Discussion #7

Episode 5 

1.Krukowski by his statement “the marginal-the rejected-the repressed-is whatever the powerful have decided is of no use at the moment,” he means that online corporations control the music trends and its recommendations. Musicians and singers, who are influencers on social media, they are in top charts, and internet influence people through diversity of ads. Having said that, some of yesterday hits are forgotten, because powerful dictates that. 

 2.The Forced Exposure is a big distribution warehouse. People can buy a record, and feel it in their hands, and listen to those songs and read about their description in the catalog. Before the internet, distribution companies, introduced many international singers and records to American listeners. On the other hand, is Spotify, a virtual music player, which has the purpose to work with the entire available music, it is based on algorithms, and is guessing listener’s preference and is giving him large recommendations. There is no effort to access any song on Spotify. 

 3.According to Krukowski, being “surprised” by music is when music recommendation services, like Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Prime Music, and others, is recommending us music which they think that we may like. On the other hand, “discovering” music is when people are making an effort to find a new artist, new album, by listening, and searching through the records. This is important because the online corporations are taking our freedom and our time giving us the information, they think we need, and we like. 

Episode 6 

1.According to Krukowski, signal is the sound which we are trying to pay attention to, and noise is the unwanted and unpleasant sound. When we are in a public space, and there are sounds from everywhere like people talking, cars sound, music, etc., those sounds will form the noise, and when will listen to a sound interested in, that is signal. This distinction is important, because when feel annoyed or disturbed, it is because of the noise, not signal. 

2.The central idea about noise is that all signals are noise when people do not pay attention to them, and when the volume is too high, people sometimes cannot distinguish the signal from the noise. In a recording studio tracing the unwanted noise is particularly important for the clarity of signal. 

 3.This episode relates to other episodes as aspects of sound, which I personally, did not pay attention to them, and I discovered something interesting about ways of hearing, and what represent sounds, signals, and noise in analog world versus digital world.