{"found":54694,"hits":[{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/008rmbt77","name":"Binghamton University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Stoever","given":"Jennifer","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

\"The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself\" \u2013bell hooks, quoted by d. Sabela Grimes at Show and Prove, 9.18.10

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This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP. In fact, I scratched out the rough draft of these lines in my notebook on the bus ride home, all Eminem 8 Mile-style. So embedded somewhere in my words will inevitably be the thick chug of the engine, the squeaky bounce-bounce of the shocks, the ocean-like roar of (the)17, and the steady tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk of hip hop pumping from my fellow commuter's earbuds. Across the bus aisle, this secondhand beat called to me and challenged me to think about ways that sound studies can reach across the (inter)disciplinary aisle to hip hop (and vice versa). So that's where my head's at right now: what does sound studies bring to hip hop's platform? And what does hip hop offer in return?

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I should say first off that I don't necessarily see an intellectual conflict between these two fields\u2014although Norma Coates' 2008 Cinema Journal piece, \"Sound Studies: Missing the (Popular) Music for the Screens?\" makes a compelling case for institutional turf wars on the horizon between sound studies, media studies, and popular music study writ large\u2014I actually came to sound studies through hip hop, and obviously haven't left hip hop behind (and neither has Sounding Out!: peep Liana Silva and Scott Poulson-Bryant's recent posts). Among the many things that hip hop has done for me and to me\u2014personally, socially, and politically\u2014was to open my ears to all sorts of amazing and important sounds, which eventually translated academically into frustration with the limits of popular music study back in the early 2000s. I found many texts that deconstructed hip hop lyrics and visual imagery, parsed MC's personas, dropped some socio-historical science, and traced capitalist networks like you wouldn't believe, but when it came down to the constitutive element of the medium itself, the sonic art through which it devoted itself to moving heads, hearts, and butts simultaneously, there was silence (and not because Doug E. Fresh said so).

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Outside of Tricia Rose's landmark chapter on \"flow, layering, and rupture\" in 1994's Black Noise, I found precious few texts that were willing or able to engage with the primary way in which hip hop put in work \"if not in the word, in the sound\" as Frederick Douglass once put it a long time ago. Hip hop was, true to its word, bringing the noise, and traditional music studies wasn't making meaning of it in even part of the way that hip hop audiences were. To signify on Shante Smalls's comment at Show and Prove in reference to trying to teach Murs's \"Dark Skinned White Girl\" to an NYU class, hip hop sounded to popular music scholars just like a guy talking over some beats\u2014all flattened out. So I strapped on my headphones night after night, trying to fill this void by listening and writing, writing and listening. You can read my early attempts in a discography of Los Angeles hip hop called \"Audible Angels\" I published online in 2004, in which I tried to capture the sonic signature of each artist I wrote about, integrating it with their vocal style, lyrical themes and historical and regional context. The fact that one of the artists in the discography sent me a remastered version of their record based on some of my commentary not only suggested that I did a halfway decent job, but also that the artists themselves are clamoring for scholars to take their sound as seriously as they do.

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Because of the bus, my experience at the conference was shorter than I would have liked, so I can't remotely claim full coverage (I am especially sorry to have missed Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr.'s talk on Filipino DJs and contemporary U.S. racial formations, which I know would have (re)mixed sound, race, and hip hop, hamster style), so I will have to sample the bits and bytes that I did hear.

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In a panel on \"Methodology, Pedagogy, and Educational Practice,\" M.C. K-Swift talked about the sonic differences between standard English, Black English, and Hip Hop English and what it means to code switch between all three. Johan S\u00f6derman discussed similar issues about hip hop in Sweden, especially the way in which hip hop enables marginalized Swedish youth to sound and signify differently in the same language.

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In the panel I moderated, \"Aesthetic Dimensions of Hip Hop\"\u2014in which there were amazing papers by Naomi Bragin on popping in Northern California's East Bay and Jessica Pab\u00f3n on the \"feminist masculinity\" of female graffiti in Brasil, Mexico, and the US\u2014sound was largely a shadow presence, animating limbs, accompanying film, and being punctuated by muscle pops and krylon hisses. Jens Althoff discussed 1970s samples briefly in his talk on the influence of blaxploitation cinema on hip hop but there was really only one paper that explicitly addressed sound, Joshua Bennett 's \"I Love it When You Call Me Big (Poppa).\" Bennett used Barthes' \"The Grain of the Voice\" to give an evocative and nuanced reading of the \"palpable sense of surplus\" in Notorious B.I.G's voice, the way in which his heavy timbre comes together with his \"wheezing undertone\" to re-present his corporeal body as superabundant rather than substandard.

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Finally, in the afternoon, I was fascinated by Nicole Hodges Persley's exploration of the sound of cross-racial appropriation both in her paper, \"People in Me\" and in her performance, in which she used both voice and gesture to represent a white suburban teen, a young Asian graffiti writer from Silverlake, and a Senegalese student drawn to the U.S. by hip hop. Persley raised important questions about who has \"the right to talk black\" while addressing the pleasures and the politics of using the body as a remixing agent and translator of hip hop, accent, culture and immigrant experience.

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So of course I came to Show and Prove eager to take in some talk about sound\u2014and I wouldn't say I was disappointed. Surprised (slightly) and challenged (totally), but not disappointed. Sound wasn't as center stage as I expected, but it certainly wasn't marginalized either. Instead, it was ubiquitous; sound in hip hop studies seems to be taken for granted in the same way that vision is just about everywhere else. Although hip hop is understood to be an audio-visual art, its organizing metaphors are sonic: remixing, sampling, scratching, and Dj-ing all describe sonic phenomena as well as aural frameworks for understanding the world. The way in which hip hop studies take sound for granted presents both a lesson and an opportunity for sound studies.

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While I had been hoping to hear more papers that brought the conversation back around to the beat, I felt that all the papers spoke through it, even if the topic reached beyond it to bodily movement, visual culture, theatre, and pedagogy. And that is where I think hip hop studies asks sound studies to step up its game\u2014to take seriously sound's intersection with the other senses, using sound as a jumping off point and not always a final destination. In Jeff Chang 's Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop, dancer Rennie Harris described bodily movement as \"just the last manifestation of sound,\" which blew my mind, because even though sound and motion are so fluidly entangled, we usually talk about them as if they are separate entities.

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On the flip side, one of the things that distinguishes sound studies from popular music study is its methodology\u2014the way in which sound is treated as an active process, a way of thinking and being, rather than solely an object of study. And this methodology is what I think sound studies can offer hip hop studies\u2014a sustained conversation on listening in a multiplicity of forms. Listening practices are what knits the different elements of hip hop together, what links artist to producer to audience, sometimes in the very same body at the very same time. What happens when we think of hip hop artists as listeners? What if we viewed them not only as producers of tracks but also of listening practices? Is there such a thing as hip hop listening? If so, what are its ethics and aesthetics? How might hip hop listening practices impact and feed into the various modes of hip-hop performance in music and beyond: dance, cinema, theatre, literature, graphic design?

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So, while hip hop studies and sound studies have quite a bit to show and prove to each other, I can't be the only one eager for the collabo.

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\u2014

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Featured Image by Michael Coughlin, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED

","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/apjdn-mx606","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=639","image":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/52537656624_f5cccc6dc1_c.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1285027200,"rid":"pjxkc-ycq37","summary":"This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP.","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Black Studies","Conferences","Diasporic Sound"],"title":"Ill Communication: Hip Hop Studies & Sound Studies @ Show And Prove","updated_at":1787782789,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/09/20/ill-communication/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Ford","given":"Robert"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"
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Ever since the Chicago Cubs installed an organ at Wrigley Field in 1941, music has been a part of the baseball ballpark experience. Unlike basketball, hockey or football, baseball doesn't have non-stop action, and its frequent periods of inaction give an organist or stadium DJ a broad canvas on which to improvise. Initially, ballpark music was strictly organ music, as organs were present at every ballpark by the middle of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the organist was complemented by the stadium DJ, who played recorded music over the stadium sound system. Gradually, the DJ overtook the organist and many stadiums no longer play live organ music; a little less than half of the 30 ballparks that host Major League Baseball games today don't employ an organist.

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As technology improved, allowing stadium DJs to play music on the computer rather than on the record or 8-track player, teams began allowing baseball players to choose the music they wanted to hear. And, in the 1990s, the phrase \"walk-up music\" entered the sports fan's vernacular. Position players chose songs for the stadium DJ to play when they walked from the on-deck circle to the batter's box. Pitchers picked music to be played while they warmed up at the start of their outing.

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Players select their music in a variety of ways. Some pick a song from their favorite artists, artists that often originate from their corner of the world (e.g. a lefthanded pitcher from Texas warming up to country music or Southern hip-hop; a utility infielder from the Dominican Republic opting for a merengue or bachata tune). Others will choose music they feel helps motivate them to perform better on the field, choosing a new song whenever they enter a slump. Some players will even allow the stadium DJ to pick their music. In 2007, New York Mets third baseman David Wright gave the fans the opportunity to vote for his walk-up song online, giving them list of 50 of his favorites to choose from (the fans choice: \"Me & U,\" the only hit by Cassie, a hip-hop artist).

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While almost every baseball player has walk-up music, only a handful of players have had their music become an iconic part of their image and legacy. The best example of a player who's become closely identified with his entrance music is New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera.

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Photo by Flickr user Dennis

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Rivera has been the Yankees' closer for more than a decade and a half, called upon to get the last three outs in the ninth inning when the Yankees are ahead by a handful of runs. The closer's role is one of the most pressure-packed in all of team sports. Do it well, and your opponents often feel defeated as soon as you come into the game. Do it poorly, and you'll frustrate your teammates, your manager and your team's fan base. After all, nothing's more demoralizing than losing a game you've all but won, and a closer's job is to turn almost-certain wins into definite victories. Rivera is arguably the best closer in baseball history, an integral part of a Yankees team that's won five championships and advanced to the playoffs in all but one of his 16 seasons.

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During Rivera's rise to prominence in the late 1990s, the DJ at Yankee Stadium, his home ballpark, began playing \"Enter Sandman\" by Metallica when Rivera came into the game. To a certain extent, \"Enter Sandman\" seems like a strange choice for Rivera's entrance. While it does start off softly before building to a eardrum-thumping crescendo of guitars, \"Enter Sandman\" is a loud, heavy-metal song. Rivera, the most reserved of the Yankees superstars developed over the last two decades, is serene and soft-spoken. To the untrained ear, \"Enter Sandman\" sounds arrogant and boastful, two words that have never been used to describe Rivera.

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However, in many ways, \"Enter Sandman\" does compliment Rivera. Its lyrics, about a child battling nightmares as he tries to sleep, are a perfect metaphor for Rivera, whose job is to gives opposing hitters nightmares while trying to put the game to bed in the Yankees' favor. Rivera, a deeply religious man by all accounts, probably approves of the song's encouragement to \"Say your prayers little one\" and its recitation of a classic children's bedtime prayer (\"Now I lay me down to sleep/Pray the Lord my soul to keep\u2026\"). In addition, Rivera may also get a kick out of the idea of opposing hitters saying their prayers before facing the dancing and darting fastballs that he throws with ruthless efficiency and pinpoint accuracy.

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It also helps that Yankee Stadium is one of the loudest outdoor venues anywhere. Its combination of rabid fans and their New York-style obnoxiousness and hubris combined with an ear-splitting sound system that could wake the dead already makes the Bronx, NY stadium one of the toughest venues for visiting teams to compete. Combine those elements with a song that's loud, even before you raise the volume, being played while an indomitable closer jogs to the pitcher's mound from the bullpen behind the outfield fence and makes his warm-up throws and it isn't hard to understand why many enemy teams are mentally vanquished before they even take their cuts against Rivera, whose entrance routine serves to both whip the Yankee Stadium crowd into a frenzy and intimidate opponents.

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Photo by de Mel

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Would Rivera be as dominant without such scene-setter is a legitimate question. While baseball is a very technical sport, requiring precision whether you're fielding a ground ball or laying down a bunt, emotion and superstition has a prominent place in the sport. Yankee Stadium is already one of the most hostile stadiums for opponents; throw in a great closer coming out to a ominous, foreboding song and it's understandable how an opponent's anxiety would be heightened. You could also argue that, Rivera is so good, what's playing over the sound system is immaterial. After all, Rivera does play half his games on the road, away from Yankee Stadium and \"Enter Sandman,\" and he has managed to excel in those contests as well.

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Rivera is now 40 years old and still among the best at an age when most baseball players are retired or on the downward slope. Upon retirement (and the requisite five-year waiting period), Rivera will almost certainly be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame with the other greats. And, while \"Enter Sandman\" hasn't been the sole reason for his success, it will always be an indelible part of Rivera's legacy.

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\u2013Robert Ford

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/k88zb-hvp37","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=659","image":"https://i0.wp.com/rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/rivera.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1285632000,"rid":"50xvw-vat28","summary":"Ever since the Chicago Cubs installed an organ at Wrigley Field in 1941, music has been a part of the baseball ballpark experience. Unlike basketball, hockey or football, baseball doesn't have non-stop action, and its frequent periods of inaction give an organist or stadium DJ a broad canvas on which to improvise.","tags":["Acoustics","Article","Music","Place And Space","Sound"],"title":"Closing Time, or What's In a Song?","updated_at":1787782784,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/09/27/closing-time-or-whats-in-a-song/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Trammell","given":"Aaron"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

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It's no secret that over the course of the twentieth century, aesthetic productions have drawn increasingly on recycled and re-appropriated materials. Perhaps, for this reason, the above video \u2013 a rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller on the newly minted Mario Paint Composer \u2013 sounds absolutely mundane. Nothing new, just another curiosity born out of the collective consciousness we cannily refer to as the Internets, which we understand jokingly as a series of tubes, notably Youtubes. Laffs aside, this phenomena complicates many traditional modes of interpretation.How do we hear the music of a convergence era when within it lies a devious set of connotations, each serving to reorient the listener to its own particular theme? What tactics do listeners take when interpreting this semiotic collision of sound, icon and song? These questions complicate the topic of genre, where a social consensus traditionally guides the collective organization of a medium. What social and sonic forms shape our understanding of Thriller as it was reproduced by Mario Paint Composer on Youtube in 2008?

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Before delving too deeply into a discussion of genre, it is important to situate the phenomena of convergence in a pre-digital context. Although the user-centric nature of web 2.0 has certainly helped to accelerate this process, one needs to look no further than Dick Hebdige's \"The Meaning of Mod,\" in the anthology Resistance Through Rituals, to sense an earlier precedent to the mash-up culture we observe today. Drawn to the adventure of a dangerous soHo night-life culture, \"The mod dealt his blows by inverting and distorting the images (of neatness, of short hair) so cherished by his employers and parents, to create a style, which while being overtly close to the straight world was nonetheless incomprehensible to it.\" Although Hebdige is writing in 1974, long before computers would become mainstream, he makes a worthy point here about the appropriation of fashion. Constructing it as an act of distortion,Hebdige argues that early 1960s mods (understood here as a working class youth movement), through their stylistic appropriations were able to undermine the fabric of British society. By acting as criminals, but lauding the style of white collar workers \u2013 suits, short hair \u2013 mods help to show that semiotic convergence is not something new, instead it can be read as a stance of resistance.

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In the case of Thriller, resistance is too strong a word. I prefer distortion, it is value neutral, although it can easily be understood in the context of resistance. Thriller on Mario Paint Composer distorts Thriller by Michael Jackson. By simplifying the song to a series of 16-bit samples, the song's transcriber geoffnet1, translates it all to the symbolic language of Mario Paint \u2013 where mushrooms sound like drums, hearts are bass notes, ships are cymbals, flowers are horns, cars are synth pads and game-boys sound like blips. geoffnet1's Thriller is a distortion of the Mario Paint Composer sound as well; originally a part of the 1992 Super Nintendo cartridge, Mario Paint, Mario Paint Composer is now a fan-modded update of its original form. Unlike the original Mario Paint Composer has been designed with functionality taking a precedent over accessibility. Originally marketed as an intuitive music scripting software, the following limitations were part and parcel of the platform (These restrictions have been copied from Tombobbuilder's page, a musician who works with the limits of Mario Paint Composer as it was originally distributed.):

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1. Only 24 measures are available.
\n2. No more than three notes at a time.
\n3. You can not double notes on the same line or space.
\n4. Tempo is restricted.
\n5. There is no fluctuation in dynamics (volume).
\n6. No sharps or flats are available.
\n7. Can only compose using the \"white keys\" from the piano.
\n8. Only two of each letter name are available (except A, where there is only one).
\n9. C major and A natural minor are the only keys to compose in.

