Although the sheer variety of training routines is extraordinary and includes many very different kinds of practices, much of what occurs in this park is geared toward achieving unity and discipline. People of all ages and ethnicities work toward a kind of heightened togetherness; very few people do anything alone, and there are almost no competitive sports. Disciplining oneself to match the teacher or the group is the most typical goal for those who come to the park.

This video documents a half hour between 7:30 and 8:00 yesterday morning in Lumphini, from a singing class to an aerobics club. In between the action, everyone pauses for the public recitation of the national anthem, which happens twice a day, every day, at 8:00AM and 6:00PM. In fact, the anthem is broadcast over mounted loudspeakers in nearly every public place in the entire country at these times, as well as on television. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, you stop in your tracks and stand still for the song. In crowded or otherwise fast-moving places, this is quite a sight. The anthem, and the specific way that it gets recited, are deployed as regular reminders of state sovereignty, and of each individual’s place in a Thai nation that is supposed to stand as a single, unfractured entity. This video is thus a vignette about the pursuit of unity.

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.

I made some recordings during and after one of the last screenings of the movie at the Bridge cinema de lux in Philadelphia. And Amina Robinson, who played Jermaine (pictured above), was kind enough to answer a few questions as well.

To first offer some minimal background for those who haven’t seen or otherwise heard much about the movie, Precious is an adaptation of a 1996 novel chronicling the harrowing difficulties of a 16-year-old girl growing up in deep poverty in Harlem. We see Precious, the title character, abused in just about every way imaginable, and the story piles her troubles on thick. The ending is hopeful, if not quite happy. Stylistically, extended sequences of grim realism are broken up by vignettes of playful, ironic fantasy, as well as some fleeting moments that border on normal adolescence. (More detailed plot summaries are widely available elsewhere.)

Critics were knocked backwards and sideways by this movie, to its immense credit. I’m not sure I read a single great review, but I certainly read plenty of painful ones. Somehow, Precious brought many critics to an irresponsibly simplistic conception of how race operates. Although the movie never claimed to speak for “black experience,” and in fact alluded to the fiction of any such singular experience (black characters spanned the socioeconomic spectrum), many writers missed this point entirely, and built entire arguments around a premise that existed only in their own nervous imaginations. And this was the case equally for those who loved and hated it.

Reading the reviews in aggregate offers a breathtaking picture of how inadequate our vocabulary for discussing race can be. The archaic presumptions left unquestioned by critics include, but are not limited to: that definitions of race are rigidly fixed; that race is only about black people and white people; that all black people are poor; that all black people see the world the same way; and that all white people are plagued by guilt. And not at all unconnected to the desperate poverty of wise commentary about race among film critics has been a persistent emphasis on race as an exclusively visual concept.

Listening to audiences watch Precious speaks to race and racial anxiety in ways that vision cannot. Unfortunately, almost all ethical questions raised about the movie in print so far have been about watching the main character. Is it therapeutic? Pornographic? How does the way YOU look affect your right to see her? But in truth, audiences do a lot more than watch during films. They listen, to the characters and to each other, and respond to both. In doing so, they open gaps that suggest nothing if not race’s perplexing contours.

At Precious, a culture of audience participation met awkwardly with a story whose villains and laugh lines were often ambiguous. On one hand (0 – :29 seconds), the movie had a wry sense of humor, even at serious moments. On the other hand (:29 – :58), the mother character, played by Mo’ Nique, was obviously a villain. But viewers disagreed as to whether her villainy was dead serious, a target for verbal outrage, or even a source of comic relief. I spoke to a young couple (:58 – 1:41) who had watched in a theater with an older woman who was so enraged by Mo’ Nique’s character that she yelled at the screen. Meanwhile, the couple found some moments, including a self-deprecating line about Precious’ weight (1:43 – 1:54), funny. Finally, a woman about my age outside the theater (1:55 – 2:55) was “appalled” by laughter at moments that she felt were inappropriate. She attributed such laughter to people being nervous about confronting the seriousness of the content.

