Sound You Research Articles

'You are making it sound like you are talking to a child': exploring community sentiment on developing and disseminating tailored sexual health education resources for migrants.

Health communication is a critical component of public health, which includes health education resources. Resource effectiveness is improved where health literacy demands, including the cultural appropriateness of resources, match the intended audience. International guidelines support the tailoring of resources for migrants from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CaLD). Five focus groups (n = 18) and interviews (n = 9) with people from CaLD migrant backgrounds explored community perspectives on sexual health resources developed by a state department of health, specifically clarity, comprehensiveness, cultural appropriateness and strategies for dissemination. We identified three major thematic areas relating to simplicity, cultural norms and beliefs and dissemination. Participants recommended resource delivery in different formats as part of a broader intervention. Generally, sexual health information was deemed appropriate and easily understood. However, the resources used simplified language that participants reported was vague and inaccurate at times, potentially contributing to misinformation and reinforcing stigma relating both to the status of being a migrant and sexual health. Findings suggest the need for more nuanced health resource development beyond translation and language simplification. Resources developed in different formats, including different health literacy demands, using approaches that engage the target group in design and dissemination and contextualized within a comprehensive health promotion project, are likely to be more effective.

Any sound you can imagine? The Bedroom Producer, creativity and popular music education

Since the publication of Paul Théberge’s seminal book Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (1997), a series of multifaceted, interrelated and co-dependent technical, economic, social, cultural and musical changes have contributed to the emergence of a distinct role of music-maker that could be termed ‘the Bedroom Producer’ (although as long as Bedroom Producers have the correct equipment, then the location of their music production activity is immaterial). This article explores the creative context of the Bedroom Producer and analyses the co-current, interactive spheres of music-making that they engage with. These analyses show that are important implications for educators working within popular music education (PME) and the article introduces some of the ways in which educators can use contemporary educational approaches to take account of the creative process in teaching and learning.

“Am I Going to Die?”: Delivering Serious News to Patients With Liver Disease

“Am I Going to Die?”: Delivering Serious News to Patients With Liver Disease

The Long Slog Through the Virtual Swamp: Making a Wetland Podcast in Spanish

The Long Slog Through the Virtual Swamp: Making a Wetland Podcast in Spanish

Mt. Rainier Sanctification

Mt. Rainier Sanctification

Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear.

Beat gestures-spontaneously produced biphasic movements of the hand-are among the most frequently encountered co-speech gestures in human communication. They are closely temporally aligned to the prosodic characteristics of the speech signal, typically occurring on lexically stressed syllables. Despite their prevalence across speakers of the world's languages, how beat gestures impact spoken word recognition is unclear. Can these simple 'flicks of the hand' influence speech perception? Across a range of experiments, we demonstrate that beat gestures influence the explicit and implicit perception of lexical stress (e.g. distinguishing OBject from obJECT), and in turn can influence what vowels listeners hear. Thus, we provide converging evidence for a manual McGurk effect: relatively simple and widely occurring hand movements influence which speech sounds we hear.

