There are differences between “hearing” and “listening”. Hearing means that the sound you hear everywhere and every day, but you don’t really pay attention. For example, the sounds of trains, airplanes, cars, buses, and so on. We hear those sounds every day, but we don’t really pay attention to it unless we have reason to do otherwise we ignore them.  On the other hand, listening is about paying attention to the sound you hear, and it requires a conscious effort. I believe that we can make choices about what we listen to avoid unnecessary noise. For example, we listen to music to avoid unnecessary background noises that come in our every day’s life. Digital technology has changed our public spaces to private spaces of listening to music and sounds through the advent of headphones, digital podcasts, and audio devices. I believe that structural features, such as race, or social class, inform how we listen. For example, I like to listen to natural sounds such as birds chirping, the sound of rain or river and it calms me down because I grew up listening to those natural sounds in Nepal.

Schafer in the ” The Soundscape” discusses that soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans. He also tells us that “noise pollution is now a world problem”. On the other hand, Krukowski in the “ways of hearing” tells us that how digital technology is privatizing public space. We can understand that the noise in New York city is considered a challenge. Schafer talks about the noises that are coming from everywhere such as buses, cars, trains etc. and these noise pollutions need to be taken care of and Krukowski talks about digital technology where we can avoid unnecessary noise by using headphones and earphones. That is how Schafer and Krukowski discuss about the relationship space and sound.

Sound is naturally produced from objects, while hearing allows us to listen and understand the vibrations. Sound is one way that will enable us to communicate once we hear what’s being generated, then we make that decision whether or not to speak. We do decide to listen to what we want to hear. We make that choice by ignoring someone not responding, putting on noise cancellation earphones, etc. Schafer and Krukowski discuss how space has an impact on the way we interpret sound. Krukowski explains how we have selective hearing depending on where we are at. Krukowski also mentions that we choose to put headphones into our ears to cancel any loud noise in public spaces. We create our own space not paying attention to what’s around us, we disconnect from the real world. Schaffer interpretation about sound and space is how a natural sound can be overheard by other sounds that are reproduced.

The difference between hearing and listening can be different for everyone. I think that listening  is when you listening closely to something you want to listen to like your favorite song or you want to listen to someone sing but hearing you can hear things and not be listening to it you can hear someone speaking but you’re not paying attention to what they’re saying. You can hear it but you can ignore it even when you block it from your brain and block the sound out you can still hear it but your brain just drowns it out. If you are focused on something else you can have the choice between hearing and actually listening to it by trying to focus on what you’re paying attention to, like reading a book and people are talking ,we try to ignore it. What we hear and listen to is different depending on what race, gender, and social class we are. For example, people of a different race don’t listen to ignorance because they learn to ignore things that are said to them  because they heard it threw out their lives . It can also depend on a person’s age, where they live, and personality.
Schafer and Krukowski’s point is that the relationship between sound and space is the space your in can play a part in how you hear sounds and things around you.

Blog Post #5

The difference between hearing and listening is that people tend to hear things if it isn’t something that they’re interested in, it won’t seem of importance to want to hear more information about it. So they may brush it off or even think about something else while they hear someone talking. When it comes to listening, I would say it’s something people are interested in getting more information about; thus, when people listen to someone talk, they give it their full attention avoiding any distractions because the information may be beneficial to aspects of their lives. People make choices based on what they listen to; rather than what they hear. Most people tend to listen to a social class structure, especially if that person has power. Seeing that most people would listen to someone with that power, it would display that they’re receiving accurate information due to his or her status in society. For instance, if they have a big following and people look up to them; and deliver information, people will run with that information and believe every word; even if it’s misinformation, only because it’s a celebrity.

As Damon Krukowski mentioned, “digital devices extend interior space into the street, through audio we’re privatizing our public space.” It’s noisy in New York City (NYC), so most people use phones or listen to their headphones while they walk down the street to block out the noise around them. On public transportation, people will use their headphones, not only to avoid the noise pollution around them but also to avoid hearing peoples’ conversations in which they aren’t interested because they are strangers. When people are in public spaces, most times it’s uncomfortable, from noise to crowds of people, so they find comfort in listening to their headphones and not having to deal with the discomfort of being in public spaces. Gentrification also played a big part in the noise in NYC because of all the construction of the new buildings that were being built around the city.