Listen out / Listen down

While practicing listening downwards into the inner nucleus of the buzz of hallway lights outside of my apartment door, I found myself distracted by the outer sounds I kept hearing. Therefore, before focusing on what was going on at deeper levels of fluorescent lighting, I let myself focus outwardly.

Starting from the light I was standing under and moving outwards, I became aware of the fact that once I stopped to really listen, I could hear everything from the clanging of dishes in apartment 3A to (unfortunately) my neighbor relieving himself over in 4B. Beyond this, cars were easily audible from the street out front, with a couple dog yaps and childrens' squeals piercing their way over from the building on the other side of the road. Moving further out still, I could trace the sound of more traffic rushing down the streets that criss-cross through the East Village, out towards the Williamsburg Bridge. Moving upwards, you can also detect the sound of wind swaying winter bare branches, to the flap of someone's drying rug outside of some unit above, all the way up to the dull scream of a jet slipping across the sky to I can't say where. Actually, the plane felt almost as loud as the cars cruising by out front of my building.

Having got that out of the way, it was easier to come back to think about the lowly light whose buzz nonetheless always caught my attention. It's not just these particular lights in my hallway; it's fluorescent lights with their buzz in every hallway that I've ever been in that catch my attention, specifically when I'm sitting in the stairwell trying to focus on anything to keep myself from being sick, usually around 4am after a party has gone on too long. Listening long enough, you can pick out the different layers of sound, overlapping each other like scratchy gauze. The different frequencies even seem to move in and out of phase with one another, creating a hypnotic lull of monotonous shifting audible vibrations.

For reference, here's a recording of the lights just outside my door.

word charts/automatic diary

I've always wanted to have the diligence and lack of self-consciousness that would allow me to keep a diary (or a personal blog, for that matter). I would love to be able to reflect back on my days from last month, a year ago or 15 years ago. However much I've tried since childhood to keep a daily diary, I've never succeeded because I've always felt so self-conscious writing down my thoughts. That feeling plus a little bit of inherent laziness made it so that all of my attempts lasted no longer than 30 minutes for every five years.

I propose to develop a system that keeps a kind of unconscious diary, by capturing everything I type while on my computer (where I spend a large part of my day thinking and communicating), and performing a word analysis at the end of every day. From the analysis, I want to compile a top 10 daily word list, to keep record of the most frequent words used, and then a top 100 daily word list, to hopefully glean what kinds of general feelings or issues I had been dealing with throughout the day. Last.fm inspired me with their running charts, to go a bit further and also keep weekly and overall running word charts, to track how I progressed from certain discussions, events, and perhaps life phases over time.

The data will be written to text files and perhaps uploaded to a blog for keeping public record; this last detail I'm still working out. How much of myself I want to expose to everybody is still up for questioning. Also, whether or not I want to parse out groups of characters, such that would describe passwords and other private and irrelevant data is another consideration on my mind.

People Using Musik

For the last week, I tried to be more aware of how myself and those around me were using music to get through their days. Music has always been a crutch i've willingly leaned on to get me through all kinds of situations. Some of those being (click linked titles to hear mp3s):

Setting up my new apartment. Moving and setting up new digs can be pretty stressful. Listened to: The Shop Assistants
Reading. Listened to: a compilation I made for a friend, consisting of Fleetwood Mac (yeah!), Pet Shop Boys, and the Church, etc.
Daydreaming on the subway. Listened to: New-Wave compilation (Thomas Dolby: Europa)
Afterparty at my house! Listened to: shoegaze
Remembering my trip to Berlin. Listened to: Swayzak
Falling asleep. Listened to: Cocteau Twins
To distract me from A in order to contemplate about B. Listened to: Love and Rockets
Seeking design inspiration: Chris and Cosey

Other people I observed were plugged into music on the subway (listening to ??? Often times, I overhear metal in particular blaring out of someone's headphones. Quite alot), hanging out on their steps in the evening warmth (playing hip hop), and driving down the street (playing LOUD hip hop).

H&M always some kind of techno pounding its walls and its shoppers. I have to say, it really does get me in the mood to buy a ton of clothing.

Restaurants used music too of course, to set moods or assign personalities to themselves. Or to identify with the majority of their clients (Enid's in Greenpoint is always playing Modest Mouse or Pavement, in tune with the indie clientele). Although this is similar to the restaurant assigning itself a personality. It's a which came first kind of question.