How We Cancel the Noise: Mack Hagood on Sound, Tech, and Attention
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Mack Hagood:
I think a lot of students think that what we're talking about is making them more productive, that they're wasting time on their phones, and I would try to impress upon them that is the last thing in the world I care about. Actually. I don't care how productive you are, I care how happy you are, and I care about how rich your life is. And that I think there are so many things on our phones that offer us a simulacrum of something real. There's so many easy, convenient ways to do something that feels like friendship, but lacks the spontaneity, lacks the sensory richness, lacks all the other ways we communicate besides through words.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. I really enjoyed this opportunity to speak with Mack Hagood, author of "Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control", to explore how we use sound to manage our minds, moods, and modern lives.From white noise apps and noise-cancelling headphones to tinnitus and sound therapy, Mack helped me understand the complex relationship between media, technology, and the human need to tune in (or out). We discuss the surprising cultural history behind everyday sonic tools — from the 1964 Sleep-Mate sound conditioner to Irv Teibel’s visionary Environments recordings, to Dr. Amar Gopal Bose’s 1978 flight epiphany that led to noise-cancelling headphones. Mack reflected on teaching “The Smartphone in Society,” and concerns with both social media and streaming platforms. Towards the end of this conversation he explained why started his podcast Phantom Power and how his childhood in New Orleans eventually led him to the new field of sound scholarship. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast!Listen now and rethink the sounds you live with.
Hey Mack, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Mack Hagood:
Thanks so much for the invitation.
Leah Roseman:
We're going to be talking about a lot of things actually not directly related to music, but I do see a whole bunch of guitars behind you in your home office.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, I do have a weakness for guitars, and I was actually a little surprised that you invited me because yeah, I am not primarily known as a musician, so I was very interested to get your invitation.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's a little bit off the beaten track, but I do try to have some academics on because I'm a super nerd. I was very interested in your research. It affected me personally and also to show people that the world of music is really broad and interesting and all kinds of musicians do all kinds of things, and you are a guitarist.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, yeah. I am a guitarist. I started playing guitar when I think I was 12. My mom got remarried and my stepdad, Skip Capron, had a really nice old Gibson L5 guitar, kind of like, I don't know, world War II era guitar maybe before that actually, and with the sort of F holes. And he was a guy who loved the Kingston Trio and Bob Dylan and that generation. And I just picked it up, fell in love with it. I had no idea what a really marvelous instrument I was getting to play. It has this very old time percussive sound to it. But yeah, so that's kind of what I learned on. I'm pretty much, which has definitely caused problems over the years. But yeah, I wouldn't call myself a trained musician, but I play music.
Leah Roseman:
And when I was looking up, you recorded with this Americana group, Pinetop Seven, so I found some of their stuff on YouTube. Were you on some of those recordings?
Mack Hagood:
I was on the last few things that came out, yeah. And it was a real privilege to play with those guys because they really were some great musicians. Darren Richard was the leader of that group, and he was a really great singer songwriter who, I don't know, his music just sort of evoked wide open spaces, and his lyrics were excellent. And he just attracted a really great bunch of musicians. Nate Walcott, the trumpet player who went on to play with Bright Eyes, a very prominent band in that kind of space. Melissa Bach, a great cello player out of Chicago. Andy Rader, played upright bass, Ned Fokerth on drums, and I was playing guitar, electric guitar. That was a great experience.
Leah Roseman:
So I found you because I was researching Joel Styzens a few months ago.Yeah, I'll link his episode if people haven't heard it. So he suffers from tinnitus and hyperacusis and changed his music career. So you had some of his music on this episode you did about tinnitus. It was a solo episode, and when I was listening to it, it was a big aha moment for me because I've had tinnitus for years, but I didn't understand how - I'd never researched it. I just put up with it and I figured all the variability was just the condition changing. I didn't understand. So I will want to talk to you about tinnitus, and actually it might be interesting to dive into your, well, we should, maybe it relates, but your book Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control. I read that book this summer and took notes, so I have some specific questions about it.
Mack Hagood:
Well, thank you for reading that,
Leah Roseman:
But maybe we should just dive into tinnitus. I bet a lot of listeners have it and may not even realize what they're hearing. Yeah,
Mack Hagood:
Well, gosh. So yeah, it could be pronounced tinnitus or tinnitus. I pronounced it tinnitus until I started doing field work and studying it. And then all the clinicians I was working with were pronouncing it tinnitus. So now that's how I pronounce it. But it is the experience of ringing, buzzing or other phantom sounds perceived to be in the head or ears. And generally there are some kinds of tinnitus that are, or some clinicians call them somatic sound, where it's actually, there is a pulse or some bodily mechanical thing that's happening that you're just perceiving that you can hear so often that's called pulsatile tinnitus, where you can hear a pulse in your ears. But for musicians, generally what we tend to experience is just straight up tinnitus that has no cause in the physical world that we can perceive. And there's nothing wrong with tinnitus.
