Listen to Me Talk about Listening

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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!

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Greetings! This week I’m talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of sounds. Specifically my favorites and least favorites. It’s an interesting assignment because there’s no real qualifications for what makes a sound pleasing or not, so it’s very personal, and also because I know what sounds I don’t like just from how they make me feel (i.e. cringing in agony) but I think the sounds I do like are more subtle. The sounds I thought of for this blog post are ones I think are nostalgic to me, or at least familiar.

This morning when I woke up I learned it was raining not only from the sound of the rain against my window but also from the distinctive sound of a car driving by on the street below. There tends to be less traffic when it’s raining so you hear almost nothing except the rainfall until that one car passes by. The sound is muffled and wet from both the damp road and the distance between the ground level and my window on the third floor. I feel like a lot of people can call this sound to mind; anyone who’s lived in an area where it rains has definitely heard the splash of a car wheel before. It’s a universal experience, and a familiar one. For some reason it also makes me nostalgic for times I’ve stayed in my grandparents’ home in Canada, trying to fall asleep in their guest bed. They don’t have air conditioning so they often leave the window open in the summer, and I always noticed that the sound of a car passing by was unusually loud as a result. A lot of people feel comforted by the sound of the rain, likely because it contrasts the feelings of warmth the indoor provides, and thus makes you feel more secure, but I feel like the quiet sound of a car nestled among the drops added to the overall scene as I lay in my bed this morning.

I spend a good amount of my time in the CS lab on campus, since I’m too lazy to walk back to my apartment during the day. One amenity it provides is unlimited free printing; something many people take advantage of. As I tried to think of sounds I find pleasing, the sound of that printer came to mind. I think part of the reason I like it is because I hear it so often but also because it’s so mechanically consistent. The rhythmic sound of each stage is predictable and thus pleasant, like a familiar song. It’s broken into a few sonic stages: first a quick warm-up swooping sound, then as it plays a steady hum the clicking of each sheet of paper being pushed out plays rhythmically. Finally the printer lets out an elongated sigh to say it’s done. I’m attaching the sound of the printer to this post so you can understand what I’m talking about.

Another favorite sound is crickets or cicadas on a summer night, since it creates a soft continuous drone. I also feel even though the sound is actually quite loud, we assume insects are quiet, so hearing them implies a kind of silence, as though the real loud sounds are missing. It’s definitely a sound associated with summer and warm nights, which made me consider the sounds of winter. The interesting thing is that when I picture a snowy peaceful landscape, it’s completely silent. No animals, no cars on the road, all ambient noise muffled by the snow. Instead I associate a cold winter day with a specific smell, something sharp and brisk. Meanwhile spring and fall are very visually striking seasons, full of vibrant colors. This isn’t really related to sounds but I thought it was an interesting observation.

Some other honorable mentions for pleasant sounds include:

·       Crunchy leaves

·       The clicking of my boots against a hard floor

·       The sound of a piano playing something slow and soft with the sustaining pedal pressed

·       The sound of my roommate laughing at something while alone in his room. It’s a very full and musical laugh and it feels more real because he thinks no one can hear him through his door.

As for sounds I dislike, I’ve noticed I’m very sensitive to high pitched sounds. Things like drills (specifically those of the dental variety, but also construction tools) and squeaky breaks on a car or bus physically pain me, and the louder the sound the worse it is. Subway cars especially are annoying, and were something I dealt with every day this summer on my commute to my internship. Another sound I hate is the sound my garbage disposal makes. Unlike the mechanical hum of the printer, this machine makes a grinding noise combined with the wetness of the drain. I think this combination of a gritty sound with a wet sound it very unnerving, which is why I think I dislike it so much.

The other day the battery in our smoke detector began to die, so to warn us it decided to start beeping at irregular and very spaced out intervals. The beep was just a quick chirp, but it was loud enough to hear in my room when I tried to sleep that night. The spacing between the beeps would also give me false hope after each one that perhaps it had finally stopped. For some reason this sound made me incredibly angry, and I went around to all the smoke detectors in our apartment trying to find the culprit one so I could just turn it off. I think it was the inability to stop it and the fact that this sound was in my home that made me so upset. It was a sound assault that I was powerless to stop. Or perhaps it was because it was a loud noise which shattered a quiet room every few minutes, and not a continuous sound space that I could adjust to. It seems like sounds I like most are low hums and continuous sound spaces, while sounds I hate are sudden piercing noises over which I have no control. Although I think I already knew this about myself, it was certainly fun thinking about what specific sounds I like and why.

