There’s been much ado about the decision earlier this month by the Library of Congress’ Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) to significantly raise the per-song royalties paid by Internet broadcasters to copyright holders and performing artists. The ruling would raise rates from .07 cents per performance (or streamed song) in 2005, to .08 cents affective retroactively beginning Jan. 1, 2006. The CRB also stipulated that these rates increase over the next three years, peaking at .19 cents by 2010. Crucially, these new rules provide no exemption for small commercial webcasters seeking to pay royalties based on a percentage of their revenue rather than on a per-song basis. Nearly all involved, except of course SoundExchange, the non-profit organization who receives each webcaster’s royalty payments and distributes them to artists and copyright owners, agree that CRB’s ruling, if unchanged, marks the end of today’s internet radio boom. (See David Oxenford’s Broadcast Law Blog for insightful commentary. Oxenford is a partner at David Wright Tremaine, the firm who represented internet radio broadcasters in the recent debates with the CRB.)
Much less has been said about the investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) into the payola practices of media bad-boys Clear Channel Communications, CBS Radio, Citadel Broadcasting and others. The FCC is very close to administrating fines in the ballpark of $12 million for these companies’ long-standing “pay-to-play” transgressions. As part of the proposed settlement, stations owned by these media conglomerates would also be forced to open up 8,400 half-hour blocks of air-time to musicians from independent and small labels. (See Paul F. Roberts’ recent Salon piece, “The fate of indie music as we know it” for more details.)
While the CRB’s ruling may strike terror in the hearts of webstreamers like Pandora, and rightly so, at least the FCC proves that the federal government isn’t entirely heartless, at least when it comes to traditional radio.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
Slim Shady and Your Medial Prefrontal Cortex
In a limited sense, we all have an idea of what happens to us when we listen to our favorite (or most hated) pop music. We understand the “what” in physical terms – the hip thrusts, air drumming, or the great and glorious rawk face. (You know you’ve seen them along St. Mark’s, those insurgent grimaces, those yearnings to plug in. Or maybe I’m giving myself away here.) We also understand it in psychological terms. Led Zepplin or Prince may not rule your iPod these days, but every time you hear “Heartbreaker” or “Raspberry Beret,” you’re helplessly returned to your high-school bedroom or your buddy’s basement.
But according to Dr. Daniel Levitin, this common understanding doesn’t even scratch the service. In a recent Rolling Stone piece entitled “Music Under the Microscope,” author Even Serpick chronicles Levitin’s efforts to reveal the precise neurological response to musical stimulation. At Montreal’s McGill University Levitin used MRI machines to monitor people’s responses to everything from Beethoven to Ludacris in an effort to track what parts of the brain are engaged by which tunes. His conclusions are compiled in his recent book, “This is Your Brain on Music.”
Serpick takes one for the team and goes under the MRI as he listens to Mozart, James Brown, and Eminem. The results aren’t particularly surprising: Mozart lights up the primary auditory cortex, the part responsible for interpreting pitch and timbre; Brown ignites the cerebellum, the branch in control of basic motor skills and emotional response; Eminem sparks the parts of Serpick’s brain responsible for language (and, one imagines, hate speech). Still, anyone working to uncover the connection between neurology and pop music, particularly one who has a background in the industry, without reducing music’s incomparable pleasures to mere chemicals should be applauded.
Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me find the article online, but you’d do well to pick up the latest Rolling Stone (if for no other reason) and check it out.
And now . . . well, I couldn’t resist. This is an MRI scan of a child’s brain tumor (poor kid):
But according to Dr. Daniel Levitin, this common understanding doesn’t even scratch the service. In a recent Rolling Stone piece entitled “Music Under the Microscope,” author Even Serpick chronicles Levitin’s efforts to reveal the precise neurological response to musical stimulation. At Montreal’s McGill University Levitin used MRI machines to monitor people’s responses to everything from Beethoven to Ludacris in an effort to track what parts of the brain are engaged by which tunes. His conclusions are compiled in his recent book, “This is Your Brain on Music.”
Serpick takes one for the team and goes under the MRI as he listens to Mozart, James Brown, and Eminem. The results aren’t particularly surprising: Mozart lights up the primary auditory cortex, the part responsible for interpreting pitch and timbre; Brown ignites the cerebellum, the branch in control of basic motor skills and emotional response; Eminem sparks the parts of Serpick’s brain responsible for language (and, one imagines, hate speech). Still, anyone working to uncover the connection between neurology and pop music, particularly one who has a background in the industry, without reducing music’s incomparable pleasures to mere chemicals should be applauded.
Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me find the article online, but you’d do well to pick up the latest Rolling Stone (if for no other reason) and check it out.
And now . . . well, I couldn’t resist. This is an MRI scan of a child’s brain tumor (poor kid):
Pump “Fergalicous” into my ears and you’d see the same damn thing.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Harmony on the Bowery
I suppose it was a reunion of sorts – my first show at the Bowery Ballroom since moving to New York last summer. That fall, I had seen Oslo’s Serena Maneesh act out their sordid heroin-chic-cum-psych-rock fantasies all over the Bowery stage. The bass player looked like Nico – but taller. She played three notes. Lead-singer and guitarist, Emil Nikolaisen, divided his time between wrestling with the scarves that kept getting tangled in his six-string and the guitar-player that kept rolling into his mic-stand. It was a great shambling mess, and not a bad show either.
Last Wednesday, I returned to the sold out Bowery to see Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear play the last show of their tour. The quartet was as tight as a Boeing’s cabin at 30,000 feet, and it was a phenomenal show. The boys play a technically ambitious brand of folk which they strap to the chromatic melodicism of a Danny Elfman film score. On records like last year’s beloved Yellow House, this comes off as lo-fi freak-folk experimentation with oodles of horns, tape loops, and found sounds burbling in the corners of their eerie tunes. One wondered how Grizzly Bear would ever pull it all off live. Their tour-capping gig at the Bowery certainly answered that question.
While Serena Maneesh looked like Burberry models checking themselves into rehab, the four mild-mannered guys in Grizzly Bear looked like boy scouts checking themselves into choir practice. And they sang like it too. At the Bowery, guitarist Daniel Rossen and multi-instrumentalist Ed Droste tossed off towering harmonies over a sea of reverb as easily as they could have tied a figure-eight not – which is precisely what Rossen did with his exquisite guitar-playing. In their sweaters and collars, the boys seemed as homey as your mother’s milk ’n’ cookies (which is not surprising given that they recorded Yellow House in the living room of Droste’s mom’s place just off Cape Cod), but they played like road-callused musicians. Grizzly Bear never let the inherently woozy material wander off course or the reverb drown out the pop hooks gleaming in each tune. We all stumbled into the frigid night humming and happy.
Last Wednesday, I returned to the sold out Bowery to see Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear play the last show of their tour. The quartet was as tight as a Boeing’s cabin at 30,000 feet, and it was a phenomenal show. The boys play a technically ambitious brand of folk which they strap to the chromatic melodicism of a Danny Elfman film score. On records like last year’s beloved Yellow House, this comes off as lo-fi freak-folk experimentation with oodles of horns, tape loops, and found sounds burbling in the corners of their eerie tunes. One wondered how Grizzly Bear would ever pull it all off live. Their tour-capping gig at the Bowery certainly answered that question.
While Serena Maneesh looked like Burberry models checking themselves into rehab, the four mild-mannered guys in Grizzly Bear looked like boy scouts checking themselves into choir practice. And they sang like it too. At the Bowery, guitarist Daniel Rossen and multi-instrumentalist Ed Droste tossed off towering harmonies over a sea of reverb as easily as they could have tied a figure-eight not – which is precisely what Rossen did with his exquisite guitar-playing. In their sweaters and collars, the boys seemed as homey as your mother’s milk ’n’ cookies (which is not surprising given that they recorded Yellow House in the living room of Droste’s mom’s place just off Cape Cod), but they played like road-callused musicians. Grizzly Bear never let the inherently woozy material wander off course or the reverb drown out the pop hooks gleaming in each tune. We all stumbled into the frigid night humming and happy.
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Née-met at Night
I usually listen to WQXR (96.3 FM), the New York Times’ classical music station, when I’m working at home. This isn’t embarrassing. When I’m being “productive” I don’t want to be “distracted” and the yawning gaps in my classical music knowledge ensure that all those lilting strings and bleating horns stay firmly in the background. But WQXR has a late-night dj. Her name is Nimet Habachy, she knows four languages fluently (English, Arabic, French, and Italian), and she pronounces her first name with the care and delicacy of a waitress in a $100-a-plate French restaurant listing the final, crucial ingredient in some obscure white wine sauce - “Née-met.” I love her. I find her very distracting. This is very embarrassing.