Experience Oneness with Creation: The Pathway to Universal Consciousness

Experience Oneness with Creation: The Pathway to Universal Consciousness

<em>The Simpsons</em> Do the Nineties

<em>The Simpsons</em> Do the Nineties

His Master’s Voice

His Master’s Voice Meredith Bergmann (bio) . . . if hearing and listening were the same. —James Merrill, “The Victor Dog” A dog is listening to the dead.His master’s brother played his master’s voice, from a wax recording.The dog sat down and all but stuck his headinto the trumpet of the afterlife. His master’s brother painted them,setting the eager, ashen dog, the gleaming brass machineagainst dark velvet and mahogany.They float on black on my computer screen. Is there no comfort in the past?The dog is listening for commands, his name, or for approval,something to make his pose make sense at last—his master trying to play Beethoven. Hearing her practice “Für Elise,”my mother-in-law’s teacher in Vienna told her then,“You sound like you have never been in love.”She thinks she was eleven, maybe ten. I fell in love when I was five,bewildering my mother: “You can’t be,” I think she said.She silenced me. His voice, his laugh, survivein jumbled fragments that are hard to play. And now I find his name online.There’s video: a dog cavorting with a tall, slim man—my childhood love, the master of that dog?His voice is wrong—the rhythm doesn’t scan. [End Page 613] His dog begins to bark for joy.Then, loud and close, a chuckle from the unseen cameraman:I recognize the timbre of that boywhen he says, finally with pride, “Good girl!” That’s all I ever longed to hear.Now put the screen to sleep. Put “Für Elise” on instead,the soothing trills; the octaves in the bassinsistent, like pronouncements of the dead. [End Page 614] Meredith Bergmann MEREDITH BERGMANN is a sculptor whose publications include Barrow Street, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Light, The New Criterion, TriQuarterly, and the anthology Hot Sonnets. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006–2017. Her chapbook “A Special Education” was published in 2014 by EXOT Books. Copyright © 2018 Meredith Bergmann

Greystone Park

Greystone Park Brian Tierney (bio) Psychiatric Hospital, New Jersey I pause at a row of rusted, part-opened doors & spear thistle stalks that the cracked, shifted floors grewerratically with leak-rain & just enough sun spotting through the ceiling & coming in the hallway, then looked down the long, curved hallwayof shredded red paint & softer cream colors, messy-peeled: like skin on an arm, if a grater slips. Water damage, I say to Tim, with me on a dare, here—an extension builtto relieve the Trenton madhouse several train-stops south, where you could buy a tab of acid from a guy they call, no shit, E. C. Lobotomyfor the scar across his head. Two small hits. Now crumpled green cans from other visits, & other items I can't determine, float like water lettuce in a puddlein the first room, & I swear I hear breathing. So which of these fuckers was hers?—meaning my great aunt Evelyn, Babe for short—her cell, of courseI don't know: that was the overcrowded decades of gland removal & insulin-shock, when ersatz beds in the attic even echoed with chest- belts squeaking at every flinch; leathergloves gripping a steering wheel in winter, she said once, at breakfast, poking a fork through the lymphatic cherry center of a Danish, thensort of laughed. As I listen in, close enough to Tim kicking stray metal instruments in a janitor's closet in the western half, I hear it again: her silver prongs hitting the plate,going too deep. Her laugh as good as scream. Pete, her husband, who [End Page 112] in her every dream, for at least three months after dying, died again deliveringcuts of beef in the city, in '60; the word, by phone, when she heard was a hole she never crawled out of, waiting for the ECT to breathe behind her eyes with its brief seizuresthat lift you from the eyes, the way midday light wavers & rises almost invisibly over standing water on a hot day in Morris Plains, after rain—until each color surrounding you, then, has a sound you can imagine has no end, but in the body. I can tell by the water-stains on the walls near the restraints onlybutchers would've known about in those days, dropping another tab that dissolves on my tongue like olanzapine in a glass of water: holeswhere holes are not supposed to be. [End Page 113] Brian Tierney Brian Tierney is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry and a graduate of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, FIELD, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, the Rumpus, and others. In 2013, Narrative Magazine named him among its "30 Below 30" emerging writers. He currently lives in Oakland, California. Copyright © 2017 Middlebury College Publications

Confessions

Confessions Michael Bazzett (bio) There is a sound you make when you exhalethrough your nose that contains nine octaves.Your fingers are small animals that burrowinto me and sleep guileless as children.Your tongue once visited me on its own.It arrived with a train-case and a listof demands incongruous with the postureof the fat pink comma on my doorstep.Pound for pound, I’m the strongestmuscle in your body, it announced.But it could not gain any leverage whenI flicked it from the stoop with a broom.Once I reached my opened handinto your chest and was startledto find another hand waiting there.It was the first handshake of my lifethat did not feel contrived.That was when I knew it was possibleto disappear into another like water. [End Page 45] Michael Bazzett Michael Bazzett is the author You Must Remember This (Milkweed, 2014) and Our Lands Are Not So Different (Horsethief Books, 2017). His verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, also is forthcoming from Milkweed. Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

In Memoriam: Peter A. Bancroft (1916–2015)

The sound you heard in September of this past year was that of another giant in the mineral world falling. Peter A. Bancroft was a fixture within the mineral community in the years when mineral spe...

