Real vs fake chord songs

When I write songs, they musically fall into two vague categories. The first is heavily influenced by my affinity for country music (I know, I know, let the judging begin), and the second is my attempt to be edgier and more free form.

In the first category, I use what I call "real" chords - easily understandable chords like Gmaj, Cmaj, Emin, Dmaj, Dmin, etc. Sometimes with a 7 chord thrown in. Sometimes suspended. I'm finding these songs fall neatly into place - it's a structure that's easy to read, and you know when and how phrases start and end.

In the second category, I use what I call "made up chords". Ok. These chords aren't really made up. In music theory, there are names for them. They're just too much trouble for me to figure out exactly what to call the chord. (did I mention that yes, I'm a classically trained musician, but when it comes to guitar, I can't even so much as read music to translate it onto the instrument? And I can't translate the sounds/noises I make on my guitar into musical notation. And it's mostly because I'm lazy and don't want to figure it out) So I call them made-up chords. They consist of a lot of suspended chords, Major7 chords, and other ones that just don't make any sense (as for example, E fingering off the 7th fret or something)

Anyway, my point with the second category is that I never know when the song is finished. Because it's so free form, it seems to change every time I play it. I'm actually speaking from a current frustration. I've been working on a song the last two days or so, and want to finish it in time for my show on the 15th. And I think it's finished, but I'm not sure. Because it almost feels like it's half improvised.

It's also funny that sometimes it takes 20 minutes to write a song. Other times, it takes 20 minutes to write 2 words.

disco response

Disco. The images this word conjures up for me include the shiny ball above the dance floor, Saturday Night Fever’s iconic image of John Travolta (a movie, I’m sad to say, I have yet to see), and big hair. Growing up in a Chinese household didn’t leave much room for cultural exploration outside that with which my parents were familiar. So, like in previous weeks, this is new territory for me. I actually thought disco took place during the 80s, which just shows how ignorant I am of pop music before the turn of the century...

Echol’s brief description of the transition from the 60s to the 70s reminded me of a book I read a couple years ago called “Generation Me” by Jean Twenge, in which she talks about the current generation of people in their 20s and 30s who grew up with a focus on the individual rather than the collective, with the desire and drive to stand out, to be unique, being told from an early age that they’re “special.” Self-esteem became more important that productivity, and “A for effort” became the norm in schools. I wonder if this has anything to do with the cultural revolutions of the 60s, which brought out a consciousness of diversity and identity, civil consciousness which spoke to the importance of the individual, and resulted in a push for self-identification and standing up for oneself. Here is one interpretation that I do not necessarily agree with, but can (if I expand my mind enough) see the point -- my mom once told me that to come out of the closet (as gay or lesbian) is a very selfish move, as it is tragic to one’s parents. It is interesting to me that she speaks from a culture that is more collective (Chinese), whereas in America, hiding one’s sexuality in order to appease one’s family, save face, and keep peace within one’s communal society would be unfathomable in, well, the liberal, diverse circles in which I live.

The continuity of disco on the dance floor is an interesting thought, especially since it seems to homogenize music - as Echols states, “songs that were easy to mix in and out of...began to dominate deejays’ playlists.” (Echols, pg. 9) Only certain songs that fit the beat and tempo of music were played and hence familiarized. Moreover, the embrace of  the “synthetic over the organic, the cut-up over the whole, the producer of the artist, and the record over live performance” (Echols, pg. 10) resonates with the popularization of techno and electronic dance music today, as Echols mentions in her Epilogue. Electronic dance music seems to be the updated disco of today’s music world, even to the point of “discofying” popular songs into a style with techno beats and pounding synthesized percussion.

Another interesting point to disco is that it seems to empower (at least economically in terms of visibility and record deals) marginalized minorities, especially black women, or the diva, with gay men as prominent consumers of this genre. Not to be grossly overgeneralizing, but the stereotype of the gay man as the diva suddenly makes more sense to me now... The point being is that it seems to me like one of the really significant things about disco was the fact that it is like a genre of subversion, a genre that was embraced by those in the margins - even the margins of the marginalized, as was the case of gay macho, and made the margins more visible than it were before. Echols makes the point that it crosses racial and gender boundaries that other genres may not. This probably says something about dance and rhythm as well...

