rhythms, but it also I find it fascinating that rhythm has become racialized and interpolated into meanings within power structures and social hierarchies, especially when, as Henri Lefebvre suggests, rhythm is intrinsic in the body, that the body is made up of rhythms: “respiration, the beating of one’s heart, the circulation of blood, the flow of one’s speech.” (location 918 on Kindle) Interestingly, classical music does not use drums until much later. Baroque and Classical, and even most Romantic era music do not use drums. If they are used, increasingly starting in the Romantic era, they are usually used sparingly, and not so much rhythmically – or to keep a rhythm. This makes me question popular music nowadays, which cannot seem to exist without a rhythmic drum beat. Drums, percussion, a rhythm track are fundamental instrumentations for today’s pop culture, no matter what race the artist or writer is.

Munro also discusses how temporality is perceived differently in different cultures. I never thought of our temporal culture as linear, as goal-oriented, but how true that is. Our music tell a story, gets somewhere. Rarely is it simply sound. I know this might be a bad example, but I watched Andrew Zimmern in Namibia (this is what happens when you’re stuck at home being more sick than you’ve ever been in your life), where he visited a tribe out in the middle of the dessert (I know, how incredibly stereotypical, right?). At night, they made what was akin to a drum circle, but with clapping. When Zimmern asked if there were any order to dancing, or if anyone can dance, he was told that anyone can dance however they wanted to. In a tribe where everything else was hierarchical, the dancing seemed to be the most egalitarian event of all. Such non-order, though, implies a cyclicalness, rather than a linearity that one would find in Western cultures. Even in jazz, there is less order and rule, less structure than strict classical music, where everything is framed by the rhythm.

It is interesting to see that the ideas of rhythm, drumming, and noise coming back, especially how “noise” has implications of class and social status, and how rhythm is used as a form of resistance against racism. It is as if, as Munro says, “[i]n a region shaped by historical genocide (and thereby silencing) of one group of people, by the brutal displacement and enslavement (and attempted silencing) of another, and by the complete (and univocal) mastery of another, the control of sounds, voices, and languages has long been associated with defining and circumscribing identity.” (location 5164 on Kindle) In other words, rhythm and sound is the means by which these disenfranchised groups establish an identity in order to not be invisible or silent, and to have a voice, to create not only a spatial space, but a space within the soundscape.

Sound historiography has been something that I’ve written about in this class, as well as something I’ve thought about for other classes, and Munro brings up questions in his conclusion that have been plaguing me as well – “We may think we know – from old images, paintings, and even films – what slavery looked like, but how did it sound?” (location 5047 on Kindle) As the discussion leader for one of my other classes, I asked my fellow classmates to read the Smith piece on Antebellum America, and one of my classmates pointed out that we can write about what we hear, but we can’t actually hear the sound because of the lack of sound recording technologies back then. He then went on to ask if the emphasis on sound now means that we should have studies that focus on taste, smell, and touch. The interesting thing is, though, we have no way to record and reproduce these other senses. So does this mean that sound does, indeed, have a hegemony over epistemology? At least more so than the other senses other than vision?

One last thing. I read the Munro on Kindle. As can be seen from this response, I had a difficult time citing direct quotes on Kindle, because Kindle doesn’t give page numbers, only “locations.” Just another example of how the archaic systems of academia and the advancements of technology are at odds with each other.

It’s been a week, and I’m still sick. Like, bedridden sick. As in, I had to call my friend this morning and ask her to bring me food and sustenance.
So because I couldn’t make yet another meeting today, I had a Skype conference with Robby. I’m helping him with his class. And because I was looking like crap, we didn’t use the video feature. So during the call, all I had were aural cues. A few thoughts – Skype’s quality is fantastic. I could hear everything clearly. Really clearly. And not only that, but I could hear the antics going on in Robby’s house in the background. His son, Atticus, at one point, locked himself in the bathroom, and I could hear his wife cajoling him to open the door in Chinese. And at one point, I hear intense crying. Atticus apparently did a face plant on the ground. It was fun, though, to sit back and visualize what was going on across Skype just based on sound, and by some limited verbal cues from Robby himself.

In other news, The Chicago Code is on. And I really like the theme song. (it’s not on YouTube yet)

My friend had compiled a bunch of video clips of us at Disneyland during Christmas. I’m amazed that iMovie has a ton of pre-made music clips for background music purposes. Many apologies for the lack of posts lately. The Annenberg Flu had knocked me out and gone back to its own corner to gloat while I try and pick myself off the arena floor. Oh, and did y’all hear the rain today? And the thunder? It went beyond soothing to somewhat frightening.