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Of these restrictions, Thriller only conforms to the third: \"You can not double notes on the same line or space,\" in this regard it distorts what most people understand as the Mario Paint sound as well. By no means am I calling this work inauthentic, instead I am calling attention to the stability of sonic tropes in our cultural memory. The sound of Mario Paint is not remembered for the limitations described above, instead, there is a stable and distinct sonic fingerprint which is derived from the alchemy of icon, sound and song though which genre can be constructed and maintained.

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Thriller is 8-bit music, even though there is nothing 8-bit about it. Similar to the way in which mods subverted the British status-quo, Thriller puts the idea of genre into crisis. This is not a crisis that works to undermine the existence of genre as a phenomenon, it is instead a crisis of interpretation, where the traditional means through which a genre can be identified are called into question. No longer can the easy answers be found at Allmusic or Wikipedia, some sounds have become more epistemically ellusive. Ultimately, this is a good thing, as it encourages listeners to take a critical ear to what they are listening to \u2013 and how they come to understand it.

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AT

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/rg065-mge82","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=679","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1286323200,"rid":"t62fq-txa43","summary":"It's no secret that over the course of the twentieth century, aesthetic productions have drawn increasingly on recycled and re-appropriated materials. Perhaps, for this reason, the above video \u2013 a rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller on the newly minted Mario Paint Composer \u2013 sounds absolutely mundane.","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Digital Humanities","Digital Media","Games/Gaming"],"title":"Genre in the Age of Convergence: Mario Paint Composer","updated_at":1787782781,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/06/genre-in-the-age-of-convergence-mario-paint-composer/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Pape","given":"Andreas Duus"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

Three hours a week, I speak to a group of ninety-nine people and explain how to make choices. I talk loudly, to the back of the room, then I lower my voice to engage them more intimately. I pause and let the room grow silent. Near the end of the twice-weekly performance, I review my main points. Like a bell, this signals to my audience that they will leave soon; they begin to rustle in their chairs. I say, \"Hey, I'm not done! You can't go yet!\" And they laugh. And they stay.

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Album Cover: Andreas Pape's The Big Hit

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I am an economist and a musician. In both of my chosen fields, performance is a necessary component. As an economist, I teach and I present papers; as a musician, I put on shows. Performance is the willful construction of a series of events using the body\u2014hands, voice, gesture\u2014and the instruments the body can manipulate to create a particular mental state for the witnesses. In the days leading up to my next show on October 16th at The Beef in Binghamton, NY, I have pondered the intimate ways in which listening structures the corporeal nature of performance. As an economist, I understand that performance is strategic, in that I imagine a listener for my music and choose my actions to influence that listener. As a musician, I recall moments that I listened.

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\"Audience as available instrument in performance\"

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The audience is one of the instruments available to the performer. I plan to use this to my advantage at my upcoming show. When I envision my fingers first passing across my guitar, the audience will not be engaged with me: they will be talking to each other, getting a drink, finding a seat. I will play a song at a normal volume; given the other noise, it will be background, not a centerpiece. Most people will hear it, but not many will notice it. The climax of the song will involve me holding a loud, high vocal note until all other noise dies. Each person there will have a moment in which they hear that note and wonder what it is and they will grow silent. By the end of the note, every person in the room will realize that the performance has started and that this sustained note is part of a song they have been hearing but not listening to for several minutes. As the note draws to a close, they will feel compelled to shout, to clap, to exclaim. Their part in this performance\u2014the noise, the silence, then the noise\u2014will be one they will play without knowing, beforehand, that they were included.

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I imagine this moment like the opening to Belle And Sebastian's \"I Don't Love Anyone:\" 'I don't love anyone/ You're not listening/ \u2026 I don't love anyone/You're not listening even now.' As a listener, you realize as he says 'even now,' that he's right: you weren't listening. It was a transcendent moment that shocks me as a listener: the author of the song had climbed inside my head without me knowing, and then was able to name exactly the listening experience I was having.

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\"Rhythm to Organize Silence\"

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In Chronicles, Bob Dylan describes a listening experience built around a singer who constructs her own way to view the rhythm of a song. \"I'd seen [Martha Reeves] in New York \u2026 where she'd been playing with the Motown Revue. Her band couldn't keep up with her, had no idea what she was doing and just plodded along. She beat a tambourine in triplet form, up close to her ear and she phrased the song as if the tambourine was her entire band\" (160). This phrasing that is out-of-phase with the band (or the audience) reminds me of Odetta.

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Odetta might be best known for her performance of \"I've been driving on Bald Mountain/Water Boy.\" She rebuilt those two traditional 4/4 folk songs swung onto a three-beat triplet, so what emerges is a swinging triplet where beats two and three are rushed in after a lethargic one: ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three. After several times though the verses, she stops the guitar entirely and carries a long vocal note, setting up a moment of unnaturally long silence. The guitar and grunt that end the silence seem arrhythmic to my ear, but Odetta can sing by her own time that swings in and out of phase with the rest of us. We're not meant to know when resolution comes, and it's that uncertainty that Odetta wants us to experience.

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I once saw Jeff Tweedy use a controlled complete silence with Wilco's performance of \"Misunderstood\" from Being There in 2001. Tweedy doesn't use uncertainty as Odetta does; his use of silence is more akin to methodically turning on and off a bedroom light in the middle of the night. In particular, the band performs an extended outro which involves two beats of sound and two beats of silence: \"NOTHING \u2013 -.\" On \"NAH\" and \"THING\" the whole band is together on two identical, stinging staccato notes.

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On the off beats, the entire theater is silent. When I was in the audience, it was so quiet you could have heard the audience breathe. . .if anyone had been taking a breath. On some level, I was in a state of shock, or at least, a state of being constantly startled; everyone must have been, because the silences were complete. On another level, I felt at peace. I calmly looked from face to face in the audience behind me, and everyone had the same startled, smiling expression I'm sure I had. I looked around the room\u2013just looked, without an agenda, just idle curiosity\u2013for the first time in what felt like years.

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Seeking to recreate a combination of those listening experiences in my audience, I wrote \"Something This Easy,\" a song about confusing interactions with an ex. The song is forty percent silence: nineteen beats of melody followed by thirteen beats of silence. I don't tap my foot or keep time during the silence, save for holding my breath, and I bring back the sound when I (have to) exhale. I try to keep the audience slightly and repeatedly startled by resisting any precise expectation of sound that they may hold. After a beat, the audience will break the silence when I make them laugh with the line: \"I know your body like a Swedish furniture map.\" With the eruption of laughter in an otherwise silent room, my audience becomes the instrument creating the music that they are listening to at that moment. That is, they are the only instrument I'm playing.

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As a musician, this is the listening experience I designed: the laughter rings after I've triggered it like a overtone ring on a string long after having been plucked and left. As an economist, I see how I used the imagined listener successfully: I forecasted how these real listeners would react, and was able to use that forecast to design not only this moment, but potentially many others as well.

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Downloadable Pape Mix of Wilco, Odetta, and his own \"Something this Easy\":

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Rhythm to Organize Silence (Misunderstood_Tweedy_ Bald Mtn_Odetta_ SmthThisEasy_Pape)

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View Andreas Duus Pape's latest album The Big Hit here

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/5jdf8-5jy70","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=690","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1286928000,"rid":"t0qx4-mhm27","summary":"Three hours a week, I speak to a group of ninety-nine people and explain how to make choices. I talk loudly, to the back of the room, then I lower my voice to engage them more intimately. I pause and let the room grow silent. Near the end of the twice-weekly performance, I review my main points. Like a bell, this signals to my audience that they will leave soon; they begin to rustle in their chairs. I say, \"Hey, I'm not done!","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Identity","Listening","Live Music"],"title":"Singing to my Imagined Listener","updated_at":1787782778,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/13/singing-to-my-imagined-listener/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/008rmbt77","name":"Binghamton University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Stoever","given":"Jennifer","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

With all the excitement over the new release of Mavis Staples's You Are Not Alone\"\" (Anti-, produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy), I can't help but be skeptical of the outpouring of Indie love for the album, even as I have been spinning (and enjoying) it myself.\u00a0 It isn't the positive reaction to Staples's talent that is surprising\u2014at 70-plus years, Mavis has been exquisite for quite some time now\u2014but rather the way in which critics have freighted her newest record with the \"uplift\" (AV Club) of a whole lot of souls that haven't ever been to church (at least not in a good long while). Her voice is described as alternately \"raw\" (Paste) and full of a \"depth, power, and warmth that seem increasingly rare in music today\" (hear ya); Consequence of Sound, who cites Tweedy's hand at the boards as the reason for all the current music blog attention, calls her voice \"empathetic. . . powerful. . .soulful. . .touching\" and \"wise.\" If the blogosphere is to be believed, Staples's voice, \"as authentic as it gets\" (buzzine), could really save us all in these tough times. Come to think of it, the fervor of (white) faith in \"authentic\" black music \u00a0shouldn't be that surprising either, given the way in which race has always been entangled with popular music history in the United States.

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Authenticity and the immediacy of experience it implies, have had a long history in the music industry\u2014especially in reference to black artists\u2014stemming back at least to the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s, an all-black acapella troupe celebrated for \"\"powerful live performances whose breakthrough concert also happened to be for a crowd of hipsters: the wealthy congregants of Henry Ward Beecher's Brooklyn church in 1871.\u00a0 Beecher gave the band his enthusiastic support, namely because he felt their sound gave listeners direct access to \"the inner lives of slave hearts expressed in music\" even after slavery had formally ended.

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While the sound of You are Not Alone differs greatly from the Jubilee Singers, the reviews of the record belie and inflame a similar desire for unmediated access to the emotive qualities (a)historically associated with black life and sound in the U.S.: namely suffering, faith, and catharsis. And Staples's record is indeed not alone in this.\u00a0 Many of the sentences from the Staples reviews could easily have been lifted from those of another recent gospel record to capture the indie imagination, Daptone Records's 2008 release Como Now.\u00a0 Starkly different from the breezier, countrified sounds of You Are Not Alone, Como Now is an acapella gospel recording made in a small town in Panola County, Mississippi. The record\u00a0was a risky release for Daptone, a Brooklyn-based label that has consistently produced new funk and soul records since its inception in 2002 by the likes of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and The Budos Band.\u00a0 Although old school sound has always been a part of the label's ethos\u2014its engineers use primarily analog equipment, for example, a major reason Amy Winehouse recorded her throwback Back in Black album at Daptone studios in 2006\u2014marketing stripped-down gospel to its audience of predominately white hipsters would nonetheless prove a daunting task.\u00a0 Treating Como Now as a labor of love and a paying of dues, Daptone attempted to spark interest in the release by relying on the familiar marketing strategies of immediacy, authenticity, and nostalgia.

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\"\"While Como Now's tagline boldly proclaims that the music was \"Recorded Live at Mt. Mariah Church on July 22, 2006\"\u2014and, thus, emphasizing the Now of the title\u2014the cover's vintage civil-rights era design evokes the Como of yesterday, or more accurately, encourages listeners to hear Como now and Como yesterday as one and the same through the vehicle of\u00a0 \"raw gospel testimony.\" Como Now's depiction of the sounds of the past as echoes within the present is as ambiguous as it is uncanny, a sonic window thrown open to simpler times happening somewhere out there, \"deep in the heart of Mississippi\" right now.

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The introductory promotional video from Como Now's website (also uploaded on Youtube) represents the record as an aural time machine to a land and a people isolated from and largely unchanged by technology, modernity, and history.

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Producer Michael Reilly's voiceover locates rawness, emotional release, and \"real religion\" in the sound of black voices, in no small part because the video places his measured Yankee pacing in sonic tension with the song that accompanies it, Mary Moore singing \"When the Gates Swing Open.\"\u00a0 Over Moore's impassioned singing, Reilly assures listeners in a muted deadpan that they will hear \"no pretty piano playing or clever guitar picking, just voices. Pure soul stirring fire from the heart.\"\u00a0 Reilly's sentiments not only evoke the gushing Jubilee Singers' press, but also the ethos of the infamous folklorist John Lomax, who made field recordings in Southern prisons in the 1930s because he sought \"negro singers untainted by white musical conventions\" (as he wrote in 1934's \"Sinful Songs of the Southern Negro\"); singers in Como were actually recorded by John's son Alan in the 1940s.\u00a0 Reilly's voiceover goes on to frame the Como singers as practitioners of what the senior Lomax called \"the real art of simplicity,\" as stripped-down, natural singers who are artful mainly in their artlessness.\u00a0 While Reilly's webcopy mentions how \"children and grown folks alike have been living and breathing gospel for as long as they can remember,\" for example, he fails to mention how the residents of Como have also been writing, rehearsing, and performing it.

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Thus, Como Now's marketing disavows the real artistry of the Como singers, even as it seeks to celebrate it.\u00a0 The simple, natural quality endowed to the singers of Como is visually accentuated by stark imagery representing the town as a down-at-the-heels, living museum of the black life of yesteryear. In the youtube clip, Moore's soaring and spirited singing animates stills of blooming cotton fields, vintage RCA microphones, and splintering upright pianos. \"\"Save for the album cover and one blurry still of a child, there are no shots of the people of Como in the introductory promo, effectively isolating Moore's voice from her corporeal and historical body.\u00a0 This isolation allows listeners to supply their own fantastic imagery and forces them to rely on historical stereotypes about the naturally sonic qualities of black people. By choosing to disembody Como's voices, the promotional video represents the album's music as emanating from, and even haunting, Panola County's lush green fields and battered strip-malls rather than showing it to be a hard-fought creation of the residents themselves. To quote Lomax again: \"[The Negro's] songs burst from him, when in his own environment, as naturally as those of a bird amid its native trees.\"

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Although the impulse to make the album reflects a progressive desire to respectfully pay tribute to the black gospel tradition in American popular music\u2014and to provide quality artists like The Como Mamas with critical renown and monetary compensation\u2014Como Now relies on well-worn racial tropes to do so.\u00a0 It also points to the continued presence in American culture of an essentialized \"black voice\" that is naturalized as more emotive, truthful, and soulful than other voices. While this phenomena is socially constructed and the sounds thought of as \"black\" have shifted considerably\u2014when I play early recordings of the Jubilee Singers my students consistently tell me that they sound \"white\" like a \"glee club\"\u2014I find it fascinating that the language used to describe them has largely remained the same.\u00a0 While Como Now's producer at least acknowledges that, in Como, \"no one has to pick up cotton anymore, thankfully,\" the marketing trades on the possibility that, while slavery and sharecropping have ended, its sonic labors have not only endured, but are readily available for download.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/53zey-6kc46","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=530","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1287532800,"rid":"ezn4q-49y95","summary":"With all the excitement over the new release of Mavis Staples's You Are Not Alone (Anti-, produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy), I can't help but be skeptical of the outpouring of Indie love for the album, even as I have been spinning (and enjoying) it myself.","tags":["Advertising","Aesthetics","Archival","Article","Black Studies"],"title":"Como Now?: Marketing \"Authentic\" Black Music","updated_at":1787782775,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/20/como-now/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Silva","given":"Liana M."}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

If masculinity is alive and well [on sports talk radio], femininity exists on talk radio as absence, lack, and difference. \u2014 John Reffue

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Radio al atardecer by Flickr user Dany Rivera

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Tune in to any random sports talk radio show and listen carefully to the voices coming from the radio. Listen to the cadence in their voices, to the passionate tone about the sporting events of the day, to the witty banter with the hosts. Listen to them and see if something stands out to you.

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Most of the people talking on these shows are men.

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Now, go to any sports talk radio website. If you scroll down, you will notice on the webpage a scantily-clad woman. Amidst all of the sports logos, and the pictures of the men who carry the voices on the radio station, you will find eye candy for the listeners who navigate to the page. The websites offer these pictures of women-as-sexual-objects, which stand in opposition to the absence of female voices on the air. This \"absence\" that communications strategist Dr. John Reffue speaks of, the absence of female callers as participants, goes hand in hand with how females are portrayed in sports media more widely: as visual objects. This undermines any authority they might have in the sonic realm and relegates them figuratively to the sidelines. Women are deemed \"eye candy\" and not \"ear candy.\"

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What does the (female) sports fan sound like?

