Blog Post #6 Prompt

In “Living with Music,” how does Ralph Ellison describe how music affects his living experience in his New York City apartment building?

What does he mean by the first sentence of the piece? (“In those days it was either live with music or die with noise…”)

Can you think of points of comparison between Ellison’s essay and either R. Murray Schafer’s “The Soundscape” or Episode 2 of Damon Krukowski’s Ways of Hearing?

2 thoughts on “Blog Post #6 Prompt

  1. Matthew Rodriguez

    1.Ralph Ellison describes how music affects his living in his New York City apartment building as a very noisy place as he describes the noises all around him. There is something always going on around him that he can hear it.

    2.What Ralph Ellison means in his first sentence (‘In those days it was either live with music or die with noise…”) by saying it was either accept and live with the music around or let it effect you negatively and have it ruin your day.

    3.A point of comparison is that noise is everywhere no matter where you are you’re gonna hear something from the smallest things to loudest things. Noise can never be escaped in the world and we use noise for our everyday living from music makers, to movies, to making shows. We use noise on a daily basis even to communicate to talk to people in languages we don’t understand.

  2. Angel Ciuro Jr

    1. Only when he moved away to a new apartment was when he realized that he missed the music that he heard. Ralph Ellison apprehended the power of music. He realized that music can is a constant reminder of your past and of whom you were, while it reminds us of our aspirations.
    2. I strongly believe that he meant to express that you either enjoy and listen to music or let it affect you negatively.
    3. One point of comparison would be that music/sound is stronger than you think, not that easy to escape when your surrounded by it 24/7, think about it, in order to escape a sound you’d have to mask it with another sound or plug your ears masking your hearing entirely.

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