sahardy

April 8, 2019 by sahardy

The Sounds of Silence (Or Lack Thereof)

Sarah Hardy

WRI 101

Professor Rippeon

8 April 2019

Abstract:

With over 25% of Davidson students playing on a varsity athletic team, the soundscape of a sports practice is widely familiar to many students. Life at Davidson is hard enough, but combined with the extreme pressure of competing at a division 1 level, and the constant noise at practice, simply living our lives becomes deafening. I play lacrosse, and will discuss both the sounds heard, and unheard, at practice along with the noise athletes create in our own heads while playing. I explore how the mind tries to tune out background noise to focus, and how this intensifies the constant noise in our minds. As athletes, we are strive for a happy balance between myopic focus and environmental awareness, and it is quite possible that the key to this balance comes from sound.

Human beings long for silence. We drive ourselves mad longing for a sense of peace in a world filled with unwanted noise, searching for quiet that can calm our frantic minds. On the rare occasions that we are able escape the cacophony of car horns, pedestrian chatter, bird song, and text-tones, odds are that silence still evades us. Environments that are considered quiet, without the “keynote sounds” of modern society, are actually filled with noise: the hum of the air conditioner, the sound of our own breath, and the soft whirl of wind hitting the window are sounds that are almost inescapable. Further, in places that lack obvious noise there is an even more intrusive “mental chatter” that inundates the stillness of our minds, a time when our own thoughts become so glaringly loud that silence seems unattainable. As a college athlete, I know all about the annoyance and frustration that an overabundance of noise can bring to my life. One of the biggest distractions I face during a game or practice is unwelcome noise, whether that be from the cheers from the crowd, the other team’s insults, or the constant shouts of negative thoughts from my own head. As athletes we are taught at a young age to block all of these things out, to create a self-made inner silence in a world of chaos and disturbance. This past year, however, I have learned that this coveted silence is not everything, and that it can be detrimental not only to my performance as an athlete but my life in general.

Typically, during lacrosse practice I hear little more than the obvious sounds around me – my teammates talking through plays, my coach giving instructions, and the occasional ball hitting the pipe. After being sidelined with an ACL injury though, unable to participate in practice, I have had a lot of time to sit and listen. There was not much else to do, so I threw all of my energy into hearing as many sounds as possible at practice. At first, I was skeptical as to how many sounds I would actually hear, but I found that there are a myriad of sounds that I had been blocking out all these months at practice. To start, there was the wind. It rustled through leaves, softly brushed the back of my neck, and flicked through pages of our playbook quietly. Then, there was the intermittent sound of track boys running by. They run in packs of four or five and their feet clapped the track harshly as they shuffled past me, slowly coming in and out of earshot as they proceed on their lap. I could hear their broken breath, and as they heaved in, trying to get their heart rate down, their breath hit the back of their throats jaggedly. I also focused on the sounds coming from my teammates. There was, of course, lots of talking and shouting from down the field. Words I couldn’t make out all the time, but almost always I could hear the urgency behind the words. Feet stomped the turf angrily, scuffing up plastic bits as their toes dragged. When the ball hit the pocket of their sticks, there was a sharp pat. The balls collided with the tough strings and the strings gave in to the hit. There were painful grunts as my teammates hit each other, and as one player’s stick slapped the waist of another there was a dull thud that reverberated into the air. These once-ignored noises have without a doubt been occurring all year, but this was the first time I had truly taken notice of them.

One theory behind my inability to hear all of this background noise during practice is that of inattentional deafness. This theory states that when focusing on an intense visual or mental task, we unintentionally become deaf to the extraneous sounds around us. Inattentional deafness could explain, for example, why your friend doesn’t respond to you while he is texting on his phone – he is not ignoring you, but rather simply cannot hear you. As athletes, inattentional deafness seems to be the key to blocking out distraction. Interestingly, it creates a positive feedback loop where the act of fully focusing on the lacrosse game causes us to filter out any noise that could potentially pull our focus away in the future. Many athletes refer to this phenomenon as getting “in the zone”, where one’s focus is so absolutely acute the mind cannot process anything going on around it. When I was younger, I believed that blocking out sound around me would create a more conducive environment for athletic success. In the past few years, however, I have realized that this self-made deafness is not as useful as I once believed. As Science Daily explained, inattentional deafness “has more serious implications in situations such as the operating theatre where a surgeon concentrating on their work might not hear the equipment beeping” (“Why Focusing on a Visual Task”). Clearly, the stakes in a lacrosse game are a lot lower than those in an operating room, but the point remains the same. While I am focusing on a play, my natural ability to block out sound around me could lead me to, for example, ignore my coach giving me vital instruction from the sideline, or my teammate telling me where to run. This deafness, while temporarily helpful, can actually be very detrimental to our success as athletes by hindering our ability to communicate with those around us. In the case of lacrosse, it is important to actively listen to and process more sound on the field than most players currently do.