I always want to just begin by saying that. So if you experience tinnitus, there's no reason to problematize it in your mind. It is a very, very common experience. And in fact, there's this classic study where they put individually a hundred people one by one into one of those silent chambers, an anechoic chamber, and I think like 98 of them heard tinnitus when they were in that space. So basically what happens is the auditory system is very much like the pupil. When you're in a low light situation, the pupil dilates it wants to get more light like its job is to see. So if you put it in a situation where it can't see it's going to do its best to see, well, the auditory system is the same way. And so basically when there's an absence of sound, the brain turns up the volume.
And what winds up happening is it's just like if you took a stereo system that you weren't playing any music on and you just crank the volume all the way up, you're going to hear the inherent noise of the system. And so what happens is the auditory system kind of perceives the random neuronal firing that's happening in our brains all the time. That's actually the signal for silence where it experiences it as sound and that sound can be perceived in different ways. Often what we perceive is frequencies that are sort of in the neighborhood of spaces where we maybe have lost a little bit of hearing. And so there's often a relationship between hearing loss and it could be a tiny, tiny amount of hearing loss and tinnitus, that's not always the case, but it's often the case. And so basically your brain might be turning up the volume just in those frequencies that you don't hear quite as well.
And I think this happens to musicians for maybe a couple of reasons. One reason would be that quite often our ears take a beating. If you're playing and you're like the brass section is behind you, you're catching some major decibels there. And we know that volume over time is what leads to hearing loss. So the louder the sound is, the shorter your exposure should be. And I think education has gotten a lot better on that front. I think people know about musicians earplugs now that have a real nice flat frequency response, still let you feel very much in contact with the music, but maybe mitigate some of that hearing damage that can happen. But the second reason I think musicians often suffer from tinnitus is simply that if you looked at our brains, the portion dedicated to sound perception is just much more developed. And so there's just this very discerning auditory system that notices these things. And then what can be bad is when basically our other parts of our brain get involved and we get maybe a perception like, oh my gosh, is this bad? What does this mean? Am I losing my hearing or am I ill? Or what is that? And then a sort of fight or flight reaction can develop, and that's when people can start to actually suffer from tinnitus instead of just merely experiencing it.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. Yeah, I've noticed that change with myself, and it's very interesting. And also I hear sometimes it's a high pitch, and that's clearly what that is. And I will now say tinnitus.
Mack Hagood:
Okay, I'm agnostic. I'm just going to say tinnitus, but can say tinnitus.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it could be a tomato, tomato kind of situation.
Mack Hagood:
Totally.
Leah Roseman:
But I do have crackling and other sounds that come and go. And when I really started noticing it Mack was when we had the pandemic lockdowns, and I suddenly wasn't in rehearsal. I was stressed out. I was home alone in this very pretty quiet house, and I really started noticing I was craving. So I started using nature sounds and just to have something on in the background when I was trying to do other things. And that's the first time I'd really sought that out.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that rings true to me, no pun intended. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people either first noticed tinnitus or kind of found it to become problematic for them during the pandemic, and I think you put your finger on it, it was the actual lack of sonic enrichment that we were getting, the quietness. I mean, there was these fascinating phenomena that happened during the pandemic. People started Googling, why are the birds so loud? And of course, the birds didn't change their volume. It's just that the world got so quiet that suddenly we could hear them. And people started being annoyed by the birds. It's like, wow, they sound so aggressive. It's like, no, I think we were the aggressive ones. We've been drowning out their mating calls for all of these years, and they're finally able to hear one another.
But some of the things that we were able to hear were the sound of our own brains, and that's not always so fun. And I myself have suffered from tinnitus and had times in my life where I was very affected by it and dealt with depression over it, much like Joel Styzens. And so I was pretty passionate about into my research on this topic and really trying to understand it and really trying to contextualize it in the culture more broadly. Not only what are the noises that maybe make us harm our hearing, that is one aspect. But I was more interested in why does it feel so threatening or dangerous or isolating to experience this sound? And so I wound up doing a lot of reading on the history of tinnitus and thinking about why it is that in our present culture, tinnitus is so bothersome.