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According to a 2002 Arbitron report, the core demographic of sports radio is male, 25-54, \"nonethnic.\" (Researchers like Dr. David Nylund have pointed out that sports talk radio's listeners are overwhelmingly white.) Even though Arbitron has not studied women's listening habits when it comes to sports talk radio, it would be silly to ignore this demographic for the mere fact that there are female sports fans. Although there are women who listen to sports talk radio and who, on occasion call in, their invisibility in this medium is echoed by how the ratings completely ignore them. (Arbitron has several free studies and reports on their site for women, but none of them talk about women and sports talk radio, let alone talk radio in general. Interestingly enough, they have a study aptly titled \"What Women Want: Factors Driving Tune-In and Tune-Out\" where they briefly point out that there is a segment of female listeners they call \"sports fans\" but they only mention what kinds of music they will tune into.)

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However, this is not the only example of how female sports fans are not heard. Dale Pontz from the blog Dames on Games makes an interesting point about women and sports talk radio when she says,

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my gender is another impediment to my sports talk radio participation. I have learned through many years of watching sports at bars that men don't mind when I sit quietly and watch (although they are known to incorrectly assume I want to flirt), but once I make a valid sports argument, that bemused interest usually becomes veiled hostility.

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In this case, expressing ideas and arguments about the game becomes a turn-off, not what the man was expecting. As someone who enjoys the nuances of the game and who writes about sports, she understands that being seen as a sexual object will prevent men from actually taking what she says seriously. Although she is conflating the visual with the aural in the above, she makes the connection between women and sexuality. Pontz's comment, as well as the responses from several female journalists to the question \"Why Do Women Dislike Talk Radio?, beg the question: are women just not listening to sports talk radio?

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Steve Duemig, sports talk radio host interviewed by John Reffue for his dissertation, mentions that he does have female callers, and that oftentimes their commentary is more nuanced and thought-out than that of their male counterparts. Reffue mentions, \"He [Duemig] indicated that while he believes women are intimidated by the prospect of calling a show, their calls end up being better, smarter calls because\u2026'Men spout shit and women come with facts'\" (128). I too have noticed women calling into sports talk radio shows here in the Kansas City area, so the idea that women do not listen to sports talk radio falls flat. However, it is precisely the rare female voice which draws attention to the absence.

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It's A Man's World

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Sports talk radio is, evidently, the realm for heterosexual men to come to talk about sports, even though they are not the only ones to do so. Nylund explains in his article \"When in Rome: Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Sports Talk Radio\" that \"at this historical moment when hegemonic masculinity has been partially destabilized by global economic changes and by gay liberation and feminist movements, the sports media industry seemingly provides a stable and specific view of masculinity grounded in heterosexuality, aggression, individuality, and the objectification of women.\" Sports talk radio becomes the place where men can participate in this \"stable view,\" and talking and listening become a way of participating.

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But it is John Reffue who focuses on the idea of community that the fans create as they participate in the shows. He mentions on page 9 the \"broadcast format as a discursive space \u2013 a place where many come to make sense of how sports fit into their lives. I believe that in this space, sports fans are afforded a singular and unique venue to cultivate not only a deeper understanding of the sports they love, but to perform community and establish identity(ies), while knowingly or unknowingly contributing to the larger public discourse on race, gender, sexuality and class and politics. (community, identity, understand sport, contribute to public discourse on race, gender, sex, and class)\" Reffue argues that sports talk radio is constructed as a male space through rhetoric and performance. Calling in and engaging the host and the listeners becomes a way of belonging to the community. I will take his argument further and argue that women are not just excluded from the sonic realm of radio by virtue of being women, but that this construction strips their voices of any authority. The divestment of the authority of women's voices reflects tendencies in sports more generally, where women are truly and figuratively relegated to the sidelines.

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The ultimate example is the dearth of female broadcasters, on radio and on television. Nationally there isn't a female sports radio broadcaster that has as much visibility as, say Jim Rome. Men lead the sports talk radio shows. The one nationally syndicated female sports radio talk show host, Nancy Donellan (otherwise known as The Fabulous Sports Babe) went off the air in the late 1990s. This reflects what happens in sports coverage in general: men are the voices of authority when it comes to talking about sports. Although there are female color commentators and play-by-play announcers, they are in the minority. An example is Beth Mowins, who recently became ESPN2's play-by-play announcer for college football games. Men, on the other hand, remain the voice and the face of sports coverage. Even when it comes to covering sports on tv, women are often relegated to the sidelines. It makes even more striking the comment by sound media scholars like Kaja Silverman, Amy Lawrence, and Michele Hilmes that discourses around women's voices cast them as a \"problem.\"

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Who Runs This Town?

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I am not advocating for a change in radio formats or for sports talk radio to be more \"girly.\" That's the kind of attitude that got us here in the first place, the attitude that women and men enjoy different kinds of radio formats. However, women's voices literally and metaphorically must be a part of the sonic landscape of sports talk radio, and sports media in general. Women must be heard over the radio in order for other women to feel like they can be a part of the conversation. If men are deemed competent enough to talk about women's sports, women should be deemed confident enough to talk about men's sports. Women need to make themselves visible, and one way of doing that is by literally making themselves heard. Maybe this way we can get sports radio to listen to women.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/1x2vs-x1e90","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=2843","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1312761600,"rid":"qtp8r-73y92","summary":"Radio al atardecer by Flickr user Dany Rivera Tune in to any random sports talk radio show and listen carefully to the voices coming from the radio. Listen to the cadence in their voices, to the passionate tone about the sporting events of the day, to the witty banter with the hosts. Listen to them and see if something stands out to you. Most of the people talking on these shows are men. Now, go to any sports talk radio website.","tags":["Article","Fandom/Fan Studies","Gender","Listening","Radio"],"title":"Eye Candy: The Absence of the Female Voice in Sports Talk Radio","updated_at":1787782770,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2011/08/08/eye-candy-the-absence-of-the-female-voice-in-sports-talk-radio/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Gold","given":"Benjamin"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

I got my first computer, A Packard Bell desktop, in 1995, when I was 11, and my parents would only buy it after three trips to Comp USA where they found a salesman with enough patience to make them feel OK about hoarding a year's worth of PC Magazines in a box under my bed that I was supposed to use for research, but really I just wanted to get the best computer for games.

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\"\"

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\"This isn't just for games,\" my parents said.

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And there was, of course, a ton of pre-loaded educational software, like Encarta, sending my folks into a state of catatonic euphoria dreaming of Ivy League schools, but there was also a Weezer music video. Specifically, the Spike Jonze-directed video for \"Buddy Holly\" inexplicably hidden in the computer's media files.

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The existence of \"Buddy Holly\" on my computer was as mysterious as the video's special effects. Now considered by aficionados to be a creative high point of the medium, the clip showed the band playing inside an episode of Happy Days, and to my pre-adolescent sense of humor was utterly hilarious.

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More than that, through the backdoor of Windows 95, Weezer, with this music video, attached themselves onto my brain in a real way, and with their humor, made the first significant bridge connecting my musical and emotional islands in a way a CD alone never could. Sure, I liked the song, but I loved that music video.

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Aggressively aging through middle and high school, through Nine Inch Nails and Black Flag, Weezer's first album was just a blue CD stacked with a bunch of other old birthday presents I couldn't return. Their music wasn't harsh enough, and it dealt with realities (sentimental longing, romantic frustration, imagination seen as inner-brain reclusivity) that I hadn't yet developed the ability to experience.

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Then a couple years into high school, on a homemade VHS tape of six hours worth of videos recorded off MTV2, I was once again confronted with the band, this time via their video for \"Say It Ain't So.\" This one was also pretty funny, but it took the band out of a pastiche and into a fully-realized suburban rock fantasy: playing guitars in a garage, doing laundry, and kicking a hacky sack in the backyard.

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Even more importantly, this was the first time I realized how good their music was. Mixing that ever-present humor, with heavy guitars and unapologetic pop hooks, Weezer were reincarnated as instant personal favorite; as anti-venom to blindingly angry music and a reflection of my own growing inner-complexity. The content of the songs on their first album, Weezer, finally registered with me too: the fragility of relationships with \"Say It Ain't So\" and the liberating loneliness of geekdom portrayed with \"In The Garage,\" to me, was deeply profound.

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It didn't take long for me to move on to 1996's Pinkerton, Weezer's second album, and with its discovery came detailed maps guiding me through new musical/emotional landmasses. Pinkerton is built around a conceit of unfiltered confession, with moments of terrifying straightforwardness, but tempered with self-deprecating humor. Songs like \"Across the Sea,\" \"Pink Triangle,\" and \"Falling for You\" tackled the irony and inevitability of heartbreak to the richest and most complex pop the band would ever create. Pinkerton not only mapped my feelings, but fueled them as well, keeping me anchored to the disc for years.

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In point of fact, as I grew into emotional self-realization, Weezer's first two albums became my sad records. These songs, while ironic in tone, were completely genuine in content and delivery, genetically engineered to combine with my particular brain chemistry.

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Pinkerton, though, was a commercial disappointment, and since that self-perceived fail Weezer's interests shifted from writing clever songs, tempering their rich content with sturdy hooks, to jokes. Their third album, also called Weezer, was released in 2001and presented the band as dually trying to tap into the geek ethos of their first record, but this time strictly in visual terms. They became a novelty band, writing \"funny\" pop songs, which are silly and sentimental, but lacking serious emotional content.

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They play shows sponsored by Axe body spray, wear costumes on stage, put an actor from Lost on their latest album cover, even going as far as to name the album after his character; Weezer are now totally vapid. Everything I loved about the band was disintegrated, leaving nothing but a scorched caricature behind.

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\"\"Blame that on the music business if you want, on the shifting roles of music in culture (as an art form now more closely related to branding and licensing as a way to disseminate culture), or even on the needs on the music-listening public, but that would frame \"Buddy Holly's\" appearance on my pre-adolescent computer in a similar way, as nothing more than a cash-in on some big market licensing.

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Well then good job, I guess. And, I guess, with all today's corny gimmicks they're just trying to do the same thing to another generation of fans fifteen years later. But, It's hard for me to think about the band Weezer are now, making it too heartbreaking to listen to those two albums I used to love so much. Weezer were an important band to me. I discovered them when I was new to music, just forming my tastes, and Weezer found a way into my brain by exploiting my non-musical inclinations, and their songs and their songs mapped my emotional center. I'm worried their directions will have me going in circles forever.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/nz545-v6s06","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=765","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1288224000,"rid":"t1zdj-kq472","summary":"I got my first computer, A Packard Bell desktop, in 1995, when I was 11, and my parents would only buy it after three trips to Comp USA where they found a salesman with enough patience to make them feel OK about hoarding a year's worth of PC Magazines in a box under my bed [\u2026]","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Fandom/Fan Studies","Identity","Listening"],"title":"Hold This Thread: A Partial History of a Rock n'Roll Relationship","updated_at":1787782769,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/28/hold-this-thread-a-partial-history-of-a-rock-nroll-relationship/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/008rmbt77","name":"Binghamton University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Stoever","given":"Jennifer","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

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[If you missed the first two installments, hit \"pause\" and rewind to June's piece on\u00a0Noir, and July's discussion of\u00a0Walter Murch].

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The third and final installment of my summer series on the top 6 appearances of the tape recorder in film focuses on the 1980s, a decade obsessed with what Hillel Schwartz called \"the Culture of the Copy.\"\u00a0While the taped recordings made in earlier films such as Double Indemnity (1944) and Touch of Evil (1958) remained essentially records, discrete evidence of a moment in the past, 1980s films throw the recording itself into question. After all, the mass production of professional grade recording equipment increased the chances that the power once wielded by police, teachers, and audiophiles now lay at the fingertips of say, Ferris Bueller.
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Furthermore, with the development of ever-higher fidelity, gone are the garbled screes of The Conversation (1974) and the feedback squelches of Touch of Evil: 1980s tapes are crystal-clear stand-ins for the original itself, which makes the idea that they could be altered or faked even more terrifying. \u00a0There is a sense of both excitement and fear in\u00a01980s' culture that copies can either best or replace the originals. Remember \"Is it Live or Is it Memorex?\"? or, my personal fave, the Maxell Guy?
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As the wind blasting the Maxell guy's oh-so-perfect 80's coiffure shows, copies have a palpable impact on the world. Copies can defy space, moving orchestras into one's living room. They break the bounds of time, appearing not to age or die. They can be sped up, slowed down, edited, remixed. Perhaps most anxiety-producing of all is that, unlike human beings, copies can theoretically be \u00a0flawlessly\u00a0reproduced, all but instantaneously. Or, conversely, flawed copies can proliferate with frightening speed. All these powers invested in the tape recorder reflected and shaped a mixture of awe and terror about recording's afterlife \u2014what happens after it leaves its maker's hands? \u00a0And, like Jean Baudrillard famously asked in Simulacra and Simulation(1981) does the original even matter (or exist) anymore? Or, will all originals be subsumed in an ironic (and seemingly insatiable) cultural lust for authentically manufactured reality?
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The Diva (Wilhelmenia Fernandez) Sings

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At the center of this lust is the female voice, turned fetish in the 1980's films\u00a0Diva\u00a0and\u00a0Blow Out. Whether screaming in terror, singing the heights of the sublime, or confessing the depths of a passionate hatred, both movies construct women as emotive objects to be recorded, often against their will, and the recordists in these films clamor for and are repelled by the female sounds they capture. (For additional Sounding Out! of the \"problem\" of women's voices in contemporary media culture see last week's post, Liana Silva's \"Eye Candy\" and Aaron Trammell's recent \"GLaDOS, the Voice of Postfeminist Control\"). In fact, this series has traced the cultural construction of the \"sound man\": how mainstream films naturalize recording as the province of men (and, with the exception of Touch of Evil, of white men). The tape recorder's\u00a0increasing accessibility should have meant that women were using the equipment in greater numbers, but according to Hollywood, tape recorders continued to mediate power relationships between (white) men. Think Walter Neff and Barton Keyes. Harry Caul and his anonymous boss. Ferris and Principal Rooney..

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Christina Aguilera and Alicia Keys at the console recording \"Impossible\" (VH1)

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With such a proliferation of representations of male recorders, it can be difficult to imagine a female hand twiddling the knobs, so much so that 95% of the professional recording industry is now male, according to the nonprofit organization\u00a0Women's Audio Mission, that works to increase the number of women behind the boards through youth outreach and training programs.\u00a0While the sole responsibility for this chronic and widespread underrepresentation does not rest entirely on the shoulders of America's dream factory\u2014an NPR story from 2003 on Women Music Producersby Neda Ulaby discusses additional reasons \"Why Female Producers Are a Rare Breed\"\u2014we must also acknowledge that cinematic images actively shape reality, they do not just passively reflect it. Representations limit our imaginations as much as as they embolden them. The images of recording in 1980s films remind us that the mere presence of women's voices is not enough to enable gender equity in our increasingly mediated and technologized public sphere, women must also \"man\" recording equipment, structuring (and shifting) the conditions under which their voices are recorded, framed, heard, and remixed into public consciousness.

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Changing the Face of Sound: Lauren Tabak Punches in (courtesy of Women's Audio Mission)

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Okay, for all the completists out there, a quick recap,\u00a0the first two films are: 1.\u00a0Double Indemnity (1944)\u00a0and 2.\u00a0Blackboard Jungle (1955), with a little Mike Hammer for good measure:\u00a0Kiss Me Deadly (1955). \u00a0The second two are: 3. Touch of Evil (1958) and 4.\u00a0The Conversation (1974), and a leap into the 1980s:\u00a0Ferris Bueller's Day Off\u00a0(1986).