Another possible reason as to why I had never heard all of this background noise during practice before is the overwhelming ‘mental noise’ or ‘mental chatter’ that I hear every day. When I refer to ‘mental chatter’, I am talking about to the constant stream of thought that can pull an athlete’s attention away from their sport. It is an inner dialogue that feeds doubt, negativity, and insecurity to the brain, playing with one’s focus. Most people have experienced deafening thoughts of anxiety telling them they aren’t good enough. These thoughts can drown out anything going. As an athlete, this ‘mental chatter’ is amplified to the maximum. There is a certain preoccupation involved in the way an athlete approaches their negative performance – we obsess over every mistake, breaking each moment down into seconds, deciding what we did wrong and how we could have done better. This stream of negativity, while not actually physical sound, is far louder than the people talking around us, the whistle of the referee, the crowd cheering off the field, and especially the small sounds like the wind in the leaves. This sound, the sound of self-doubt, is perhaps the biggest obstacle an athlete has to overcome in their path to success. To effectively block out mental noise is challenging at best, especially when one is trying to continue to process physical noise around them. It is entirely possible that I missed all those background sounds simply because I was too focused on my own thoughts, a problem that my coach actually worked to address this year.

This past year, my coach placed a lot of emphasis on something called EQ, which stands for ‘emotional intelligence’. Back in August, she had Dr. Izzy Justice, who specializes in emotional intelligence, come and talk to the team about what it means to be smart with our emotions. According to Dr. Justice, out of two teams who are evenly matched physically, the team with the higher EQ would come out on top. Thus, my coach launched a mission to make us the emotionally smarter team on the field. A key part of this is in our routine before practice, where we work to silence our ‘mental chatter’ while halting our natural inattentional deafness. We do this by selecting something we call our “macrofocus”, or a keynote sound that we hear as we step onto the field. Sometimes, it’s the chirp of a bird, a distant siren, or echo of a voice in the stadium. We take deep breaths and focus on that sound, using it to situate ourselves in the context of lacrosse practice. These sounds we hear only at the field are meant to draw ourselves away from the classroom, the library, or Commons. As we focus on the chirping birds and the pace of our breath, the world outside the field melts away, our mental noise bows in quiet reverence, and we prepare to give one-hundred percent of minds to practice. Its effectiveness is remarkable, the deep breathing is able to bring silence to our minds while we continue to process the little sounds going on around us. The introduction of this tradition was at first met with laughter, but as the weeks progressed and we found ourselves more prepared for practice each day, it’s a custom that we finally embraced and look forward to each day.

Ultimately, the question of how athletes should handle noise is a personal one and should be up to the athletes themselves. Unwanted noise is both annoying and incredibly distracting in most areas of life, but especially in sports. After all, the opposing team doesn’t “boo” before a foul shot for no reason – the sound they make is meant to distract the shooter enough to miss the shot. Too much noise in competition can win or lose games — the team with sharper focus no doubt has the upper hand. Additionally, too much mental noise in competition can wreck a team entirely, the athlete with the stronger mind will almost always come out on top. That creates an interesting challenge for athletes and coaches alike, where no longer is just the physical body being tested but also the mind. Too often athletes revert to using inattentional deafness to block out any distractions, but this has its consequences. The unselective way in which inattentional deafness ignores sound allows for the possibility to miss vital auditory information on the field. Blocking out sound also gives the athlete little to hear except for the voice in his own head, the voice that is telling him he won’t succeed. Thus, the way EQ doctors approach sound seems to be the most effective way for athletes to handle the pressure of testing themselves every day. Honing focus in on the sounds of practice combined with deep breathing to lessen mental noise successfully prepares athletes for competition. Noise does not have to be a burden on the field, if used correctly, it can be the distinguishing factor between winning and losing.

Works Cited

University College London. “Why focusing on a visual task will make us deaf to our surroundings: Concentrating attention on a visual task can render you momentarily ‘deaf’ to sounds at normal levels.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 December 2015.

<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151208184335.htm>.

Sridhar, Narayanan. “Effect of Mental Noise on Sports Performance.” International Journal of Physical Education, Sports, and Health. IJPESH, 2014, pp 1-3.http://www.kheljournal.com/archives/2014/vol1issue2/PartA/11.1.pdf.

