EPISODE 5 – POWER

1. When Krukowski asserts, “the marginal-the rejected-the repressed-is whatever the powerful have decided is of no use at the moment.” He means that society forget about anything they get tired of to replace it for something new, and that happens to the music too, the audience has power to control what is on demand nowadays. Why would people go to a record store when they can buy any album they want in Ebay or Amazon? Krukowski says he pick up some knowledge every time he goes to a record store, in a record store you can find new perspectives and approaches to art looking at what the mainstream culture has no use for.

2. Forced Exposure employees listen to every new release and they even write about it, and produce a printed catalog, they inform us what is worth it; people choose the music they want to hear based on the reviews. Paul design recommendation programs, instead of having to search new music for yourself, you just hit one button and the algorithm plays songs based on what you like, your mood, where you are, where you are doing. Also this companies like Spotify and Pandora work with almost all the music available in the world so it’s impossible for them listen to every song.

3. Surprise is not the same as discover, when you discover music is because you were searching for a specific type of music, but being surprised by music means that you were not expecting to hear that kind of music. Music corporations want to keep us engaged, they want us to find what we are already comfortable with, they don’t want to turn our requests upside down. They are replacing the freedom and chaos of the internet at large, with the control and predictability of their programs making harder for us to find new perspectives and question our knowledge.

   EPISODE 6 – NOISE

4. Noise and signal are always connected in the analog world, think of a radio if you turn up the volume you turn up the noise, but digital allows the busting of signal without the busting of noise, for example when you are listening to a podcast online there is no static, no surface noise, so if you turn up the volume you get more volume. There is no noise to restrain the sound and everything is louder.
5. Noise is the background sounds, sounds that you are not interested in, signal is the main sound, the sound you are trying to pay attention to. This episode conveys the importance of noise and signal. We are very skilled at shifting our attention from noise to signal, focusing and refocusing on different sounds in the environment, and shutting out others.
6. In all the episodes they talk about the switch between analog and digital changed our ways of hearing, and also the impact of technology in the society. Digital devices remove the noise we don’t want to hear and make more clear the message we want to express. Our perception of sound is not as natural as we tend to believe, we hear what they want us to hear. This episode explores the differences of noise and signal, it’s related to the other episodes because it is like the start of everything else, for example in the episode 2 when they talk about the efforts to control sound or the episode 3 when they talk about how digital devices remove the musical qualities of our voice and the main message are our words.