Her show is called New York at Night and it runs from midnight to 5:30am every weeknight. Ms. Habachy (I will call her respectfully “Née-met” for the remainder), born and bred in Cairo, has been gracing New York’s insomniacs with her deliciously cosmopolitan voice since 1982. She generally spins the standards – Debussy (“De-bú-see”), Mozart (“Mo-zart”), Chopin (“Cho-pa”) – and admirably so. But it isn’t the music that’s interesting about this former language coach. It’s Née-met’s super-sophisticated affect, her un-self-conscious self-consciousness that makes her seem like some relic of 1940’s Manhattan. She’s straight out of some Bogart or Clark Gable flick. Her on-air presentation is as blissfully archaic as a soft-focus wedding photograph of your grandmother . . . And so is her bio photo online.
Née-met speaks of using those wee hours to comfort people in great periods of mourning or sickness. This is admirable I suppose – whatever it takes to justify heading in to the office at 11:30pm every night. As for myself, neither grief-stricken nor bed-ridden, I prefer to use Née-met for a different purpose – as a healthy, though no less guilty, distraction from the pains of graduate journalism school. I wonder how Née-met would pronounce “query” . . .
Friday, February 23, 2007
A Gallery Ends in Silence
In a fit of sad irony, the Tribeca gallery Gigantic Art Space (GAS) will be closing its doors this weekend with the conclusion of its final exhibit, [silence]. Curated by Galen Joseph-Hunter and Dylan J. Gauthier, the show investigates the “futility of the chase, the beauty of absence, and the rich potential of an empty signal.” In practice, and off the pages of the press release, this means pieces like Douglas Henderson’s mesmerizing Untitled – a sound sculpture in which pools of water in the cones of four upturned loudspeakers ripple and purr as inaudibly low frequencies course through them. At 4:33pm tomorrow evening (Saturday, Feb. 24th) the radio theatre troupe 31 Down will perform, marking the end of the exhibit and GAS’ final hour.
[silence] has hosted a number of these Saturday performances, and last weekend’s was certainly worth the trek to Franklin Street. Australian artist Michael Graeve – who played alongside Tianna Kennedy (a free03point9 staff member and [silence] contributor) and her cello – used a fascinating musical contraption built by an Austrian friend of his. I didn’t catch its name (if it had one), but Grave’s “instrument” was essentially a 70s-era portable record player/speaker combo hooked up to a large glass mirror. By “hooked up,” I mean the mirror had a pick-up attached to its face that functioned much like what you’d find on a Les Paul. Every time Kennedy would tap on the back of the mirror or run her cello bow along its edge the record player’s speaker would react accordingly, amplifying the sound to the nth degree. After fiddling with the mirror, Kennedy returned to her chair to run through a series of haunting harmonics and single note passages over Greave’s record-player assisted feedback. You could feel the wine rumbling in your little plastic cup.
Brian Devine, who has worked in film and television production and as a singer-songwriter with the band Spanish Speaking Psychics, founded Gigantic Art Space in 2003. GAS was conceived as a kind of media catch-all – a meeting place for artists working with sound, video, and other interactive technologies. Though I know little of Devine’s and artistic director Lea Rekow’s past work at GAS, if [silence] is at all representative, the gallery will surely be missed come Sunday.
[silence] has hosted a number of these Saturday performances, and last weekend’s was certainly worth the trek to Franklin Street. Australian artist Michael Graeve – who played alongside Tianna Kennedy (a free03point9 staff member and [silence] contributor) and her cello – used a fascinating musical contraption built by an Austrian friend of his. I didn’t catch its name (if it had one), but Grave’s “instrument” was essentially a 70s-era portable record player/speaker combo hooked up to a large glass mirror. By “hooked up,” I mean the mirror had a pick-up attached to its face that functioned much like what you’d find on a Les Paul. Every time Kennedy would tap on the back of the mirror or run her cello bow along its edge the record player’s speaker would react accordingly, amplifying the sound to the nth degree. After fiddling with the mirror, Kennedy returned to her chair to run through a series of haunting harmonics and single note passages over Greave’s record-player assisted feedback. You could feel the wine rumbling in your little plastic cup.
