Unsanctioned Listening
Hello again for the last time! It’s a strange task to be asked to eavesdrop. At first I thought this would be the easiest and most fun assignment for this blog. I kept telling my friends that yes, my homework really is to eavesdrop and write about what I hear. However, I had a hard time finding a conversation to write about. The primary public location I inhabit is the CS lab, where I am surrounded by people I know, which makes it hard to listen without being noticed, and frankly, the thought of purposefully eavesdropping on acquaintances made me strangely uncomfortable. I then tried listening in the new coffee shop that just opened, but after a while I realized I couldn’t really make out half the words of people sitting next to me because of the sounds of music and the milk frother. I had dismissed the idea of using the CS lab initially because I know so many people there, and I wanted to overhear strangers so I could try to learn about their lives through one conversation. The goal was to write an interesting blog post about how much I could actually know about someone else’s life without interacting with them at all. Instead I found a different approach, involving me knowing people but those people not knowing me.
Let me preface by saying I am one of two TAs for a class, which involves running lab sessions and grading. The class involves teams of students working on a large project all semester. My co-TA and I talk a lot about these groups since we grade together, and one group in particular gets discussed a lot. I never interact with them because they’re not in my lab section but I know them by their project. The other day in the CS lab I overheard this group as they were working on their assignment together, and I couldn’t help but listen to what they had to say. I’m not going to go into the specifics of what exactly they said because I don’t want to reveal too much identifying information, but the general gist was that they were not happy with the course, their grades, or the turnaround of feedback on their project. As a grader, it’s been interesting all semester to see how courses are run behind the scenes, and I’m reminded of how easy it is as a student to off-handedly complain about a course.
In this sound studies class we talked a bit about the relationship between an eavesdropper and the eavesdropped, as explored in the film The Conversation. However, a completely anonymous listener does not have a full picture of the situation. They are forced to believe what they hear and try to read between the lines without any context. I’m not saying I know everything about these students and their lives, but I can say that I’ve seen their complaints from a very different perspective, which changes the way in which I perceive their conversation. It’s easier to take things with a grain of salt when you already have a small bias towards it. Maybe this bias is bad, maybe it’s good, but it still makes it possible for me to interpret their conversation in more than one way.
I said already that the idea of eavesdropping made me uncomfortable when the time came to actually write this blog post. I’m still trying to figure out why though. Thinking about it, I overhear conversations all the time. In fact, I often get annoyed at how hard it is to block out a conversation when I’m trying to do work. However, I think there is a difference between accidentally overhearing and purposefully eavesdropping. I think overhearing assigns the blame of this nonexistent crime to the speaker, for being too loud and having too interesting of a conversation. Eavesdropping however is the choice of the listener, and creates a sense of inexplicable guilt. As far as I can recall, I tend not to eavesdrop on people. If a conversation interests me I try to insert myself into it (if I know the people of course) or I put on headphones and tune it out. For juicy drama I overhear, I message my friends, which ironically forces me to focus on that conversation instead. Even with the example of eavesdropping I’ve talked about, I only listened to it because it pertained to me. Otherwise I probably would have forgotten about it entirely.
One thing I will say about this assignment is that it has made me pay more attention to surrounding conversations. For the past week or so I’ve been desperately searching for something interesting to write about, so with every passing conversation I perked my ears a bit more, seeing if it would be enough material to do some kind of analysis on. Like every other prompt I’ve had for this blog, it forced me to listen to the everyday in a slightly different way. This whole semester has been a great exercise in understanding more about the world around me and about myself through sound. Thanks for reading!