Leah Roseman:
I remember one thing in this early pandemic days, I actually Googled "cafe sounds" like to have background noise because I missed going to a cafe, and if anyone's interested, it's definitely up there like 10 hours of the murmur and coffee cups and background noise. It's a lot less expensive maybe than going out sometimes if you're seeking that sort of hubbub to concentrate.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, there's a lot of that kind of content out there. And that is one of my research interests is what are those sounds doing for us? Why do we crave them so much? And I suppose just to sort of answer the question, at least to some extent, I think because we live in a culture where we are responsible for ourselves, we're no longer in an environment where most of us, we get one job and have that job for life. We're all free agents in this economy. It's often called neoliberalism. It's this kind of lack of a safety net and great opportunities in some regards, but also a great responsibility to the individual. And so our control of our own attention becomes very important in that scenario. I mean, it really separates who can be a higher earner from who can't. And no matter what kind of sphere you're trying to be excellent in, you need to be able to control your own attention.
And so tinnitus is sort of like a threat to that. It's a sound that's attached to yourself and you can't get rid of it. And I think that's part of what adds to the angst around it in contemporary life. And then moreover, the reason why we use things like the cafe sounds that you're talking about, or noise canceling headphones or white noise machines or any of the things that I studied in that book, you mentioned Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control. All of these are sonic tools that we use to help control our own attention, whether we want to relax and chill or concentrate and get our work done.
Leah Roseman:
So I wanted to ask you about some specific things in the book. Let's talk about the 1964, the Sleep Mate, this electromechanical sound conditioner. It's kind of a funny story.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. Yeah. There's a mythology within the company, which I believe they're now called Yogasleep, but at the time that I was studying them, they were called MARPAC. They had a few names, but within the company, there was this sort of this myth. I mean, I think there was some truth to the story. I'm just not a hundred percent sure which version is true. But basically the idea was that the Buckwalter, there's the couple that founded the company, the Buckwalters were sleeping in a roadside motel in the early sixties. And there's different versions of this story, but basically there might've been a poker game going on in the room next door all night, or it might've just been, there was noise from cars on the highway, but whatever the scenario was, they couldn't sleep. And there was a sort of air conditioner in the window of the room, and they had the insight that if this air conditioner wasn't broken, which it was, they would be able to sleep just fine because they would've had the sound of the air conditioner. And James Buckwalter was a tinkerer. He was the guy who invented the rubber floor mats for automobiles. He used to work for the Rubbermaid Corporation as a salesman, but also invented a few things himself. And so when he got home from this trip, he took a piece of plywood and cut out a circular piece of plywood, and he got a tin dish,
Leah Roseman:
Like a dog dish or something, right?
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. I don't think it turns out maybe it wasn't actually a dog dish. This was another point of contention in the lore of the company. But yeah, it was just like, yeah, it could have been a dog dish. It was like a tin dish, and he got a church key and he punched a few holes in it, and then he got a motor from a fan that you would, I think it was sort of the kind of fan that you would have in your bathroom or something like that. But he just had the motor for it. And then he took a coffee can and cut out some fan blades and put this under the dish on top of the plywood base and plugged it in, and it made this, and they put it on their bedside table, and it helped them sleep. And they were like, I think this is a pretty cool idea.And then they would tell their friends about it, and all of their friends wanted one. And so they wound up making this electromechanical sound machine, basically we would probably just call it a white noise machine. And also they called it a sound conditioner. And that's sort of the way they marketed it. And these are the kinds of things that if you've ever been to a therapist's office, and they might have one in the hallway so that the people who are in the waiting room can't hear the emoting going on inside the therapist's office. So I think these are pretty familiar things. A lot of people use them for their babies, that sort of thing.
Leah Roseman:
And then it was sort of like a family, when it started, they had the kids assembling these in the garage. And I also found the marketing interesting. It was kind of gendered because they had the young man studying, and it was the same product, but it was named differently. And then the woman on her bed trying to sleep,
Mack Hagood:
They marketed, it was very interesting. I mean, one of the big breakthroughs that they had was they got it into the Sears and Roebuck catalog, which was a huge deal back in that time before the internet, these big thick catalogs were in terms of commerce, they were the internet before the internet. And so just to get their product in there was a huge deal. And they did use these very gendered imagery of women, always white women sleeping peacefully next to this machine. And they called the machine the Sleep Mate. That was the brand that they used. But then they started to get letters from people who were using the machine at work, and these folks felt that Sleep Mate did not seem very professional, and they didn't want that in their office. And so basically, they just took it and they put a different badge on top of the machine that said Sound screen. And so they had the identical product that they just marketed two different ways and sold to two different audiences.