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On the Soundscape of Guy Fieri

Hello again. This week my listening task was to listen to a short segment from a TV show without watching it, and then compare it to a short segment from a movie, again without visuals. I found the toughest part of this assignment was actually choosing what show to compare to what movie. My favorite show, “Game of Thrones” would not work because I find it to be too close to filmic conventions to do a fair analysis. I then tried a lighter show “30 Rock” but found the majority of its sound to be extremely dry sarcasm and short musical interludes to indicate a change in scene. In the end I decided on a show I had never watched before, but knew the format for like the back of my hand, “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” starring Guy Fieri.

The interesting thing about reality TV shows like this one is that they are designed to make you unaware of the fact that you’ve just watched six episodes in a row. There is virtually no distinction between episodes since each one contains several sequential storylines anyway. I noticed when listening to the first five minutes of an episode that there was no pause before the action started. Big cinematic shows like “Game of Thrones” and other HBO shows have long opening sequences to get you excited for the episode, but reality shows don’t want to show you the same thing too many times in a row, since episodes are so short. Instead the episode starts immediately and the opening sequence is quick.

Something I noticed about this show is that it is almost never silent. The listener is constantly bombarded with dialogue, music, and various sound effects. The editing is done in a way that there is never a pause in the conversation. It gives the impression that the show has too much material to get through and that there is an enormous time pressure. While it is true that a 22 minute episode has much less time than a full hour HBO show or two hour film, the pacing grabs hold of you and never lets go. It’s rushing to squeeze as much material as possible into a short period of time.

We all know reality TV is a bit of an oxymoron, but this is especially so in relation to the soundscape. Nowhere in the world sounds like this. The editing creates a completely unnatural dialogue pacing and music is added specifically to add dramatic or comedic effect. Narration is added in post-production. There is no sound that was recorded on site that hasn’t been heavily edited. Of course, this fits into the visual editing model as well, which is fast and cuts to various locations without much time to orient the viewer. Interestingly though, the sound serves to maintain cohesion in the whirlwind of actions.

I went back and watched the segment I listened to so I could connect the audio to visuals. The first interesting thing is that I didn’t realize the opening theme was an opening theme at all. The music shifted so sporadically throughout the entire clip that the music played during the opening could have been played over anything. I also realized how little the visuals actually add to the sound. Since almost all the information conveyed is told through narration and dialogue, the visuals basically just added images of food. On the other hand, sound is essential to making the visuals make sense. Watching the clip again with no sound or subtitles I noticed how incredibly jarring the edits are. The establishing shots are only at most a second long each, and shots of the food are riddled with jump cuts. These cuts are mainly used to shorten time, for example a shot of people grabbing slices of pizza uses at least five distinct clips instead of a full and continuous shot. This discontinuity goes unnoticed with sound however because the music playing over this sequence is continuous.

Picking a movie to compare this segment of a TV show to was extremely difficult. There are so many films that are nothing like a reality show about food, and it almost seemed unfair to try to listen to some classic sound film and say it uses sound in a more interesting way. A reality show and a narrative film serve completely different purposes. Thus I decided to focus on documentary film, which has its own unique kind of sound. For this blog post I chose the famous documentary Super-Size Me because it also focuses on one man’s journey of eating.

The opening of this film actually felt a lot like “Diners, Drive-Throughs, and Dives” with its narration, catchy music, and summary of what’s to come, but by jumping in to a later part, the differences became more clear. The scene I watched also involved talking about food and ingredients, but there was no background music, no snappy editing, just the sounds of cutlery and a more natural sounding dialogue. Of course, musical cues were still added to indicate transitions between scenes, but because the film had so much more time to tell its story, it was allowed to have some quiet moments, even a few seconds of no sound at all, which reality TV almost never can afford to spend time on. Overall it felt like less of an assault on the ears and more like it was trying to present this man’s life to us.

No matter what a film’s subject matter is, every movie has some form of creative vision. There is a director with a story to tell and a large budget to tell it. Reality TV however has a much lighter budget and less time to explore creative possibilities. Any new ideas are too risky to explore since a new episode has to be out quickly, and since each episode is so formulaic, audiences might be disappointed or disoriented if the format is altered even slightly. As strange and unpleasant as it may seem, the sound editing in reality TV is familiar to a lot of people, and in the end, audience retention, not immersion, is the ultimate goal of television. Unrealistic sound spaces overlaid atop fast cuts makes the audience feel as though changing the channel for even a second will result in missing something crucial. The sound is designed to keep the audience engaged episode after episode. On the other hand, Super-Size Me is not trying to get the audience to watch the next movie this creator produces. The content is interesting enough to retain viewers and the message the film sends is clear.

