{"id":2063,"date":"2019-05-11T01:58:28","date_gmt":"2019-05-11T01:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wri-101k-s19.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/?p=2063"},"modified":"2019-05-11T01:58:29","modified_gmt":"2019-05-11T01:58:29","slug":"assimilation-of-the-sonic-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wri-101k-s19.andrewrippeon.com\/blog\/writing-project-4-remix-revise-reflect\/assimilation-of-the-sonic-south\/","title":{"rendered":"Assimilation of the Sonic South"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On August 15th<\/sup>\u00a02019, I took a flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to the Charlotte Douglass International Airport. I soon learned that when flying halfway across the country, temperature and culture are not the only changes as for the atmosphere. In coming to the South, I found myself in a not only a new environment but a new soundscape entirely. Suddenly, I had experienced what I would later label as a multiplex consciousness, as stated by DJ Spooky, but at the time was nothing more than the realization of my other-ness. In New York, my voice and the sounds I was so accustomed to\u00a0were\u00a0a part of everyday life, whereas in Davidson, they had become a piece of my identity. For the first time, my identity wasn\u2019t reflected by the surroundings, but rather the surroundings had become my identity. My identity had become more nomadic, and evolved into a product of the settings, Northern and Southern, that I had been immersed in. At the time, this understanding of my sonic relationship between myself and the new setting of Davidson was one of assimilating to a foreign environment, a product composed solely of accents and exclusively stereotypical \u201cnorthern\u201d or \u201csouthern\u201d sounds.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New York had always been a setting and surrounding. However, with the abrupt change of living my whole life in New York to suddenly moving into a dormitory in North Carolina, what had once been external noise had now become an internal part of identity. Without having any prior knowledge of the relationships between voice, noise, and sound or any of the vocabulary and tools to analyze them, this transition was anything but smooth. As a result of general ignorance as for how sound affected my identity, I categorized the two \u201cfactors of my identity\u201d into the most stereotypical images of regional noise. The first of the two was the external part of my identity, my accent. My knowledge of my accent at the time was limited to describing it as fast paced and pronouncing \u201co\u201d as \u201caw\u201d. In the audio file below, you can hear two New York natives speaking (rather comically) in a slightly exaggerated accent from my hometown. Without any knowledge of DJ\u00a0Spooky\u2019s\u00a0\u201cmultiplex consciousness\u201d or\u00a0Rhythm Science<\/em>, I couldn\u2019t explore the reasons, causes, or effects of my accent being my external mask to everyone; and as a result, my identity was the \u201ckid from New York\u201d. Additionally, without having ever read the works of Schafer and his \u201csoundscapes\u201d, I was unequipped to answer the many questions I had regarding the sound of the environment around me. Like\u00a0the accents, the soundscapes of Astoria, Queens and Davidson, North Carolina are nothing short of different worlds. The contrast between the whizzing of vehicles on crowded corners or the roar of subway carts flying by and the peaceful hymn of cicadas is overwhelming. However, at the time these sounds were just a part of life, not an identity or soundscape; they were broken into their simplest form: a plethora of different pitched noises culminating to make a metallic or motorized noise that told me to stand clear of the tracks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n