And just another thing I appreciated about this book - the historicizing and summarizing of gay culture in America.

Wedding sounds

Reaction paper in the making...

But. I meant to blog about this sooner. I was at a wedding this weekend. It was a beach wedding. During the vows, you could hear what the officiator was saying (for the bride and groom to repeat), but you couldn't actually hear the bride and groom repeat it. I thought this was interesting in that sonically, the audience could hear what was supposed to be said, but the sounds of the bride and groom were reserved only for them. Perhaps that makes it more intimate.

Just a quick thought.

Also, ever notice that regular TV is louder than if you have a DVD in? I have to turn my volume way up when I watch a DVD.

sounds at Diz

Explanation of title: According to a Disney cast member we met today, people at Disneyland call the park "diz" or "the park" or "DCA" (for California Adventure)

Ok, on to other thoughts. Warning: Will be disjointed and not written very...intelligently... (or, eloquently) because I am very very tired (after spending the day at Diz), but wanted to get these thoughts up. Some of this is from today, some of this is from last month when I went.

Pirates:
1) It's like a movie. Where each room you pass is a different scene. And visually, it changes with each room you pass. Aurally, it fades, but remnants of the last "scene" or room still seep into the current.
2) There are two types of sounds on the ride - the produced sounds (or mechanical sounds), and the "real" sounds. The produced sounds are the ones that are recorded and reproduced. In pirates, this means the voices, the singing, the bullets and cannon shots, the dog barks, the instruments. Almost EVERY sound you hear on the ride is a produced sound. The real sounds are few and far between. Mostly sound of water. Or, for example, a great combination of the two are in the cannon battle scene. Where there are simulations of cannonballs hitting the water. The sounds of the cannonballs are all recorded, yet they blast water up, and the water hitting the surface of the, well, water from whence it came, is a "real" sound. There aren't much of these in ride.
3) The experience is so aurally immersive that you don't hear people talking, unless they're sitting RIGHT next to you. And even then, it's hard to hear them. Very much like a movie. Which I found was really the point (John Hench, head Imagineer, seems to imply) --- actually, we went to check out the Little Mermaid ride preview in DCA, and the layout plans of the ride show each section as a "Scene". As in, "Scene 8 - Ariel's escape" or something like that.

Fantasmic:
One thing really struck me during the fireworks. They play music during the fireworks. And the fireworks visually works with the music. Like, you'd see a burst of something or other on the downbeat, or a significant syncopated beat in the music. HOWEVER. As we all know, the burst you hear from fireworks occurs later than the burst you hear (which, I believe, is simply due to the scientific fact that light travels faster than sound). So the SOUND of the fireworks is in complete disjunction with the music. And yet, it seems like people don't CARE. It doesn't seem to affect the experience in any way, as long as the visual falls in place with the music. This is not only another example of visual hegemony, but that people are so taken in by the produced-ness of the experience, that there is a certain kind of deafness to the VERY LOUD boom that comes with the fireworks - it's heard but not really heard. The loudest sound of this produced experience is one that is unavoidable, and yet somehow forgotten. It's an aural signal that is expected to be disjointed, yet doesn't disrupt the produced experience.

Main Street:
I have to go back and listen to this, but it seems like people are lethargic around 3pm, very lively heading back into the part (presumably after an afternoon nap) around 7pm, then restless to go home at around 10pm. I just remember 3pm being very quiet. And the produced music was everywhere on Main Street. Lots of swing music, some ragtime, some musical, marching band-type music, and the music is continuous anywhere you go on Main Street, although if you listen closely enough, you can figure out where the speakers are, even though Diz tries very hard to hide them and make the sound seem sonorously magically present.