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5. Diva\u00a0(Les Films Galexie, 1981, Dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix):

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\"\"The global sex trade. Transatlantic circulation of music and capital. International piracy rings. The Vietnamese diaspora. Imperialist fetishizing of the bodies (and voices) of women of color. \u00a0Taiwan as a rising force in the international economy. Police stings and gangland killings. Operatic performance and fan worship. Described by Frederic Jameson as \"the first French postmodernist film\" in Signatures of the Visible (1990), Diva is a rich, multilayered narrative that locates the tape recorder at the center of the vast cultural flows and postcolonial power struggles of late capitalism. As much fun Diva\u00a0sometimes has with copies\u2014there are duplicate cars, convenient doppelgangers, random mannequins, multiple decoy tapes\u2014it also explores the melancholic cultural loss caused by a medium that holds out the promise of saving everyone, at the rate of 38.1 centimeters per second.
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At its heart, Diva is an intertwined tale of two tapes, both highly volatile recordings of women's voices that threaten to escape masculine control. \u00a0The first is a bootlegged performance of an acclaimed African American opera singer, Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez) made by Jules (Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Andr\u00e9i), a young, mild-mannered moped-riding postal delivery man who blows his meager checks on top-of-the-line recording equipment and opera tickets. The second is a self-made confession by the tragic Nadia (Chantal Deruaz), a prostitute and the mistress of Jean Saporta (Jacques Fabbri), a crooked cop and underworld kingpin who sends hit men to kill her as she stumbles barefoot down a crowded Parisian street, en route to turning herself in to the cops. \u00a0Nadia's dying act is to sneak the incriminating cassette into Jules's messenger bag, unbeknownst to him, and he spends most of the film zipping around the city on his \"mobillette\" wondering why both the cops and the bad guys are chasing him. \u00a0All he wants to think about is his Diva, Cynthia, and the secret recording he has made of her latest performance.
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Well, it was secret. Until Jules lends it out to impress a preteen roller skating, record-stealing Vietnamese fashionista named Alba (Thuy An Luu) who plays it for the (way) older man she lives with in a creepy ambiguous arrangement, a fortysomething Zen Buddhist hipster tough guy named Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), who then tries to arrange a deal with two nameless, emotionless, mirrored-sunglass wearing, carbon copy Taiwanese business men (yellow peril much?) who are willing to pay top dollar for the tape. \u00a0As Cynthia's manager eventually warns her in the most realistic moment of an otherwise over-the-top film, \"the quality of the recording is perfect. . .and Taiwan never signed any international copyright agreement!\"

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Jules (Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Andr\u00e9i) and his Nagra

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Diva asks audiences to imagine that Cynthia has never been recorded\u2014she wants to preserve the aura of her performances as \"unique moments\"\u2014and she considers pirated recordings as akin to \"theft, rape even.\" The metaphor is uncomfortably extended by the sexualized recording sequence when Jules finally captures her voice, squirming and fiddling with his recorder, hidden underneath a jacket on his lap, as tears stream down his face. \u00a0After the show, he steals the Diva's dress and returns to his apartment to clutch it while listening,\u00a0over and over, to her voice. Eventually even the \u00a0illicit sonic reproduction cannot contain Jules's desire to possess Cynthia; he tries to create a reproduction-in-the-flesh by seeking out a black prostitute and paying her to wear the stolen gown.

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Through unsettling images such as these, Diva depicts the tape recorder as a technological phallus. It isn't only that women are fetishized recording objects, but they are actively chased away from the machine.When an excited Alba reaches out to grab Jules's Nagra, he pushes her away, barking \"Don't touch my stuff. It is precious. Don't touch it. . .The levels were precisely set.\" \u00a0She backs off, sighing, \"You and your Nagra,\" in a tone that is both taunting and resigned. The only woman to make her own recording, Nadia, ends up dead, although grateful that her tape will at least allow her to \"pick the time and place to die. There will be witnesses and evidence.\" At least she hopes so.

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6. \u00a0Blow Out\u00a0(MGM 1981, Directed by Brian DePalma):

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Jack Terry (John Travolta) and his shotgun mic

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Fresh off the success of Grease and Urban Cowboy, 70s hearththrob John Travolta brings macho swagger to the role of Jack Terry, a burned out sound designer who is complacent about getting the \"perfect\" female scream for B-grade horror flicks. When his director busts his chops about finding some \"new wind\"\u2014he had been squeaking by with library sounds\u2014he finds himself doing some midnight lurking in a Philadelphia park. Armed with his trusty shotgun microphone, he is ready when an out-of-control car careens around a corner and plunges off a bridge.\u00a0 Instantly casting his equipment to the ground\u2014oh! not The Nagra III!!!\u2014he pulls a drowning woman from the car, the woefully vulnerable Sally (Nancy Allen).\u00a0\u00a0 As if this isn't bad ass enough to beef up the rep of \"sound guys\" for eternity, Jack cockily lets the investigating detective have it when he insinuates that Jack misheard what happened on the bridge: \"I know what an echo sounds like, all right? I'm a sound man! The bang was before the blow out, all right?\"

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Carrying overtones of Chappaquiddick, the incident that Jack earwitnessed involved the death of a very prominent governor who was headed to the White House. The powers that be want to silence Sally and erase all traces of her presence in the\u00a0passenger seat, so they turn a deaf ear toward Jack's insistence that he has a tell-tale shot on tape that proves the \"accident\" was really murder. Ostensibly\u00a0about the tenuous relationship between politics and \"the truth,\"\u00a0Blow Out\u00a0also asks audiences to press pause and consider the disposability of women in our contemporary culture\u2013how their real lives are often mixed down, edited out, and even erased, while their recorded representations are hyperamplified and hungrily consumed.

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Terry, listening for the telltale shot

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Inspired by The Conversation and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 Blow Up\u2014in which a swinging London photog enlarges a photo to reveal a killer\u2014Blow Out depicts Jack on an obsessive rewind rampage, listening and re-living the incident on the bridge trying to prove the murder. The tape recorder is a both a necessary foundation of the film's plot and a figurative device sparking audiences to listen again and to listen differently, to simultaneously question what they hear and to stake their lives on it. Interestingly, in a movie obsessed with sound and depictions of careful listening, audio itself cannot tell the whole story; it is only after Jack merges his soundtrack with a DIY film reconstructing the murder via newspaper photos that he feels his voice will finally be heard. Ultimately, however, the brash and principled sound man fails to find a listener. The haunting ending of the film, which I will not reveal, suggests that American culture mainly values \"reality\" and \"truth\" when it comes packaged as throwaway entertainment and that the female voice in terror is at the very heart of this\u00a0titillating cycle of consumption.

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And in a supporting role. . \u00a0.\u00a0

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Real Genius\u00a0(Tristar, 1986, Director Martha Coolidge. \u00a0This film is notable for having five women on the sound team, editors\u00a0Anna Boorstin,\u00a0Virginia Cook-McGowan,\u00a0Julia Evershade,\u00a0Roxanne Jones, and assistant editor\u00a0Christy Richmond).

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\"Math on tape is hard to follow, so please listen carefully!\"

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The tape recorder slyly appears in the midst of this sarcastic blast to the late cold war that chronicles the revenge exacted by a band of brilliant college students (led by a young Val Kilmer) when they find out that the laser they developed for their university was intended for use by the U.S. government as an airborne weapon. Appearing in the first of two iconic 80s montages\u2014this one set to the Comsat Angels' \"I'm Falling\"\u2014the vector-like proliferation of tape recorders silently communicates much anxiety about the technological landscape of the 1980s. \u00a0When our irrepressible uber-nerd protagonist Mitch (Gabriel Jarrett) first begins his semester, he arrives at a full math lecture, barely noting the peppering of small personal recorders nudged to the corners of his classmate's desks. \u00a0As time passes, the camera revisits Mitch, still earnestly scribing notes alongside what is now only a handful of other students; he is surrounded by a sea of boom boxes the size of bread boxes and flat black slimline recorders, with a few candy apple red models thrown in for '80s hipness.

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Finally, the earnest Mitch arrives alone, notebook in hand, only to find a completely empty lecture hall, save for the spinning spools of various tape recorders. The professor, too, has left the building\u2014a reel to reel drones on at the head of the classroom, in front of a chalkboard that states, \"Math on tape is hard to follow: so please listen carefully.\" The pained look on Mitch's face says it all: the meritocratic world of ideas that he once expected to inherit quite simply no longer exists, if it ever had. \u00a0And, in a contemporary moment where online courses and \"webinars\" are the rule of the day and we stockpile podcasts like we have thousands of years to live, the humor of the tape-to-tape lecture cuts a little too closely. Suddenly I want to tap the mic and ask: \"is this thing on? Bueller? . . .Bueller?\"

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/q4y9d-stv83","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=2874","image":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/tape_lauren1.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1313366400,"rid":"e2fws-z8d28","summary":"[If you missed the first two installments, hit \"pause\" and rewind to June's piece on Noir, and July's discussion of Walter Murch]. The third and final installment of my summer series on the top 6 appearances of the tape recorder in film focuses on the 1980s, a decade obsessed with what Hillel Schwartz called \"the Culture of [\u2026]","tags":["Archival","Article","Film/Movies/Cinema","Gender","History"],"title":"Play it Again (and Again), Sam: The Tape Recorder in Film (Part Three on the 1980s)","updated_at":1787782766,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2011/08/15/play-it-again-and-again-sam-the-tape-recorder-in-film-part-three-on-the-1980s/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Trammell","given":"Aaron"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

\"\"We're all familiar with the stereotype. Inside the library, deep in study, you stumble upon something funny, a pun, a quip or even a reference to one of the meme-like librarians do-Gaga sing along. Whatever it is, its funny. . . hilarious even. At first you try to bottle it in, but what starts as a snigger eventually manifests itself as boisterous laughter. You're making noise, then: SHHHHHHHHHHHH! Libraries, for better or worse, are quiet spaces, but they are also important third-spaces, social forums and purveyors of an all-ages educational opportunity. Even though we imagine libraries to be quiet, they often distribute music. This blog entry suggests a musical intervention of sorts, a reconstitution of the library as a space of noise. A site of collaboration in the public imaginary where conversations can take place over a splice of Iggy Pop and Tchaikovsky fading from one century to the next. This is no pipe dream, it is a radical rethinking of what tomorrow's library could be within the parameters of virtual space.

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This idea is nothing new, Library Information Science scholars like Brenda Dervin have been arguing since the seventies that libraries should be configured as sites of community and activity, not as tombs of information. There is a fundamental tension still; libraries are a space of study, and most users are more comfortable reading in a quiet space. Virtual spaces offer a way out of this problematic by allowing for a second acoustic space for users to listen in, a space which can be conveniently tethered to social networking software, like Facebook. I am arguing, along with my friend Nathan Graham, that libraries are the ideal setting through which to stage a new social platform of participatory and collaborative listening. Using emergent tools from social media platforms, users can cobble lists for shared virtual listening (complete with edited audio clips) and discuss them in a virtual forum. Because of the library's institutional history as an educational space, these locally hosted forums can stage a strong argument for collaborative listening as fair use, an integral part of the 21st century library.

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Right now this idea is just a seed: we are thinking of the platform, its potentials and its restrictions. Notably, in a not so discreet attempt to get feedback from the Sounding Out! reader base, I want to further entertain the idea of collaborative listening. Collaborative listening is a more interactive form of collective listening \u2013 it implies that a conversation between listeners is taking place. Some physical spaces of collaborative listening could be the living room while a record spins on a turntable, the classroom where a group of students discuss a song, a subway train where two people share MP3 earbuds, a car in a parking lot surrounded by kids all listening to its stereo, or even Youtube and Last.fm where people often leave comments about songs in the forum below. It is important to consider open spaces which can push against the impending corporate monetization of music sharing and cloud computing as Patrik Wikstrom establishes in his 2010 book, The Music Industry. Bringing this conversation to libraries helps to smash our prejudice of the library as a tomb of knowledge, it opens up the space and facilitates conversation between a greater breadth of citizens. Hopefully, this platform will help transform the library into a open source hub of conversation and collaboration.

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So let us listen silently with earbuds in, to the libraries who might channel noise through the internet, a fantasy/testimony to the hopeful sounds of tomorrow.

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AT

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/fb9fr-hpg35","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=807","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1288569600,"rid":"6zqxp-rvt09","summary":"We're all familiar with the stereotype. Inside the library, deep in study, you stumble upon something funny, a pun, a quip or even a reference to one of the meme-like librarians do-Gaga sing along. Whatever it is, its funny. . . hilarious even.","tags":["Archival","Article","Digital Humanities","Internets","Libraries"],"title":"Remix the Libraries / Collaborative Listening","updated_at":1787782766,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/11/01/remix-the-libraries-collaborative-listening/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Silva","given":"Liana M."}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

In the March 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, David Means published a short story titled \"The Knocking\" (find it online here) that I found interesting for its clear emphasis on sound\u2013particularly on noise. In a nutshell, the story presents us with two neighbors who don't like each other from first sight: one who lives upstairs and makes noise all day, and one who lives downstairs and has to cope with the constant influx of sound. What strikes me as interesting is that the narrator, understandably annoyed, describes the sounds coming from his neighbor's apartment as \"knocks.\" The story, which aims to give us a look into the sad life of the man downstairs who can't stand the noises coming from upstairs, actually ends up being a study in noise.

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\"The Knocking\" is all about knocks: knocks as sounds and knocks as noise. The story starts out with a perturbed narrator, annoyed by the sounds emanating from the apartment above him. In the first paragraph\u2013comprised of just two sentences\u2013the sentences seem to flow like sounds floating in the wind. But don't let the sensation fool you, the noises come off as rough and harsh (or at least that is how the narrator perceives them): \"I know, as I wait, that the knocking will begin again, if not in the form of his tapping heel, then as some other kind of knocking: perhaps the sound of the hammer he uses to pound nails\u2026, or the rubbery thud of his printer at work\u2026, or the thump of his mattress hitting the slats.\" The narrator admits that the sounds are not knocks per se, but that they became knocks over time due to their \"mechanistic, reproduced quality.\" Noise is clearly in the ear of the beholder, according to the narrator. However, further down, the narrator shows us a deeper understanding of the knocks: \"At some point the sweet, even anachronistic, broom swish switched over to knock mode; not so much the actual sound but, rather, the intent behind the gesture had gone from the act of sweeping to the sound that the act made, so that it was clear to me below that what had started out as a normal cleaning routine had, perhaps in response to my moaning and occasional shouts up at the ceiling between sweeps, shifted to knocking.\" The noise is displaced from the listener to the one making the noise; if the intention is to make noise, noise it is. As the story flows he understands the sounds his neighbor is making as more than just annoying rapts; he shows us how the sounds gain meaning via the listener as well as the the person making the noise.

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Eventually the sounds become a metaphor for what is going on inside of him. The narrator has come out of a failed marriage, and we find out that before he moved to that apartment, he was married and had children. All that is left is an apartment and a fussy neighbor upstairs. The repetition and the lifelessness of the knocking echo the emptiness of his life. The knocking mocks what is left. This is best illustrated when he tries to explain to himself what happened in his marriage through his theory of love:

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\"Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, begins to form something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the penultimate days in the house by the Hudson), and then is, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss; Mary gone, kids gone)\"

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It is one of the most beautiful passages in the story, and does justice to the theme of sound in the story. Love becomes sound, and instead of love at first sight, we have love at first vibration.

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This story brought together two of my passions: literature and sound. Although I don't claim that Means is the first author to focus a story on sounds, he did well by reading in those sounds the lives of the listeners/characters. \"The Knocking\" is short and enjoyable, but it is also meaningful and deep. I did not know about David Means' fiction until this issue( here you can see the collections he's published, and here you can read his latest story in The New Yorker), but after reading this story and noticing his attention to sonic detail, I wonder if his other stories are just as mindful. It's refreshing to find fiction that attentive to sound, even if it brings back memories of my own noisy neighbors.

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Bonus Track: read a brief interview of Means in The New York Times by clicking here.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/sjk3r-tbf34","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=823","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1289260800,"rid":"w40f5-xvz33","summary":"In the March 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, David Means published a short story titled \"The Knocking\" (find it online here) that I found interesting for its clear emphasis on sound\u2013particularly on noise.","tags":["Acoustics","Listening","Literature","Noise","Sound"],"title":"Check it out: David Means' \"The Knocking\"","updated_at":1787782762,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/11/08/check-it-out-david-means-the-knocking/","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/008rmbt77","name":"Binghamton University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Stoever","given":"Jennifer","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

\"The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself\" \u2013bell hooks, quoted by d. Sabela Grimes at Show and Prove, 9.18.10

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This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP. In fact, I scratched out the rough draft of these lines in my notebook on the bus ride home, all Eminem 8 Mile-style. So embedded somewhere in my words will inevitably be the thick chug of the engine, the squeaky bounce-bounce of the shocks, the ocean-like roar of (the)17, and the steady tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk of hip hop pumping from my fellow commuter's earbuds. Across the bus aisle, this secondhand beat called to me and challenged me to think about ways that sound studies can reach across the (inter)disciplinary aisle to hip hop (and vice versa). So that's where my head's at right now: what does sound studies bring to hip hop's platform? And what does hip hop offer in return?