Brian Devine, who has worked in film and television production and as a singer-songwriter with the band Spanish Speaking Psychics, founded Gigantic Art Space in 2003. GAS was conceived as a kind of media catch-all – a meeting place for artists working with sound, video, and other interactive technologies. Though I know little of Devine’s and artistic director Lea Rekow’s past work at GAS, if [silence] is at all representative, the gallery will surely be missed come Sunday.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
U.S. Torture Techniques a Laugh Riot
On February 2nd, the Society for Ethnomusicology posted an official statement on their website condemning the use of music as a form torture by the U.S. military. To wit:
On behalf of the Society for Ethnomusicology the SEM Board of Directors approves the Position Statement against the Use of Music as Torture, which originated in the SEM Ethics Committee and has the unanimous support of the Board of Directors.
The Society for Ethnomusicology condemns the use of torture in any form. An international scholarly society founded in 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and its members are devoted to the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts. The SEM is committed to the ethical uses of music to further human understanding and to uphold the highest standards of human rights. The Society is equally committed to drawing critical attention to the abuse of such standards through the unethical uses of music to harm individuals and the societies in which they live. The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies has used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror.
The Society for Ethnomusicology
- calls for full disclosure of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture;
- condemns the use of music as an instrument of torture; and
- demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and psychological torture.
Suggested link
For further information on the American history and praxis of using music as an instrument of torture, the Society for Ethnomusicology recommends the following article:
Suzanne Cusick, “Music as Torture, Music as Weapon,” Revista Transcultural de Música/Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006).
* * *
And who, you might ask, has had the privilege of blaring out of American military speakers over the years? Well, there’s been Eminem, Christina Aguilera, Metallica, Barney, and Sesame Street over the last five. But the U.S. military was dallying in pop music torture far before Rummy had his way with the Pentagon in 2001. Though the SEM’s statements claims this musical torment only started that year, according to a Washington Times article from December 29, 1989 (and David Pescovitz’ blog on BoingBoing) U.S. troops blasted Michael Jackson, Linda Rondstadt, The Marvelettes, the Bobby Fuller Four, and Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child” as a means of getting Panama’s president Manual Norriega to surrender a full 18 years ago.
Surprisingly (or not), the chief reaction to SEM’s statement, particularly among conservative bloggers, has been little more than chummy laughter. (See, for example, Right Wing Nation and Mark Steyn’s “Facing the Music” in the New York Sun and his blog The Corner on the National Review.) In the abstract, I suppose any discussion of Ms. Aguilera’s blanched electro-pop making young men frantic is amusing, but this is torture, folks. Hating your kid’s Eminem records when he’s playing them in the next room while you’re trying to blog for Right Hand Politics and make fun of big words like “ethnomusicology” is one thing. Having Dr. Dre’s sharp beats rammed into your skull at full volume while standing stark naked on four hours of sleep in the last three days is another thing all together. Kudos to SEM.
Friday, February 9, 2007
Off Broadway
Many of us go about the tedious and exhausting process of renting or buying an apartment in New York with an eye (and an ear) to keeping street noise out of our living rooms and bedrooms. (Check out Jay Ramono’s recent piece in the Times, Checking Out The Noise Level for pointers). On the other hand, if you don’t actually have to sleep in the place, the idea of hearing Broadway brimming and buzzing three floors below while you’re safely ensconced in some Soho art gallery munching on wine and cheese seems like a lovely way to spend a Thursday evening. Well, you’ll have the chance to do just that starting March 21 with the opening of Jacob Kirkegaard’s “Broadway” at the Swiss Institute Contemporary Art (SI) on, yes, Broadway between Spring and Broome.
Since I don’t know an accelerometer from a hole in the ground, here’s SI’s own description of Kirkegaard’s fascinating sound installation:
The piece "Broadway" is a five-channel sound installation that draws its source from the five subtly vibrating columns running through the gallery space. When you put your ear to these columns you can hear them resonating with the sound of Broadway below. The internal sound of each column will be recorded with accelerometers (sensitive contact microphones) and played back into the space through the columns by means of exciters (electro acoustic devices). Thus the five columns are being turned into loudspeakers - each one of them playing the sounds of Broadway in another resonant scale.
With this piece, Kirkegaard not only draws a multifaceted portrait of Broadway as idea, location and historical concept - he also offers a unique way of experiencing the reverberations of an urban environment, as it were, "from within.”
If only because Kirkegaard’s last release, Four Rooms (Touch Records), was a sonic portrait of four rooms within Chernobyl’s “Zone of Alienation,” one should expect more than just spineless ambient knob-twiddling. “Broadway” runs through May 7.