At a Party on a Colonist Car Across Canada

At a Party on a Colonist Car Across Canada Chelsea Dingman (bio) You sit next to a man struggling to sing. The true northstrong and he warbles like that bird that struck the window earlier. It didn’t seem to notice anything but the blur of its own wings. Then,a sound you didn’t know a bird could make. A cry. A hiss. The pin letting air loose from a tire. You sip at the drink you were given for hours. Voices loud, beginto slur. You stand on guard for cracks in the ice on the lake outside. You wind with the train’s motion, the same seat you will sleep on for four or fivenights. The cracks swallow snow, growing wider. Slowly. Water, wanting more of everything. More earth. Through the crowd: dilapidated chairs, bare walls. Our native land.Before the crack thunders again, music swells. This hunger you’ve felt for so long. You let your hand float up to the window in answer. But all you can make outare shadows flittering like wings. A stranger swaying in the dark night. Someone else’s hands. [End Page 117] Chelsea Dingman CHELSEA DINGMAN’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in 2017. In 2016, she also won the Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize and the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, and was a finalist for the Auburn Witness Prize, Arcadia’s Dead Bison Editor’s Prize, and Phoebe’s Greg Grummer Poetry Award. Her forthcoming work can be found in Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and Third Coast, among others.* Copyright © 2016 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Listening to Whales

The class bell rings, as usual. But then the lights are switched off. A deep blue light spills on the ceiling overhead, rippling like waves. Images appear on the front screen: whales underwater. Eerie sounds emerge. Wailing? Keening mourners? Water sounds. Low guttural rolls. Short squeaking moans. Long stuttering glissandos. Almost melodic. More images: a whale lofting out of the ocean, then its immense form crashing seaward again, with an explosive spray of water. The sounds continue, strange but soothing. These must be whales? Nothing on the board to copy in your notes. No hints from the teacher. Somewhat uncertain, you sit back to take it in. The haunting, almost mystical sounds wash over you and penetrate through you. After a while, you recognize a series of sounds you heard before. The strange becomes more familiar. The undulating light above is almost hypnotic. The sounds in the darkness lull you into thoughtfulness. You revel in the pleasant atmospheric sound. Eventually, the sounds taper into silence. The class bell rings again. Has it been a whole period? What was the teacher thinking? Is this going to be on the test? Your teacher, smiling gently, expresses a hope that you have enjoyed the experience and learned something valuable from it. As you leave, one student shakes his head ruefully (“Loony!”). You wonder. Readjusting to the familiar cacophony and hectic change of classes seems difficult. You reflect: why was that sound so haunting? No, this will not be on the test. So perhaps it is not a proper biology lesson? If it is not listed on the state curriculum, is the class time even justified? Here, I wish to challenge the sacred bovine that what matters in biology education is only – or even mostly – the content. Aesthetics matter, too. And they …

COMO SE COME O QUÊ (SE COME)