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I should say first off that I don't necessarily see an intellectual conflict between these two fields\u2014although Norma Coates' 2008 Cinema Journal piece, \"Sound Studies: Missing the (Popular) Music for the Screens?\" makes a compelling case for institutional turf wars on the horizon between sound studies, media studies, and popular music study writ large\u2014I actually came to sound studies through hip hop, and obviously haven't left hip hop behind (and neither has Sounding Out!: peep Liana Silva and Scott Poulson-Bryant's recent posts). Among the many things that hip hop has done for me and to me\u2014personally, socially, and politically\u2014was to open my ears to all sorts of amazing and important sounds, which eventually translated academically into frustration with the limits of popular music study back in the early 2000s. I found many texts that deconstructed hip hop lyrics and visual imagery, parsed MC's personas, dropped some socio-historical science, and traced capitalist networks like you wouldn't believe, but when it came down to the constitutive element of the medium itself, the sonic art through which it devoted itself to moving heads, hearts, and butts simultaneously, there was silence (and not because Doug E. Fresh said so).

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Outside of Tricia Rose's landmark chapter on \"flow, layering, and rupture\" in 1994's Black Noise, I found precious few texts that were willing or able to engage with the primary way in which hip hop put in work \"if not in the word, in the sound\" as Frederick Douglass once put it a long time ago. Hip hop was, true to its word, bringing the noise, and traditional music studies wasn't making meaning of it in even part of the way that hip hop audiences were. To signify on Shante Smalls's comment at Show and Prove in reference to trying to teach Murs's \"Dark Skinned White Girl\" to an NYU class, hip hop sounded to popular music scholars just like a guy talking over some beats\u2014all flattened out. So I strapped on my headphones night after night, trying to fill this void by listening and writing, writing and listening. You can read my early attempts in a discography of Los Angeles hip hop called \"Audible Angels\" I published online in 2004, in which I tried to capture the sonic signature of each artist I wrote about, integrating it with their vocal style, lyrical themes and historical and regional context. The fact that one of the artists in the discography sent me a remastered version of their record based on some of my commentary not only suggested that I did a halfway decent job, but also that the artists themselves are clamoring for scholars to take their sound as seriously as they do.

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Because of the bus, my experience at the conference was shorter than I would have liked, so I can't remotely claim full coverage (I am especially sorry to have missed Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr.'s talk on Filipino DJs and contemporary U.S. racial formations, which I know would have (re)mixed sound, race, and hip hop, hamster style), so I will have to sample the bits and bytes that I did hear.

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In a panel on \"Methodology, Pedagogy, and Educational Practice,\" M.C. K-Swift talked about the sonic differences between standard English, Black English, and Hip Hop English and what it means to code switch between all three. Johan S\u00f6derman discussed similar issues about hip hop in Sweden, especially the way in which hip hop enables marginalized Swedish youth to sound and signify differently in the same language.

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In the panel I moderated, \"Aesthetic Dimensions of Hip Hop\"\u2014in which there were amazing papers by Naomi Bragin on popping in Northern California's East Bay and Jessica Pab\u00f3n on the \"feminist masculinity\" of female graffiti in Brasil, Mexico, and the US\u2014sound was largely a shadow presence, animating limbs, accompanying film, and being punctuated by muscle pops and krylon hisses. Jens Althoff discussed 1970s samples briefly in his talk on the influence of blaxploitation cinema on hip hop but there was really only one paper that explicitly addressed sound, Joshua Bennett 's \"I Love it When You Call Me Big (Poppa).\" Bennett used Barthes' \"The Grain of the Voice\" to give an evocative and nuanced reading of the \"palpable sense of surplus\" in Notorious B.I.G's voice, the way in which his heavy timbre comes together with his \"wheezing undertone\" to re-present his corporeal body as superabundant rather than substandard.

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Finally, in the afternoon, I was fascinated by Nicole Hodges Persley's exploration of the sound of cross-racial appropriation both in her paper, \"People in Me\" and in her performance, in which she used both voice and gesture to represent a white suburban teen, a young Asian graffiti writer from Silverlake, and a Senegalese student drawn to the U.S. by hip hop. Persley raised important questions about who has \"the right to talk black\" while addressing the pleasures and the politics of using the body as a remixing agent and translator of hip hop, accent, culture and immigrant experience.

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So of course I came to Show and Prove eager to take in some talk about sound\u2014and I wouldn't say I was disappointed. Surprised (slightly) and challenged (totally), but not disappointed. Sound wasn't as center stage as I expected, but it certainly wasn't marginalized either. Instead, it was ubiquitous; sound in hip hop studies seems to be taken for granted in the same way that vision is just about everywhere else. Although hip hop is understood to be an audio-visual art, its organizing metaphors are sonic: remixing, sampling, scratching, and Dj-ing all describe sonic phenomena as well as aural frameworks for understanding the world. The way in which hip hop studies take sound for granted presents both a lesson and an opportunity for sound studies.

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While I had been hoping to hear more papers that brought the conversation back around to the beat, I felt that all the papers spoke through it, even if the topic reached beyond it to bodily movement, visual culture, theatre, and pedagogy. And that is where I think hip hop studies asks sound studies to step up its game\u2014to take seriously sound's intersection with the other senses, using sound as a jumping off point and not always a final destination. In Jeff Chang 's Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop, dancer Rennie Harris described bodily movement as \"just the last manifestation of sound,\" which blew my mind, because even though sound and motion are so fluidly entangled, we usually talk about them as if they are separate entities.

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On the flip side, one of the things that distinguishes sound studies from popular music study is its methodology\u2014the way in which sound is treated as an active process, a way of thinking and being, rather than solely an object of study. And this methodology is what I think sound studies can offer hip hop studies\u2014a sustained conversation on listening in a multiplicity of forms. Listening practices are what knits the different elements of hip hop together, what links artist to producer to audience, sometimes in the very same body at the very same time. What happens when we think of hip hop artists as listeners? What if we viewed them not only as producers of tracks but also of listening practices? Is there such a thing as hip hop listening? If so, what are its ethics and aesthetics? How might hip hop listening practices impact and feed into the various modes of hip-hop performance in music and beyond: dance, cinema, theatre, literature, graphic design?

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So, while hip hop studies and sound studies have quite a bit to show and prove to each other, I can't be the only one eager for the collabo.

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\"Like

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\u2014

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Featured Image by Michael Coughlin, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED

","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/apjdn-mx606","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=639","image":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/52537656624_f5cccc6dc1_c.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1285027200,"rid":"pjxkc-ycq37","summary":"This past Saturday, I got up before dawn and bussed it into New York City to attend Show and Prove , a conference on \"the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of hip hop studies in practice,\" organized by my friend and colleague, Imani Kai Johnson. The conference was excellent\u2014intense, earnest, and busting at the seams with ideas\u2014and was one of the few in recent memory that left me energized and ready to put pen to paper ASAP.","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Black Studies","Conferences","Diasporic Sound"],"title":"Ill Communication: Hip Hop Studies & Sound Studies @ Show And Prove","updated_at":1787782789,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/09/20/ill-communication/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Ford","given":"Robert"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"
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Ever since the Chicago Cubs installed an organ at Wrigley Field in 1941, music has been a part of the baseball ballpark experience. Unlike basketball, hockey or football, baseball doesn't have non-stop action, and its frequent periods of inaction give an organist or stadium DJ a broad canvas on which to improvise. Initially, ballpark music was strictly organ music, as organs were present at every ballpark by the middle of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the organist was complemented by the stadium DJ, who played recorded music over the stadium sound system. Gradually, the DJ overtook the organist and many stadiums no longer play live organ music; a little less than half of the 30 ballparks that host Major League Baseball games today don't employ an organist.

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As technology improved, allowing stadium DJs to play music on the computer rather than on the record or 8-track player, teams began allowing baseball players to choose the music they wanted to hear. And, in the 1990s, the phrase \"walk-up music\" entered the sports fan's vernacular. Position players chose songs for the stadium DJ to play when they walked from the on-deck circle to the batter's box. Pitchers picked music to be played while they warmed up at the start of their outing.

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Players select their music in a variety of ways. Some pick a song from their favorite artists, artists that often originate from their corner of the world (e.g. a lefthanded pitcher from Texas warming up to country music or Southern hip-hop; a utility infielder from the Dominican Republic opting for a merengue or bachata tune). Others will choose music they feel helps motivate them to perform better on the field, choosing a new song whenever they enter a slump. Some players will even allow the stadium DJ to pick their music. In 2007, New York Mets third baseman David Wright gave the fans the opportunity to vote for his walk-up song online, giving them list of 50 of his favorites to choose from (the fans choice: \"Me & U,\" the only hit by Cassie, a hip-hop artist).

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While almost every baseball player has walk-up music, only a handful of players have had their music become an iconic part of their image and legacy. The best example of a player who's become closely identified with his entrance music is New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera.

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Photo by Flickr user Dennis

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Rivera has been the Yankees' closer for more than a decade and a half, called upon to get the last three outs in the ninth inning when the Yankees are ahead by a handful of runs. The closer's role is one of the most pressure-packed in all of team sports. Do it well, and your opponents often feel defeated as soon as you come into the game. Do it poorly, and you'll frustrate your teammates, your manager and your team's fan base. After all, nothing's more demoralizing than losing a game you've all but won, and a closer's job is to turn almost-certain wins into definite victories. Rivera is arguably the best closer in baseball history, an integral part of a Yankees team that's won five championships and advanced to the playoffs in all but one of his 16 seasons.

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During Rivera's rise to prominence in the late 1990s, the DJ at Yankee Stadium, his home ballpark, began playing \"Enter Sandman\" by Metallica when Rivera came into the game. To a certain extent, \"Enter Sandman\" seems like a strange choice for Rivera's entrance. While it does start off softly before building to a eardrum-thumping crescendo of guitars, \"Enter Sandman\" is a loud, heavy-metal song. Rivera, the most reserved of the Yankees superstars developed over the last two decades, is serene and soft-spoken. To the untrained ear, \"Enter Sandman\" sounds arrogant and boastful, two words that have never been used to describe Rivera.

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However, in many ways, \"Enter Sandman\" does compliment Rivera. Its lyrics, about a child battling nightmares as he tries to sleep, are a perfect metaphor for Rivera, whose job is to gives opposing hitters nightmares while trying to put the game to bed in the Yankees' favor. Rivera, a deeply religious man by all accounts, probably approves of the song's encouragement to \"Say your prayers little one\" and its recitation of a classic children's bedtime prayer (\"Now I lay me down to sleep/Pray the Lord my soul to keep\u2026\"). In addition, Rivera may also get a kick out of the idea of opposing hitters saying their prayers before facing the dancing and darting fastballs that he throws with ruthless efficiency and pinpoint accuracy.

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It also helps that Yankee Stadium is one of the loudest outdoor venues anywhere. Its combination of rabid fans and their New York-style obnoxiousness and hubris combined with an ear-splitting sound system that could wake the dead already makes the Bronx, NY stadium one of the toughest venues for visiting teams to compete. Combine those elements with a song that's loud, even before you raise the volume, being played while an indomitable closer jogs to the pitcher's mound from the bullpen behind the outfield fence and makes his warm-up throws and it isn't hard to understand why many enemy teams are mentally vanquished before they even take their cuts against Rivera, whose entrance routine serves to both whip the Yankee Stadium crowd into a frenzy and intimidate opponents.

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Photo by de Mel

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Would Rivera be as dominant without such scene-setter is a legitimate question. While baseball is a very technical sport, requiring precision whether you're fielding a ground ball or laying down a bunt, emotion and superstition has a prominent place in the sport. Yankee Stadium is already one of the most hostile stadiums for opponents; throw in a great closer coming out to a ominous, foreboding song and it's understandable how an opponent's anxiety would be heightened. You could also argue that, Rivera is so good, what's playing over the sound system is immaterial. After all, Rivera does play half his games on the road, away from Yankee Stadium and \"Enter Sandman,\" and he has managed to excel in those contests as well.

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Rivera is now 40 years old and still among the best at an age when most baseball players are retired or on the downward slope. Upon retirement (and the requisite five-year waiting period), Rivera will almost certainly be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame with the other greats. And, while \"Enter Sandman\" hasn't been the sole reason for his success, it will always be an indelible part of Rivera's legacy.

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\u2013Robert Ford

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/k88zb-hvp37","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=659","image":"https://i0.wp.com/rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/rivera.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1285632000,"rid":"50xvw-vat28","summary":"Ever since the Chicago Cubs installed an organ at Wrigley Field in 1941, music has been a part of the baseball ballpark experience. Unlike basketball, hockey or football, baseball doesn't have non-stop action, and its frequent periods of inaction give an organist or stadium DJ a broad canvas on which to improvise.","tags":["Acoustics","Article","Music","Place And Space","Sound"],"title":"Closing Time, or What's In a Song?","updated_at":1787782784,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/09/27/closing-time-or-whats-in-a-song/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Trammell","given":"Aaron"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

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It's no secret that over the course of the twentieth century, aesthetic productions have drawn increasingly on recycled and re-appropriated materials. Perhaps, for this reason, the above video \u2013 a rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller on the newly minted Mario Paint Composer \u2013 sounds absolutely mundane. Nothing new, just another curiosity born out of the collective consciousness we cannily refer to as the Internets, which we understand jokingly as a series of tubes, notably Youtubes. Laffs aside, this phenomena complicates many traditional modes of interpretation.How do we hear the music of a convergence era when within it lies a devious set of connotations, each serving to reorient the listener to its own particular theme? What tactics do listeners take when interpreting this semiotic collision of sound, icon and song? These questions complicate the topic of genre, where a social consensus traditionally guides the collective organization of a medium. What social and sonic forms shape our understanding of Thriller as it was reproduced by Mario Paint Composer on Youtube in 2008?

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Before delving too deeply into a discussion of genre, it is important to situate the phenomena of convergence in a pre-digital context. Although the user-centric nature of web 2.0 has certainly helped to accelerate this process, one needs to look no further than Dick Hebdige's \"The Meaning of Mod,\" in the anthology Resistance Through Rituals, to sense an earlier precedent to the mash-up culture we observe today. Drawn to the adventure of a dangerous soHo night-life culture, \"The mod dealt his blows by inverting and distorting the images (of neatness, of short hair) so cherished by his employers and parents, to create a style, which while being overtly close to the straight world was nonetheless incomprehensible to it.\" Although Hebdige is writing in 1974, long before computers would become mainstream, he makes a worthy point here about the appropriation of fashion. Constructing it as an act of distortion,Hebdige argues that early 1960s mods (understood here as a working class youth movement), through their stylistic appropriations were able to undermine the fabric of British society. By acting as criminals, but lauding the style of white collar workers \u2013 suits, short hair \u2013 mods help to show that semiotic convergence is not something new, instead it can be read as a stance of resistance.

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In the case of Thriller, resistance is too strong a word. I prefer distortion, it is value neutral, although it can easily be understood in the context of resistance. Thriller on Mario Paint Composer distorts Thriller by Michael Jackson. By simplifying the song to a series of 16-bit samples, the song's transcriber geoffnet1, translates it all to the symbolic language of Mario Paint \u2013 where mushrooms sound like drums, hearts are bass notes, ships are cymbals, flowers are horns, cars are synth pads and game-boys sound like blips. geoffnet1's Thriller is a distortion of the Mario Paint Composer sound as well; originally a part of the 1992 Super Nintendo cartridge, Mario Paint, Mario Paint Composer is now a fan-modded update of its original form. Unlike the original Mario Paint Composer has been designed with functionality taking a precedent over accessibility. Originally marketed as an intuitive music scripting software, the following limitations were part and parcel of the platform (These restrictions have been copied from Tombobbuilder's page, a musician who works with the limits of Mario Paint Composer as it was originally distributed.):

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1. Only 24 measures are available.
\n2. No more than three notes at a time.
\n3. You can not double notes on the same line or space.
\n4. Tempo is restricted.
\n5. There is no fluctuation in dynamics (volume).
\n6. No sharps or flats are available.
\n7. Can only compose using the \"white keys\" from the piano.
\n8. Only two of each letter name are available (except A, where there is only one).
\n9. C major and A natural minor are the only keys to compose in.

