This weekend, 644 competitors vied to become the 2010 crossword-solving champion. (I came in 338th, way ahead of Ken Burns.) As solvers finished each puzzle, they filed out to the lobby to discuss triumph and tragedy.
Posts tagged with New York City
We hear many voices when we’re in public. But the logic between which ones we engage, ignore, or get frustrated by isn’t always apparent, even to ourselves.
One of the most perplexing examples is the cell phone conversation. To wit: if we’re sitting in front of two people on a bus, and they’re talking in a reasonable tone of voice, it’s very unlikely we’ll care at all. But if it’s only one person, and he’s talking at the same hypothetical volume on the phone, we might think bad thoughts about him, or have trouble concentrating. Why are we bothered by the latter and not the former?
We develop and adjust auditory filters throughout our lives. Our annoyance with overhearing cell phone chatter suggests that we’ve become accustomed to telephone conversations – however innocuous – being private. And so the sound of them in public space registers as a breach of etiquette, even if it’s no different in pitch, volume, or timbre than an old-fashioned, in-person conversation. This may change over time, perhaps after we’ve spent years and years confronted with the practice. For now, the memory of landline custom still obtains.
The following recording is a good example of this phenomenon, starring one of those much-despised Motorola walkie-talkies. As the F train went above ground during a snowstorm that had severely delayed train traffic, a man got a page (presaged by the famous tone) from a friend, and commenced telling him where he was, how long he expected to be there, and so on. There was a whole lot of eye-rolling on the busy car. The tones kept coming, and the voice of the man on the other end came through covered by a harsh, almost mean-sounding distortion. This mixed with the sound of train announcements which, as you might expect, were filtered into the normal bin.
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.
Last week, the New York City Police Department began outfitting patrol cars with a device called The Rumbler, a pair of subwoofers that serve as an alternative to sirens.
1 comments
October 21, 2009
Artwork #7: Buzz-a-Rama “500″ (or where to find some excited children on the weekend)
The double-wide storefront across the street had been shuttered for two months. Once I saw some guys getting arrested in front of it on my way to work in the morning, but that was the most action to be observed there, and it seemed unrelated to whatever business was hiding inside. Then, just last weekend, the metal gates finally flung open, like God parting the waters at Yam Suph. But what was revealed was far more miraculous than anything in the bible.
The building is home to Buzz-a-Rama “500,” the last remaining slot-car establishment in the city of New York. The owner, Frank Perri, 74, claims that there used to be 30 or 40 such venues throughout the boroughs, back in the late 60s and 70s when he first opened. Children worked on their personal cars over the weekend, and then brought them in to race on lovely and elaborate courses. This article suggests that the name Buzz-a-Rama “captured the energy of the hundreds of teenagers and kids who used to crowd into the room on race days, and also the sound of the cars themselves, a high-pitched, insectlike whine — the sound of constant speed.”
A short documentary has Mr. Perri yelling at a child who claims his fingers are numb, among other amazing old slot-car guy moments.
This spring, the music department borrowed a professional sound level meter from a company that sells them. I spent a day walking around and talking to people about noise in the city, using the reader to show them how loud their environments were. This brief interview was with two teenage girls on the Manhattan-bound Q train.
I recorded something last week. I don’t know what. First order of business: do you?
Bureaucratic departments – the DMV, the career services agency, the post office – are places of infinite, futile drama. Although they are designed to move customers with mechanical efficiency from the entrance to the exit, they are usually tense and messy.
Their drama, ironically, results from trying to maintain rigid structures in a liquid universe. On paper, in the abstract, less flexibility means a more streamlined service process. Take a number, proceed to the desk when you’re called, hand over the necessary forms, and wait for the thud of the stamp. In Plato’s post office, it’s that easy.
Outside the world of forms, however, there are always delays, because there is always serendipity, confusion, and disagreement, sometimes all at once. The man at the front of the line has a complicated question. He doesn’t speak English very well. The clerk can’t find his package. Now he’s arguing with her, although she legislates nothing and therefore can only argue back at him, all the more cruelly because she recognizes her own impotence. (Mutual impotence is the infinite loop that renders bureaucratic drama futile.)
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Sound is a useful tool in bureaucratic settings because, under the right conditions, listening can synchronize tightly with action. We can hear ourselves called faster than we can see our number appear on the stern little LED board. No matter what we’re doing – reading, staring, resting – we can mostly be responsible for hearing “68!” and then standing at attention and proceeding. In the post office/DMV/career center, we willingly reduce ourselves to veritable automatons – obedient listening machines – in order to finish our business quickly and get out. We submit to the authority of the system for our own ultimate benefit. Sound, which we don’t have to face to receive, is a great convenience to this end. With it, we can orchestrate a nearly immediate dynamic of command and obedience.
But noise is dangerous. In a bureaucratic utopia, a listener would hear only numbers, perfectly repetitive instructions, and the shuffling of feet. In actual offices, we hear much more. Dramas, futile as they may be for the actors involved, crash the noiseless utopia of efficient repetition, for better or worse. Noise is not only evidence of these dramas, but also a frequent cause of them.
If sound is expedient for an efficient bureaucracy, then we have an opportunity to hear the failure of bureaucracy in noise – sensation, metaphor, and disruption all rolled into one. (We will continue to listen to both the operations and failures of bureaucracy in this space.)
After the AM rush hour, New York falls into the peaceful lull of the local. Traffic dies down, kids play handball, parents stroll infants, grill cooks sit on stoops and take it easy before lunch. Pairs of old men in high pants laze in lawn chairs on the sidewalk and wait expectantly for anything even marginally remarkable, although Bensonhurst, Brooklyn at 10:15 in the morning won’t usually surprise you. It’s actually brutally routine. No one really visits except delivery vehicles and people picking up U-Hauls from the lot on New Utrecht and 68th. It’s an excellent, low-stress time to hear the texture of dirty truck engines mingling with conversations about parenting.
This recording was made walking in a semi-circle around a handball court, away from the street and toward two mothers.
THIS IS WEIRD VIBRATIONS // the politics of sound
Ben Tausig, ed.
