Episode 5

Question # 1:
I believe Krukowski wanted to point out that we are naturally affected by music, but the question is if the choice of music is also natural. Big companies like Amazon, Google, Spotify, or other online music servers, serve us all sources of information irresponsibly and are using cookies or other practices to provide or unobtrusively intrude to us the music they wanted to based on whatever is currently most popular or seemingly wanted. That is why are some bands or records pushed aside – marginalized. Then the choice of music we listen to is often affected and not natural. Walking into some store with music doesn’t have to be than just snobbish habits of nowadays, but also our diligence in getting the natural and responsible flow of information and so to form our personalities and opinions.

Question # 2:
Forced Exposure means listening to the opinion of those who listened to all of the available records and wrote about them. People picked what they wanted to listen to based on this information. In contrast, Spotify is choosing for us a source of music based on our listening history by using the algorithms.

Question # 3:
There are algorithms on the internet that are helping us to find precisely what we are looking for. That means no surprises. Spotify is offering the music based on our taste and definitely won’t surprise us with some new kind of music that is not resonating with our current listening history. It is crucial to be aware of that because even Spotify is an efficient tool, it can impoverish our discoveries or experiences. Discovering music can, on the other hand, be very surprising and bring us something new, unexpected, and exciting.

Episode 6

Question # 1:
The signal is one part of the sound on which is our hearing apparatus concentrating at the specific moment the most. Noise is considered all the other sounds going on around, which we don’t care about at the moment. These sounds can be manipulated in the recording studio, by removing all the unwanted noises and adding loudness to these that are chosen as the signal.

Question # 2:
Even the sound considered as noise can be essential in order to get the right impression from music. Manipulation of the sounds in the record studios can be very beneficial to us to listen to the noises of music clearly and as a part of the production.

Question # 3:
In all the episodes, including the one about the noise, are finding out what impact has the digital technologies on our hearing, sensing of sounds and music, and also its impact on our society. Digital technologies are adjusting the sound we are receiving or helping us to avoid what we don’t want to listen at all. Our perception of sound is changed and much less natural. The episodes are exploring these differences and the questions if it is a good or bad thing. We might get more clear sound, but in the end, the digitalized music is already some kind of reproduction, and in my opinion, it will never be the same as the live experience. Also, from all of the episodes, I got the expression that digital and modern technologies are dividing us from each other and creating more distance.