Abortion Politics in Canada

My neighbor sent me a link to a petition, which I’m passing on to my Canadian readers:

Stop Bill C-484. Called the “Unborn Victims of Crime Act,” it allows charges to be laid in certain cases where a fetus dies. While it’s expressed purpose is law-and-order politics, it also opens the legal door for anti-abortion activists. That door has been shut for over 20 years in Canada and we should keep it that way. I urge the Canadians to sign. I signed, but if they were to look, I’m not (yet) a voter. More important, probably, are the letters you can use to contact your MP and the Liberal party, who could easily kill this measure as official opposition if they wanted to.

Grad Students: Record Your Meetings With Your Profs

I know the headline sound paranoid, but it’s not.

Just think about it. You’ve written a chapter of your dissertation, a seminar paper, whatever. You go in and meet with your prof for an hour or more and have a great discussion about it. You take some notes. You’re excited. You get busy. You leave the project for awhile. You come back to it weeks or months later and remember what you wrote down (maybe), but that’s it.

At least two of the students with whom I work have taken to recording these kinds of meetings. I had one dissertation proposal defence recorded and a few one-on-one meetings. You do have to listen to it again and not be horrified at the sound of your own voice (and/or relive the experience if it’s a defence), but it is a way to have a freer-flowing conversation, not worry about getting everything down, and to just be in the moment.

Anyway, my students have used the voice recorder add-on for the iPod and also just the built-in microphone on the mac laptop with Audacity, which is a free program. I’ve got at least two people swearing by the practice now.

In fact, I was once told by a Michael Denning student that he doesn’t write comments on seminar papers but instead insists that students meet with him. I might try that with my sound course in the fall and also record the meetings, providing each student with a record of it immediately afterward.

All this takes more time and is less efficient in some ways, but if it works for you, you may get more out of the meeting. And your prof has to be willing to be recorded.

Of course, you need to make sure you turn OFF the recorder when you get to the part of the meeting where the discussion moves to things you may not want recorded.

This is exactly what’s wrong with theories of leisure time

Sivacracy links to a speech by Clay Shirky about “cognitive surplus” which epitomizes the problem with how people think about leisure. They think that the best way to understand leisure is through its generation of things that are useful. Indeed, the whole essay uses an economic metaphor “cognitive surplus” to describe what people have when they work 40 hours a week. Except that many people have such mind-numbing, alienating and miserable jobs that they do not arrive home, fresh from a satisfying day’s work and ready to write Wikipedia entries. Instead, they arrive home exhausted and depleted in one way or another, searching for meaning or value in life that they did not find during the majority of their waking hours that they just spent at work. That’s capitalism.

Also, the old saw about how television is passive and the web is active is a big yawner.

Check out Tiziana Terrnova on Free Labo(u)r instead for a critique of how the web economy works and a better take on how we might think about those people who do actually contribute to things like wikipedia, or for that matter, amazon.com reviews.

And Now a Few Words on Dub and Lawns

An offhand comment in Joel Schalit’s blog entry led me to check out the work of Scientist. “Scientist Rids the World of the Curse of the Vampires” is an amazing album. Black Uhuru was my favorite reggae act back in the day, and actually my first exposure to dub before I knew it was a “thing” (ca. 1987). But my dub education has been completely haphazard. I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Scientist until I read Joel’s entry, and it turns out that I like him even better than Tubby (Lee Perry isn’t as much my thing). Clearly, I need a more systematic education in dub.

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Even since childhood, I hated lawns (also, to be fair hedges). I grew up in a house with a lot of lawn and it required a lot of maintenance. Even though I played outside, I never really appreciated it. I saw lawnwork as something straight out of The Myth of Sisyphus since grass is a fussy plant — difficult to keep alive but not something you can simply let grow. I warmed to the lawn concept a little in Pittsburgh, mostly because Carrie ripped out half our back yard to create a lush and beautiful garden and the remaining lawn could easily be dispatched with the push mower we’d picked up for $5 at a garage sale (it cost $25 to sharpen). But really, I still didn’t believe in lawns. They seemed absurd, as opposed to gardens, which were both more beautiful and more useful.

Then I saw the lawn at King’s College in Cambridge.

The picture doesn’t really convey it, but there’s something about the color of the grass in the UK. Perhaps it’s that it’s grey and rainy all the time — the indirect and diffuse light creates sharper colors that just explode before your eyes. Or at least mine. So I guess that’s why England is the country that brought the world the lawn.

I didn’t know you could do that in Musicology

In all the commotion around here I haven’t had much of a chance to say anything about my trip, which was delightful. My tour of Europe (okay, the UK and the Netherlands) was one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences of my life. Partly, it was the timing. In the last 3 weeks of April I thought more about my book than I had in the year previous. Now I just need to get the writing down.

The tour itself wasn’t grueling but it was brisk in that “it’s Tuesday, so I must be in Liverpool” sort of way.

I’ll try and have a few posts this month based on my experiences in April.

So let’s start with two conference programs. Have a look at them if you haven’t already:

CHARM Symposium 5: Cultures of Recording (a summary here; I didn’t feel like an outlier even though I look like one there) and Music, Sound and the Transformation of Public and Private Space.

