The Art of Listening: Mixtape Project

One of my favorite assignments from the Graduate Seminar in General Education that I took this spring was our mixtape project. The goal was to get students to directly engage with an outdated format: cassette tapes. The courseheads provided us with blank tapes, and loaned out several tape recorders with varying capabilities.

The assignment was to assemble five tracks (not necessarily music) that had helped us to learn to listen, or that we thought might help someone else learn to listen. Furthermore, an important part of the assignment was coping with the technology: figuring out how to get our recordings (most of which were digital) onto the tapes.

Each person was limited by the type of tape recorder they ended up with. (Some had lines in, some had only microphones, etc.) I got a boombox with a stereo RCA line in (the red and white plugs that you find in the back of your TV, DVD player, video game console, etc). My solution was thus to burn my tracks onto a CD from my computer, play the CD in my DVD player, and run the audio out into the tape deck. I haven't digitized the actual tape yet (I will), but here are the liner notes for my project, with links to the digital files when possible.

Mixtape - February 22, 2013

1. Pink Floyd - "Nobody Home" - sheer perfection. Beautiful, emotional music. Even better, it combines the sad-rockstar-wasting-time-in-hotel-watching-old-movies aesthetic of the middle chunk of The Wall with a series of imagined voices from Pink's past. Listen at the last line for the most perfect interlocking of music and background movie voice. The movie version carries the film idea even farther, although its gets rid of my favorite voices.

2. The guitar solo from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." We've all heard the whole thing too many times before, so I'm giving you what matters: 5:54 to 6:43 contain simply the best 48 seconds ever committed to tape, in the history of anything. I will fight you about this.

3. Cantus - Let Your Voice Be Heard - This is a piece of group improvisation--it's semi-organized chaos, based on a series of "loops" which various members of the choir sing, and combined with a clapping game. A listening experience in which voices randomly pop out of the texture. My undergraduate men's chorus sang this, and it was a very unique performing experience -- starting from the basic loops and deviating from them whenever and however you felt like it, if you heard a gap in the texture that you wanted to fill in. The only direction necessary is a signal when the piece is ending.

4. "Operations 2" from System Shock 2: You should listen to this through headphones. I wrote a paper about this a few years back, trying to build up an entire theoretical apparatus around one fleeting impression that I could never really re-create (a brief sensation of nausea, which I thought might be vaguely related to the conflicting stereo streams), and which may not have even been caused by the music anyway. Looking back from a little distance, it reminds me that the way in which you listen (good headphones, bad headphones, stereo speakers, computer speakers) can have profound effects on what you experience.

5. Morphine - "All Wrong" - My dad was a big Morphine fan, and I first heard this in middle school. It's the first song I can remember listening to and thinking, "What...IS that? What is that instrument?" (It plays a solo about 2/3 through). I started playing the saxophone because of this band, and it was eventually my saxophone teacher who was able to tell me that it's a baritone sax, played into a guitar wah-wah pedal. Anyway, the pseudo-acousmatic effect (listening to a sound and having no idea what strange thing produced it) had a profound impact on me.

More Swotd: PITF training

Swotd:new digs

Swotd 16

Today's workspace was Widener Library's Loker Reading Room, probably the most...Harvard-y location on the blog so far. I think I may prefer the Cambridge public library though. Both rooms are gorgeous, but CPL is both smaller and cozier, and covered with wood rather than stone. I'll have to revisit both and think more about it...

SOTD:

A brief, page-long aside on Cartesian dualism is a welcome recapitulation of Klumpenhouwer 2006 (one of the more significant pieces of recent, philosophically-oriented Lewin reception), and hints at the larger issues at stake in one’s choice of analytical “technology.”

Swotd 15

Today's workspace is the reading room in the 'old' side of the Cambridge Public Library, which is located conveniently close to my apartment. The most beautiful space ive documented here so far, I think.

SOTD:

This complete reorientation is in one sense unwieldy, but also extremely intuitive, accurately capturing the sense that a pitch class associated with one quale can take on an entirely different character just a few measures later; the shifting qualia of modulation can make the same acoustic signal sound quite far from its previous iteration.

Swotd 14: Quiet. Too quiet...

I spent the morning at work and then at the department. It was incredibly quiet around the music building, possibly because everyone's avoiding campus due to the commencement hubbub today and tomorrow. I found myself craving coffee and decided to come home to make it, so here I am happily writing away on the couch.

Note taking is mostly over, it's time to beef up my short review from Suzie's class into a more substantive "Review Essay" that I can actually do something with. Here's a sentence of the day:

Although Rings wears the methodological and orthographic influence of David Lewin on his sleeve, it becomes apparent in the course of reading Tonality and Transformation that the third word of the title could just as easily be intentionality. 

Swotd 13: Rain

I realized as I was looking through the archives, that I seem to have skipped number 8. So, this title seems to be a lie. However, I'm not going to go back and fix all the previous entries, so unlucky 13 it is.

It's pouring rain outside, so after work I took shelter at the Andover Theological Library at Harvard Divinity School--the closest library to home, and the only one between the NW Lab building and my apartment. The building is gorgeous and gothic looking, although the library is somewhat disappointingly renovated and modern. I was hoping for something Hogwarts-y. Still, its very nice, nearly empty, and pleasantly reminds me of the Oxford Lane Public Library, where I spent many happy hours as a child. So, I have no complaints.

I've once again staked out a window seat so I can enjoy my third-favorite kind of weather (first: snow, second: thunderstorm, third: rain)

SOTD, again from notes:

Rings, perhaps referring to the methodological pluralism described earlier, apes Lewin's "Behind the Beyond" when he writes, 'Analytical representations can, however, function suggestively, acting as goads to specific acts of intentional hearing, or as a means of focusing and refining prereflective hearings. Such analyses can encourage us to direct our ears to the tonic in specific ways, via the mediation of specific theoretical categories.'