Sound maps are graphic catalogs of music, noise, local ambient color, or anything else audible. Most often based on city boundaries, they typically plot sound on a Google Map (or something similar) – as art projects, policy evidence, historical archives, or consumer tools.
Posts archived in Sound
Increased CO2 emissions caused by marine shipping have made the ocean less acoustically absorbent. As a result, animal sounds travel further, creating an underwater cacophony that may affect marine life.
The journal Nature Geoscience published a letter online yesterday suggesting these findings.
Putting sound in the workplace is a two-edged sword; it inspires efficiency, but also, at times, insurrection. Cuban cigar factories have a centuries-old tradition of employing readers, who sit at the front of the factory room announcing their way through a stack of printed matter, to entertain the labor force.
The practice continues today. A BBC piece from last week describes how the readings, the content of which includes the newspaper, self-help books, modern novels, and classics, “help[s] workers pass away the day.” The repetition of the job makes it easy to concentrate on other information and, in turn, alleviates boredom with the original task. (Which, as you might imagine, can be immense.)
The factory owner is arguably the main beneficiary of the reader’s work, since he’ll end up with more cigars to sell. For their part, the workers are – for both better and worse – mentally shielded from their shitty jobs.
But the segment also suggests an educational benefit. Cigar factory employees often have little or no contact with literature elsewhere in their lives, so the readings offer them access to useful information about the world. What the report doesn’t mention is that reading to laborers was an idea originally organized in prisons. The modern tradition of factory reading stems directly from that history. From the Cuban Heritage Collection:
In 1861 activist and intellectual Nicolás Azcárate proposed reading to prisoners in jail as part of their rehabilitation. His idea was implemented and, since many prisoners rolled cigars to earn wages, a direct link to the cigar industry was established. The wages, received by prisoners at the end of their terms, were managed in the meantime by the prison administrators and used in part to replenish the book fund.
This is liberalism in a classic sense. But education had effects beyond rehabilitation:
Factory readings became popular, attracting passersby who stopped to listen outside. Several newspapers dedicated articles to the subject and published reading lists. But the custom also had detractors who claimed it encouraged revolutionary ideas. They were not entirely wrong: tobacco workers became the best informed working sector and vital in the fight for independence, both inside Cuba and in Tampa, where they organized in support of the Independence movement.
What other stories about sound and labor are you aware of?
Thanks to ST for the original link.
Chris DeLaurenti, field recording specialist and member of the Phonographer’s Union, was on KUOW‘s “Weekday” program yesterday to discuss many of the most important issues around the study of sound. This post is a listening guide to the discussion, and serves also as a pretty decent primer for understanding how and why sound is useful as a type of analytic material.
“Sound Studies,” while increasingly common in the academy, still lacks basic definitions. This post is part of an ongoing effort to provide clear, descriptive expositions of what the study of sound encompasses – as an art form, as a humanistic science, and as a general philosophy.
Precious, out for about a month now, was a tremendously complicated movie to attend. Audience members were divided on how to respond, vocally. How should people react to difficult art? Loudly or quietly? And if loudly, how? This problem took on an ethical dimension, and the sound of the theater became one of the key ways that viewers experienced the movie as a document of race and racial difference.
The annual Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) conference starts Wednesday; look for live updates here, and via the #sem09 tag on Twitter. This material will comprise the rest of the week’s posts. Expect some combination of panel reactions, SEM celebrity gossip, and sound snippets from around Mexico City. For today, please enjoy browsing a late draft of the paper I will be presenting at the conference on Thursday. Comments and discussion are most welcome.
Apologies, incidentally, for the lack of updates over the past six days. (I got hitched.)
The other day, a man with Tourette Syndrome got on the subway. The scenario played out as it usually does – people were jolted by an out-of-place sound, looked straight at the source for a few seconds until they figured out what was happening, and then slowly turned their attention back to what they were doing before. There’s an overwhelming normative pressure after a few seconds to look away – he can’t help it, don’t make him feel awkward. But what are the ethics of listening in a situation like this?
Something “lite” for Friday. (Trying to make this the routine.)
Most of the interview snippets concern race, obliquely or head-on. If you ask New Yorkers open-ended questions about anything, the conversation will almost always end up there sooner or later. The movie anthropomorphizes common New York objects in a generally random fashion (with the exception of the Italian luggage, I didn’t read any associations between thing and identity), but the matter of race remains, both explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly, when the red emergency services box speaks about her pride as a black woman, when the big and little newspaper boxes discuss their Cherokee ancestry, etc., and implicitly when accents and other vocal details suggest individual histories – the smoker’s cough of the Bronx-born free-used-car-info box seemed, to me, particularly suggestive. Also notable was the Asian (?) pay phone’s awkward reference to “some black people” blasting music from their car, although the remark was obviously well-meaning.
Thanks to TM for the original link.
Next week: the ethics of recording involuntary outbursts, and the sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia.
What are the consequences of believing in the synchrony of representation and space? Usually not confusion. More often hucksterism.
Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture
by Frances Dyson
University of California Press, 2009
262 pps., $24.95
There are, today, somewhere on the order of 1.67 billion internet users in the world. Staggeringly, about 1.65 billion of these are new since the mid-90s. Today nearly a quarter of the world’s population has a degree of internet access. Just over a decade ago, that figure was a fraction of a percent.
THIS IS WEIRD VIBRATIONS // the politics of sound
Sound in Bangkok