I asked Amina Robinson about these kinds of reactions:

I actually had this conversation with one of my White co-workers. He asked why the African-Americans in the theater were laughing while it seemed the White people were appalled. I certainly have noticed that as well. When I’ve seen Precious with a lot of Black folks in the audience it is actually more funny throughout, just as when there has been mostly White people there is a lot of silence.

I find both very interesting. I can’t speak for all African-Americans, but some of us know the characters in this movie. When we see them and are confronted with this particular brand of pathology we identify with it and laugh. It feels good to know that you are not alone in what you’ve experienced. There is a certain justification. While other African-Americans see it, identify with it, and feel the strong push to deal with and heal it.

In reverse, many White people watching this movie seem to be being introduced to a part of life that they were ignorant to. So they get sucked into the world and are captivated and speechless. That is not to say that White people don’t deal with the issues in the film, because they do, but Precious is simply the Black version. It takes place in a world they may be unfamiliar with.

Personally, I laughed some and cried some. And I find any reaction to the film valid and worthy of discussion.

The disparity in reactions, ostensibly along racial lines, has led some viewers to extreme conclusions. A viewer in a forum on Oprah.com, writes:

I tried to talk about the film, process the themes and examine the extraordinary performances. I tried, but I could not escape the whole of the experience. I walked in a white woman and walked out a racist. Disgust with the audience became disgust in my heart, disappointment with myself and fear that my work as a teacher in the inner city was tainted by unclaimed/unacknowledged racism. I can escape neither my disgust with the audience nor my own sense of shame and loss. Is this the power of “Precious”, I wonder?

But, to put it bluntly, not every African-American laughed, and not every white person didn’t. However, for those unaccustomed to hearing interpretations vocalized during the movie, half of the audience, or even a handful of people, could easily stand in for everyone, or at least be a pesky distraction. Robinson describes the importance of responding authentically, regardless of one’s reasons:

We are human beings. We all have different experiences of life that affect how we view the world. We are as different as we are the same, and I think it does humanity and art an injustice to try to dictate how someone should respond to an artistic work.

I say laugh if you must, cry if you must. I do draw a line at talking in the theater though, because then you are ruining the movie for others. Other than that let the movie affect you as it does.

For Robinson, all viewers may relate to dramatic material differently. In an environment where loud response is normal, such relationships are not necessarily more fractured, just more public. This has benefits as well as drawbacks:

I can only speak from my experience when I say that I feel African-Americans like to connect to art in a very visceral way. We like to live our art, feel it, and breathe it. So when we are moved by something we become a part of it and enjoy communicating with it and adding our input. We do come from a tradition of call and response and I think that it can be a beautiful thing.

Aside from possibly that, I don’t think it is a racial issue. I think it is one of experience and identification. We as people connect in different ways to different things based on what they mean to us. Precious is a universal story of triumph over the odds, but it is still about a Black girl.

Clearly, listening to audiences watch Precious does not signal the end of racial difference. What it suggests, rather, is the danger of taking race at face value. Critics have been so quick to divide white and black viewers that they’ve missed the enormous interpretive divisions that the film has created among viewers of all racial self-identifications. This fact is much more audible than it is visible. But our audition has to be thorough. Just because we hear someone in a theater – or experience their silence – doesn’t mean we understand them, or even know what their reaction means.

A quick walk through any store targeted to people twenty or younger – in other words, almost any store – reveals the importance of emphatic sensory appeal to product value, especially for toys and games. The best-selling holiday items are often outfitted with literal bells and whistles, or the 21st century equivalent.

This has perpetrated something of an arms race among toy manufacturers. It’s not unheard of, according to some reports, for holiday toys aimed at children younger than three to reach 115 decibels or higher. The risk of hearing loss is made worse, many note, because children have short arms, and generally play with their toys at a very close distance. For accuracy, decibel measurements thus must be taken from just a few inches away. Children also have smaller ear canals, which make them more susceptible to auditory damage even after a few seconds of listening.