Since I don’t know an accelerometer from a hole in the ground, here’s SI’s own description of Kirkegaard’s fascinating sound installation:
The piece "Broadway" is a five-channel sound installation that draws its source from the five subtly vibrating columns running through the gallery space. When you put your ear to these columns you can hear them resonating with the sound of Broadway below. The internal sound of each column will be recorded with accelerometers (sensitive contact microphones) and played back into the space through the columns by means of exciters (electro acoustic devices). Thus the five columns are being turned into loudspeakers - each one of them playing the sounds of Broadway in another resonant scale.
With this piece, Kirkegaard not only draws a multifaceted portrait of Broadway as idea, location and historical concept - he also offers a unique way of experiencing the reverberations of an urban environment, as it were, "from within.”
If only because Kirkegaard’s last release, Four Rooms (Touch Records), was a sonic portrait of four rooms within Chernobyl’s “Zone of Alienation,” one should expect more than just spineless ambient knob-twiddling. “Broadway” runs through May 7.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Jackhammer Heart
Construction and its malignant soundtrack are simply part of city life. To pitch a fit every time some bozos with jackhammers, two-by-fours, and hard hats set up shop nearby is to renege on the holy urban contract. We deal with the squeal of the F train, the heedless wail of car alarms on Metropolitan Avenue, and, in this case, the shake, rattle ‘n’ roll of a new construction site so we can see the Wrens at the Knitting Factory, a movie at the Angelika, and a wine-tasting at Astor Wines & Spirits. You have to eat your vegetables first, folks.
This was a position I was willing to argue (and with folks who’ve called New York home far longer than myself) until yesterday morning. Jackhammers are useful metaphors for a reason – like so many of life’s irritants they are maddingly unpredictable and yet their roar is entirely unmistakable. Anyone worth their Soho rent could pick up on the sound of compressed air thrusting into concrete a mile away. But when the S.O.B. is right outside your door on a Wednesday morning, it’s more than just a metaphor – it’s a disaster. Granted it was 9:30am and I wasn’t actually woken up by the thing (my alarm had gone off just seconds earlier), but with the good folks at Triboro Plumbing slaving away next door, I had nowhere to hide and every reason to complain.
No, I didn’t call 311. I didn’t really do much more than look out my fourth-floor window, gawk at the colossal pile of Macadam on my street, and grumble ineffectually. But now I relate, if somewhat superficially, to all those tenants, community organizations, and government agencies that lobbied for years to get the city’s archaic noise code revised. “Neighborhood Noise and Its Consequences,” a report released last month based on online surveys conducted in 2004 by The Council on the Environment of New York City (CENYC), revealed that “construction or repair work” was the fifth most bothersome noise for New Yorkers. (Online respondents had 25 annoyances to choice from. “Neighbors activity or voices” came in first.) While the revised noise code, which goes into affect July 1, restricts nighttime construction work, it unfortunately doesn’t do much more to specifically construction clatter.
Our prayers, God save us, may instead rest in the hands (and ears) of the NYPD. Currently the department can only afford to provide officers with one hand-held decibel meter per precinct. The new noise code promises, with the help of the Department of Environmental Protection, to provide each officer with his own meter. At $2,000 a pop, that may be a tall order. But should they pull it off, come July, every officer in the city will have the ability to fine over-zealous construction companies if their jackhammers start belching out at ten decibels or more above ambient sound.
Until then (or until I shell out $2,000 of my own), I have no way of knowing whether my friends in Triboro Plumbing are actually breaking the city’s sound barrier. Maybe they’re entirely within code; maybe their jackhammers are, technically speaking, only modestly disruptive; maybe this is just something I’ll have to learn to deal with. Even in the wilds of Williamsburg, the city’s aural unpleasantness makes itself felt. It would be foolish for me to think otherwise - which brings me back to my first argument, one I’m not entirely willing to give up. How often am I willing to listen to drunkards stumbling home at 4:30am just so I can stay out ’till 5? Maybe more than I’m willing to admit. And really, jackhammers or not, I shouldn’t be sleeping past 10am anyway.