Leah Roseman:
And okay, let's see. There's so many interesting, I should say it's a fairly academic book, but there's so many interesting stories within it. And Irv Tebel, what a character in his Environment series, which I did find on YouTube. You can check out the original.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I should mention that actually, I agree with you that it is a pretty academic book. And I was sort of frustrated by that because I would go out and give talks about the book, and everyone had stories to tell me about how they can't live without their noise canceling headphones or their white noise machine, or everyone I talked every time I would go give a talk on another campus about this, I got such a response from the audience, and I was like, why didn't I write this book in a way that would've been more accessible to a wider audience? And of course, the reason is because I needed to get tenure as a professor, and you have to do certain things. So I actually found an agent, and I have a book contract with Penguin Press to write a public facing version of this story that really focuses a lot more on the stories of how these things were invented and the sort of more broader cultural implications of them, but is not so academic. So hopefully that'll be coming out in the next couple of years.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. Irv. Yeah, his environments series was the first series that, basically the first record series that used nature sounds as what I call a technology of the self. This is, I pull that term from the theorist Foucault, who talks about how there were certain kinds of technologies or practices that people use to help them withstand the pressures of modern life. And so the environments series had titles like Wood Masted Sailboat, Ultimate Seashore, Country Stream, and they had these really extensive liner notes that told you what speed to play the record at and how you were supposed to listen to them by not listening to them. So basically they were like, the concept was you don't listen to these records, you hear them. And Irv Teibel who came up with this concept had all of these really rather extraordinary claims printed on the records. They would double your reading speed.They would make sex better, they would make your plants grow faster. It's a pretty sort of hippie dippy early seventies, like pet rock kind of weird kitschy thing on one level. But on another level, we kind of live in the sonic world that he invented. I mean, everywhere you look now, there are environmental sounds being used. They come stock, we bought a new tv, and they're just like a setting that you can turn on the tv. There's a bajillion YouTube channels and Spotify recordings and podcasts that play this kind of stuff. So he was definitely ahead of his time,
Leah Roseman:
And I might be mixing him up with somebody else in the book, but these loops were manipulated in such a way that they didn't sound looped because the recordings weren't as long as the final track.
Mack Hagood:
So for his first record, which was The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore, he had a problem because he had these three minutes of ocean wave sounds that he recorded at Coney Island that sounded just beautiful, and they're what gave him the entire idea. He was actually there to record sounds for an avant-garde film being made by some folks in the audience will know Tony Conrad, who was sort of an associate of the Velvet Underground and an experimental musician, and also a filmmaker who recently passed away a couple of years ago. But I got to interview him about his side of this whole story. Basically, he's the one who brought Teibel out to the beach to record some ocean waves for his film that he was making called Coming Attractions. And they record these sounds and Teibel's very reluctant. It's winter and it's cold, and Conrad trying to make him go out into the ocean, and he doesn't want to, he thinks I could have just faked these sounds in my studio. Why are you making me come out here? But then he gets home and he plays the tape, and most of it has noise, like his own voice complaining and things like that, or traffic or planes flying overhead. But there's just a few minutes that are just the ocean and in stereo, and it's hard for us to appreciate today how new that was. This was, you have to remember that the late sixties was really just at the dawn of the era where you could make a mobile recording that was truly high fidelity.
And so this was really a new thing to have this amazing sound of the ocean through headphones. And he was blown away by it. And then he just basically overnight had this whole idea of this whole record series. But the problem was he only had three minutes of music. And to make a long story short, he goes all up and down the eastern seaboard trying to get more perfect ocean sounds, and he could never get another good recording for whatever reason, apparently Coney Island, the beach was dredged right after he made that recording, and it changed the sounds of the waves. And so he wound up with the help of a colleague of his who worked at Bell Laboratories. They actually ran the recording through a mainframe computer, and it's very technical. I won't really go into all the details, but they basically made a 45 minute recording out the three minutes using the help of a computer, and it's actually the first digital recording that was a popular recording. And people don't even realize that.
Leah Roseman:
I found that really fascinating. And for anyone who's younger, who's listening, maybe in their twenties, they may not realize what a computer was at that time. It would've been like a whole room.
Mack Hagood:
It was a whole room,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. It's quite a weird story, and I've been having fun writing about it for the new book and getting into the characters, and it's a different challenge to write a book for the public because the characters have to take the foreground. So there was a whole new level of research and thinking that I had to do about, well, what drove these people and how to characterize them.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I look forward to reading the new book.
Mack Hagood:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Well, another character, Dr. Amar Gopal Bose, 1978, goes on a flight, and I found it interesting that he was a violinist as well as, what was he, A mechanical engineer? I can't remember.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, yeah. And so Bose is this beloved MIT professor. His classes were known for not only instilling technical knowledge, but also just sort of life lessons. But way before that, when he was just a kid, he grew up in Philadelphia, and he too was a tinkerer, and he loved to fix old radios in his basement. And he spent a lot of time in his basement because his dad was from India, and his mom was, I don't remember where she was from, but she was a white woman, and the racism at the time was really bad in Philadelphia among other places. So basically, he was often chased through the streets and called the N word. And so he spent just a lot of time in his basement tinkering with things, and he was a bit of an autodidact, apparently. It was not a sure thing that he was going to get into a place like MIT, but eventually he did, and he became the great person.
