In “Living with Music”, Ralph Ellison describes how music affects his living experience in his New York City apartment building in many ways. He describes many things related to the noise he hears around him. His apartment is surrounded by many different noises like the cats and dogs or the singer who lived above him. He describes some of his experiences as positive and some of them as negative.

In the first sentence when he says “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise…” he means they had to live with all the sounds around his apartment. He described how he tried many things like audio equipment to prevent the noise. He chose to desperately live instead.

There are many comparisons between Ellison’s essay and episode 2 of Damon Krukowski’s Ways of hearing. Both described the noises they hear around them. They also talked about experiences in New York. They both talked about sound and noise that added to their experience in New York.