Jungle Cruise:
If you're talking about produced sounds creating an immersive experience for the audience, the Jungle Cruise does not do this. Especially if you're sitting in the back of the boat, where the motor is. You can't hear the guide at all. An example where real sounds overpower produced sounds and punctures (a bit) this frameworked experience Disney wants you to have. There's an interesting performative thing here too. Imagine being the guide and giving the same spiel for hours and hours on end, and needing it to sound fresh every time.

Tiki Room:
The split between produced sounds and real sounds (in this case, the mechanical sounds made by the animatronics technology that moves the birds and flowers mouths) is most pronounced here, and the real sounds probably the most ignored. The mechanical sounds are really percussive, and very noticeable, that at first, I thought it was part of the music, and was thinking, "huh. that's clever. they use the mechanical sounds to add to the produced and recorded sounds to make it sound more percussive." Until the flowers started singing some aria-type number, and then (because I was paying so much attention to it), the mechanical sounds started being distracting and overpowering. But probably only because I was listening for it. Everyone else seemed to not notice it at all - it didn't alter their experience...or the experience Walt Disney wants them to have. Again, another example to check reality at the door, to be willing to look past the real and buy into the experience (and pleasure --- this is talked about in the "Inside the Mouse" book) of the park - the fabricated and constructed one - to only experience what you're SUPPOSED to. It's all pretty totalitarian.

On a completely unrelated note, I realize that I can hear my neighbors' coffee maker early in the morning from my bedroom (my bedroom and their kitchen are adjacent) - and it has to be early because any later and I hear the faint occasional sound of cars in the street, which actually overpowers the very VERY quiet coffee maker sounds. And, when my ear is physically touching my pillow or blanket at certain times, I can hear my heartbeat. Sound travels through solids best, I guess. I mean, I know that sound travels through solids best, but I guess that's the explanation for the latter one.

Ok, I'm going to bed before people think I'm completely discombobulated. Good night.

Andrew Lansley rap

On the heels of our genred, racialized discussions...white rapper from the UK. Talking about the NHS in peril. Awesome stuff.

response to Migrancy (Kun and Ragland)

I found Josh’s article fascinating, and an interesting introduction for me into the world of narcocorridos. Before this week’s readings, I knew absolutely nothing about Mexican music. (and honestly, I still feel like I don’t know much!) So, I think this response will be drawing comparisons to types of music and situations with which I am familiar.

The narrative style of narcocorridos to which the readings this week refers reminds me a little bit of country music - the telling of a story often centered around a character. With country music, though, there’s usually a moral point to the song or the story. Narcocorridos seem to celebrate crime and subversion. It is almost as if music itself is in cahoots with these ideas of subverting traditional power structures - women in the position of power with the example of Emilio Varela and Camelia le Tejana. Ragland paints a very interesting story of the tensions between Mexican and Mexican American culture - one that I’m rather familiar with as well, being Asian American and seeming “westernized” in the eyes of Asian friends, family, and acquaintances. The fact that Camelia was able to get away with murder and money, I felt, could be read a few ways. That it was ok because she was a woman, but not REALLY Mexican, and women are shady, subordinate creatures anyway, which doesn’t disrupt the social order if they deviate from it, because their position of less power. That it is empowering that a woman (regardless of nationality or culture) overpowers and outsmarts a man. That a woman had so much “visibility” or “aurality” - or “airtime” and given notice - that she was represented and given (quite a bit of) space in the musical narrative, that may seek to change the patriarchal hegemony.

Josh’s article quotes Mr. Quintero as saying that “songs for peace, or songs about ending violence...It’s not what people want to hear.” At first, that seems a bit disturbing. However, if we take ourselves out of the dichotomized framework of good and evil, legal and illegal, peace and violence, etc, can we start seeing the world more as relational rather than as absolute? Ragland also alludes to the complicated dynamics of the border, of nationality and identity, and of music. The narcotraficante lifestyle seems like it can be painted a bit like Robin Hood, where the questions of good and bad are thrown out the window and are, rather, replaced with questions of perspective, power, need, culture. If you steal from the rich (the drug-addicted North Americans) to feed the poor (shunting drug money back to Mexico to better the community) (Ragland, 166), is that really “bad”? The law may seem black and white, but morality is rarely that clearcut... as are the other strands of questions Mexican music plays with - culture, identity, nationality, race, gender, etc, and the movement across and between the Mexican and American frameworks for these.