We've heard of these Bose radios and Bose headphones and all of these things, but I think it was in, I forget, I'm forgetting what year it is right now, but it was in the seventies. He was on a flight, and he was really looking forward to this flight because it was sort of the debut of the headphones that you could plug into the armrest. And these were not the ones that this is going to really, only certain people are going to remember this, but there used to be these weird earphones that looked like a stethoscope that you would put into your ears that were pneumatic tubes, that the sound would come through, and they sounded horrible, and they looked absurd. So then the big excitement was that these were more Walkman headphones that plugged into the armrest, and it was an electronic connection. And so Bose was really excited to try them.
He put them on, put some classical music, and he was instantly disappointed because of the airplane noise. He had to crank up the headphones so loud that they distorted, and the violin was sounding more like the guitar of Jeremy Hendrix or something. And as a violinist, he knew what a violin should sound like. And he was one of these folks that some scholars of technology would call a cultural intermediary. He occupied these two different spaces. He understood the aesthetics of music. He knew what music should sound like. He knew what music sounded like unmediated in person, but then he was also an acoustical engineer who knew how to do schematics, and he knew electronics, and he knew how to build things. And so up until that time, at least in his opinion, a lot of speakers in Hi-Fi systems, they made sense on paper. They made sense from an engineer's perspective, but they didn't actually sound the way the music should sound in his opinion.
And so he became this innovator in the space of acoustic design. And then when he was on that flight, so frustrated because of the sound of the distorted violins, he was like, there must be some way you can subtract things you don't want from things you want. And he took out a piece of paper and a pen, and he started doing these equations that proved active noise cancellation was possible. And so right then he invented on that flight noise canceling headphones, but it would take well over a decade for him to actually bring them into fruition. In fact, it was decades because it wasn't until the early two thousands that they really came out on the consumer market.
Leah Roseman:
And I remember the first flight when I was able to use them, what a difference it made. Oh,
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, for sure.
Leah Roseman:
Something you mentioned about how he knew how sound should be. Brings me to another little comment you had in the book to the Edison, what was it called? Realism test, which is really interesting. The people in the early years of the phonograph, it was weird for them that there would be a sound and not a person in the room making it.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. It's another one of those things. And folks in the kind of subfield that I'm in called Sound studies, love to talk about this Edison Realism test because it shows how culturally influenced and environmentally influenced our listening is People think sound has a history. There was a quiet past, and then there was the industrial revolution, and then there was noise. And now we live in a noisy world, and of course we need noise canceling headphones. It's a noisy world. But in the discipline of sound studies or the interdiscipline, we have folks from anthropology and history and all these different humanities disciplines who are thinking about sound and pointing out, well, actually listening has a history too. And so when something like the phonograph gets invented, that changes our listening. It doesn't just change the soundscape, it changes the way we listen. And the proof of that is things like this Edison Realism test, where basically it was teaching people how to listen to a record, how to listen to music without being able to see a musician.This was a rather uncanny experience. It was the same thing for the telephone. A lot of people were pretty freaked out hearing the voice of somebody without being able to see that person. And in fact, there was a lot of, we get the rise of spiritualism and a whole lot of things like that once these audio technologies come out, and there's sort of a direct influence there. This idea that you could hear voices from virtual what feels like out of thin air really got people thinking in a very spiritual way, I guess you could say.
Leah Roseman:
And did some people use recordings covertly as part of their sales or whatever?
Mack Hagood:
Oh, yeah. I think almost certainly there was that kind of trickery going on, but there was also earnest belief that people could, it reminds me of the way a lot of very smart people talk about AI right now. Either is or is going to be some kind of actual thinking entity that we can communicate with and is going to change the world mean. This is the way Edison was thinking about sound. He was working on something called the Spirit phone where we were going to be able to somehow use a telephone to communicate with the great beyond and talk to our deceased relatives and stuff like that.
Leah Roseman:
That's interesting that he would've thought that way. I thought of him as being so scientific.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, but I mean, you could say the same of Elon Musk, but he's clearly a lot of other things besides rational.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, my sister's an anthropologist, and I did take a few anthropology courses for fun as a music student. So it's interesting some stuff that came up. And you mentioned the interdisciplinary aspect of sound studies. One of the things was that many languages don't distinguish noise as a category of sound.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, that's something I learned from an ethnomusicologist named Dave Novak. It was something that he mentioned in a book called Keywords and Sound. I don't have a lot to say about that beyond that, but it does show, once again, how culturally conditioned our ways of listening are. I often like to tell my students, we think we hear the world to directly, we have a clean signal. And as an electric guitarist with a weakness for guitar pedals, I like to say actually in our signal chain, we have a bunch of delays and distortions and echoes and reverbs and all of these different things that are affecting the way we actually hear the world. Those are culturally conditioned, but physically embodied ways of listening. I think classically trained musicians will know there are certain kinds of modes of listening for slight variations in pitch or timur that you're not born with those things, you become soaked in them.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Joel Styzens, Verna Gillis, Karen Power, Leif Karlstrom, and Lawrence English. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Mack!
