for whom

I can hear church bells out my window, interspersed at various distances. Muted by buildings, tilted widows and that gathering dusty fog that seems to settle here of an evening. Sunday, they began at half past five and are still at it. It’s something that still strikes me as quaint, church bells; something that shouldn’t be part of the city soundscape. In my dirty old town, sunday bells were the toll of ice cream trucks.

Its hard for me to hold up the first few classes (the first week) of the sound studies program against what I expected, because I have no clear idea exactly what I expected. Dissent is brewing over the sound anthropology section though. It turns out that the professor who was there before needs to leave for a while, so he is not teaching our class and there is a woman instead. She has written a lot on music and philosophy and so on and so forth and must have been deemed the woman for the job. But her program, though it includes fascinating materials and themes, is very different than the focus before. Many of the students, myself included, find it far too much music theory and traditional aesthetics and not enough of the sense-based acoustic communication approach that the previous professor outlined. How to reconcile this? to move toward the former themes without alienating our present professor? We will figure something out. The side result of this is that, I think, we are banding together more as a group.

Ah, the group. its quite funny. There are a people who seriously studied music (medieval chamber choir) and have done sound to installation art, a guy who studied acoustic engineering/mastering, musicians of rock bands, electronica, a couple people from punk music, a pr rep who’s done logopaedic singing, people who’ve done music to animation or video or commercials even, an engineer from Tokyo who’s done fluxus-type art pieces, a mixed media photo-documenter from Venezuela and then there’s, well, me. Aged across the board. I’m definitely curious to see how and what turns out. also remind me to talk about sam auinger.

The bells have stopped. It’s six.