I also wonder how narcocorridos compare with rap and the prevalence of sex and domestic violence and rape in rap music. I know very little about ether genre (oh, how problematic this idea of genre is, as we know), but it doesn’t seem as though rappers are killed like the Mexican musicians were...

Another instance of the drowning music industry....

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/032211fill?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mediaredef+%28jason+hirschhorn%27s+Media+ReDEFined%29

response to Miller reading

One of the major things I got out of the Miller book was the idea that commercialized music was integrated into "folk" music, or southern music, rather than the other way around, of the Powers That Be appropriating "authentic" or "folk" music. I actually thought it would be the second way, although when one thinks about it, given the proliferation of commercialized music, it is not surprising that southern music would be influenced by commercialized music. It was interesting that Charles Peabody was dismayed to hear African American laborers singing commercialized "white" music coming from New York City - in that it exemplified the sentiment of the Jim Crow laws, wherein Powers That Be (usually white) wanted to put race and genres and music in separate boxes. The bleed-thru of commercial music into "folk" music, then, seemed to threaten the sacred tenet of segregation on which the Jim Crow laws are based, and hence threaten the hegemonic power of white folks. (who are, at the end of the day, still "folks" - more on this later)

Genres have always really bothered me. It seems to seek to put art and artistic endeavors (music, film, TV, etc --- and people, as we see) in these tiny boxes. They put unnecessary boundaries and limitations on human expression, and seek to categorize and organize in order to control. We see this with film and TV genres all the time. Especially with the Emmys, what is "good" and what is "bad" is often based on genre - this is a "good" drama show, this is a "good" comedy show, and we will reward you for falling within the lines of genre, award shows tell us. Race, then, as Miller demonstrates, is an ultimate genre that then gets tied closely with art produced by racialized bodies. It is a type of genre that comes with even more historical power struggles than the genre to which I previously referred. Both, of course, are constructed, and are sites of power struggles. This idea of racialized genres is still prevalent in music today, although it seems less imposed upon by Powers That Be and more simply part of the hegemonic fabric of our society that comes from a history of slavery and oppression of non-white people.

Broonzy's quote "all music is folk music" in the afterword of the book is poignant on many levels. On one level, he speaks of the challenges (and possibly inanity) of trying to categorize folk music, of trying to categorize what is "authentic." On the other hand, I feel he makes a much broader statement about race and the perceived inferiority of African Americans or non-white musicians. He seems to react to the fact that non-Whites, and especially African Americans, were treated no better than animals, if we recall the slavery era. His comment about the horse speaks to this very clearly. This statement is poignant because it recognizes the dehumanization of black folks in the south, and seeks to bring an aspect of humanity back into the conversation, to remind people that, regardless of race, everyone is foundationally human.

One more quick anecdote that I won't elaborate on too much (might be able to link it later to another blog), but I thought was relevant to this idea of racialized music. My friend Dawen performed at the Apollo in NYC last week. Did not win, but is interesting in that he's a guy of Asian decent playing soul music. Dawen's genre is R&B, another "traditionally" black genre. I've often wondered if Asian American musicians have a genre of music, or if we just bounce around, adapting other racialized genres?

parody? or not?

My brother showed me this (right before going into surgery this past week .... so I guess maybe this is a lasting legacy of his underbite, which is no more)...

Anyway - I can't decide if I think this is a joke or not, because it's SO BAD...like, how can the producers not know that it's so bad?!

In other, more pressing and scary news, there seems to be a memory leak in my macbook. WTF?! It just went from 7GBs to 1GB...and I haven't downloaded anything.

Sound therapy

Not a new concept, but talk about artificially created "natural" soundscapes.

Metadata, music, $$$$$

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/is-metadata-music-...

propriety in sound in critical care

I'm here in the critical care waiting room waiting on, well, I'm not sure what. Just to be proximal to my brother, who had surgery yesterday on his jaw. My poor brother is all swollen, and my poor mom wasn't expecting the surgery to be as major as it was (it seemed like I was the first one to realize how major this surgery is....and then it dawned on my brother, and I think my mom was the only one under the illusion that this surgery would just be a "minor jaw adjustment."