And the subject of soundscapes and field recordings have come up with several of my guests, and I actually took a course with Murray Schafer when I was a student
Mack Hagood:
Oh wow!
Leah Roseman:
with his book about soundscapes, The Tuning of the World, I think it was.
Mack Hagood:
Wow. What was that like?
Leah Roseman:
Well, he was a visiting professor at McGill, so he wasn't living in Montreal. I mean, this one class, and he had to catch a train because he had to go back to where he was living. So he said, okay, meet me on the steps of the music building, and this will be the class. And then we show up and he just put his suitcase down and he looked at his, whatever, the graduate student was helping him and just expected him to carry the suitcase, which is a kind of 20 minute walk or whatever to the train station. Then we got there. He said, okay, I want everyone to close their eyes and just listen, and that's your assignment. I'm going to go catch my train. And that was lecture for. He was kind of like that.
Mack Hagood:
I love that. Yeah. I mean, actually on my podcast, Phantom Power, we did a two part series on him, which really gave, I think a good faith sounding out of both his musical output and his more theoretical work. But the second part was really looking at a lot of the contradictions and maybe more problematic areas with his work. So you're not the first person to say something negative about R. Murray Schafer to me. Let's just put it that way.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I interviewed Ellen Waterman, who had worked with him quite a bit.
Mack Hagood:
I interviewed her too for that.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.And I not as familiar with his music, but I certainly that reading the book and the course, I got a lot out of it. And I do remember one of the very first lectures where there was just a painting, like an old painting, and he asked us to imagine all the sounds in the scene. I had never thought that way before, and quite a few people I've interviewed have been influenced by and have worked with Pauline Oliveros. So sort of stuff has come up. But what I find interesting about field recordings, when you listen to them like a really good field recording, it just transports you in a different way than music. It can be very special.
Mack Hagood:
And it's also really interesting that when I go back and listen to a field recording I did a long time ago, it's like I instantly know that spot. I'm like, oh, yeah, and it could be a place I haven't thought of in many, many years. And then I hear that, I'm like, oh, yeah, I was right there. It's a very unusual teleportation technology.
Leah Roseman:
I'll be linking a few episodes for people. I'll mention Karen Power, the Irish composer, and field recordist is probably a very interesting episode for the listeners of this one. And also the Australian Lawrence English who
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, we've had him on Phantom Power. Yeah, he's remarkable. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So actually, you mentioned Phantom Power, and we can get back to some other stuff. So I've listened to several episodes of your podcast, but in May of last year, you announced to listeners, this is the last episode. I'm going to be doing something different. But you continued.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. Yeah. That didn't last long at all. I was, frankly, with the book contract and the expectations around that, I was concerned about being able to do everything at once and beyond that. I was also working on a scripted series about sound that we have completed a pilot episode for called How To Listen, and that was really, I mean, just that one episode, I think I did six drafts of the script before we even started recording and sound designing and bringing in voice actors. There's a whole production involved in that. And so I just didn't think I had time for Phantom Power, but once I started to get a realistic sense of how long, How to Listen was going to take to even just put one season out, I decided I just missed talking to people. And then very strangely, when I brought the show back, not long after that, I got contacted by a podcast network called Spectre Vision Radio, which is run by Daniel Noah and the actor Elijah Wood. It turns out they're movie producers, but they're also huge sound nerds. And so now I'm part of their network and my audience is growing, and it's been really cool. And to think that I almost quit putting the show out.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it is hard to get traction. I put so much time into publicity and trying to figure that out. I'm curious, do your students, as an academic, is your podcast listening? Do they have to listen to episodes as part of assignments or
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, yeah, actually, I have them listen to certain episodes in the context of, and sort of in lieu of a reading or sometimes alongside a reading. And a lot of folks use Phantom Power in that way. I've gotten a lot of emails from people all over the world who are using the show in the classroom. So that's really gratifying and part of the reason that I didn't want to stop doing it. I think at this point in the world of sound studies, people know about it. They know about this show. I've hit a critical mass with that community that feels really nice. It's fun to help people. I feel like my mission in that show is just to help scholars and sound artists get the word out about what they're doing. Very similar to what you're doing in just sort of an adjacent space, I think.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I guess my show is, I think it's so broad that it's a little hard because it's not enough of a niche. It's interesting because an accordion podcast and at least one mandolin podcast, and there's these very specific, but it's fairly broad, although not so much pop music. But anyway, it's interesting because I've become aware of other podcasts that there might be some overlap with my listeners, and yours is definitely one of them. So of course we'll be linking that. Before we get into, I had questions about a couple of your episodes, but just finishing about Hush, I know there was a couple things, like 1979, first Walkman, which I remember, and you said that there were two headphone jacks because there was an idea that the Sony Corporation had about Japanese culture and the perception, I found that super interesting. We could use two headphone jacks. Well, now everything's Bluetooth, but you know what I mean.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is really fascinating. They just didn't think that people were necessarily going to feel comfortable being out in public listening to something on their own. Seemed a little antisocial. So they put the two headphone jacks on the Walkman, and eventually one fell off like the vestigial tail. It was, I guess, but it's interesting though, because there, oh, gosh, I'm forgetting his name, but there was a scholar who actually studied sort of iPod use among eighth graders, seventh graders, middle schoolers like that. And he found that one of the ways that they sort of created bonds between them and friends is to take the little earbuds and share them, and each one listening to, which I just thought was so sweet.