Here is the Sight and Hearing Association’s top offender from 2008, the Shake ‘N Go, a toy car that reaches 120.8 db, in action.

The United States issues recommendations for toy volume, but compliance is voluntary. Canada has stricter regulations, but many toys surge past the limits anyway. A number of independent tests quoted in news stories found that well over half of popular holiday toys significantly exceeded guidelines or recommendations.

–

The research in audiology is conclusive: children experience real risk by playing with loud toys. Hearing loss, especially at a young age, is not only inconvenient, but a demonstrable impediment to learning. There is a definite need for regulation that would limit these harmful effects.

Toys are loud because it’s profitable, and so in a sense necessary, to make them that way. We’ve discussed in this space a certain general trend toward greater silence in product manufacture, as a way to signify modern and especially “green” technology. But such a shift has hardly taken effect among children’s toys. One can see the stirrings, however, of a kind of elite response, underwritten by boutiqueish nostalgia, for playthings that would never blare out music or canned phrases. When I (b. 1980) was little, interactive educational toys were de rigueur among concerned parents; adjusted for the volume demands of the contemporary marketplace, would these still even qualify as safe?

With respect to noise, toys are in the same ironic position as most consumer goods. Even once sound became too loud for political comfort, industry couldn’t turn down the volume on consumer taste. Niche markets, ostensibly healthier for our ears, began to develop, but these are an incomplete solution, because they stigmatize noise rather than diminishing it. Meanwhile, those who consume “mass market” goods (i.e. the most affordable offerings), through no fault of their own, put their children in a disadvantaged position.

There is a clear burden on government to introduce significant regulation. But we should also recognize that the origin of the problem is deep-seated.

Visual technology can be inserted strategically into situations of injustice, standing witness to very real problems, triggering necessary responses. It can, as the The Organization for Visual Progression (OVP) puts it, “amplify voices.”

But it takes work to make visuality work for you. The politics of any sense-mode run deep, so any sense-material will naturally be volatile. I spoke with OVP’s Ben Foley and Iben Trino-Molenkamp about how they utilize and handle film and video in the name of projects dedicated to social justice. (d/l here.) (read more about OVP here.)

Gallery:

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.

A certain debate raged in the fraction-of-a-percent years, especially among people who predicted (or at least fantasized about) the coming expansion. A vast, valuable-looking tract spread across the horizon. Silicon-era von Bismarcks sitting in chat room Berlin Conferences began to wonder and clamor about who should control it and how. On one side, those of a more libertarian bent argued that “cyberspace” was fundamentally ungovernable, owing to its transnational infrastructure, and that in any case regulation would be overreaching, ineffective, and potentially a colossal buzzkill. On the other, proponents of internet governance countered that traditional regulations could and must be adapted to new contexts. If libel, theft, harassment, fraud, and other crimes were possible online – and they all were, demonstrably – then states were obliged to protect users thus exposed, and to prosecute the responsible parties.

The problem at the root of this debate was about spatiality, and the debate itself was often conducted in the language of territorial expansion and settlement. The libertarians believed that “real” and “virtual” space were distinct realms, structurally foreign to one another, and that the virtual was properly anarchic. John Perry Barlow, in a statement that typified this position, wrote in 1991 that “the old concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context, based as they are on physical manifestation, do not apply succinctly in a world where there can be none.” For Barlow, cyberspace was a world apart, at most a neighbor to the material universe of the real. But “coming into the country” (the title of one of his essays) inevitably meant making choices about how to live on the wild digital frontier. Would our new-world settlements facilitate personal privacy or corporate control? Barlow offered the analogical figures of frontier anarchists and corporate fur traders, respectively, to represent the advocates of these outcomes, and pushed hard for the greater legitimacy of the first. (An ironic position, as it happens – who benefits from decreased regulation more than corporations?)

