Into Disney with a Sound Recorder

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.

Quick thoughts on EMP

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.

Response to Munro's "Different Drummers"

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.

Skype saves sick synthia

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)

iMovie

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.

Response for this week

The theme that runs across several of the readings this week is one that alters sound in order to create “art.” Kahn discusses the fact that sound is not really an object, which is why it makes sound art so hard to pin down, given that the visual hegemony treats art as objects. Ironically, Sterne has said that sound has become objectified and commodified in The Audible Past, but this line of thinking follows Kahn’s pointing out of the fact that sound is not necessarily something that is tangible. While Sterne and Kahn talk about sound differently. Sterne talks about it in a way in which sound as commodity has implications of class, power, status, economics, etc, whereas Kahn talks about the materiality of sound...a materiality that, before the inception of sound recording and reproducibility, did not exist. To experience sound, still, in the age of sound reproduction, is an exercise in ephemerality. 

“When the industry comes up with a machine to record something, it has a very specific use, but the artist always tired to go beyond what the machine was designed for.” (Marclay, 344) There is a sort of subversion that happens here, using technology made by Powers That Be, but using them in a way that is not intended. This is similar to remix culture, and has tinges of copyright issues. You can use a CD player in any way you want, making them skip, scratching the CD player, etc in order to create something else - a work of sonic art. In remix, you use a piece of music, and remix it to create something else, yet in today’s digital world, these remix artists run into copyright issues. Marclay makes a rather poignant statement about records, about how he remembers when “the record changed from being this object to be respected, collected and stored for posterty, into a piece of plastic that had no more value than a coffee cup in the gutter.” (Marclay, 345) This conflict is particularly pertinent to the idea that sound is an object, but an ephemeral one rather than a tangible one.

There seems to be roughly three categories of aural signals that can be discerned from the readings this week - Cox highlights this a bit with his discussion of noise as unintended and the sonic unconsciousness. Then there is music, which has ideological and cultural expectations (this is what music is SUPPOSED to sound like - John Cage wonderfully pushes back on this notion with pieces like 4’33”, along with other composers like Boulez, Schnittke, Partch who push the conventional boundaries of music to a point where people may question whether their “music” is actually music). Then there is sound art, which seems to be, not exactly in the middle, but negotiates the position of music as the *only* type of art that can come of sound, and the questions of what “art” is, and how this differs from “music.” Sound art seems to play more with technology than music, as I had alluded to before, although I loathe to put boxes around these terms and make generalizations. But hopefully this is a useful way to start thinking about the distinctions, and the power structures that lay behind these concepts.

On another completely unrelated note, a Kit Kat commercial just came on. The breaking sound of the Kit Kat is completely fabricated, yet is THE selling point for the candy bar - not taste, not visual aesthetics, but sound.

Tire Tracks and Broken Hearts

I have been tasked with shipping our family car from Thousand Oaks (my hometown) to my brother at Dartmouth, in New Hampshire. I had put in the order with Direct Connect, an auto transport broker. They connect you with a carrier who will then physically pick up your car and ship it to your location.

It was supposed to work this way. The broker puts your name up on the board, where all carriers they work with have access, and one picks up the request and notifies the broker. The broker then tells me when they can come get the car, and I give them a yay or a nay.

There must have been some miscommunication, because I got a call early this morning from a carrier who wanted to confirm that he would pick up my car in TO after 5pm today. A few red flags went off in my head. First, I never heard from my broker. Second, I was paranoid because my quote request went to 10 different companies, so I didn't know if one was trying to pull a fast one on me. Third, I need more than 7 hours notice for this. Needless to say, the conversation did not go well, and I ended up calling my broker, who apologized profusely and assured me that he would "scold" their dispatch department, which was supposed to contact me sooner. They did later, but I was still in peeved mode.

I contact the carrier directly around 5:15pm to confirm what time they were going to be there, from an earlier agreement to talk at 5 to see where he is. He tells me that he will be between 7 and 8. I hop on the road right away, and hit dead stop traffic on the west side. It wasn't until after the fact that I was told Johnny Depp's new film, Rango, was premiering in Westwood, and streets were blocked off, effectively slowing down traffic for all of West LA. It took me an hour to go about 4 miles to the freeway.

Needless to say, I did not make it to TO by 7. The good news (if it could be good...how about "less bad") was that my carrier was also running late. Actually, he didn't get into TO until after 9:30p, pulling me from my Valentine's Day date with Jennifer Beals and "The Chicago Code." I had been chilling at a family friend's place, where our family car was being stored. Carrier and I had agreed to meet at the Oaks Mall, since there is more room, and the carrier truck is ginormous. I hop into the family car, turn the ignition, and this ugly, harsh clicking sound emits from the engine. Shit. What's going on? Turns out, the battery was dead. We had to jump it, which we did just fine. And family friend followed me as I drove toward the mall.