I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing reality TV (I was actually really disappointed to see they had taken “Say Yes to the Dress” off of Netflix) but it is interesting to consider it as a genre. The format of these shows are very formulaic, but this means it has a distinct enough soundscape that anyone could listen to a random episode from any show and be able to identify it as such. I tried to pick a show and a movie that cover the same topic to make the comparison less “apples to oranges,” but even so, I don’t think I could possibly make any grand sweeping conclusions about the differences between TV and film sound from any one show/movie pair. For this case however, the difference in goals for each work is distinct enough to analyze.

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Outside My Listening Ken?

Welcome to entry two of my sound blog! My task for this week was to listen to something outside of my normal musical preference. Given that I don’t know what kind of music I don’t listen to, my good friend introduced me to something called Dali Vision, music by Ari Finkel. This is what most people would probably call “experimental electronic” music, which is pretty different from my normal listening taste of top 40 hits and Christmas carols year round. I went in with an open mind though and found I actually really enjoyed it.

I listened to four songs, “The Field Engine,” “Dandelion Wishes,” “Hollows,” and “Evergreen Contrast.” On my first listen through, my favorite was the first, because it opened with this beautiful melody I found both eerie and a bit nostalgic, though for what I can’t say. It got me in the right mindset for these pieces by transitioning from traditional melody to the more experimental. There’s a creepiness to it which comes from the static and unnatural sounds played over the bell melody. I think the static gives it an old-time feel which is probably where the nostalgia comes from, but it also adds a technological aspect to the music. As the static gets louder and overtakes the melody, you can hear voices coming through occasionally, like flipping through radio stations. I think I liked this piece because I’ve always been a fan of sadder sounding music, but what surprised me is that it reminded me a lot of the soundtrack to the game “Sword and Sworcery,” a game I strongly consider to be a work of art as well as a traditionally fun experience. I did not expect this music to sound familiar to me, and if you listen to it you probably wouldn’t expect it either. I guess in a way this means I’m cheating, since this music isn’t that far out from what I’ve willingly chosen to listen to in the past, but considering I had no idea what I was going into when I started listening, I think it should still count.

The second song, “Dandelion Wishes,” opens with a much more harsh sound than the previous. The high pitched electronic sounds could have come out of a science fiction movie, but despite the objectively painful sounds, I somehow found it almost relaxing. The beeps and whirs happen almost rhythmically and there’s an echo to it which gives it a surreal dream-like feel. Its lack of melody or structure also makes it less distracting if I wanted to listen to it as background study music, like a white noise machine.

The third song has more of a melody, and has a relaxing echoey sound, but about two minutes in becomes disturbing as static again overwhelms the music. The title “Hollows” brings to mind Sleepy Hollow, so I began to associate the piece with Halloween. When the melody comes back it feels eerie now.

The last song has a lot of layers of contradicting sounds, which made it really interesting. This song has a guitar segment that is really pretty, but again falls between strange static and unnatural sounds. Unlike previous songs though, the melody doesn’t disappear under the white noise, but perseveres as it becomes more and more distorted. It’s only at the end that the guitar finally drops off, but it feels more like it was allowed to finish, instead of being cut off.

I listened to these pieces inside a fairly crowded and echoey space (I’m attending a hackathon this weekend so there are a lot of people around) which I know is less than ideal for analyzing new music. One interesting side effect of this though was that it was hard to tell in my first listen through what sounds were coming from the music and which were outside noises interfering. A lot of this music relies on contradicting sounds coming together, so a random tone playing in the background could just as easily be part of the piece, and there were a few times that I had to take out an earbud to check if what I was hearing was actually part of the piece.

Initially my favorite piece was “The Field Engine,” but after listening to them all a second time, I think my favorite is the last one, “Evergreen Contrast.” I’ve always been a sucker for the sound of a guitar, and the way it ends leaves me feeling both satisfied and wanting it to loop forever. I think it’s really interesting that I enjoyed this so much actually. The music is objectively creepy and unsettling, something which we discussed in class as being generally ill-received by people. However when the melodies come through they are really beautiful, and I think the way in which the sad and the eerie parts both contradict and complement each other is really interesting. It’s an odd reaction to have, but I can’t say I’ve never enjoyed creepy music. The irony is that I absolutely hate scary movies, but as I said before I love the soundtrack to “Sword and Sworcery,” and listening to the Apocalypse Now soundtrack this past week I found I also enjoyed the creepy parts (especially the demonic circus music at the Do Lung bridge). I really can’t explain it, but these songs have caused me to consider this about myself, which I think makes for a pretty good listening experience.