Regulation proponents responded that the so-called “virtual” world was actually just a new aspect of a current reality, an overlay of communications that allowed faster and more flexible exchanges, but that did not by any means unsettle jurisdiction or legal doctrine, even if it might necessitate certain adjustments. Jack Goldsmith wrote, in 1998, that “the skeptics are in the grip of a nineteenth century territorialist conception of how ‘real space’ is regulated and how ‘real-space’ conflicts of law are resolved. This conception was repudiated in the middle of this century.” Goldsmith suggested that the activation of hardware or software amounted to real-world checkpoints where users automatically became subject to the legal restrictions of specific territories. With the stakes of digital communication rising by the nanosecond, accountability at the level of existing sovereign entities was not only practical but imperative.

In technological time, that was then. But one-and-a-half billion users later, the debate hasn’t budged much. On October 5th, 2009, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for full disclosure of paid endorsements, with particular regard to bloggers. The guidelines are not themselves laws, but are an interpretation of the 1980 Federal Trade Commission Act in terms of how that act applies to new media. With the transposition of old regulations to contemporary modes of communication, the FTC is doing precisely what Jack Goldsmith argued for in the late 1990s; that is, adapting existing structures of accountability to modern environments.

And there certainly seem to be good reasons for doing so. PayPerPost, a deliberately opaque provider of sponsored online advertising, has become a multi-billion dollar operation within three years, and has inspired many clones. The company has also, predictably, recently developed a “Sponsored Tweets” concept. It is an ingenious system that matches posters with advertisers, allowing the former to shill for the latter in mutually profitable ways. PayPerPost’s transparency requirements (naturally, in the absence of any legal impetus otherwise) have been described as laughably weak.

Meanwhile, popular blogs and celebrity Twitter accounts might have millions of eyes on them in a day. The temptation for advertisers to arrange to transform these platforms into paid advertorials, all the more valuable because there is no mandate of transparency, is bound to be a powerful one. Consumers presumably lose in this scenario, having no way to know whether Claritin-D is a miracle cure for Miley’s allergies, or whether Schering-Plough is in fact writing her a check. Common sense suggests that the FTC, with limited money and personnel (just 1200 employees, in a nation with uncountable millions of blogs, not to mention social networking accounts) would concern itself precisely with high-profile, high-yield cases like this.

The outcry against the guidelines from bloggers, however, has echoed John Perry Barlow’s earlier objections with surprising fidelity. First, some bloggers assert, the internet is simply not a medium like television or radio. It is empty space, like air, and the communications that take place within it should be sacrosanct like any other constitutionally-protected form of individual free speech. As Jeff Jarvis puts it:

the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk … for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

Second, and relatedly, many bloggers see the guidelines as a tremendous overreach that puts ordinary citizens who discuss any product online – including in a Twitter post or an Amazon review – at risk of committing unwitting criminal action. About this, they point to the clause in the FTC’s interpretation which states that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” Hypothetically, if a publisher sent a free copy of a book to be reviewed by a website, the site would have to include a disclaimer about the freebie along with its post. In the view of the dissenters, this gives the government the right to intrude unfairly on private affairs.

Third, many bloggers feel that the guidelines are ham-handedly ignorant about the specificities of blogging and social media, and that as a consequence any online communication may be compromised. Jack Schafer at Slate shudders that “the vagueness of [the] guidelines doth make suspects of you all.” The vagueness problem has also been cited as a reason why the guidelines will inevitably fail – the internet simply cannot be regulated by dead-tree-pushing bureaucrats. Several commentators have called the FTC’s actions a “power grab,” and others have even called for the commission’s outright abolishment.

—

A new sound studies book (of all things) makes a convincing case against the ontological assertions made by the anti-regulatory bloggers. Frances Dyson’s Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture is not about the legal particulars of online endorsements, but it is very much about our flawed and at times troubling perceptions of new media. Her book also provides a sober historical and philosophical perspective that fills in some of the most glaring gaps in debates about the internet as a place.