March 21, 2019 by sahardy

Respecting Cover Songs

“Franklin’s song gave many people what they longed for most: a voice.”

The year 1965 was a great year for music. The Rolling Stones went on their 1st American Tour, Frank Sinatra won four Grammys including Record of the Year, and the Temptations’ “My Girl” rose to the top of Billboard charts. Legendary R&B artist Otis Redding had another great year, releasing his third album Otis Redding Sings Soul. The album dazzled with four originals and six covers including a sensational rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. This nearly perfect album had one major blemish: a tired, uninteresting track about his wife that Redding entitled “Respect”. Basic at best, this tune was forgotten amid the other successful songs on the album. Two years later, acclaimed soul artist Aretha Franklin unearthed Redding’s “Respect” and gave it a new life of its own. Franklin’s cover revived the once-dead song and turned it into a widely popular piece heard even today, 50 years later. Whether or not Franklin intended this, however, is up for debate. Contrary to popular belief, Franklin did not knowingly produce an anthem, but rather the song’s popularity was a result of the current political climate.

Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” differs greatly from Otis Redding’s original, not only in its sound but also in its lyrics. Redding’s 1965 original lacks any special vocal emphasis, it is not like the majority of his songs as it lacks all emotion. The original song is short, with the simple two-line chorus of “All I’m asking is for a little respect / When I come home”. The instrumentation is basic, with a five-note motif seen after each refrain. In this two-minute song, Redding implores his wife to treat him with more respect. He repeats that respect is what he needs, implying that because he is a man he deserves a certain standard of treatment. Franklin’s “Respect”, on the other hand, is packed with emotion. She uses her powerful, boisterous voice to deliver a song laced with frustration, tenacity, and demand. The entire instrumentational set-up, not just the lyrics, has semantic content. With two different kinds of saxophones, several drums and a keyboard Franklin creates music to accent the words she is singing. She also alters the lyrics slightly by adding in a new chorus, thus the birth of the infamous “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me”. Regardless of whether it was the changes Franklin made or the uniqueness of her voice that set this song on fire, there is no doubt that Franklin’s version caught major attention from critics worldwide.

It became clear very quickly that what Franklin did with “Respect” elevated the song to a new level of importance. While Redding’s version received little cultural merit, Franklin’s cover was highly popular, and was seen as an anthem for social activism. In Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity, Michael Awkward discusses how artists used cover songs to debate racial, artistic, and personal authenticity. Particularly, he focuses the musical identities that artists were able to find in songs originally performed by different artists, including those of Aretha Franklin. To Awkward, “Respect was received as a racial anthem that brought a new era of meaningful music with groove to America”. As the civil rights movement raced its way through the country, Franklin’s song found a perfect home in the mouths of those who felt overlooked and mistreated. Regardless of her intentions, “Respect” became a source of hope and rebellion for many Americans. To her audience, “[Franklin] embodied the social and cultural change that was taking place in the country merely by being herself without pretense”. For perhaps the first time in history, a black female was on stage singing about black female issues. Rarely did a marginalized minority have the opportunity or platform to advocate for themselves, and here Franklin did it on a national scale. As she rose to fame, it quickly became clear that Franklin was more than just a singer, she was an activist. Awkward goes on to explain that “Franklin’s reign as Queen of Soul was burdened with the weight of sociopolitical significance none of her predecessors had to bear” (Awkward 56). The social climate in the 1960s, Franklin’s audience, and her talent as a singer all combined to create the unique opportunity for her work to foment a social movement, which happened with the release of “Respect”. Whether or not we can consider this fame to be entirely the result Franklin’s own merit, however, is up for debate.

For many, cover songs should maintain the integrity of the original, as the performer is less important than the song’s composition. In the early stages of recording, song covers served as a way to further a song’s social reach. When looking into the history of the cover song, researchers Dr. Keir Keightley and Sean Dineley illuminated the cover’s origins and purpose in the mid 20th century. According to Dineley, “A successful product was one that sold well in multiple versions, speaking to the appeal of the composition rather than the composer”. In other words, a cover song was not in competition with the original, but was seen as a perpetuation of the composition. The success of a song sung by different artists in a myriad of circumstances spoke to the universality of the piece. Thus, if we apply this to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, her success with the song was not the sole result of her ability, but rather a combination of the right time, the right place, and a good song written by Redding. Dineley goes on to explain that “cover versions were not only released by competing record labels but multiple versions were often released on the same label to distribute a single composition to diverse markets” (Dineley 65). While occasionally other labels produced a cover version to compete with the original label’s piece, this was not always the case. Many times, the label produced cover renditions to make more money. If the song could sell in two versions rather than one, that created more opportunity for revenue. With this perspective on cover songs, Franklin did not create a new song that sold better than Redding’s. Instead, she sung Redding’s song is a way that made it more popular. This opinion, however, is not a common one.