BRICOLAGEM ALIMENTAR NOS ESTILOS NATURAIS Maria Claudia da Veiga Soares Carvalho. Rio de Janeiro: Ed.UERJ, 2013. 162p. ISBN: 978-85-7511-294-6 In a hypothetical situation, a nutritionist with its white coat, heads to the corridor of a basic health unit and calls out loud (or the sound level you wish) the next patient. This one enters the office, sits, or maybe weight and height collection procedures are carried out before that, whatever. What interests us is that at some point of the conversation between the professional and the patient, the last one will be asked about what he eats. From that moment on, it is predictable. The professional questioning, as much as possible, about all the patient usually eats. What he ate from the time he opened his eyes until the moment before going to sleep. And from the patient’s side he will answer to all (or almost all), according to the qualified Nutritionist, who in his eagerness to cure, prevent diseases and promote health, uses his strategies to extract the truth from that person. An a cknowledgment relationship in the case the nutritionist conducts it with docility, a certain empathy, or perhaps if the inquiry mode of extracting the facts is explicitly more violent, i.e., when the response elements are apparent, become obvious in subliminal symbols of questions. As a force that moves from the one that occupies a privileged place of distinction towards the subject, who may resist, accommodate, but who will always play the game in which he becomes the object. Now, when asking “ What did you eat for breakfast ?” already transmits itself elements of a framework that both the professional and the patient, understand, even unconsciously, leading to practical actions. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/demetra.2015.11372

Ralph Ellison as a Reader of Hegel: Ellison’s Invisible Man as Literary Phenomenology

Ralph Ellison as a Reader of Hegel:Ellison’s Invisible Man as Literary Phenomenology Jack Taylor (bio) Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when,and by the fact that, it so exists for another;that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [recognized]. ~Georg W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish and you strike out with your fists, and you curse and swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful. ~The Invisible Man, Invisible Man There has been little scholarship connecting Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit despite biographical information that Hegel influenced Ellison. Lawrence Jackson acknowledges, for example, that Ellison wrote to Richard Wright in 1940 searching for Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (229). John Wright argues that Ellison agrees with the Hegelian notions that “consciousness is all,” “human life is a move toward the rational,” and freedom is a byproduct of consciousness, not political projects in the name of abstract ideas (69). Arnold Rampersad discusses how Ellison viewed Bigger Thomas’s consciousness as an “indignant consciousness,” which is a clear appropriation of Hegelian thought (132).1 Rampersad further shows how Ellison in “A Congress Jim Crow Didn’t Attend,” a piece of propaganda written for New Masses, drew on Hegel when he wrote the delegates at the third convention of National Negro Congress possessed “a temper of militant indignation” (134). These insights into Ellison’s use of Hegel are without a doubt valuable. Such biographical facts highlight the need for a discussion of how Ellison utilized and critiqued aspects of Hegelian phenomenology in Invisible Man.2 Invisible Man is laden with philosophical references to Emerson, Kierkegaard, and Hegel at the very least.3 Thus, I argue Ellison’s Invisible Man can be read as a sustained and profound meditation on African American consciousness that draws on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This article will explore how Invisible Man seeks to investigate black existence and consciousness as it is shaped by anti-black racism from a Hegelian perspective. I argue that the philosophical dimensions of Invisible Man can be read side-by-side Hegel, so [End Page 135] as to position Ellison as an author deeply engaged with understanding black consciousness from the philosophical perspective. To accomplish this task, I discuss Ellison’s Invisible Man as literary phenomenology that can be read through and at times against Hegel’s concept of recognition and his lordship and bondage scene by charting ruptures and movements in the Invisible Man’s consciousness throughout the course of the novel. Jesse Wolfe rightly argues in “‘Ambivalent Man’: Ellison’s Rejection of Communism” that Ellison appropriates the Hegelian and Marxist categories of “recognition” and “contradiction,” to construct his prologue (621). As Wolfe’s title indicates, however, his main concern is Ellison’s dismissal of communist ideology, not Hegelian thought itself, although he does draw out vital connections between Hegel, Marx, and Ellison which I am indebted to and build upon. In regards to Hegel’s concept of recognition, I argue Ellison’s Invisible Man characterizes black existence as a struggle for recognition. I will draw on Hegel’s concept of recognition and his staging of the master-slave scene to provide the backdrop necessary to (re)read Invisible Man as an investigation of African American consciousness. To advance these claims, I analyze the Invisible Man’s struggle for recognition with Mr. Norton, which I argue can be read as a restaging of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic with a difference and his unsuccessful attempt to gain recognition through violence at the outset of the narrative. The point is to emphasize that Invisible Man can be understood as nothing short of a genuine phenomenology of spirit moving according to four environments, which traces the Invisible Man’s trajectory from slavery, or a subservient consciousness, to freedom through his negation of his fear of death and acceptance of invisibility: the school, which is an allegory of the plantation south; New...