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Of these restrictions, Thriller only conforms to the third: \"You can not double notes on the same line or space,\" in this regard it distorts what most people understand as the Mario Paint sound as well. By no means am I calling this work inauthentic, instead I am calling attention to the stability of sonic tropes in our cultural memory. The sound of Mario Paint is not remembered for the limitations described above, instead, there is a stable and distinct sonic fingerprint which is derived from the alchemy of icon, sound and song though which genre can be constructed and maintained.

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Thriller is 8-bit music, even though there is nothing 8-bit about it. Similar to the way in which mods subverted the British status-quo, Thriller puts the idea of genre into crisis. This is not a crisis that works to undermine the existence of genre as a phenomenon, it is instead a crisis of interpretation, where the traditional means through which a genre can be identified are called into question. No longer can the easy answers be found at Allmusic or Wikipedia, some sounds have become more epistemically ellusive. Ultimately, this is a good thing, as it encourages listeners to take a critical ear to what they are listening to \u2013 and how they come to understand it.

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AT

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/rg065-mge82","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=679","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1286323200,"rid":"t62fq-txa43","summary":"It's no secret that over the course of the twentieth century, aesthetic productions have drawn increasingly on recycled and re-appropriated materials. Perhaps, for this reason, the above video \u2013 a rendition of Michael Jackson's Thriller on the newly minted Mario Paint Composer \u2013 sounds absolutely mundane.","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Digital Humanities","Digital Media","Games/Gaming"],"title":"Genre in the Age of Convergence: Mario Paint Composer","updated_at":1787782781,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/06/genre-in-the-age-of-convergence-mario-paint-composer/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Pape","given":"Andreas Duus"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

Three hours a week, I speak to a group of ninety-nine people and explain how to make choices. I talk loudly, to the back of the room, then I lower my voice to engage them more intimately. I pause and let the room grow silent. Near the end of the twice-weekly performance, I review my main points. Like a bell, this signals to my audience that they will leave soon; they begin to rustle in their chairs. I say, \"Hey, I'm not done! You can't go yet!\" And they laugh. And they stay.

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Album Cover: Andreas Pape's The Big Hit

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I am an economist and a musician. In both of my chosen fields, performance is a necessary component. As an economist, I teach and I present papers; as a musician, I put on shows. Performance is the willful construction of a series of events using the body\u2014hands, voice, gesture\u2014and the instruments the body can manipulate to create a particular mental state for the witnesses. In the days leading up to my next show on October 16th at The Beef in Binghamton, NY, I have pondered the intimate ways in which listening structures the corporeal nature of performance. As an economist, I understand that performance is strategic, in that I imagine a listener for my music and choose my actions to influence that listener. As a musician, I recall moments that I listened.

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\"Audience as available instrument in performance\"

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The audience is one of the instruments available to the performer. I plan to use this to my advantage at my upcoming show. When I envision my fingers first passing across my guitar, the audience will not be engaged with me: they will be talking to each other, getting a drink, finding a seat. I will play a song at a normal volume; given the other noise, it will be background, not a centerpiece. Most people will hear it, but not many will notice it. The climax of the song will involve me holding a loud, high vocal note until all other noise dies. Each person there will have a moment in which they hear that note and wonder what it is and they will grow silent. By the end of the note, every person in the room will realize that the performance has started and that this sustained note is part of a song they have been hearing but not listening to for several minutes. As the note draws to a close, they will feel compelled to shout, to clap, to exclaim. Their part in this performance\u2014the noise, the silence, then the noise\u2014will be one they will play without knowing, beforehand, that they were included.

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I imagine this moment like the opening to Belle And Sebastian's \"I Don't Love Anyone:\" 'I don't love anyone/ You're not listening/ \u2026 I don't love anyone/You're not listening even now.' As a listener, you realize as he says 'even now,' that he's right: you weren't listening. It was a transcendent moment that shocks me as a listener: the author of the song had climbed inside my head without me knowing, and then was able to name exactly the listening experience I was having.

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\"Rhythm to Organize Silence\"

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In Chronicles, Bob Dylan describes a listening experience built around a singer who constructs her own way to view the rhythm of a song. \"I'd seen [Martha Reeves] in New York \u2026 where she'd been playing with the Motown Revue. Her band couldn't keep up with her, had no idea what she was doing and just plodded along. She beat a tambourine in triplet form, up close to her ear and she phrased the song as if the tambourine was her entire band\" (160). This phrasing that is out-of-phase with the band (or the audience) reminds me of Odetta.

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\"\"

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Odetta might be best known for her performance of \"I've been driving on Bald Mountain/Water Boy.\" She rebuilt those two traditional 4/4 folk songs swung onto a three-beat triplet, so what emerges is a swinging triplet where beats two and three are rushed in after a lethargic one: ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three; ONE\u2026 two three. After several times though the verses, she stops the guitar entirely and carries a long vocal note, setting up a moment of unnaturally long silence. The guitar and grunt that end the silence seem arrhythmic to my ear, but Odetta can sing by her own time that swings in and out of phase with the rest of us. We're not meant to know when resolution comes, and it's that uncertainty that Odetta wants us to experience.

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I once saw Jeff Tweedy use a controlled complete silence with Wilco's performance of \"Misunderstood\" from Being There in 2001. Tweedy doesn't use uncertainty as Odetta does; his use of silence is more akin to methodically turning on and off a bedroom light in the middle of the night. In particular, the band performs an extended outro which involves two beats of sound and two beats of silence: \"NOTHING \u2013 -.\" On \"NAH\" and \"THING\" the whole band is together on two identical, stinging staccato notes.

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On the off beats, the entire theater is silent. When I was in the audience, it was so quiet you could have heard the audience breathe. . .if anyone had been taking a breath. On some level, I was in a state of shock, or at least, a state of being constantly startled; everyone must have been, because the silences were complete. On another level, I felt at peace. I calmly looked from face to face in the audience behind me, and everyone had the same startled, smiling expression I'm sure I had. I looked around the room\u2013just looked, without an agenda, just idle curiosity\u2013for the first time in what felt like years.

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Seeking to recreate a combination of those listening experiences in my audience, I wrote \"Something This Easy,\" a song about confusing interactions with an ex. The song is forty percent silence: nineteen beats of melody followed by thirteen beats of silence. I don't tap my foot or keep time during the silence, save for holding my breath, and I bring back the sound when I (have to) exhale. I try to keep the audience slightly and repeatedly startled by resisting any precise expectation of sound that they may hold. After a beat, the audience will break the silence when I make them laugh with the line: \"I know your body like a Swedish furniture map.\" With the eruption of laughter in an otherwise silent room, my audience becomes the instrument creating the music that they are listening to at that moment. That is, they are the only instrument I'm playing.

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As a musician, this is the listening experience I designed: the laughter rings after I've triggered it like a overtone ring on a string long after having been plucked and left. As an economist, I see how I used the imagined listener successfully: I forecasted how these real listeners would react, and was able to use that forecast to design not only this moment, but potentially many others as well.

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Downloadable Pape Mix of Wilco, Odetta, and his own \"Something this Easy\":

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Rhythm to Organize Silence (Misunderstood_Tweedy_ Bald Mtn_Odetta_ SmthThisEasy_Pape)

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View Andreas Duus Pape's latest album The Big Hit here

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/5jdf8-5jy70","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=690","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1286928000,"rid":"t0qx4-mhm27","summary":"Three hours a week, I speak to a group of ninety-nine people and explain how to make choices. I talk loudly, to the back of the room, then I lower my voice to engage them more intimately. I pause and let the room grow silent. Near the end of the twice-weekly performance, I review my main points. Like a bell, this signals to my audience that they will leave soon; they begin to rustle in their chairs. I say, \"Hey, I'm not done!","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Identity","Listening","Live Music"],"title":"Singing to my Imagined Listener","updated_at":1787782778,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/13/singing-to-my-imagined-listener/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/008rmbt77","name":"Binghamton University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Stoever","given":"Jennifer","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

With all the excitement over the new release of Mavis Staples's You Are Not Alone\"\" (Anti-, produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy), I can't help but be skeptical of the outpouring of Indie love for the album, even as I have been spinning (and enjoying) it myself.\u00a0 It isn't the positive reaction to Staples's talent that is surprising\u2014at 70-plus years, Mavis has been exquisite for quite some time now\u2014but rather the way in which critics have freighted her newest record with the \"uplift\" (AV Club) of a whole lot of souls that haven't ever been to church (at least not in a good long while). Her voice is described as alternately \"raw\" (Paste) and full of a \"depth, power, and warmth that seem increasingly rare in music today\" (hear ya); Consequence of Sound, who cites Tweedy's hand at the boards as the reason for all the current music blog attention, calls her voice \"empathetic. . . powerful. . .soulful. . .touching\" and \"wise.\" If the blogosphere is to be believed, Staples's voice, \"as authentic as it gets\" (buzzine), could really save us all in these tough times. Come to think of it, the fervor of (white) faith in \"authentic\" black music \u00a0shouldn't be that surprising either, given the way in which race has always been entangled with popular music history in the United States.

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Authenticity and the immediacy of experience it implies, have had a long history in the music industry\u2014especially in reference to black artists\u2014stemming back at least to the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s, an all-black acapella troupe celebrated for \"\"powerful live performances whose breakthrough concert also happened to be for a crowd of hipsters: the wealthy congregants of Henry Ward Beecher's Brooklyn church in 1871.\u00a0 Beecher gave the band his enthusiastic support, namely because he felt their sound gave listeners direct access to \"the inner lives of slave hearts expressed in music\" even after slavery had formally ended.

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While the sound of You are Not Alone differs greatly from the Jubilee Singers, the reviews of the record belie and inflame a similar desire for unmediated access to the emotive qualities (a)historically associated with black life and sound in the U.S.: namely suffering, faith, and catharsis. And Staples's record is indeed not alone in this.\u00a0 Many of the sentences from the Staples reviews could easily have been lifted from those of another recent gospel record to capture the indie imagination, Daptone Records's 2008 release Como Now.\u00a0 Starkly different from the breezier, countrified sounds of You Are Not Alone, Como Now is an acapella gospel recording made in a small town in Panola County, Mississippi. The record\u00a0was a risky release for Daptone, a Brooklyn-based label that has consistently produced new funk and soul records since its inception in 2002 by the likes of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and The Budos Band.\u00a0 Although old school sound has always been a part of the label's ethos\u2014its engineers use primarily analog equipment, for example, a major reason Amy Winehouse recorded her throwback Back in Black album at Daptone studios in 2006\u2014marketing stripped-down gospel to its audience of predominately white hipsters would nonetheless prove a daunting task.\u00a0 Treating Como Now as a labor of love and a paying of dues, Daptone attempted to spark interest in the release by relying on the familiar marketing strategies of immediacy, authenticity, and nostalgia.

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\"\"While Como Now's tagline boldly proclaims that the music was \"Recorded Live at Mt. Mariah Church on July 22, 2006\"\u2014and, thus, emphasizing the Now of the title\u2014the cover's vintage civil-rights era design evokes the Como of yesterday, or more accurately, encourages listeners to hear Como now and Como yesterday as one and the same through the vehicle of\u00a0 \"raw gospel testimony.\" Como Now's depiction of the sounds of the past as echoes within the present is as ambiguous as it is uncanny, a sonic window thrown open to simpler times happening somewhere out there, \"deep in the heart of Mississippi\" right now.

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The introductory promotional video from Como Now's website (also uploaded on Youtube) represents the record as an aural time machine to a land and a people isolated from and largely unchanged by technology, modernity, and history.

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Producer Michael Reilly's voiceover locates rawness, emotional release, and \"real religion\" in the sound of black voices, in no small part because the video places his measured Yankee pacing in sonic tension with the song that accompanies it, Mary Moore singing \"When the Gates Swing Open.\"\u00a0 Over Moore's impassioned singing, Reilly assures listeners in a muted deadpan that they will hear \"no pretty piano playing or clever guitar picking, just voices. Pure soul stirring fire from the heart.\"\u00a0 Reilly's sentiments not only evoke the gushing Jubilee Singers' press, but also the ethos of the infamous folklorist John Lomax, who made field recordings in Southern prisons in the 1930s because he sought \"negro singers untainted by white musical conventions\" (as he wrote in 1934's \"Sinful Songs of the Southern Negro\"); singers in Como were actually recorded by John's son Alan in the 1940s.\u00a0 Reilly's voiceover goes on to frame the Como singers as practitioners of what the senior Lomax called \"the real art of simplicity,\" as stripped-down, natural singers who are artful mainly in their artlessness.\u00a0 While Reilly's webcopy mentions how \"children and grown folks alike have been living and breathing gospel for as long as they can remember,\" for example, he fails to mention how the residents of Como have also been writing, rehearsing, and performing it.

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Thus, Como Now's marketing disavows the real artistry of the Como singers, even as it seeks to celebrate it.\u00a0 The simple, natural quality endowed to the singers of Como is visually accentuated by stark imagery representing the town as a down-at-the-heels, living museum of the black life of yesteryear. In the youtube clip, Moore's soaring and spirited singing animates stills of blooming cotton fields, vintage RCA microphones, and splintering upright pianos. \"\"Save for the album cover and one blurry still of a child, there are no shots of the people of Como in the introductory promo, effectively isolating Moore's voice from her corporeal and historical body.\u00a0 This isolation allows listeners to supply their own fantastic imagery and forces them to rely on historical stereotypes about the naturally sonic qualities of black people. By choosing to disembody Como's voices, the promotional video represents the album's music as emanating from, and even haunting, Panola County's lush green fields and battered strip-malls rather than showing it to be a hard-fought creation of the residents themselves. To quote Lomax again: \"[The Negro's] songs burst from him, when in his own environment, as naturally as those of a bird amid its native trees.\"

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Although the impulse to make the album reflects a progressive desire to respectfully pay tribute to the black gospel tradition in American popular music\u2014and to provide quality artists like The Como Mamas with critical renown and monetary compensation\u2014Como Now relies on well-worn racial tropes to do so.\u00a0 It also points to the continued presence in American culture of an essentialized \"black voice\" that is naturalized as more emotive, truthful, and soulful than other voices. While this phenomena is socially constructed and the sounds thought of as \"black\" have shifted considerably\u2014when I play early recordings of the Jubilee Singers my students consistently tell me that they sound \"white\" like a \"glee club\"\u2014I find it fascinating that the language used to describe them has largely remained the same.\u00a0 While Como Now's producer at least acknowledges that, in Como, \"no one has to pick up cotton anymore, thankfully,\" the marketing trades on the possibility that, while slavery and sharecropping have ended, its sonic labors have not only endured, but are readily available for download.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/53zey-6kc46","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=530","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1287532800,"rid":"ezn4q-49y95","summary":"With all the excitement over the new release of Mavis Staples's You Are Not Alone (Anti-, produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy), I can't help but be skeptical of the outpouring of Indie love for the album, even as I have been spinning (and enjoying) it myself.","tags":["Advertising","Aesthetics","Archival","Article","Black Studies"],"title":"Como Now?: Marketing \"Authentic\" Black Music","updated_at":1787782775,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/20/como-now/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Silva","given":"Liana M."}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

If masculinity is alive and well [on sports talk radio], femininity exists on talk radio as absence, lack, and difference. \u2014 John Reffue

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Radio al atardecer by Flickr user Dany Rivera

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Tune in to any random sports talk radio show and listen carefully to the voices coming from the radio. Listen to the cadence in their voices, to the passionate tone about the sporting events of the day, to the witty banter with the hosts. Listen to them and see if something stands out to you.

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Most of the people talking on these shows are men.

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Now, go to any sports talk radio website. If you scroll down, you will notice on the webpage a scantily-clad woman. Amidst all of the sports logos, and the pictures of the men who carry the voices on the radio station, you will find eye candy for the listeners who navigate to the page. The websites offer these pictures of women-as-sexual-objects, which stand in opposition to the absence of female voices on the air. This \"absence\" that communications strategist Dr. John Reffue speaks of, the absence of female callers as participants, goes hand in hand with how females are portrayed in sports media more widely: as visual objects. This undermines any authority they might have in the sonic realm and relegates them figuratively to the sidelines. Women are deemed \"eye candy\" and not \"ear candy.\"

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What does the (female) sports fan sound like?