The thesis of Sounding New Media is, in brief, that our most ingrained assumptions about digital environments closely parallel similarly ingrained assumptions about sound. “The ‘new’ of new media,” she writes, “depends on redefining embodiment, space, reality, and experience in ways remarkably similar to notions of immersion and transcendence associated with audiophony.” ^[1]
Considering some tried-and-true deep sonic thinkers (R. Murray Schafer, John Cage, Edgar Varèse, Antonin Artaud, Pierre Schaeffer) and some fresher ones as well (Char Davies, Catherine Richards), Dyson identifies and critiques some predominant metaphysical tropes about sound. ^[2] These tropes, she argues, are often marked by romantic fantasies about the disappearance of mediation in environments so immersive, so full of feeling, that people look to them for psychic restoration.

We have all chased such a metaphysics or, at the very least, known others who have. Dyson briefly alludes, for example, to 90s rave culture, where the combination of sound loud enough to be felt on the skin, bodily co-presence, and chemical highs offered a wellspring of unity and pleasure among groups of people, as well as in one’s own consciousness. Sound was absolutely crucial here, since it seemed both inexhaustible and accessible to everyone at once. In an alienating modern world, sound promised to heal rifts both cultural and technological by bringing everyone together in a single sensual field.

Sound is conscripted in the production of this togetherness, according to Dyson, because in a society where the truest realities are the most empirically approachable (that is, visible), sound becomes an enigma, a thing which is not quite a thing because it cannot be grasped or observed. This effect is only exaggerated when we wear headphones, which encourages us to imagine music reaching our ears with nothing in between. In such a rationalist context, it is easy to miss the fact that sound is indeed and entirely real – that it is by nature a physical force with a material basis, and that it always travels through mediating channels. But being invisible, it draws anti-modern romantics like a spiderweb.

Fantasies about new media and virtual environments function in much the same way, snaring a specially credulous breed of romantics called technophiles. When our field of vision is encompassed by a screen, we tend to assume that we have entered whatever picture we might be observing. This assumption is motivated by an ontology so powerful as to be undisturbed by the utter lack of tactility, smell, taste, and dimensionality which, even with a quarter of the world online, remain stubbornly absolute. Focused in this way on seeing as being-in, we quickly jump to the conclusion that the internet must be a space. Furthermore, we imagine that once we enter that space, whatever conveyance brought us can be conveniently left behind, like a parked car. Our experiences once inside are thence regarded as untouched by technology. Recall Jarvis’ claim: “the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk.” Logic like this leads us to believe, not only rhetorically but all too often really, that technological advances will progressively allow richer and richer modes of being “inside” digital space. The culmination of these advances, were they not imaginary, would be a total move away from the physical realm of bodies and into one of pure, immaterial communication.

But believing this depends on an extreme form of tunnel vision. The actual net effect of our partial blindness – far from partitioning the universe into virtual and real spaces – is the inauguration of a single material world, our whole world, the same one as before, where all entities can be regarded as digital, reducible to code like the things we see on screens. We collectively come to understand our bodies as mechanical, our histories as unfolding scripts, and even our houses as bug’s nests of binary code:

Dyson is most explicit about this in the chapter titled “Embodying Technology,” asserting tersely that “computing …. renders the body a thing to be computed.” ^[3] This portion of the book argues against, or at the very least complicates, some of the most frequently-cited literature on posthumanity, including the work of Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway.

Sounding New Media is in fact worthwhile for a number of reasons other than those discussed here. It is an original and astute analysis of perception, sense, and knowledge, and will be of interest to a variety of readers in different disciplines. But reading it when I did, it happened to resonate most powerfully as a well-crafted theorization of the source of some persistent prejudices about media. These prejudices, far from being obscure matters of ontological debate, have had a clear impact on the architecture of digital interfaces, which are very much a part of our world.