It's past 10pm by this time. The carrier is exhausted too, having driven from San Diego, and he had to wait while we figured out the car jumping situation. On the way there, my dashboard lights were doing weird things, and my headlights were flickering. Halfway on the main road to the Oaks, my headlights go out. Then my dashboard display goes out. I press on the accelerator, and that doesn't make the car go faster. Uh oh. I pull over to the side of the road, right as my steering wheel locks up. After this, nothing works. Not even my emergency lights. Good thing family friend was behind me, and she put on her blinkers so no one would ram into us. I call AAA, and juggle that phone call with calls from the carrier trying to figure out where we were. Long story even longer but approaching the end, the carrier was able to jump the car with a jumper box and get the car on the truck. Kenneth will just have his work cut out for him when the car gets to New Hampshire.

(BTW, the post title is from Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Whistle Down the Wind.")

Some random ruminating on music

This was part of a reaction paper I wrote for another class, but thought I'd share it here too:

I had an interesting discussion with a cellist friend of mine today (as I was sitting in traffic on the West Side. Rango, the movie with Johnny Depp’s voice just came out, and they blocked off a few streets in Westwood for the premiere... and I’m sure I can get into a discussion about how pop/mass culture such as a Johnny Depp Hollywood movie can cause physical discomfort and inconvenience for even those not involved, both spatially and temporally, given the power of said culture industry, but I’ll save that for another day), about why young people don’t like classical music. Or why classical music is not popular. My thinking on this is two-fold. On one hand, borrowing from Gross’s notion of symbolic competence, we are not trained competently in music as a language. We do not need music as a foundational competence in order to function in our society like we do linguistic competence (we need to know how to read, write, speak, and understand the English language), and hence, we do not know how to comprehend the musical code. I have encountered many people who say they like classical music because it is “beautiful.” They cannot give a deeper reason as to why they like it. But classical music, or all music, really, should transcend simply being “beautiful.” It’s like saying, I like listening to Italian poems because they sound beautiful, but I don’t understand Italian. We are not trained in the depth of understanding and significance of music as a language. Hence, pop songs use the English language - words - to supplement the music, while rendering the music in these pop songs to the pseudo-differentiated mindless drone Adorno says it is, with conventional and predictable chord progressions that flatter the listener when it is expected and realized. But people who are trained in English as a basic symbolic competency are able to draw a narrative, to draw meanings, from pop music because of its words, in ways that they are unable to draw deeper meanings from the word-less, strictly instrumental pieces of classical music. Hence, a musical competency requires time and education (to go above and beyond the basic competency of the English language), and a certain socioeconomic and class status, which follows Bourdieu’s statement about cultural capital, effectively making classical music cognitively and meaningfully inaccessible to the “masses.”

So the question becomes, how can we change that? What can be done with classical music in order to get more people interested in it? Can we popularize classical music without bastardizing it (like what Vanessa Mae does - example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euOu89d3npA)? Can we get people interested in classical music without compromising the purity of music (by techno-fying, or adding rhythms and percussion and a bass beat) that has been in existence for 300, 400 years? Let us set aside, for the moment, that wanting to keep classical music “pure” may be, in fact, problematic in itself. My thoughts are that it is hard to change a culture, to change people’s habits of listening. We have an idea of what entertainment is, of what interesting art is, and classical music just isn’t it. It just ain’t hip enough for the young ‘uns.

New Dawen Video!

All done in one take. Totally acappella, totally crazy, totally awesome, totally Dawen:

Tracy Bonham

I can't remember where I had heard this song before, but this is my latest download:

riffing in Bb

This is amazingly awesome.http://www.inbflat.net/

Dvorak goodness

My friend's playing this piece and told me to look it up. So I did.

Response to Sterne's The Audible Past

Jonathan Sterne’s semi-behemoth of a book gives a coherent narrative the different ways of hearing and listening that stemmed from the advent of sound technologies. His idea of audile techniques are helpful in framing the way we think about how we listen in a world of intense sound mediation and sound reproduction. He strips the ideas of hearing and listening down to the basic biologies, then building up techniques and technologies of listening and sound reproduction and mediation on top of these philosophies that stemmed from biology and anatomy.

His discussion of how public acoustic space turned private in order to enable the commodification of sounds and music and class distinctions that it constructed and into which it interpolated individuals illuminated something that seems so normal to us that we never think to deconstruct it. This is a cohesive continuation from the articles we had been reading earlier, about how sound is immersive and inescapable, with bells, with Islam soundscape, environments in which sound is NOT private. Could we go as far as to think about this “equity” of accessibility to sound as democratic? What are the implications here? After all, Sterne discusses how audile techniques privilege certain sounds and render them into a privatized space, whether it be with stethoscopes or headphones, or sound telegraphy and Morse codes. How does this isolation effect habits of listening, how has it changed, and how has commercialized entities turned sound commodification to their advantage?

Mediated sound as “better” hearing seems to be a theme that is relevant today. Back in the day, sound mediation tools and technologies (like the stethoscope) was needed to hear properly. Even today, people use headphones, especially those with noise canceling capabilities, in order to become fully immersed in sound. They hear the music “better” (or perhaps just more like how the people who control these privatized sonic spaces want you to hear it). Sterne’s discussion of audile technique as “dissemination of a specific kind of bourgeoise sensibility” (Sterne, 160) ties into private space, and this commodification of sound. After all, one needs to be able to afford the equipment in order to experience privatized music.