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According to a 2002 Arbitron report, the core demographic of sports radio is male, 25-54, \"nonethnic.\" (Researchers like Dr. David Nylund have pointed out that sports talk radio's listeners are overwhelmingly white.) Even though Arbitron has not studied women's listening habits when it comes to sports talk radio, it would be silly to ignore this demographic for the mere fact that there are female sports fans. Although there are women who listen to sports talk radio and who, on occasion call in, their invisibility in this medium is echoed by how the ratings completely ignore them. (Arbitron has several free studies and reports on their site for women, but none of them talk about women and sports talk radio, let alone talk radio in general. Interestingly enough, they have a study aptly titled \"What Women Want: Factors Driving Tune-In and Tune-Out\" where they briefly point out that there is a segment of female listeners they call \"sports fans\" but they only mention what kinds of music they will tune into.)

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However, this is not the only example of how female sports fans are not heard. Dale Pontz from the blog Dames on Games makes an interesting point about women and sports talk radio when she says,

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my gender is another impediment to my sports talk radio participation. I have learned through many years of watching sports at bars that men don't mind when I sit quietly and watch (although they are known to incorrectly assume I want to flirt), but once I make a valid sports argument, that bemused interest usually becomes veiled hostility.

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In this case, expressing ideas and arguments about the game becomes a turn-off, not what the man was expecting. As someone who enjoys the nuances of the game and who writes about sports, she understands that being seen as a sexual object will prevent men from actually taking what she says seriously. Although she is conflating the visual with the aural in the above, she makes the connection between women and sexuality. Pontz's comment, as well as the responses from several female journalists to the question \"Why Do Women Dislike Talk Radio?, beg the question: are women just not listening to sports talk radio?

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Steve Duemig, sports talk radio host interviewed by John Reffue for his dissertation, mentions that he does have female callers, and that oftentimes their commentary is more nuanced and thought-out than that of their male counterparts. Reffue mentions, \"He [Duemig] indicated that while he believes women are intimidated by the prospect of calling a show, their calls end up being better, smarter calls because\u2026'Men spout shit and women come with facts'\" (128). I too have noticed women calling into sports talk radio shows here in the Kansas City area, so the idea that women do not listen to sports talk radio falls flat. However, it is precisely the rare female voice which draws attention to the absence.

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It's A Man's World

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Sports talk radio is, evidently, the realm for heterosexual men to come to talk about sports, even though they are not the only ones to do so. Nylund explains in his article \"When in Rome: Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Sports Talk Radio\" that \"at this historical moment when hegemonic masculinity has been partially destabilized by global economic changes and by gay liberation and feminist movements, the sports media industry seemingly provides a stable and specific view of masculinity grounded in heterosexuality, aggression, individuality, and the objectification of women.\" Sports talk radio becomes the place where men can participate in this \"stable view,\" and talking and listening become a way of participating.

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But it is John Reffue who focuses on the idea of community that the fans create as they participate in the shows. He mentions on page 9 the \"broadcast format as a discursive space \u2013 a place where many come to make sense of how sports fit into their lives. I believe that in this space, sports fans are afforded a singular and unique venue to cultivate not only a deeper understanding of the sports they love, but to perform community and establish identity(ies), while knowingly or unknowingly contributing to the larger public discourse on race, gender, sexuality and class and politics. (community, identity, understand sport, contribute to public discourse on race, gender, sex, and class)\" Reffue argues that sports talk radio is constructed as a male space through rhetoric and performance. Calling in and engaging the host and the listeners becomes a way of belonging to the community. I will take his argument further and argue that women are not just excluded from the sonic realm of radio by virtue of being women, but that this construction strips their voices of any authority. The divestment of the authority of women's voices reflects tendencies in sports more generally, where women are truly and figuratively relegated to the sidelines.

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The ultimate example is the dearth of female broadcasters, on radio and on television. Nationally there isn't a female sports radio broadcaster that has as much visibility as, say Jim Rome. Men lead the sports talk radio shows. The one nationally syndicated female sports radio talk show host, Nancy Donellan (otherwise known as The Fabulous Sports Babe) went off the air in the late 1990s. This reflects what happens in sports coverage in general: men are the voices of authority when it comes to talking about sports. Although there are female color commentators and play-by-play announcers, they are in the minority. An example is Beth Mowins, who recently became ESPN2's play-by-play announcer for college football games. Men, on the other hand, remain the voice and the face of sports coverage. Even when it comes to covering sports on tv, women are often relegated to the sidelines. It makes even more striking the comment by sound media scholars like Kaja Silverman, Amy Lawrence, and Michele Hilmes that discourses around women's voices cast them as a \"problem.\"

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Who Runs This Town?

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I am not advocating for a change in radio formats or for sports talk radio to be more \"girly.\" That's the kind of attitude that got us here in the first place, the attitude that women and men enjoy different kinds of radio formats. However, women's voices literally and metaphorically must be a part of the sonic landscape of sports talk radio, and sports media in general. Women must be heard over the radio in order for other women to feel like they can be a part of the conversation. If men are deemed competent enough to talk about women's sports, women should be deemed confident enough to talk about men's sports. Women need to make themselves visible, and one way of doing that is by literally making themselves heard. Maybe this way we can get sports radio to listen to women.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/1x2vs-x1e90","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=2843","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1312761600,"rid":"qtp8r-73y92","summary":"Radio al atardecer by Flickr user Dany Rivera Tune in to any random sports talk radio show and listen carefully to the voices coming from the radio. Listen to the cadence in their voices, to the passionate tone about the sporting events of the day, to the witty banter with the hosts. Listen to them and see if something stands out to you. Most of the people talking on these shows are men. Now, go to any sports talk radio website.","tags":["Article","Fandom/Fan Studies","Gender","Listening","Radio"],"title":"Eye Candy: The Absence of the Female Voice in Sports Talk Radio","updated_at":1787782770,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2011/08/08/eye-candy-the-absence-of-the-female-voice-in-sports-talk-radio/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Gold","given":"Benjamin"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

I got my first computer, A Packard Bell desktop, in 1995, when I was 11, and my parents would only buy it after three trips to Comp USA where they found a salesman with enough patience to make them feel OK about hoarding a year's worth of PC Magazines in a box under my bed that I was supposed to use for research, but really I just wanted to get the best computer for games.

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\"\"

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\"This isn't just for games,\" my parents said.

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And there was, of course, a ton of pre-loaded educational software, like Encarta, sending my folks into a state of catatonic euphoria dreaming of Ivy League schools, but there was also a Weezer music video. Specifically, the Spike Jonze-directed video for \"Buddy Holly\" inexplicably hidden in the computer's media files.

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The existence of \"Buddy Holly\" on my computer was as mysterious as the video's special effects. Now considered by aficionados to be a creative high point of the medium, the clip showed the band playing inside an episode of Happy Days, and to my pre-adolescent sense of humor was utterly hilarious.

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More than that, through the backdoor of Windows 95, Weezer, with this music video, attached themselves onto my brain in a real way, and with their humor, made the first significant bridge connecting my musical and emotional islands in a way a CD alone never could. Sure, I liked the song, but I loved that music video.

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Aggressively aging through middle and high school, through Nine Inch Nails and Black Flag, Weezer's first album was just a blue CD stacked with a bunch of other old birthday presents I couldn't return. Their music wasn't harsh enough, and it dealt with realities (sentimental longing, romantic frustration, imagination seen as inner-brain reclusivity) that I hadn't yet developed the ability to experience.

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Then a couple years into high school, on a homemade VHS tape of six hours worth of videos recorded off MTV2, I was once again confronted with the band, this time via their video for \"Say It Ain't So.\" This one was also pretty funny, but it took the band out of a pastiche and into a fully-realized suburban rock fantasy: playing guitars in a garage, doing laundry, and kicking a hacky sack in the backyard.

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Even more importantly, this was the first time I realized how good their music was. Mixing that ever-present humor, with heavy guitars and unapologetic pop hooks, Weezer were reincarnated as instant personal favorite; as anti-venom to blindingly angry music and a reflection of my own growing inner-complexity. The content of the songs on their first album, Weezer, finally registered with me too: the fragility of relationships with \"Say It Ain't So\" and the liberating loneliness of geekdom portrayed with \"In The Garage,\" to me, was deeply profound.

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It didn't take long for me to move on to 1996's Pinkerton, Weezer's second album, and with its discovery came detailed maps guiding me through new musical/emotional landmasses. Pinkerton is built around a conceit of unfiltered confession, with moments of terrifying straightforwardness, but tempered with self-deprecating humor. Songs like \"Across the Sea,\" \"Pink Triangle,\" and \"Falling for You\" tackled the irony and inevitability of heartbreak to the richest and most complex pop the band would ever create. Pinkerton not only mapped my feelings, but fueled them as well, keeping me anchored to the disc for years.

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In point of fact, as I grew into emotional self-realization, Weezer's first two albums became my sad records. These songs, while ironic in tone, were completely genuine in content and delivery, genetically engineered to combine with my particular brain chemistry.

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Pinkerton, though, was a commercial disappointment, and since that self-perceived fail Weezer's interests shifted from writing clever songs, tempering their rich content with sturdy hooks, to jokes. Their third album, also called Weezer, was released in 2001and presented the band as dually trying to tap into the geek ethos of their first record, but this time strictly in visual terms. They became a novelty band, writing \"funny\" pop songs, which are silly and sentimental, but lacking serious emotional content.

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They play shows sponsored by Axe body spray, wear costumes on stage, put an actor from Lost on their latest album cover, even going as far as to name the album after his character; Weezer are now totally vapid. Everything I loved about the band was disintegrated, leaving nothing but a scorched caricature behind.

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\"\"Blame that on the music business if you want, on the shifting roles of music in culture (as an art form now more closely related to branding and licensing as a way to disseminate culture), or even on the needs on the music-listening public, but that would frame \"Buddy Holly's\" appearance on my pre-adolescent computer in a similar way, as nothing more than a cash-in on some big market licensing.

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Well then good job, I guess. And, I guess, with all today's corny gimmicks they're just trying to do the same thing to another generation of fans fifteen years later. But, It's hard for me to think about the band Weezer are now, making it too heartbreaking to listen to those two albums I used to love so much. Weezer were an important band to me. I discovered them when I was new to music, just forming my tastes, and Weezer found a way into my brain by exploiting my non-musical inclinations, and their songs and their songs mapped my emotional center. I'm worried their directions will have me going in circles forever.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/nz545-v6s06","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=765","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1288224000,"rid":"t1zdj-kq472","summary":"I got my first computer, A Packard Bell desktop, in 1995, when I was 11, and my parents would only buy it after three trips to Comp USA where they found a salesman with enough patience to make them feel OK about hoarding a year's worth of PC Magazines in a box under my bed [\u2026]","tags":["Aesthetics","Article","Fandom/Fan Studies","Identity","Listening"],"title":"Hold This Thread: A Partial History of a Rock n'Roll Relationship","updated_at":1787782769,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/10/28/hold-this-thread-a-partial-history-of-a-rock-nroll-relationship/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/008rmbt77","name":"Binghamton University"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Stoever","given":"Jennifer","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

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[If you missed the first two installments, hit \"pause\" and rewind to June's piece on\u00a0Noir, and July's discussion of\u00a0Walter Murch].

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The third and final installment of my summer series on the top 6 appearances of the tape recorder in film focuses on the 1980s, a decade obsessed with what Hillel Schwartz called \"the Culture of the Copy.\"\u00a0While the taped recordings made in earlier films such as Double Indemnity (1944) and Touch of Evil (1958) remained essentially records, discrete evidence of a moment in the past, 1980s films throw the recording itself into question. After all, the mass production of professional grade recording equipment increased the chances that the power once wielded by police, teachers, and audiophiles now lay at the fingertips of say, Ferris Bueller.
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Furthermore, with the development of ever-higher fidelity, gone are the garbled screes of The Conversation (1974) and the feedback squelches of Touch of Evil: 1980s tapes are crystal-clear stand-ins for the original itself, which makes the idea that they could be altered or faked even more terrifying. \u00a0There is a sense of both excitement and fear in\u00a01980s' culture that copies can either best or replace the originals. Remember \"Is it Live or Is it Memorex?\"? or, my personal fave, the Maxell Guy?
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As the wind blasting the Maxell guy's oh-so-perfect 80's coiffure shows, copies have a palpable impact on the world. Copies can defy space, moving orchestras into one's living room. They break the bounds of time, appearing not to age or die. They can be sped up, slowed down, edited, remixed. Perhaps most anxiety-producing of all is that, unlike human beings, copies can theoretically be \u00a0flawlessly\u00a0reproduced, all but instantaneously. Or, conversely, flawed copies can proliferate with frightening speed. All these powers invested in the tape recorder reflected and shaped a mixture of awe and terror about recording's afterlife \u2014what happens after it leaves its maker's hands? \u00a0And, like Jean Baudrillard famously asked in Simulacra and Simulation(1981) does the original even matter (or exist) anymore? Or, will all originals be subsumed in an ironic (and seemingly insatiable) cultural lust for authentically manufactured reality?
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The Diva (Wilhelmenia Fernandez) Sings

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At the center of this lust is the female voice, turned fetish in the 1980's films\u00a0Diva\u00a0and\u00a0Blow Out. Whether screaming in terror, singing the heights of the sublime, or confessing the depths of a passionate hatred, both movies construct women as emotive objects to be recorded, often against their will, and the recordists in these films clamor for and are repelled by the female sounds they capture. (For additional Sounding Out! of the \"problem\" of women's voices in contemporary media culture see last week's post, Liana Silva's \"Eye Candy\" and Aaron Trammell's recent \"GLaDOS, the Voice of Postfeminist Control\"). In fact, this series has traced the cultural construction of the \"sound man\": how mainstream films naturalize recording as the province of men (and, with the exception of Touch of Evil, of white men). The tape recorder's\u00a0increasing accessibility should have meant that women were using the equipment in greater numbers, but according to Hollywood, tape recorders continued to mediate power relationships between (white) men. Think Walter Neff and Barton Keyes. Harry Caul and his anonymous boss. Ferris and Principal Rooney..

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Christina Aguilera and Alicia Keys at the console recording \"Impossible\" (VH1)

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With such a proliferation of representations of male recorders, it can be difficult to imagine a female hand twiddling the knobs, so much so that 95% of the professional recording industry is now male, according to the nonprofit organization\u00a0Women's Audio Mission, that works to increase the number of women behind the boards through youth outreach and training programs.\u00a0While the sole responsibility for this chronic and widespread underrepresentation does not rest entirely on the shoulders of America's dream factory\u2014an NPR story from 2003 on Women Music Producersby Neda Ulaby discusses additional reasons \"Why Female Producers Are a Rare Breed\"\u2014we must also acknowledge that cinematic images actively shape reality, they do not just passively reflect it. Representations limit our imaginations as much as as they embolden them. The images of recording in 1980s films remind us that the mere presence of women's voices is not enough to enable gender equity in our increasingly mediated and technologized public sphere, women must also \"man\" recording equipment, structuring (and shifting) the conditions under which their voices are recorded, framed, heard, and remixed into public consciousness.

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Changing the Face of Sound: Lauren Tabak Punches in (courtesy of Women's Audio Mission)

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Okay, for all the completists out there, a quick recap,\u00a0the first two films are: 1.\u00a0Double Indemnity (1944)\u00a0and 2.\u00a0Blackboard Jungle (1955), with a little Mike Hammer for good measure:\u00a0Kiss Me Deadly (1955). \u00a0The second two are: 3. Touch of Evil (1958) and 4.\u00a0The Conversation (1974), and a leap into the 1980s:\u00a0Ferris Bueller's Day Off\u00a0(1986).