…

Footnotes

^[1]
Dyson, p. 182

^[2]
Dyson commits the entire middle portion of the book to specific discussions of these figures and their ideas, as well as to the writing of Heidegger, Derrida, and other philosophers who have theorized sound or sonority. The present review focuses very narrowly on one of the author’s general theoretical assertions, for reasons of expediency largely bypassing these particular discussions.

^[3]
Dyson, p. 154

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/25/review-2-this-is-not-a-medium/feed/ 1 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/07/ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/07/ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:57:29 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=302 I recorded something last week. I don’t know what. First order of business: do you?

For context, G.F. and I moved last month to an apartment on the cusp of Kensington and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Our neighborhood is Hasidic/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Polish/Albanian/Mexican/Caribbean, among others. We have, in the course of our sensory adjustment to the new neighborhood, gotten acclimated to the muezzin issuing five calls to prayer every day over a loudspeaker, to lots of children running around the building, and to the daily delivery of goat carcasses by the truckful to the butcher down the block. But some things are still unclear, even if we have guesses. e.g., Why do so many men congregate outside the closed-looking dentist’s office across the street? What’s in the jungle that comprises our (inaccessible) backyard? What and why does a chorus of women sometimes chant, as above, around dinner time?

Our new neighborhood, 1903

I’ve been researching sonic conflict in urban space for a few years now, and Brooklyn is a great place to do it. As much time as Brooklynites spend around people of different habits, cultural variation is so dense and dynamic here that even longtime residents tend to find themselves perplexed by sounds they can’t quite place. For some, what can’t be identified is heard as evidence of a special diversity. For others, or for the same people under different circumstances, weird sounds are rude, inappropriate, extraneous, heretical, and/or invasive. (I’ve heard people mention each of these.) We seem to have something of an itch to locate sound, not only in terms of where it’s coming from but in terms of what it means. We want a reference, often desperately. Why?

So, the second order of business: why do you think unidentified sound is so disturbing?

And the third: what mysterious sounds (recordings or descriptions, from wherever) would you like to share?

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/07/ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah/feed/ 7 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/09/25/artwork-5-god-made-these-colicky-indian-babies/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/09/25/artwork-5-god-made-these-colicky-indian-babies/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:50:29 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=260

Movie theater culture varies dramatically, but in most places audiences respond out loud in ways that are normative and even, in a sense, ethical. These modes of response are a very important part of how people are expected to relate to artwork. For instance, Film Forum has sustained, respectful silence with dashes of old-man snore, followed by a hearty concluding round of applause to recognize auteurship. The UA on Court Street has text-pages and outdoor voices. You might be interested to know that Jaipur, India has crying, whistling, and viewers generally wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

Although none of us knew a word of Hindi, the plot of “Rab Ne Bana De Jodi” (“God Made This Couple”) was pretty transparent. We were riveted for more than three hours (plus an intermission) by a twisting love story in which two of India’s most glamorous models played an ordinary working couple struggling through an arranged marriage. In a device I found Shakespearian, especially for its implausibility, the male lead did double-duty as a working schmo and a hubristic fop, changing only his shirt, glasses, and mustache in the transformation.

You get the idea from the trailer:

Anyway, the crowd in the gigantic one-screen theater with the ice cream paint job treated the movie like an event from the opening shot. Particularly in the first and the last half-hour, every scene was accompanied by shouts of delight and expressions of concern. By the end, the crowd was worked up, and the babies were at their crankiest. As the protagonists (fop now revealed as schmo) were named the winners of the climactic dance contest, and the central motif began playing for the last time (1:45), there was a grand finale of appreciative clapping and whistling.

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/09/25/artwork-5-god-made-these-colicky-indian-babies/feed/ 0 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/23/artwork-2-cane-with-trance-bangkok/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/23/artwork-2-cane-with-trance-bangkok/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:24:48 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=130 This (see “about artworks” or “Artwork #1” for background) was recorded about a year ago.