With this idea of privatized music comes the idea of how, with sound recordings, people have more control over how they spend their time listening to music or experiencing sound recordings. Sound recordings essentially divorce sound from its necessity to be present, to be in the now. Attali, through Sterne, talks about “stockpiling” others’ use-time. While I won’t attempt to tackle the Marxist implications in what he says, I do want to mention that sound recordings have huge implications for the idea of temporal capital, in that being able to separate a sonic experience from its presence in time allows more control over temporal capital (or how one spends their time). There is more flexibility in this, and temporal capital is much more widely spread - people are able to spend their time increasing their cultural capital (ie: as Kenney, through Sterne, points out, “recorded music allowed people to experience concert music they might otherwise not have encountered.” (Sterne, 243) I would argue that sound recording actually increases one’s temporal capital, as temporal capital is not necessarily the time available for a sonic experience, but one’s control over such time. Hence, in a concert, forget about the fact that going to the concert, dressing up for it, buying the tickets, providing transportation, etc would cost not only economically, but the individual who is going to the concert would need to, ironically, have the temporal capital, or the flexibility, in order to enjoy this sonic experience in the NOW, in the inflexibility of the experience. Sound recordings free the individual from the constraints of the concert hall in time and space.

Sterne also discusses the question of authenticity. The idea that the “original” does not exist until “copies” are made is poignant on many levels. They are both “products of the process of reproducibility.” (Sterne, 241) We also should think about the fact that many of the “original,” live shows tend to try and mimic the “copy,” or the sound recording of a record. After all, in most cases, albums are not recorded live. They are heavily engineered and layered, with each part being recorded at a different time, then compressed together on the same timeline in order to create that “authentic” sound. The real test is whether or not the “authentic” live performance can live up to the sound recording. This become a real conundrum. What is the original? Is it the recorded and engineered music? Or is it the ability of the artist or musician to reproduce what was heard on the record? It becomes a Catch-22.

Finally, Sterne talks about preserving sound, and creating an audible history. All I can think about is, sadly, we will never ever hear Mozart play his own piano concertos, because sound recording and reproduction technologies have not been invented yet.

Strangeness on Figueroa

Heading north on Figueroa a little before 7pm tonight, I encountered a ton of traffic. Unexpected. Near LA Live, though, there seemed to be commotion. I saw lots of lights - seems to be very renau. So I turned off my radio and rolled down my windows. Not only were people cheering, but there were teenage girls SCREAMING in a very high pitch. I thought, it HAS to be Justin Bieber, which was confirmed when I got home and googled it, but I swear, I didn't know beforehand, until I heard high-pitched screaming. Because who else would there be high-pitched screaming for? I figure, high pitched screaming would be limited to a small age range. Once you hit your mid-20's or so, you wouldn't be screaming at such a high pitch. There's a modicum of propriety people seem to develop. Most people. I'm not going to overgeneralize. So this establishes the fact that there were a lot of excited teenage girls there. What then, I though, would teenage girls be screaming at (a la Beatles back in the day)? Must be male. The only thing I could think of was Justin Bieber. How right I was.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110209/ap_en_ce/us_film_justin_bieber_premiere

All this just from hearing high-pitched screaming.

In a completely unrelate tangent, Jen Kwok is awesome. And I still can't get enough of this video (it's a live performance at Kollaboration NYC 2010):

And the actual music video for the song is here:

serious sound pollution

I'm sitting outside ASC232 right now, and there seems to be someone blasting...something from one of the rooms. It sounded like there was an amateur singer who's singing Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You." Oh, it sounds like she's a 10 yr old girl singing crazy hard songs.
Oh, I think I know where the sound is coming from. Someone's putting it on in a classroom, but the sound is seeping everywhere in the vicinity.

On another note, I realize that I know exactly when my tea kettle starts to whistle because the tone changes right before it does. Talk about sound giving off information.

Flashdance

I'm watching Flashdance for the first time. I'm only 30 minutes in, but can already conclude that it's schizophrenic and plotless. This also means I will have 80's music stuck in my head for the rest of the week.

In other news, Jennifer Beals is on The Chicago Code tomorrow night, but I will be stuck in meetings all evening. API Equality Public Education Committee, you'd better feel special! I'm choosing you over Jennifer Beals. Speaking of...the timbre of JBeals' voice has changed rather drastically over the years. But the grain of her voice remains the same. I can't remember right now who says that though...Adorno?

(and to class members, or my professor, who are reading this and may be somewhat confused by my over-personal blogs: because I don't want to keep track of tons of blogs, and I don't like having separate blogs with different stuff on them, I have this posterous blog forwarded directly to my main blogger blog (cyndaminthia.blogspot.com) --- if this becomes too annoying or too irrelevant, let me know and I'll blog separately for the remainder of the semester)

...what a feelin'.......

Marching with the Gaysians

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.

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.

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.

New cover by Dawen

Another cover by Dawen:

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?