Pops from the little crackerpop thingies that you throw to the ground. Drumming and cymbals in a familiar pattern made for dragon dances. Intermittent cheering, and constant drum rhythms from the Korean drummers. Chatter, excitement. The cheerleaders of the marching band ahead of us vocalizing to the beat of their drumline cadence. And the hollow plunk of the double-sided Chinese mini-kettle drums that have a bead attached at the end of a red string on either end, so when you spin it back and forth, the beads hit the head of the drum, creaking a plunking sound. We had about 30 or 40 of those too.
So many sounds today at the Chinatown Chinese New Year Parade. Chinese New Year is the epitome of “renau” in any Chinese-based society. Even those of us not born in China (or Asia) still celebrate, still keep up the tradition, and for a few days, we stop minding the constant sounds that are based in the celebration of the Spring Festival.
I’m a volunteer for API Equality LA, which is an Asian Pacific Islander community group for marriage equality. And we had the largest group today in the Chinatown Chinese New Year parade. Another member of the group mentioned that this parade is better for us to do than Pride, because at Pride, we’re preaching to the choir, whereas in Chinatown, we face some of the people who are most inhospitable to the idea of gay rights. Which is why, whenever we heard an intermittent roar of cheers, it was rejuvenating. We had supporters in the crowd! And really, it wasn’t all that intermittent. Even though it was hot, and most of us were dehydrated by the end of it, it was so much fun.
Author Archives: Cynthia Wang
Bassilicious
After 5 months of listening exclusively to the radio while in the car (mostly KUSC and KPCC, and some country music, as evidenced by previous posts), I finally bought some blank CDs and burned a CD of songs I listened to while I was still living in NYC. In NYC, we listened to music mostly through earphones. The CD I burned has a good mix of all genres of music, including some Pearl Jam (The End), Charisse (Listen), Madonna, some country, and some indie, soft acoustic stuff. One thing I noticed right away when I played the CD in my car was the presence of bass in the Charisse and Sade songs, which literally vibrate the car (and I don’t turn my music up too loudly).
Just interesting to me that, whereas thru earphones, I could hear the bass, but I couldn’t FEEL it until I put it in my car. Maybe my car speakers are just better.
Just interesting to me that, whereas thru earphones, I could hear the bass, but I couldn’t FEEL it until I put it in my car. Maybe my car speakers are just better.
Eric Garland Talk
Went to the Eric Garland talk today. It was fantastic, with really interesting data about music transactions and online impressions (and what makes money and what doesn’t). I’ll try to blog a bit more about it when I’m not about to pass out.
On another note, I took a 5 block walk through downtown LA today, and it struck me how quiet LA is. Few people on the street, very little city chatter. The only noise were cars, and there weren’t a lot in downtown LA at 8pm at night. It was surprisingly serene.
Response to Rasmussen and Corbin
I will respond mostly to the piece on bells, but wanted to also talk a little bit about the Rasmussen piece, especially the chapter about the Islamic soundscape.
Anne Rasmussen’s piece about the Islamic soundscape illuminated the difference between (and I know I’m being completely reductive) the logical, written, visually driven Western tradition of the private citizen silently reading a newspaper in a cafe (Habermas), and the oral, participatory nature (heavy with religious overtones) of Islamic culture of “musicking” and constant sound. Rasmussen actually brings it up herself when she says, “Orality is a fundamental aspect of Muslim cultures both historically and in contemporary times in ways that, I submit, are difficult for Westerners, who are conditioned by what I have called ‘the prestige of literacy,’ to understand.” (Rasmussen, 72) Hence, even through reading this work, my Western-entrenched brain kept thinking about how foreign it feels for a society to be so immersed in a culture of communal aurality and ramai. In Taiwan, as Rasmussen mentions, ramai is like the Mandarin expression renau, which translates literally into “hot ruckus.” Which does have positive connotations in the language.
The idea of aurality being performed is also one that is familiar in the West, although not in the lived everyday as it seems to be for Islamic cultures, but for people in the public’s eye – rock bands, politicians (who could forget the Scream That Ended A Presidential Campaign in 2004?), public speakers, and, of course, preachers. But, whereas in the West, these performances generally make up those who seek to reinforce the hegemonic framework that already exists through their performative acts, Islamic soundscapes perform a sort of resistance, “a force that runs against the grain of government-mediated messages and the ever-increasing intercession of Western sources.” (Rasmussen, 68) The West has this as well – but is usually seen as disruptive to the soundscape, rather than part of the soundscape.