Take a listen for yourself: https://dalivision.bandcamp.com/

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I’m sitting in BWI airport at 4:30pm, currently waiting for my friends to return from the McDonald’s. When I first decided to write about my time waiting in the airport, for some reason I had imagined it to be louder. I have been to airports so many times in my life, and yet I’ve never thought about what they actually sound like. In my head I picture people frantically running to catch flights and the dull roar of groups of people chatting, but in reality the carpeted floor muffles many sounds, and everyone seems to be speaking in low voices. The occasional sound pierces the quiet though; the loud single voice, the child’s shout, a cell phone ringing, or the speaker informing everyone at once that the flight to Fort Lauderdale is now boarding. Attached is a recording of the space, and if you listen you’ll notice the faint background sound of a plane taking off. At first I thought it was a vacuum cleaner, which just goes to show how untrained my ears really are. There is also a conversation that a man is having on his phone. I think it’s interesting that we can always tell when someone is on the phone just by listening. They speak louder, and there are distinctive pauses between sentences, as we all miss the other half of the conversation.

At the beginning of the recording you can hear very faint music. A man sitting near me was listening to something with his headphones, but even my phone’s microphone can still pick it up. Listening to a recording makes it easier to pick up on these kinds of things, since when you listen you feel completely removed from the visuals, even though I can still see the same people and sources of the sounds. I wonder if that man knew how loud his music was.

I cut a part from the beginning of the recording of my friends asking me if I wanted something from McDonald’s. Like almost every other human, I hate the sound of my voice, especially when it’s amplified so dramatically since I’m holding my phone. Also because I didn’t want the world to know my shame in asking for a small fries and then switching to wanting a large and a soda. It’s surreal to listen to a conversation you just had immediately afterwards. I remember everything that was said, so hearing it again almost feels scripted, like a scene I know all the lines to.

I can hear the sounds of a food wrapper being opened, and a bottle of soda fizzing as it releases its gases for the first time.

Something interesting to note is the dramatic contrast but strange similarity that the soundscape of the inside of the plane has. Opposite to my preconceived notion of the airport terminal, I always imagine the inside of a plane to be quiet, even though it’s obviously not. The engine roar is so deafening as to overwhelm all other sounds, so people’s conversations are completely drowned out. It gives the illusion of silence, in the same way that a chorus of cicadas at night gives a sense of quiet, contrary to what we all literally hear. The only distinctive sounds on a plane in flight seem magnified as a result. A baby’s cry is universally hated. Its high tone pierces through everything else, and the small cramped space makes it bounce along the walls. The airport terminal is a larger space, so sounds often dissipate into the carpet before they can reach me. On the plane though there is no escape. The sounds only add to the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped between so many strangers.

When I was younger I always wondered how flights always had so many people on them. It’s always so strange to think about how every person here is going to Houston too. The man on the phone said he would be home later, so he lives in Texas, but what about everyone else? If they live in Texas, what were they doing in the DC/Baltimore area? Otherwise why are they going to Texas? There is no way of ever knowing.

On the plane I just heard the song from Shrek from where they first enter Duloc (sp?) and that annoying little song plays. I remember all the lyrics and recognized it immediately. I can’t locate the source though, since the seats obstruct my view of anyone not to my left or right, though I suspect the small child a seat or two ahead of me may be behind it. The real question is where this audio came from. It was too loud to be from headphones, so the child and possibly father are watching it out loud. It baffles me how some people are so unaware of the sound they are producing. Also was the entire movie saved to a device and this one short scene chosen to be played? Or was the song itself saved? It really doesn’t matter, but I just find it to be a strange song to play to entertain your child with. Of course, this is all speculation drawn from that one minute of sound. Perhaps the child is unrelated to the song, but the juxtaposition of the piece with the strangely incoherent but recognizable sounds of a small child created this narrative in my head. Again I will never know.

I also have a short recording of the Houston airport at 7am. I found it interesting that it was so much noisier at this early hour than BWI in the afternoon. Maybe it’s because IAH is a much larger airport, or maybe it’s the people in Houston.