Anyway, the soundscape in the CCU waiting room is interesting. There was a moment earlier where everyone was silent, and there was this girl who was speaking rather loudly on and on about some medical procedure in great (uninformed, it seemed) detail - something about breaking ribs and seeing the so-and-so's heart beating underneath a sponge, and gorily too. And she was shushed by the waiting room attendant. And got all huffy about it.
Space is an interesting thing in the waiting room too. It seems like people really just camp out here, at least, with this girl and her friends, they seem to have taken up an entire half of the waiting room. I'm still trying to listen to see exactly why they're in here. Oh, and she listens in on other people's conversations and interrupts. Interesting. Boundaries seem to dissolve in hospital waiting rooms. Probably because everyone is looking for an excuse for distraction.

Oh, interesting, there's a gender debate going on...involving Barbies and Disney princesses. And this woman seems like she has 5 kids. But she looks no older than I. Yeeeeesh. It seems like she just needs to be the center of attention. She's completely hijacked the conversation between these two other people.

Ok, here's the story. Since she was willing to share so very loudly. Her husband was in an accident after he fell asleep at the wheel, and 4 of the kids are stepchildren. Yikes. Hope everything will be ok. But yikes. Oh, the collapse of public and private space...

changes in voice

The title sort of gives it away, but here's a disconnect between visual and audio signal, and our ideas of gender norms.

Interstitial Time

Interstitial time. Time that's not work time or leisure time. Time that traditionally has not been "productive." Work time increases economic capital, while leisure time increases cultural and social capital, to put it reductively.

What I find though, is that I'm incredibly productive during interstitial times. Especially when I have hours and hours and hours of it. Like at the airport, or on the airplane. Maybe it's because I don't feel like I'm obligated to do work, that I do a ton of it.

On my way to Ottawa, I created my presentation (essentially wrote a 10-page paper based on my paper from last semester on temporal capital). Then, on the way back, I wrote three abstracts and read an entire *academic* book (Granted, it was on Disney World, but it ain't no Twilight, and was in the critical theory/cultural studies realm), made new friends, and had a whole conversation about Don't Ask Don't Tell, as one of my new friends is in the Army Reserve (she was wearing her fatigues).

Then today, I opened my email to the daunting task of translating a canvassing script for Vote for Equality into Chinese. Daunting because they want it by Thursday, and because Chinese isn't my native language. And the previous translation that I was working with was written in simplified Chinese. Which, for me, was like reading Shakespeare with letters missing.

(oooh. my free wifi session just canceled, but all I had to do was log in again...and this time, I took a REALLY quick survey - took literally 20 seconds - talk about temporal capital in exchange for something)

However, because I had nothing else pressing to do, and for some reason can't consume entertainment media during interstitial time because the joy of consuming entertainment media only happens when you're procrastinating on something you're SUPPOSED to be doing (ie: during work time...), I translated half of this document waiting for my flight at LAX (which was delayed), and translated the rest on the plane before watching 2 episodes of Dexter, then conking out for 3 hours.

And now waiting at Logan, I've already written two blog posts and discovered discrepancies in this NCA submission process...

Maybe Spring Break is the interstitial time for me to be really productive. Of course, it could also go horribly in the other direction.

Kind of brilliant

Never seen anything like this before. And it's pretty brilliant in terms of Internet and advertising. And so incredibly simple.

I just got into Logan, and waiting here for two hours for the first bus to get here (oh, the joys of red-eye flights). Logan has Internet. I can access Internet automatically from my iPhone and iPad (I think - I haven't tried the iPad yet, but I have had experience where if it's an apple product, it will log you right in, and my iPhone seemed to pick it right up). Then, because I had some deliverables I needed to send out, I pull out my laptop to see if Logan is giving my laptop free wifi.

It does, conditionally. But it's a condition I don't think anyone would complain about if free wifi is the reward.