The Sound of the Bat, and: A Few Meditations on the Tightly-Wound Baseball

The Sound of the Bat, and: A Few Meditations on the Tightly-Wound Baseball Bill Meissner (bio) The Sound of the Bat The sound of a wooden bat hitting a baseball is so sharp and resonant that if you close your eyes, you can almost see it, like a flash of light. The bat hitting the ball is not like the soft, gentle sound of an egg cracking. It’s the sound you hear when lightning parts the air for a split second, and the sky claps its hands. It surprises the sleeping air around home plate, wakes the grass blades of a whole sandlot field, startles an entire stadium. Its jolting alarm starts the game, sets everything into motion: fielders, ump, baserunners. Like the starting gun at a race, it signals the batter to sprint down the first base line; it lifts fans and onlookers to their feet. It’s sudden, like the wings of a startled thrush as it bursts from a branch. It’s the explosion of polished wood striking fast-pitched leather. It’s a sound you feel as much as hear, a sound that echoes deep in your chest, especially if you’re close to home plate. When a batter swings and the bat shatters, it’s not the same. It’s a sad, splintering sound, like a bone breaking, or a dead tree limb falling to the hard ground. But the solid hit—oh, the solid hit: the batter feels its vibration in his hands and wrists and forearms and all the way down to his roots. The crack of the bat: Baseball’s punctuation. Its heartbeat. Its music. A shot that, sometimes, is heard around the world. It’s when all time begins and ends. If Albert Einstein were in the stands, he’d hear the sound of the bat and calculate energy and distance. He’d tell you exactly how long it would take a long home run—if it kept on flying—to reach the stars. [End Page 137] A Few Meditations on the Tightly- Wound Baseball The tightly-wound baseball is the ball that always seems to poke a hole in the sky when you hit it. It’s the ball, in Little League, that gives you your Magic Swing, flying farther than you’ve ever hit a baseball before. There’s a logical explanation for the tight-wound, of course. Perhaps the climate was unusually hot in Haiti, or Costa Rica, or perhaps the women in the baseball factory were upset with their husbands or frazzled by their children, angry at the looseness of the world. On a specific morning at one spool, a woman wound the yarn tighter than she’s ever wound it before, tugging at it with each rotation until the pain subsided, and in its place appeared a perfect, firm sphere. The tight-wound is the baseball that spins during your afternoon nap; sometimes it unwinds as it spins, spooling out yards of blue yarn, but by the time you wake, it will have rewound itself, slipped its leather clothes back on and sealed them again, seamlessly, with red stitches. The true tight-wound can be sensed by an uneasy pitcher as he squeezes and rotates it with his hand; the true tight-wound speaks to the lines on the palm. When a pitcher senses the taut leather of a tight-wound between his fingers, he wishes he could toss it away among the tall weeds. But for the batter, the tight-wound is prized. He wants to see it rotating with that flip-flopping smile. The batter’s eyes widen as the ball reaches the plate, and for just one instant, wood falls in love with leather as his bat meets it and sends it up, up, up, high enough to land in the bleachers of his dreams. [End Page 138] Bill Meissner Bill Meissner’s novel, Spirits in the Grass, about a ballplayer who discovers the remains of an ancient Native American burial ground on a baseball field, is available in print and e-book from the University of Notre Dame Press. His baseball short story collection, Hitting into the Wind (Random House...

Marine mammal vocalizations: Spectrum analysis.