It is perhaps more appropriate to view Franklin’s cover as one intending to greatly alter original, rather than a product of circumstance. Most people consider cover songs to be an opportunity for a new artist to add something more to an existing song, which is what many people understand Franklin to have done. On Hi-Phi Nation’s podcast “Cover Me Softly”, the success of a cover song is discussed extensively. According to guest author and cover-song expert Ray Padgett, “A version of a song could only be possible if there was something that covering itself could add creatively and aesthetically to an existing song” The creation of a cover song is not possible unless the covering artist has vision to add something more, to push the song into new arenas, to challenge its barriers. A cover can soar, but it also can flop. Do too little, and the audience will question as to why the song was covered in the first place, do too much, and the original will be lost completely. Pagett goes on to explain that “if you take your favorite Beatles recording and placed it side by side with an impeccable mimic cover of that recording, only one has the status of art” (Padgett). To create art, it must have originality, imagination, and purpose. A cover song that is too similar to the original lacks voice and creativity, and at that point it no longer has importance. If Franklin had kept Redding’s song entirely the same, it would lack any of the meaning we have attributed to it. If she had sung it at the same pitch, with the same words, emphasis, and instruments as Redding, it would be nothing but a copy. However, she adds her own flare, her own experiences, her own meaning, and it becomes something larger than herself.

Whether or not Franklin intended to create an anthem when she produced the song, however, is up for discussion. It seems obvious that “Respect”, flush with anger and determination, was created to belong to activists. Franklin, though, has denied any intention to create an anthem by saying “what they hear and what I feel when I sing it can be very, very different”. As Michael Awkward states in his book, “If Otis felt he lost his song to ‘that girl’, Franklin recognizes that she ‘lost’ it both to nationalist and feminist listeners who hear and continue to hear it as infused with authentic racial and gendered meanings she did not mean” (Awkward 56). In the excitement and chaos of the civil rights movement, the intention of Franklin’s song seems to be lost almost completely. Activist groups found solace in a song about social issues and blew Franklin into the poster-child for their movement. To Franklin, this was a personal song indicative of her struggle as a black female in the United States. This was Franklin taking back her power, a demand for a higher worth, a commitment to accountability. Though meant to be individual song, the black female struggle was a community struggle not unique to Franklin. The release of “Respect” situated in the social climate of the 1960s created a perfect outlet for the estranged and alienated Americans who needed representation. Franklin’s song gave many people that which they longed for most: a voice.

Ultimately, Aretha Franklin’s cover of “Respect” fulfilled some people’s expectation of a cover, but also fulfilled others to the point where people began to cover Franklin’s version. In one sense, she turned a tired, quiet song into a belting diva tune. Her voice was considered an instrument that one could pick up and play, adding a new flare to Redding’s original. To others, Franklin took the piece and added her own meaning, turning it into an entirely different song. She transformed “Respect” from a song about a man imploring his wife to respect him to one demanding to be heard in a time where a black female’s voice was often silenced. Of her intention, however, we cannot be sure. Knowing that Franklin had not planned for this song to become an anthem creates an interesting dynamic between performer and consumer. Her audience misconstrued her voice to be a national billboard for activism without her consent. With the popularity of Franklin’s “Respect” came the understanding that no longer does the artist’s intention matter – music has become what the consumers make it. Thoughts and feelings of artists have no bearing on the way one appreciates the music, it is all up to those who listen.

Works Cited

Awkward, Michael. Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic

Identity. Duke University Press, 2007. Duke University Books.Web. 12 March 2019.

Dineley, Sean, “Covers Uncovered: A History of the “Cover Version,” from Bing Crosby to the

Flaming Lips” (2014). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2119.

Franklin, Aretha. “Respect.” I Never Loved A Man The Way That I Love You. Atlantic Records,

1967, track 1. Spotify, open.spotify.com/track/7s25THrKz86DM225dOYwnr?si=sn_JzQjYQ3e3rjLDvcLQQg

Redding, Otis. “Respect.” Otis Redding: Otis Redding Sings Soul. Stax Records, 1965, track 14.

Spotify, open.spotify.com/track/1NGGxERGytoBIGn7dtSzeu?si=sdBFw5ciRbevcySIIdF_JA

Padgett, Ray. Cover Me: The Stories behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time. Sterling, 2017.