Alain Corbin’s piece on bells really applies not only to the historic use of bells in 19th Century France, but allows the reader to ruminate on how sound, and the ability to make other people hear the sound someone makes, or the sound someone has power over, is a form of identification within society. It not only defines that someone’s position within society in relation to everyone else, but it also defines the identity of those who have to endure said sound. In Corbin’s case, the sound is the ringing of bells. In modern days, as we have discussed earlier in this class, sound and/or noise have a political economy and social hierarchy aspect to it. Someone who lives under the flying trajectory of planes landing in airports has a very different socioeconomic status than someone who lives far from the “noise” of civilization, nestled in their own little sound-insulated pocket.
The part of Corbin’s piece that very much resonated with me was the section on bells and time, and how “the complex organization of auditory signals in the nineteenth century along with peoples’ many different experiences of time” (Corbin, 190) signaled the start of a subsumed power structure that had to do with “quantitative time” that was gradually imposed on people. For a while, the power lied with the “winder” of the clock. Whoever winds the clock, or rings the bells, holds power over the structure of time in a society. Bells aurally announced time, and announced the passage of time (hence “dictat[ing] the meaning of delay, the sense of being ahead of behind, and the forms assumed by haste. (Corbin, 191)) Personal watches, which Corbin mentions, then, was a way in which time is almost democratized. Everyone can keep their own time (provided the can, of course, afford to buy a personal timepiece), rather than having bells aurally announcing time and imposing it, though sound, on everyone within the space the sound can reach, which creates its own spatial boundaries. On the other hand, though, watches follow a structure of time that becomes a sort of constructed truth. Even if you have a watch, there is a universality to the measurement of a second, a minute, an hour, that has been pre-defined and constructed as truth. That being said, bells, with their omnipresent resonance, is the ultimate imposition of the passage of time, and imposition of time upon those living within its structures of constructed, quantification.
The consciousness of the flow of time leads to other questions that may not be so easily answered. Before this imposed construction of time and a consciousness of temporal flow that was imposed upon a community aurally by the bell (or other means, like the town crier, as Schafer mentions), how did people perceive time? Did they perceive it as something that passes, something that has increments? How did people make sense of aging, or growing, or days and months? Did they even think about age as a quantifiable thing? Was their quantification measured by suns and moons, and seasons? Did they ever think about time on the micro-level we feel? Do they feel so viscerally as we do the race against time as we sit in our car in traffic, hoping against hope that we will not be late to class, as the digital clock in our car ticks off another minute, prompting a curse under our breath? Were people ever early? Late? Did these feelings of relativity to time exist in human consciousness before its measurements and increments were imposed by the Powers That Be in a community?
Shameless self-promotion
There’s no website I can find for this event – I think it’s just in one of the galleries that participates in the Long Beach Artwalk.
Anyway. I’m playing an hour-long set in Long Beach during the Artwalk (or after or something. I’m not sure.) Here’s the information.
Feb 12 at 8pm
Catalyst
430 E. 1st Street
Long Beach, CA 90802
For more information about Catalyst, check out this website at http://www.gocatalyst.org/. This is my first time getting involved with them, and the evening will also be featuring an artist, Joey Paytner, and another band, SHE (not to be confused with the Taiwanese girl group of the same name…) – here’s the write up on…um…us:
Cynthia Wang is part singer-songwriter and part graduate student. After teaching herself guitar in college when she realized she couldn’t fit a piano into her dorm room, Cynthia started writing songs, although her first public performance took place a good 3 years after she started down the road of music creation and GAS (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome – she owns nine guitars), at Komuzika’s Fall Residency Program in 2006. Cynthia’s demo album,which was recorded and engineered at Big Brother Studios in Simi Valley, was released at the end of 2007, right before traveling and graduate school took over her life. After spending the last few years in New York City, where her singer-songwriter side laid dormant while grad-schooling, she recently moved back to Los Angeles and is currently writing material for a new album, while performing as time allows. She has played at venues such as the Ventura Majestic Theatre, the Derby, Cat Club on the Sunset Strip, and Bar Lubitsch. She has also performed at Five Star Variety Hour in New York City, and Tuesday Night Cafe in Los Angeles. You can find Cynthia’s music at http://www.cynthiawangmusic.com
SHE is a Long Beach based all girl band consisting of 3 musicians: Kris Suafilo (lead guitar/lead singer), Tina Stephenitch (bass guitar/vocals) and Carole Maducdoc (drums). The three have played together off and on in various bands for the past 5 years. About 9 months ago their passion to play music brought them back together to form SHE, an alternative rock band performing covers and originals. Influenced by groups such as; Pearl Jam, Green Day, Offspring, Joan Jett, U2 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Their mission: to engage people with music that is meaningful, entertaining and fun!