Leah Roseman:
I remember seeing that in movies, and maybe with my daughters when they were younger. Certainly one of them. I don't know if people do that now with their Bluetooth devices. They might, I dunno. But for those of us that use over your headphones,
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, that's it. Adjustable. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, we talked a little bit about sound masking, but Oh, yeah. You interviewed a guy who developed one of the earliest apps, and it was interesting to me that people asked for very specific sounds like someone got used to the sound of a hair dryer to sleep, and it was running hair dryers.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This guy, I mean, the thing that interviewing these folks who were creating all of these nature sound apps, they were all just like, if I have to make another kind of rain, I'm going to kill myself because people want to rain on a tent, rain on its tin roof, rain on a slate sidewalk, or whatever. There was just so many rain requests. But then there were also weird requests, which were just things that people had gotten used to and made them feel safe, made them feel relaxed. And I guess there was a woman who was using the sound of the hairdryer to help her sleep, and she mentioned that she had burned out so many hair dryers by leaving them running all night. And this guy was like, I can't put a hairdryer in my app. People will criticize it and rate it poorly, but he was worried that she was going to die in a fire. So he created some kind of mode where you could record whatever sound you wanted and then use it. I think so. I think that's the way he handled the hairdryer situation.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Let's get into, you teach a large class The Smartphone in Society.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Do you want to talk to us about that?
Mack Hagood:
So the Smartphone in Society, on the one hand, it was sort of like an entry level class that we thought would be a good, almost like Trojan Horse for critical media studies. Here's a beloved object that every college student is very attached to. So what if we make a class about it, and then we can sort of bring in media theory and show how the humanities can help us have a deeper understanding of these everyday practices and technologies that we engage with. And I think it's been successful in that front. I mean, the class always fills up quickly, but as time has gone on and my students have become more and more, I mean, I've been teaching this class over a decade now, and the hours I always make them monitor. There's one assignment that they do early in the semester where they measure their screen time.
They do sort of an autoethnography of what apps they use and why they use them, and how many notifications they get, which is an insane number, a totally insane number. Some of them are getting 800 plus notifications a day. I'm like, how does that, and so as time has gone on and this attachment has grown so strong and that even they feel oppressed by it, I feel like the importance of this class has just grown and grown. And at this point, I think my main mission is just to help them critically engage with their smartphone use and their social media use, and especially their TikTok use right now at least, and find some agency, find a little bit of control for them over this object, which has been so carefully designed to feed on their minds and suck every drop of attention and commerce that can be sucked out of them. And they sense it. They're not completely naive. They're worried about their own smartphone use increasingly. And so I just feel like I'm there to provide resources in dealing with that relationship.
Leah Roseman:
I should try to get sponsorship from this company I'm going to mention, because they really helped me. Have you heard of The Brick?
Mack Hagood:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So have you tried anything like that?
I got one. It's been about a month, and it's really changed my relationship with my phone. You can really customize what you're blocking, and it doesn't take any self-control because I'll brick my phone before I leave the house. So when I'm out the apps I've blocked, I can't bring them up. And even if you try to look at, I, I was doing research actually on a podcast guest, so I was trying to look on Google for them, and it was like their Facebook, but it wouldn't let me do it because I had Facebook blocked on my phone. So it's actually really, really good. And then apparently you can have many different accounts in a family. And so it's a physical thing, and when you lock your device, you decide how you want to use it. So you could make your phone into just phoning and texting and get rid of the internet altogether, or just block very specific apps that you might have trouble with. So I find it very interesting because that whole issue where we're beating ourselves up because we're losing focus, it just removes that for me.