Both conferences were outstanding. They were well put together and most of the papers were excellent. As a special bonus, I got to meet a wide swath of people whom I’d read but not met, and also a bunch of people whom I hadn’t read but was delighted to discover.

Of particular note for me was the work by musicologists. I haven’t been to many musicology conferences; I tend to either just give talks in Music departments (and so don’t hear other people give talks) or wind up at conferences with ethnomusicologists or Opera studies types or others on the margins of the field. So most of my suppositions about the field were formed in the 1990s, especially when I briefly considered Music departments for my PhD work.[1] Well, I was blown away to find musicologists at both conferences who actually talk about music as I hear it. The first academic sound-related thing I ever wrote was a paper attempting an aesthetic analysis of multitrack recording. It wasn’t a great paper or anything, but at the time I couldn’t find any serious work on the issue. So I was really excited to listed to Andrew Flory break down the breath sounds in different versions of the vocal track for Marvin Gaye songs. He even pointed out the silence in the track where you can hear the punch-in, and used it to talk about the ways in which Gaye constructed his vocal tracks. In some ways, it was a traditional musicological analysis of style, but at the same time the tools and methods were completely different from the notes and staves usually used in the field (though his presentation did include a transcription).

Joe Auner’s paper on the fate of the voice in glitchy music was also engaging for the same reason. He was analyzing what happens to the voice when it becomes “just another instrument” in a mix (think Prefuse 73 or a bunch of Ninja Tune artists) and combined writings on the voice from sound studies with a careful analysis of several songs and how they were put together. Rather than using traditional notation, he basically imitated the way that a song is laid out as a series of tracks and measures (this was pioneered in Acid but now it’s in Live, Garageband and everywhere else) and used that for his analysis. I heard some grumbling in the front row about his sin against notation but the guy’s an Arnold Schoenberg scholar, so I’m pretty sure he could have done the notes and staves if he wanted to.

At the Cambridge conference, I heard a paper by Eric Clarke on the auditory space within recordings and the status of the voice, in which he undertook an analysis of the various effects on the voice in a Goldfrapp song. Again, I was simply astounded to hear a musicologist actually talk about music in a manner that has something to do with the way that I actually hear it. We had a big argument about whether one can call any audible sonic space virtual (my position is that the term virtual doesn’t make sense when applied to sound, though of course one could have a “virtual concert” in Second Life, as Nicholas Cook pointed out) but I was delighted to discover his project, along with Nikki Dibben’s work on the auditory perception of space inside sound recordings.

So, my conclusion is that Musicology has come a long way, or at least you can now do a bunch of cool stuff that I really like in the field, or at least you can do that kind of work in the UK. I have occasionally mused that all this writing I’ve done on sound has been structured by the impossibility of writing about music as I would like to in an academic context, but I think that may be more of an historical phenomenon than a description of present reality.

If that weren’t enough, as I’m catching up on blogs, I see that Charlie Bertsch and Joel Schalit just did a talk on reverb space in dub.

As for me, I’ve got a piece on convolution reverb for the Augmented Reality project group of which I’m a part.

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[1] I was looking for grad schools in the early 90s. The conversation with the grad director in music departments usually went like this:

THEM: “So, what do you think of Susan McClary’s new book, ?
ME: I loved it. Feminist musicology is totally overdue. She misreads the Whitesnake video, though.
THEM: [silence]
ME: So, is there any support for cultural studies work in your program?
THEM: [silence]
THEM: So, can you read music?
…and on and on

A Small Town With an Embassy Row

Earlier this week was the annual Weinstein lecture, and so members of my family converged on Washington DC. As is our wont, Carrie and I took advantage of the opportunity to go book shopping and found ourselves at Kramerbooks. After selecting a nice pile of reading, we decided the best plan of action would be to mail it home, as we usually do. We buy the books and then inquire about shipping. At first, everything seems fine. Then, once the hipster behind the counter learns we live in Canada, the conversation changes. They don’t ship to Canada. We’re surprised, since they evidently have shipping. There’s a FedEx a few blocks away.

So we bag up the books and walk a few blocks to FedEx. We arrive in the door and ask for a box. After a few exchanges, the FedEx employees inform us that this store, which looks like a normal FedEx store, does not ship internationally. “You have to use the internet for that.” I asked how exactly one uses the internet to ship real physical objects. They explain that we would have to create an account online, print up a shipping label and then bring the label and the books to their FedEx store. Needless to say, they didn’t have the internet there for us to do it on site.

It was a beautiful summer day, so the walk around DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood was okay. But really: here we were in the capital of the world’s most powerful country (okay, maybe only militarily) and nobody would ship internationally. Not FedEx, not a destination bookstore that is listed in tourist guides. My uncle, for whom the lecture series is named, used to be fond of calling the Washington Post “a small town paper with a foreign desk.” DC isn’t exactly a small town with an embassy row, but sometimes it’s got that mentality.

Of course, we finally found a post office and shipped the books without incident. And of course, DC is still a potential sabbatical destination, since the libraries are amazing. But really, it’s full of people who appear to have no idea it’s an international city. Only in America.