Joey Paynter has traveled to 33 countries volunteering her time to help prostitutes and lepers in Thailand, provide services to aborigines in Australia and volunteered in medical centers in the Solomon Islands. She has worked in Orphanages in Bali, Surabaya, Thailand and South Africa. She has counseled refugees and those with HIV/AIDS in South Africa and ran groups for children that have been victims of sexual abuse. She has provided relief trauma therapy to those in Haiti and has spoken to thousands of people in high schools, Universities and churches about injustice and awareness. She has worked on several photojournalist projects in the Middle East, Bali, South Africa, Panama, Brazil (Amazon), and Haiti. Joey helped create a 30 day devotional: “A Voice for the Voiceless”, which has been translated into 6 different languages with over 100,000 copies distributed world wide. Her photography from the Amazon is published in the book, “A Voice for Life” and her photography has been displayed overseas in Australia, as well as in galleries and shops in Oregon, South Carolina, and California. Joey received her Masters of Science in Clinical Psychology from Vanguard University and has worked in a variety of therapeutic settings. She currently resides in Newport Beach, California and her passion is to empower others to discover and connect with their soul.
One more for today
My best friend from college is in the original Anything Goes Revival Cast, and is in rehearsals now. He’s Korean, but plays one of the Chinese men in the cast (I know, I know, I’m going to leave it at that).
Anyway, because he needs to intermittently use Chinese phrases, he’s been asking me to teach him Chinese phrases. Thank god for audio recording technology, because I’ve been recording short files on my iPhone for certain phrases he needs, and sending it to him. Aural language is a funny thing. Chinese is so tonal that I can’t just give him written pronunciations of the words. It’s much easier to just record myself saying certain phrases and sending it to him.
Switching gears, I love this song. It was playing at the end of this Mad Men episode, which reminded me of its existence.
(it’s Ella Fitzgerald’s “Manhattan” – amazing how references to certain streets and areas in New York feel so nostalgic…)
Tick Tock
My clock is LOUD. It’s one of those I got for $3 at Target. And it ticks and tocks…I hear it even over my TV. And it’s comforting. But one thing (this is what happens when you pay attention too much) that I notice more now is the silence between ticks. Probably has something to do with my line of thinking during my Soundscape reaction paper, and how sound only exists with the passage of time…
In other very random news, I notice these new songs I’ve been writing use the GMaj to BMaj7 chords a lot.
I’ve been on a Mad Men bent. The beginning of the 4th episode of the 1st season is a bunch of people sitting around in the character Pete Campbell’s office listening to a vinyl record of some comedy show. And there’s a shot of the record spinning, with reaction shots to the men laughing. Makes us forget, sometimes, that the proliferation of TV and the moving image in American homes really didn’t happen until the 1950’s at the earliest, but radio dominated the way people got information for decades before that. Information was gotten through audio.
My friends and I tried to catch an open house for a condo in Beverly Hills. It was this beautiful street with trees overhanging and lots of green. Don’t see that a lot in LA. In any case, it was nice and sunny, glinting off the streets, when all of a sudden, we hear pit-pattering. It was still sunny, but it was raining, with the rain hitting the leaves of the trees. Very serene.
Unrest in Egypt – a timeline – Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Unrest-in-Egypt-a-timeline/Article1-655881.aspx
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Sent from Cynthia Wang's iPhone
cyndaminthia@gmail.com
On the way to san diego
I’m in san Diego right now and quite without Internet, so I’ll do my best with this post. There was a bad accident on the southbound 5 as I was driving down to sd, effectively turning the freeway into a crawling parking lot. I rolled down my windows. And enjoyed the sounds of traffic around. And I’m not being facetious. Being in a car all the time mutes out sounds from the world, making us detached from the space we’re in. The simple act of rolling down my windows on the 5 seemed to connect me back to the world. Like the feeling you get walking around a city with no walls between you and the next Human being. Everything felt clearer. The crunch of tires on the asphalt, the engines of the cars around me, the occasional motorcycle brave enough to ride between the stalled lines of cars, and sometimes the muffled sounds of someone else’s stereo blasting a rhythmic beat (and yes, sometimes I could only hear the bass).
Also, I noticed that the radio stations I listen to cut out somewhere around san Juan capistrano. Some before that. Kusc actually lasted the longest, but dissolved into static in proximity of SD. I’m posting with CNN playing in the background about Egypt and organizing via social media.
Cynthia Wang 