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5. Diva\u00a0(Les Films Galexie, 1981, Dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix):

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\"\"The global sex trade. Transatlantic circulation of music and capital. International piracy rings. The Vietnamese diaspora. Imperialist fetishizing of the bodies (and voices) of women of color. \u00a0Taiwan as a rising force in the international economy. Police stings and gangland killings. Operatic performance and fan worship. Described by Frederic Jameson as \"the first French postmodernist film\" in Signatures of the Visible (1990), Diva is a rich, multilayered narrative that locates the tape recorder at the center of the vast cultural flows and postcolonial power struggles of late capitalism. As much fun Diva\u00a0sometimes has with copies\u2014there are duplicate cars, convenient doppelgangers, random mannequins, multiple decoy tapes\u2014it also explores the melancholic cultural loss caused by a medium that holds out the promise of saving everyone, at the rate of 38.1 centimeters per second.
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At its heart, Diva is an intertwined tale of two tapes, both highly volatile recordings of women's voices that threaten to escape masculine control. \u00a0The first is a bootlegged performance of an acclaimed African American opera singer, Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez) made by Jules (Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Andr\u00e9i), a young, mild-mannered moped-riding postal delivery man who blows his meager checks on top-of-the-line recording equipment and opera tickets. The second is a self-made confession by the tragic Nadia (Chantal Deruaz), a prostitute and the mistress of Jean Saporta (Jacques Fabbri), a crooked cop and underworld kingpin who sends hit men to kill her as she stumbles barefoot down a crowded Parisian street, en route to turning herself in to the cops. \u00a0Nadia's dying act is to sneak the incriminating cassette into Jules's messenger bag, unbeknownst to him, and he spends most of the film zipping around the city on his \"mobillette\" wondering why both the cops and the bad guys are chasing him. \u00a0All he wants to think about is his Diva, Cynthia, and the secret recording he has made of her latest performance.
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Well, it was secret. Until Jules lends it out to impress a preteen roller skating, record-stealing Vietnamese fashionista named Alba (Thuy An Luu) who plays it for the (way) older man she lives with in a creepy ambiguous arrangement, a fortysomething Zen Buddhist hipster tough guy named Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), who then tries to arrange a deal with two nameless, emotionless, mirrored-sunglass wearing, carbon copy Taiwanese business men (yellow peril much?) who are willing to pay top dollar for the tape. \u00a0As Cynthia's manager eventually warns her in the most realistic moment of an otherwise over-the-top film, \"the quality of the recording is perfect. . .and Taiwan never signed any international copyright agreement!\"

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Jules (Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Andr\u00e9i) and his Nagra

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Diva asks audiences to imagine that Cynthia has never been recorded\u2014she wants to preserve the aura of her performances as \"unique moments\"\u2014and she considers pirated recordings as akin to \"theft, rape even.\" The metaphor is uncomfortably extended by the sexualized recording sequence when Jules finally captures her voice, squirming and fiddling with his recorder, hidden underneath a jacket on his lap, as tears stream down his face. \u00a0After the show, he steals the Diva's dress and returns to his apartment to clutch it while listening,\u00a0over and over, to her voice. Eventually even the \u00a0illicit sonic reproduction cannot contain Jules's desire to possess Cynthia; he tries to create a reproduction-in-the-flesh by seeking out a black prostitute and paying her to wear the stolen gown.

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Through unsettling images such as these, Diva depicts the tape recorder as a technological phallus. It isn't only that women are fetishized recording objects, but they are actively chased away from the machine.When an excited Alba reaches out to grab Jules's Nagra, he pushes her away, barking \"Don't touch my stuff. It is precious. Don't touch it. . .The levels were precisely set.\" \u00a0She backs off, sighing, \"You and your Nagra,\" in a tone that is both taunting and resigned. The only woman to make her own recording, Nadia, ends up dead, although grateful that her tape will at least allow her to \"pick the time and place to die. There will be witnesses and evidence.\" At least she hopes so.

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6. \u00a0Blow Out\u00a0(MGM 1981, Directed by Brian DePalma):

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Jack Terry (John Travolta) and his shotgun mic

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Fresh off the success of Grease and Urban Cowboy, 70s hearththrob John Travolta brings macho swagger to the role of Jack Terry, a burned out sound designer who is complacent about getting the \"perfect\" female scream for B-grade horror flicks. When his director busts his chops about finding some \"new wind\"\u2014he had been squeaking by with library sounds\u2014he finds himself doing some midnight lurking in a Philadelphia park. Armed with his trusty shotgun microphone, he is ready when an out-of-control car careens around a corner and plunges off a bridge.\u00a0 Instantly casting his equipment to the ground\u2014oh! not The Nagra III!!!\u2014he pulls a drowning woman from the car, the woefully vulnerable Sally (Nancy Allen).\u00a0\u00a0 As if this isn't bad ass enough to beef up the rep of \"sound guys\" for eternity, Jack cockily lets the investigating detective have it when he insinuates that Jack misheard what happened on the bridge: \"I know what an echo sounds like, all right? I'm a sound man! The bang was before the blow out, all right?\"

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Carrying overtones of Chappaquiddick, the incident that Jack earwitnessed involved the death of a very prominent governor who was headed to the White House. The powers that be want to silence Sally and erase all traces of her presence in the\u00a0passenger seat, so they turn a deaf ear toward Jack's insistence that he has a tell-tale shot on tape that proves the \"accident\" was really murder. Ostensibly\u00a0about the tenuous relationship between politics and \"the truth,\"\u00a0Blow Out\u00a0also asks audiences to press pause and consider the disposability of women in our contemporary culture\u2013how their real lives are often mixed down, edited out, and even erased, while their recorded representations are hyperamplified and hungrily consumed.

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Terry, listening for the telltale shot

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Inspired by The Conversation and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 Blow Up\u2014in which a swinging London photog enlarges a photo to reveal a killer\u2014Blow Out depicts Jack on an obsessive rewind rampage, listening and re-living the incident on the bridge trying to prove the murder. The tape recorder is a both a necessary foundation of the film's plot and a figurative device sparking audiences to listen again and to listen differently, to simultaneously question what they hear and to stake their lives on it. Interestingly, in a movie obsessed with sound and depictions of careful listening, audio itself cannot tell the whole story; it is only after Jack merges his soundtrack with a DIY film reconstructing the murder via newspaper photos that he feels his voice will finally be heard. Ultimately, however, the brash and principled sound man fails to find a listener. The haunting ending of the film, which I will not reveal, suggests that American culture mainly values \"reality\" and \"truth\" when it comes packaged as throwaway entertainment and that the female voice in terror is at the very heart of this\u00a0titillating cycle of consumption.

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And in a supporting role. . \u00a0.\u00a0

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Real Genius\u00a0(Tristar, 1986, Director Martha Coolidge. \u00a0This film is notable for having five women on the sound team, editors\u00a0Anna Boorstin,\u00a0Virginia Cook-McGowan,\u00a0Julia Evershade,\u00a0Roxanne Jones, and assistant editor\u00a0Christy Richmond).

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\"Math on tape is hard to follow, so please listen carefully!\"

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The tape recorder slyly appears in the midst of this sarcastic blast to the late cold war that chronicles the revenge exacted by a band of brilliant college students (led by a young Val Kilmer) when they find out that the laser they developed for their university was intended for use by the U.S. government as an airborne weapon. Appearing in the first of two iconic 80s montages\u2014this one set to the Comsat Angels' \"I'm Falling\"\u2014the vector-like proliferation of tape recorders silently communicates much anxiety about the technological landscape of the 1980s. \u00a0When our irrepressible uber-nerd protagonist Mitch (Gabriel Jarrett) first begins his semester, he arrives at a full math lecture, barely noting the peppering of small personal recorders nudged to the corners of his classmate's desks. \u00a0As time passes, the camera revisits Mitch, still earnestly scribing notes alongside what is now only a handful of other students; he is surrounded by a sea of boom boxes the size of bread boxes and flat black slimline recorders, with a few candy apple red models thrown in for '80s hipness.

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Finally, the earnest Mitch arrives alone, notebook in hand, only to find a completely empty lecture hall, save for the spinning spools of various tape recorders. The professor, too, has left the building\u2014a reel to reel drones on at the head of the classroom, in front of a chalkboard that states, \"Math on tape is hard to follow: so please listen carefully.\" The pained look on Mitch's face says it all: the meritocratic world of ideas that he once expected to inherit quite simply no longer exists, if it ever had. \u00a0And, in a contemporary moment where online courses and \"webinars\" are the rule of the day and we stockpile podcasts like we have thousands of years to live, the humor of the tape-to-tape lecture cuts a little too closely. Suddenly I want to tap the mic and ask: \"is this thing on? Bueller? . . .Bueller?\"

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\n\"\"\"Add\"Add\"Add\"Add\"Add\"Add\"Add\"Add\"Add\"Add\"\"

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\"Like

","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/q4y9d-stv83","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=2874","image":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/tape_lauren1.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1313366400,"rid":"e2fws-z8d28","summary":"[If you missed the first two installments, hit \"pause\" and rewind to June's piece on Noir, and July's discussion of Walter Murch]. The third and final installment of my summer series on the top 6 appearances of the tape recorder in film focuses on the 1980s, a decade obsessed with what Hillel Schwartz called \"the Culture of [\u2026]","tags":["Archival","Article","Film/Movies/Cinema","Gender","History"],"title":"Play it Again (and Again), Sam: The Tape Recorder in Film (Part Three on the 1980s)","updated_at":1787782766,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2011/08/15/play-it-again-and-again-sam-the-tape-recorder-in-film-part-three-on-the-1980s/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Trammell","given":"Aaron"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

\"\"We're all familiar with the stereotype. Inside the library, deep in study, you stumble upon something funny, a pun, a quip or even a reference to one of the meme-like librarians do-Gaga sing along. Whatever it is, its funny. . . hilarious even. At first you try to bottle it in, but what starts as a snigger eventually manifests itself as boisterous laughter. You're making noise, then: SHHHHHHHHHHHH! Libraries, for better or worse, are quiet spaces, but they are also important third-spaces, social forums and purveyors of an all-ages educational opportunity. Even though we imagine libraries to be quiet, they often distribute music. This blog entry suggests a musical intervention of sorts, a reconstitution of the library as a space of noise. A site of collaboration in the public imaginary where conversations can take place over a splice of Iggy Pop and Tchaikovsky fading from one century to the next. This is no pipe dream, it is a radical rethinking of what tomorrow's library could be within the parameters of virtual space.

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This idea is nothing new, Library Information Science scholars like Brenda Dervin have been arguing since the seventies that libraries should be configured as sites of community and activity, not as tombs of information. There is a fundamental tension still; libraries are a space of study, and most users are more comfortable reading in a quiet space. Virtual spaces offer a way out of this problematic by allowing for a second acoustic space for users to listen in, a space which can be conveniently tethered to social networking software, like Facebook. I am arguing, along with my friend Nathan Graham, that libraries are the ideal setting through which to stage a new social platform of participatory and collaborative listening. Using emergent tools from social media platforms, users can cobble lists for shared virtual listening (complete with edited audio clips) and discuss them in a virtual forum. Because of the library's institutional history as an educational space, these locally hosted forums can stage a strong argument for collaborative listening as fair use, an integral part of the 21st century library.

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Right now this idea is just a seed: we are thinking of the platform, its potentials and its restrictions. Notably, in a not so discreet attempt to get feedback from the Sounding Out! reader base, I want to further entertain the idea of collaborative listening. Collaborative listening is a more interactive form of collective listening \u2013 it implies that a conversation between listeners is taking place. Some physical spaces of collaborative listening could be the living room while a record spins on a turntable, the classroom where a group of students discuss a song, a subway train where two people share MP3 earbuds, a car in a parking lot surrounded by kids all listening to its stereo, or even Youtube and Last.fm where people often leave comments about songs in the forum below. It is important to consider open spaces which can push against the impending corporate monetization of music sharing and cloud computing as Patrik Wikstrom establishes in his 2010 book, The Music Industry. Bringing this conversation to libraries helps to smash our prejudice of the library as a tomb of knowledge, it opens up the space and facilitates conversation between a greater breadth of citizens. Hopefully, this platform will help transform the library into a open source hub of conversation and collaboration.

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So let us listen silently with earbuds in, to the libraries who might channel noise through the internet, a fantasy/testimony to the hopeful sounds of tomorrow.

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AT

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\"Like

","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/fb9fr-hpg35","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=807","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1288569600,"rid":"6zqxp-rvt09","summary":"We're all familiar with the stereotype. Inside the library, deep in study, you stumble upon something funny, a pun, a quip or even a reference to one of the meme-like librarians do-Gaga sing along. Whatever it is, its funny. . . hilarious even.","tags":["Archival","Article","Digital Humanities","Internets","Libraries"],"title":"Remix the Libraries / Collaborative Listening","updated_at":1787782766,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/11/01/remix-the-libraries-collaborative-listening/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Silva","given":"Liana M."}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Jennifer Lynn Stoever","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1528-7871"}],"community_id":"e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb","created":1785110400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"pushing sound studies into the red since 2009","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/soundstudiesblog","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e7855922-6211-4622-873f-797c87c02fcb/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/","issn":"2333-0309","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"soundstudiesblog","status":"active","subfield":"1210","title":"Sounding Out!","updated":1783980033,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"Sounding Out!","blog_slug":"soundstudiesblog","content_html":"

In the March 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, David Means published a short story titled \"The Knocking\" (find it online here) that I found interesting for its clear emphasis on sound\u2013particularly on noise. In a nutshell, the story presents us with two neighbors who don't like each other from first sight: one who lives upstairs and makes noise all day, and one who lives downstairs and has to cope with the constant influx of sound. What strikes me as interesting is that the narrator, understandably annoyed, describes the sounds coming from his neighbor's apartment as \"knocks.\" The story, which aims to give us a look into the sad life of the man downstairs who can't stand the noises coming from upstairs, actually ends up being a study in noise.

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\"The Knocking\" is all about knocks: knocks as sounds and knocks as noise. The story starts out with a perturbed narrator, annoyed by the sounds emanating from the apartment above him. In the first paragraph\u2013comprised of just two sentences\u2013the sentences seem to flow like sounds floating in the wind. But don't let the sensation fool you, the noises come off as rough and harsh (or at least that is how the narrator perceives them): \"I know, as I wait, that the knocking will begin again, if not in the form of his tapping heel, then as some other kind of knocking: perhaps the sound of the hammer he uses to pound nails\u2026, or the rubbery thud of his printer at work\u2026, or the thump of his mattress hitting the slats.\" The narrator admits that the sounds are not knocks per se, but that they became knocks over time due to their \"mechanistic, reproduced quality.\" Noise is clearly in the ear of the beholder, according to the narrator. However, further down, the narrator shows us a deeper understanding of the knocks: \"At some point the sweet, even anachronistic, broom swish switched over to knock mode; not so much the actual sound but, rather, the intent behind the gesture had gone from the act of sweeping to the sound that the act made, so that it was clear to me below that what had started out as a normal cleaning routine had, perhaps in response to my moaning and occasional shouts up at the ceiling between sweeps, shifted to knocking.\" The noise is displaced from the listener to the one making the noise; if the intention is to make noise, noise it is. As the story flows he understands the sounds his neighbor is making as more than just annoying rapts; he shows us how the sounds gain meaning via the listener as well as the the person making the noise.

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Eventually the sounds become a metaphor for what is going on inside of him. The narrator has come out of a failed marriage, and we find out that before he moved to that apartment, he was married and had children. All that is left is an apartment and a fussy neighbor upstairs. The repetition and the lifelessness of the knocking echo the emptiness of his life. The knocking mocks what is left. This is best illustrated when he tries to explain to himself what happened in his marriage through his theory of love:

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\"Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, begins to form something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the penultimate days in the house by the Hudson), and then is, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss; Mary gone, kids gone)\"

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It is one of the most beautiful passages in the story, and does justice to the theme of sound in the story. Love becomes sound, and instead of love at first sight, we have love at first vibration.

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This story brought together two of my passions: literature and sound. Although I don't claim that Means is the first author to focus a story on sounds, he did well by reading in those sounds the lives of the listeners/characters. \"The Knocking\" is short and enjoyable, but it is also meaningful and deep. I did not know about David Means' fiction until this issue( here you can see the collections he's published, and here you can read his latest story in The New Yorker), but after reading this story and noticing his attention to sonic detail, I wonder if his other stories are just as mindful. It's refreshing to find fiction that attentive to sound, even if it brings back memories of my own noisy neighbors.

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Bonus Track: read a brief interview of Means in The New York Times by clicking here.

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","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/sjk3r-tbf34","guid":"http://soundstudiesblog.com/?p=823","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1289260800,"rid":"w40f5-xvz33","summary":"In the March 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, David Means published a short story titled \"The Knocking\" (find it online here) that I found interesting for its clear emphasis on sound\u2013particularly on noise.","tags":["Acoustics","Listening","Literature","Noise","Sound"],"title":"Check it out: David Means' \"The Knocking\"","updated_at":1787782762,"url":"https://soundstudiesblog.com/2010/11/08/check-it-out-david-means-the-knocking/","version":"v1"}],"out_of":54694,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":54694}