This was a position I was willing to argue (and with folks who’ve called New York home far longer than myself) until yesterday morning. Jackhammers are useful metaphors for a reason – like so many of life’s irritants they are maddingly unpredictable and yet their roar is entirely unmistakable. Anyone worth their Soho rent could pick up on the sound of compressed air thrusting into concrete a mile away. But when the S.O.B. is right outside your door on a Wednesday morning, it’s more than just a metaphor – it’s a disaster. Granted it was 9:30am and I wasn’t actually woken up by the thing (my alarm had gone off just seconds earlier), but with the good folks at Triboro Plumbing slaving away next door, I had nowhere to hide and every reason to complain.
No, I didn’t call 311. I didn’t really do much more than look out my fourth-floor window, gawk at the colossal pile of Macadam on my street, and grumble ineffectually. But now I relate, if somewhat superficially, to all those tenants, community organizations, and government agencies that lobbied for years to get the city’s archaic noise code revised. “Neighborhood Noise and Its Consequences,” a report released last month based on online surveys conducted in 2004 by The Council on the Environment of New York City (CENYC), revealed that “construction or repair work” was the fifth most bothersome noise for New Yorkers. (Online respondents had 25 annoyances to choice from. “Neighbors activity or voices” came in first.) While the revised noise code, which goes into affect July 1, restricts nighttime construction work, it unfortunately doesn’t do much more to specifically construction clatter.
Our prayers, God save us, may instead rest in the hands (and ears) of the NYPD. Currently the department can only afford to provide officers with one hand-held decibel meter per precinct. The new noise code promises, with the help of the Department of Environmental Protection, to provide each officer with his own meter. At $2,000 a pop, that may be a tall order. But should they pull it off, come July, every officer in the city will have the ability to fine over-zealous construction companies if their jackhammers start belching out at ten decibels or more above ambient sound.
Until then (or until I shell out $2,000 of my own), I have no way of knowing whether my friends in Triboro Plumbing are actually breaking the city’s sound barrier. Maybe they’re entirely within code; maybe their jackhammers are, technically speaking, only modestly disruptive; maybe this is just something I’ll have to learn to deal with. Even in the wilds of Williamsburg, the city’s aural unpleasantness makes itself felt. It would be foolish for me to think otherwise - which brings me back to my first argument, one I’m not entirely willing to give up. How often am I willing to listen to drunkards stumbling home at 4:30am just so I can stay out ’till 5? Maybe more than I’m willing to admit. And really, jackhammers or not, I shouldn’t be sleeping past 10am anyway.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Vomiting: Worst Sound Ever
Someone better call up Bloomberg’s office and tell ’em the news. Car alarms, air-conditioners, and Mister Softee jingles may, in fact, not be the most intolerable aural burdens. According to a study conducted by Dr. Trevor Cox of Britain’s Salford University, the sound of somebody vomiting is officially the most revolting to the human ear. It looks like New York’s new noise code – you know, the one slated to go into affect July 1st, the first major change of its kind in 30 years – might be in need of some revision. Nowhere among Local Law No. 113’s 25 pages will you find any mention of “vomit” or “retch” or “barf.”
Early last fall, Cox set up a website (http://www.sound101.org/) presenting test-takers with 34 different samples the good doctor and his team had recorded themselves. After hearing the sharp whir of a dentist’s drill, say, or the flatulent ripple of a whoopee cushion, users were asked to rate the recordings on a six point scale ranging from “Not horrible” to “Horrible.” (Emoticons in various stages of distress were provided for purposes of clarity.) Over one million curious masochists took the challenge, crowning the sound of vomiting – a sample Cox made with the help of a fairly unconvincing actor and a can of baked beans – the most “Horrible” sound of all time. Microphone feedback came in second, while babies crying and something described as a “horrible scrapping” sound tied for third.
The classically repellent screech of fingernails on a chalk-board (just typing it makes me cringe) came in at an astounding 16th place. Other surprises revealed by Cox’s lovely potpourri had more to do with gender than cultural expectation. Women gave a worse rating than men to 25 of the 34 recordings. Conspicuously absent from those 25, though, was the sound of babies crying. For reasons that Cox surmises have something to do with women’s traditional role as protectors, men found the chorus of wailing infants much harder to bear than their mates. “It could be that females have become habituated to the sound of babies crying,” Cox says.