One day in downtown Bangkok, I crossed paths with a blind man using a lead pipe to echolocate his way down the street. The resonance of the hollow pipe is especially well-suited to producing sonic images that can reveal large objects at a distance – walls or buildings or sets of steps, say. This is a useful supplement to the cane as a means of feeling objects directly. As the man walked, a gym in the ground level of a shopping center played a trancy jingle through loudspeakers mounted outdoors. The gym is called California WOW Xperience, and they’re all over the city, enticing natives and visitors alike with kitschy, oily body-building imagery that nevertheless gets its point across.

Music in advertisements, rather obviously, recruits consumers. Songs plug into associations between identity and sensuality that we often don’t even realize we carry around. The California WOW Xperience ad declares in sensual terms (i.e., without needing to use words) that the gym is high-tech and modern. The accelerated tempos of trance suggest not only the pace of exercise but of the modern more broadly. The use of this ad thus creates and maintains a space that might “feel” “right” enough to passersby to entice them into laying down good Baht for a personal trainer or a yoga class or whatever.

Any useful acoustic analysis has to account not only for primary sound sources as they come into contact with materials, but also for reflections and noise. Sounds interact with one another in complicated ways that can confound engineers attempting to manage sound environments. This recording gestures to another source of confusion, one that lies beyond echo or interference – listening. The taps happen to be audible acts of listening that disrupt or at least mingle with the advertisement, which is what makes this work as a piece (I think). But it should also remind us that listening is a kind of work we do every time we encounter a sound, even if it seems to be second nature.

The ad and the taps are also, finally, kind of amusingly indifferent to each other. I like this a lot, because it rightly insinuates (to my ear) that human encounters are only fleetingly cooperative and never truly systematic.

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/23/artwork-2-cane-with-trance-bangkok/feed/ 1 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/05/tonal-language-atonal-speakers/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/05/tonal-language-atonal-speakers/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:09:35 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=45

Thai language teacher and first-year students practice vocabulary. August, 2009.

Thai is a tonal language and English is not. Thai has five tones, and every syllable in every word in the language has one. Disconcertingly, often comically, there are many groups of words that have exactly the same phonemic sounds, and yet because of different tones express very different meanings. For example, call a man “laaw” (low tone) and you’ve told him he’s handsome. Call him “laaw” (rising tone – pronounced like a cartoonish imitation of an Italian chef saying “Come-a on-a in-a!) and you’ve insinuated that he has no teeth.

Spectrogram of tones in Thai

You can hear this difference in action in the sound clip at the top of the post. From the first word, the teacher gives deliberately exaggerated inflection to every syllable, to make the tone as clear as possible. The students, who in their native language speak flatly and inflect only for emphasis (rather than meaning), imitate her fledglingly.

The teacher, by turn, inflects English in ways that have no meaning – except, as it turns out, to mark her speech as that of a native Thai speaker. Tone is excessive once she switches to English and yet, out of habit, her speech is still full of it. Notice how, at :18, she pronounces “selLER” with a high tone on the second syllable. Thais tend to do this with borrowed words, for reasons I can’t explain. Around 1:48, she does it again with “buyER” and then once more with “how ‘BOUT.” I think that accent is not only an impediment to clarity, but also a way of continuing to “speak” one’s native language while speaking another language.  The patterns of nonsensical excess produced by speaking in an accent immediately take on new meaning beyond the parameters of the languages themselves, since they mark their speaker in totally relative terms.

The valences of accent, however, work differently depending on which direction you’re traveling, i.e. an American in Thailand is not the same kind of foreigner as a Thai is in the United States. Thais are used to foreigners being inept with tone, and will often laugh at them openly. The monotone of the foreigner (say it to yourself: for-ay-NERRR) is partially confusing, but also an unmistakeable marker of alienness, probably at least as potent as skin tone.

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/05/tonal-language-atonal-speakers/feed/ 0