The site that pops up gives three options - either you can log in with boingo, pay for a day pass, or watch a 30-second ad by Asus (at least mine was Asus). I, of course, chose the last option. After a painless and rather entertaining ad, voila! Internet!

What can you say? Boston's full of smart people.

guitar shopping

I feel like I've been so bad at blogging recently - mostly because I went to this conference in Ottawa and talked about temporal capital and how an episode of Lost takes up 43 minutes of my time, and how we are completely limited in how much time we have in a day. So that's my excuse. I haven't had time to sit down and blog.

I went to Guitar Center with a friend today to get her a guitar. And amid the multitudes of brands, models, styles, shapes, sizes of guitars, trying to pick the perfect one took, well, nearly 3 hours. And the end of the day, you question whether or not the sound of one is really better than the other (the one she eventually picked out is, in my opinion, a fantastic guitar - a Martin D-15 - all-solid all-mahagony dreadnought guitar - total beaut). And the challenging thing is that in Guitar Center itself is a cacophony of sound as other people also try out various guitars. I frequent Guitar Center, and rarely is it that crowded where you can't hear your own playing. And then there are people who are really amazing players jamming away on random guitars, and all you want to do is listen to them for a while, but then you don't want to seem too intrusive.

Anyway. Yay for guitar shopping. I was very VERY tempted to get a ukulele, but I resisted.

20111_comm_620_20911: You Are Listening to Los Angeles

Perry - posting this to my blog. Blog readers (all, you know, 3 of you), this was sent to me by a classmate of mine. Fascinating.

It's interesting - I listened to NY, LA, and Chicago (the three cities I've called home!) and all the dispatchers seem to be female! Actually, there are a lot of female voices here in Chicago (which I'm listening to right now).

In Chicago, there's a disturbance at a club by an "extremely intoxicated male refusing to leave," and a suspicious-looking auto.

OH they just said that there's an incident, and was cautioned to "be professional." errrr?!

The ambient music is kinda creepy. I turned it off. It makes it feel as though it's pre-recorded.

Cynthia

************
Cynthia Wang
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Southern California
cynthia.w@usc.edu

http://www.cynthiawang.co

On Mar 9, 2011, at 1:15 AM, Perry Johnson wrote:

Hi friends!

Thought this might interest those of you thinking about sound mapping and the soundscape(s) of LA for the final project--if not, still a fascinating project.

You Are Listening to Los Angeles: LAPD Police Radio and Ambient Music

http://youarelistening.to/losangeles

Enjoy your spring break!

Perry

What Pi sounds like.

Check out this video on YouTube:

wind

When it's really windy, it sounds like cars are driving by my apartment in the rain (with the sound their wheels make on wet pavement). So all afternoon, I totally thought it was raining. Until I checked weather.com.

Bieber

I just heard/watched this for the first time:

I don't know if I should feel proud for having avoided it for this long, or pathetic for spending 3:45 of my temporal capital watching it....

Thanks a lot, SNL, for having Miley Cyrus spoof Justin Bieber tonight.

At the roller derby

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.

Memo.m4a Listen on Posterous

As I sit procrastinating...

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:

Beau Sia

I've always loved this guy.

Response for Suisman

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.

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?

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

************
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.

Soundtrack for New York City

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.

Musical Stairs

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:

A (way too philosophical) response to Schafer's "Soundscape"

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?

Backstage with Castle

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."

is youtube bad for music?

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/is-youtube-bad-for-music/

Tiger Mother

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

"real" acting?

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.

sounds of campus and stuff

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.

Classic Album Sundays

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.

Visions and voices

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.

thumping and ticking

There's been a lot of thumping going on in the apartment above mine tonight. And the occasional incomprehensible sound of voices muffled by the layers of dry wall and carpet. My apartment tends to be pretty quiet at night, but there seems to be more activity tonight than normal. Other than the thumping, the only other sound I'm hearing right now is my clock (yes, I still have an analog clock) ticking away, reminding me that I must get a response paper (for a different class than this one) in before I sleep tonight. Even my fridge is quiet.