Beyond Cox’s stated hope that his project will “inform industry about how to engineer sounds which are more pleasant,” and its pleasingly simplistic (and imminently quotable) results, one wonders exactly how much his BadVibes experiment (as he calls it) actually engages with the ways humans experience sound on a daily basis, particularly within the cramped environs of New York City. With Bloomberg’s new noise regulations approaching – regulations that aim to clamp down on common city annoyances ranging from noisy bars to barking dogs – “horrible” sounds seem to be on everyone’s mind (and in everyone's ears). But there is, of course, something different between a single test subject gagging while someone looses their lunch, and thousands of commuters gritting their teeth against the daily grind of a whining subway train. Cox is explicitly testing individual reactions to sounds generally experienced only by individuals. Bloomberg and the city’s Department of Environmental Protection – the agency that pushed forward the new regulations – are dealing with communal reactions to sounds generally experienced by all of us. More importantly, so many of the city’s aural assaults are patently unavoidable aspects of daily life. One can’t choice not to take the subway in the morning in the same way that one can’t simply pick up and move to another building when the idiot next door won’t curb his hateful obsession with Eurotrash dance music.
I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Cox’s ambitious experiment is a failure for not addressing these differences. I’m only suggesting that its gimmicky premise – its understanding of a “horrible” sound as something you can be rid of the moment you close your browser – does not, for the most part, apply to the public noise debates currently raging in New York City (see, for example, this recent story in the New York Times’ City Section, The Sound and the Fury). In fact, the parties involved in these debates are not fundamentally talking about “sound” at all. They’re talking about what one should or should not be made to endure as a citizen of a vibrant city – which urban nuisances are part of the fabric of New York and which are beyond the pale. This is a culture war, not a battle of the bands.
Early last fall, Cox set up a website (http://www.sound101.org/) presenting test-takers with 34 different samples the good doctor and his team had recorded themselves. After hearing the sharp whir of a dentist’s drill, say, or the flatulent ripple of a whoopee cushion, users were asked to rate the recordings on a six point scale ranging from “Not horrible” to “Horrible.” (Emoticons in various stages of distress were provided for purposes of clarity.) Over one million curious masochists took the challenge, crowning the sound of vomiting – a sample Cox made with the help of a fairly unconvincing actor and a can of baked beans – the most “Horrible” sound of all time. Microphone feedback came in second, while babies crying and something described as a “horrible scrapping” sound tied for third.
The classically repellent screech of fingernails on a chalk-board (just typing it makes me cringe) came in at an astounding 16th place. Other surprises revealed by Cox’s lovely potpourri had more to do with gender than cultural expectation. Women gave a worse rating than men to 25 of the 34 recordings. Conspicuously absent from those 25, though, was the sound of babies crying. For reasons that Cox surmises have something to do with women’s traditional role as protectors, men found the chorus of wailing infants much harder to bear than their mates. “It could be that females have become habituated to the sound of babies crying,” Cox says.
Beyond Cox’s stated hope that his project will “inform industry about how to engineer sounds which are more pleasant,” and its pleasingly simplistic (and imminently quotable) results, one wonders exactly how much his BadVibes experiment (as he calls it) actually engages with the ways humans experience sound on a daily basis, particularly within the cramped environs of New York City. With Bloomberg’s new noise regulations approaching – regulations that aim to clamp down on common city annoyances ranging from noisy bars to barking dogs – “horrible” sounds seem to be on everyone’s mind (and in everyone's ears). But there is, of course, something different between a single test subject gagging while someone looses their lunch, and thousands of commuters gritting their teeth against the daily grind of a whining subway train. Cox is explicitly testing individual reactions to sounds generally experienced only by individuals. Bloomberg and the city’s Department of Environmental Protection – the agency that pushed forward the new regulations – are dealing with communal reactions to sounds generally experienced by all of us. More importantly, so many of the city’s aural assaults are patently unavoidable aspects of daily life. One can’t choice not to take the subway in the morning in the same way that one can’t simply pick up and move to another building when the idiot next door won’t curb his hateful obsession with Eurotrash dance music.
I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Cox’s ambitious experiment is a failure for not addressing these differences. I’m only suggesting that its gimmicky premise – its understanding of a “horrible” sound as something you can be rid of the moment you close your browser – does not, for the most part, apply to the public noise debates currently raging in New York City (see, for example, this recent story in the New York Times’ City Section, The Sound and the Fury). In fact, the parties involved in these debates are not fundamentally talking about “sound” at all. They’re talking about what one should or should not be made to endure as a citizen of a vibrant city – which urban nuisances are part of the fabric of New York and which are beyond the pale. This is a culture war, not a battle of the bands.
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