During my travels within Iowa City, I've heard many sounds that I've categorized into these categories: ambient, annoying, musical, and depressing. They have a sort an emotional affect on me whether it is total ambivalence or my emotions are plucked as though they are like a puppet and the sound is the strings. The majority of my tweets were recorded while on campus, at down town, or my dorm. Less frequently, though, some were from Ames.
In the morning, I usually don’t notice the sound of the heat radiator exuding warm air, but this time I did. It is an ambient noise that is the most familiar, because I hear it every night while I sleep. It is also the easiest to tune out.
I was sitting in World Music talking amongst my classmates, and I made a common error in the morning--I mistook the sound of a maraca for a marimba. At the time, I discovered that a marimba is a xylophone type of instrument, and the maraca has beans in it that one shakes. I was still unclear, since in the title of the piece I was analyzing, the instruments used were "steel drums," but nonetheless, a maraca-type instrument was in the recording. It was a very infrequent sound compared to the others I recorded in my tweets. I still think that the sound produced was by a brush being moved in a circular motion on a steel drum...
One of the less frequent things that people listen for, which I took it upon myself to try something original, was to listen for annoying sounds, and I define annoying sounds as the type that one can’t bear after a while. While I was at the library, I noticed that many people were typing and if one focuses on its unique sound, it's very difficult to deduce any differences except for distance from the listener, frequency of the keystrokes (the times they are struck), and attack. I decided to say that it's impossible to tell by sound alone whether the typists had cut or uncut finger nails, which is again something few people listen for during the day...
I've spent most of my time recording my tweets at bars, but after reviewing them, I still have an idea of how frequently they are reproduced. They fall either into artificial or authentic categories, in my mind. After my last class ends, usually, I walk to a bar and the snow that I tread upon, which is now melted away, made a squishy sound. This occurred every day; so it occurred during the mornings and evenings rather rarely since I'd spend at least thirty minutes listening to this ambient noise (usually subconsciously). Often I've eaten at the Old Capital Mall, which is another location where it's scientifically impossible to listen to every single sound occurring and comprehending them at the same time, (unless one is in close proximity), especially when there's a crowd during typical class hours.
While at one of my most frequented bars, I've discovered that they play my Dad's favorite "oldie music" either from an MP3 player, or the radio. Some of the sounds played, rather rarely, though they are always repeated since they are classics, are: "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, "Kashmir," "Another One bites the Dust" by Queen, "Who Stopped the Rain?" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and “Another Brick in the Wall,” by Pink Floyd. I used to be exposed to these songs very frequently because my Dad always plays them at his house, but now that I see him less frequently (he lives in Ames); it always brings back a memory of this pastime. I heard these songs during the night. When a waitress ripped the receipt from the register, I tweeted what I had heard. It is a sound I rarely hear and I probably won’t for a long time.
One of the characteristics of being a composer is carrying this illusion that one is like Mozart in the sense that one hears notes in one’s head and one writes them down because he was a genius. Unfortunately, this isn't the case for me. I was doing my music theory homework at another bar during midday, The Summit, while I wrote down an atypical progression that I was sure my professor would give an A+ (but now that I will drop the course, so it doesn't matter). I was either hearing the music in my head consciously/subconsciously, which produced this chromatic scale idea for the bass, or I was treating it like a math problem, just filling out the “correct chord values.” Because, when I listened to what I wrote on my electric piano (when I got home), it sounded very good to me. This was a one-time deal.
When I was in Ames that weekend I was recording my tweets, I visited my favorite bar—Café Baudelaire. The owner of the restaurant, a Brazilian of Portuguese decent and friend of mine and my father, was using iTunes to play his favorite music for the crowd. He hand-picked them—it was not from the radio. After leaving the restaurant, I returned to my Dad’s house in Ames, and I was thinking again of Pink Floyd lyrics/songs, and the song titled, “Time.” In the beginning of the piece, a bunch of clocks’ alarms go out. So I decided to include my Dad’s clock because one can hear the second hand move every second. It’s like a pulse without meter, or a heartbeat, counting down till the end of time. And it really was noticeable when I was sitting in on the sofa and all else is quiet. It to me is a very infrequent sound to zone in on, because I use digital watches/clocks. Later that night, I had to return via bus because my Dad didn't have time to offer me a ride. The result was a tweet about the "gentle hum of a bus's air conditioner" during the late evening. I heard that ambient noise infrequently because I rarely use the bus.
Back at my house, I turned on some night music, the overture “Romeo and Juliet,” by Tchaikovsky, which is my favorite piece by him and of all time. I must have listened to all twenty minutes at least ten times that week, making this the most often listened to piece of music of all my tweets. Another piece by Tchaikovsky, which he named after the-love-of-his-life, “Francesca Da Rimini,” is also about fatal, adultrous love… I listened to that piece once in my room in the darkness of night. Also, before midnight, I was paying attention to what I was hearing and I made a mental note to tweet the next day that the refrigerator’s radiator had turned on (fading in), subsided, and then turned off.