Marine mammals communicate underwater using sounds at different frequencies. Some whales speak using low frequency moans, and others communicate using high frequency whistles and clicks. Some sing notes that sweep over different frequencies. Come hear some of the amazing sounds that whales, seals, and walrus make! Look at spectrum plots to see which frequencies make up the sounds. See if you can match pictures of spectrogram plots with the sounds you hear. Also explore the sounds made by common man‐made noise sources in the ocean such as ships, sonars, and geophysical survey equipment. In this demonstration, you will learn how to distinguish low frequency and high frequency sounds, both by ear and by eye, through a computer based matching game. You will click on an image of a marine mammal, or a man‐made noise source, to hear an audio clip of the sound that each makes. After hearing the sound, try to guess which of the presented spectrum plots matches the sound you heard.

Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir (review)

Reviewed by: Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir Daisy Levy (bio) Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir. Terry Galloway. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009. 248 pages, cloth, $23.95. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. —Joan Didion, The White Album What if you could no longer hear the stories of your life? What if the sounds you had used as evidence of your belonging disappeared and left your "body feel[ing] no evidence of their presence, not a trembling of the air, not a prickling of the skin. . . . feel[ing] no trace of those sounds being there." This is the way Terry Galloway describes the experience of losing her hearing as a young girl. Mean Little Deaf Queer is Galloway's eff ort to answer "no evidence of their presence" with sounds and shapes and stories that prickle the skin. Galloway is writing her existence into the world. Galloway divides her memoir into three neat compartments: "Drowning," "Passing," and "Emerging." The overarching metaphor is clear, and maybe a little obvious—these tropes line up with the unfolding of her life: "Going Deaf," "Being Deaf/Acting Hearing and Being Queer/Acting Straight," and "Coming Out." On one level, then, this is a coming-out story like so many others—Galloway starts with an impending sense of not fitting in. What's notable about this narrative is less the newness of it, the originality of it, but exactly the opposite—this story is something completely ordinary. At least, this is how Galloway tells it. Never mind that she is hallucinating, having out-of-body experiences, losing the hearing in both ears. These are, for her, ordinary, everyday things—things that will come to mark her as diff erent, as [End Page 163] extraordinary, as queer; but in the stories, she is just another kid, with obstacles, things that keep her from feeling normal. And why not be just another kid, for these are her stories, the ones she is telling for us. We see all the ways she may not look like us; even her title dares us to concentrate on her diff erence. She's Mean, she's Deaf, she's Queer. But still, Galloway's tone is even—not overly careful, but not reckless either. She's going to tell us what she wants us to hear, and she's going to help us hear it. Not to say that the trials and tribulations of Galloway's childhood—replete with camps for children with disabilities, torturous audiological screenings with bigoted doctors, hunting and disemboweling rabbits—are generic "What I Did Last Summer" tales we might see on the Hallmark Channel. They're not. What Galloway has endured is extraordinary, but what's spectacular about the way Galloway writes these stories is the nonchalance in her voice. It's as if she's staring these stories down, cool and with no trembling. The part of these stories where I feel Galloway wince is not in the details, but in the eff ect, the self-hatred that comes with erasure by others. When Galloway tells me that "I fell out of love with my own being, my own body, and lost the sense of myself as the center of my own story," I am crushed. I worry she is slipping away from the world, from us, from me. Of course, once you've read two-thirds of the book, you come to realize that Galloway is a performer—and she is performing here too. Theater, performance art, and comedy become pivotal acts in Galloway's life—transformative, or maybe in a more literal way, formative. She founds the Mickee Faust Club, an alternative theater company, and in doing so finds herself. Bodies—in particular queer bodies, "those same bodies in the context of theater—bodies that invited stares, whose very presence was evocative, bodies that bucked and shook and seized and couldn't be"—are the stories themselves, Galloway's vehicle for proof of life. The Galloway of Mean Little Deaf Queer is the engineer of Galloway's lived experience. She makes her life in this memoir—in the sense that she crafts, builds, positions, and shapes it. The stories of...

How to help music websites choose sounds you will really like

To make music recommendations on download stores and streaming services more to our taste, we might need to train their computers to appreciate music