What Are You Listening to When youarelistening.to/losangeles ?
Earlier last week I came across this post by GOOD regarding a new site called youarelisteningtolosangeles.com. Eric Eberhardt’s (http://twitter.com/url2la) web creation uses an LAPD radio feed and plays Creative Commons-licensed music in the background. (According to Olsen Bright at NBC Los Angeles, the URL was registered only last week, but since it went live it has gone viral. As of this post, it has links for New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Montreal). The site that has gotten more news coverage has been, by far, the Los Angeles site. Nicola Twilley from GOOD calls it “hypnotic, beautiful, and utterly compelling.” When I first tuned in, I couldn’t stop listening. It is certainly haunting and leaves behind a feeling of uncanniness: the disembodied voices of police dispatchers far away mesh with the soothing sounds of ambiance music.What caught my eye about the article was Twilley’s description of what it was like to listen to LAPD’s radiofeed:
“To listen to it is to be plugged into the pulse of the city; lost in fragments of someone else’s story. Urgency alternates with frustration and low-level routine; some incidents are reported while others are resolved; and jaywalking tickets are issued in the same breath as lives are lost.”
I like her idea that the site allows you to tune into “the pulse of the city.” The feed is a sonic representation of what is happening on LA’s streets. I had the feeling that I was listening to some subversive channel of LA life, narrated by a police dispatcher. However, there are two things that come to mind: a) the sounds of urban life are being filtered through the police department, and b) what are the sounds we hear on the feed telling us about the sonic dimensions of cities?
This online radio station of sorts mashes up city sounds with background music, but once you pause the music what we get are conversations between police officers. The result is that those sounds (voices, codes, numbers, addresses) filter the soundtrack of the city. When we click on youarelisteningtolos angeles.com we are actually listening to the keepers of peace and order on the city streets. The city has already been distilled for us through a radio dispatcher and officers.
The sounds are haunting. Interestingly, what attracts some listeners is the fact that they can eavesdrop on the police feeds, like we’re tuning into what our neighbors are doing. Others point out how soothing the sounds meshed with the dispatcher feed can be. However, the site serves as an example of how city sounds are filtered to us. We don’t hear the actual people who the dispatchers talk about, but the stories of their actions. In that sense, what we hear about them is really a narrative of order, chaos, authority, and traffic violations. Who is stepping outside of the lines?
But…can we ever really listen to The City? This is why audio projects such as soundwalks are important, because they make that aural experience multisonoral. The same way we must reject single stories (like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie pointed out in her TED talk) we must also bring to light different soundtracks of the city around us, lest the radio feed of a police dispatcher become the one that stands out.
This brings me to my second concern: what are we actually listening to? What was initially problematic for me was that we don’t actually hear urban sounds. We hear voices talking about citizen activity on the streets. Once you mute the music, what you get are voices narrating what is happening on the street level. But then I realized that I was be limiting what sounds are classified as city sounds. In that sense, youarelistening.to is opening up what it means to listen to cities. The citizens also make sounds; their voices are part of the soundscape of the city.
I’d love to hear from our readers from these different cities, see what their reaction to listening to the transmission is.
By the way: can we get a youarelistening.to/kansascity?
Bonus tracks:
Here is Soul Coughing’s “Screenwriter’s Blues,” whose line “You are listening to Los Angeles” provided inspiration for the title. (via laist.com)
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Can You Hear Me Now?
The New York Times' Brian Stelter posted this tweet earlier this week. It serves as an example of the importance of sound to the media coverage of the protests in Egypt.
And Gil-Scott Heron thought the revolution would not be televised.
The past few weeks the world has been watching the protests in Egypt. We have not just watched, but we have also tuned in. This is history in the making, especially considering that many of the information we are getting of this protest movement come from the ground, from the protesters themselves, and their requests have gone viral on Youtube and Twitter.
Earlier this week, I was watching CNN and its coverage of the protesters at Tahrir Square after Mubarak’s statement that he would not step down. On several occasions the broadcasters on CNN asked viewers to listen to protesters. The grainy images of the mobile crowds had been playing in the background all afternoon, a reminder of what was going on while the broadcasters offered information and analysis. But at times the broadcasters stopped speaking so viewers could listen to the crowds. The grainy images emitted a dull roar, the combination of all of the cries and statements from the protesters. The cameras followed people down streets, but the roar was constant. It struck me how often the plea to listen came up during the broadcast. On Friday, when Mubarak resigned, I tuned in online (from work) to CNN, MSNBC, and BBC America. The broadcasters made the same requests: let’s tune in to the crowds at Tahrir Square. See early in this MSNBC video where Brian Williams encourages viewers to listen to the protesters:
The newsmedia seemed to offer the sounds to its viewers, but what is at stake when that happens? How are the sounds being coded? Mark Branter’s post on sound and sanity in the context of the Rally to Restore Sanity (which took place on October 30th 2010), reminds us that oftentimes noise and screaming is connected to “irrationality and fear.” He points out, “Public noise is senseless sound, while rational debate is meaningful sound.” In this context, the constant plea from newscasters for the American public to “listen in” to the crowds at Tahrir Square takes a different spin. Are we insiders looking at the Other scream and shout? When the newscasters ask us to tune in to the pleas and screams coming from the Egyptian crowds I wonder if the newscasts frame them as senseless crowds because of the way that they present these sounds. In any instance, this presentation of sound is not innocent. Some may argue that it is just a request from Western media to pay attention to what the crowds are saying, but I believe that we cannot truly listen to their cries on Tahrir Square when we still hold in place this analogy of “sound/noise::rationality/irrationality.” Many agreed that Mubarak should listen to the pleas of the crowds, but are we listening to them as well?
The coverage of the Egyptian protests shows us how complicated listening is. The protesters are not just seen but heard (only when the network wants the viewers to listen, mind you) by viewers. The sonic aspect of this movement is reinforced when we think of the “Speak-to-Tweet” service, set up to allow Egyptian protesters to tweet when the Egyptian government turned off all internet communication. We could read AND hear what the protesters were saying.
When media outlets choose to tune in to the protests in Egypt, this is an example of how important sound is to narratives. Visuals are not the only story, is what I get from the protest coverage. (And letting the world hear the protesters is a step in the right direction.) The coverage and its inclination toward the audio of the protesters tells me that it’s not just a matter of shock value but it’s also a statement of the role of audio in the news. It’s supposed to be a reflection of what is going on at the moment, like taking the temperature of the crowds. As others have said on this blog (for example, Priscilla Peña Ovalle) sound is usually linked to the visual, and the hierarchy of senses in our society always has the visual as the most important. Listening is important, but we must also think about how we listen, and what filters the sounds we listen to.
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