Mack Hagood:
So
Leah Roseman:
It's kind of a cool idea around that.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm all for things like that. I think a lot of students think that what we're talking about is making them more productive, that they're wasting time on their phones. And I would try to impress upon them that is the last thing in the world I care about, actually. I don't care how productive you are, I care how happy you are, and I care about how rich your life is. And that I think there are so many things on our phones that offer us a simulacrum of something real. There's so many easy, convenient ways to do something that feels like friendship, but lacks the spontaneity, lacks the sensory richness, lacks all the other ways we communicate besides through words. And I mean, there's no pheromones crossing the fiber optic cables and wifi signals of this great country. We're missing out on all the sounds around us when we walk around with our headphones on.
And I'm just all about that richness. And I honestly feel like the more I've gotten into this theme of research, the less of a trouble I have staying off my phone. I'm just like, actually, I don't really want to listen to music right now. I just want to hear what's going on around me. And the same thing with social media. It's really lost its luster for me, especially now that so little of it comes from my actual friends, which makes me, in some ways a terrible podcaster. I don't promote my show at all. I don't feel like if I try to make a TikTok video, I'm speaking a language that I don't speak. I'm trying to do something that I actually don't engage with at all. So it just looks completely false to people. I don't even try because it would be so insincere. But what I love about podcasts is, I mean, you and I have never met before, but I feel like I'm getting to really know you. So I don't treat all media equally. I think they all have different shortcomings and bonuses, but I tend to podcasting a lot.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, when you got into podcasting, was it partly you had a love of good radio and because you were sort of before the pandemic that you started, right?
Mack Hagood:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was 2018.
I had finished Hush, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And I'd had an idea of podcasting for a long time. I was a pretty early podcast listener, and I was frustrated that I was in this sound studies world, and then all of my work came out on the printed page or in pixels. And I was like, that just seems dumb. And so I was really like, well, how could we really do scholarship in sound? And since then, there's been some really great journals and so forth that are doing, there's one called Seismograph. It's a Danish journal. Their latest issue, the September issue has 19 different audio articles, and they engage with music, but they're also very anthropological. And the one that I was just writing up this morning from my newsletter is they have an article about the great Asian songbird crisis. Have you heard about this?
And so for folks who don't know, there's a huge market for competitive songbird specimens or whatever. So basically, you train up your songbird and there are these competitions that can be for a lot of money. But the problem is these are, I think, very powerful bird human relationships, but they're also leading to the potential extinction of these songbirds in the wild, because people go out and capture them for this market. And so there's an anthropologist and a musicologist who made this 18 minute audio piece, and they went to Indonesia, they did their research, they spoke to all the people who are in these competitions, and the field recordings bring you into the competitions. You can hear it. And they're saying, us Westerners shaking our fingers. We don't really understand what's going on. We need to talk to them and find out what the attraction is. And I mean, the fact is, these guys are loving these birds to death. They love the birds. And so just to hear a piece of audio scholar, I mean, that would've been interesting to read anyway, but to hear it, I think that is what we should be doing in sound studies. Not that we shouldn't write at all, but to get our work out to the public. I think we should be working in sound more.
Leah Roseman:
A couple of your episodes I found very interesting. It was with Carolyn Birdsall, and you spoke to her about her book Radiophilia and also her Nazi soundscape stuff. And there was just a little thing in that discussion that you guys mentioned that I hadn't been aware of. I don't watch sports, was during the pandemic, they used a canned crowd sound to help both the players and the viewers at home.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just didn't, when they first were trying to do pandemic era sports, I think they very quickly, I don't even know if they tried to do it without putting in canned sounds. And that was not the earliest time that those kinds of simulated sounds have been used. When you watch the Olympics and you're seeing the cross country skiing or whatever, they can't get mics way out there in the snow or what have you. And so they're putting in simulated sounds in there too. In fact, there was a great episode of the podcast, 99% Invisible that talks about all the fake sounds in the Olympics. That was really great.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's another good podcast. Too many.
Mack Hagood:
Oh, that's a really good one. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, also, I think for my listeners, Liz Pelley, her book Mood Machine, the Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist very apt. And this topic comes up with so many of my guests who are so frustrated by streaming platforms and the algorithms.
Mack Hagood:
Are they frustrated because of the compensation or because of what it's doing to their music listening? What do folks say to you?
Leah Roseman:
Well, of course, compensation, but I think a lot of it is discoverability because, well, we can get into the discussion about AI music, which is even separate. But from what I understand, and I don't use Spotify, but they try to have this sort of chill vibe and to discourage people from actively finding music they like, and they'll feed you the most popular or what they think you want. And when you look up an artist, you don't even, the way it's displayed, it's not like, here's their discography. They'll say, listen to this. So I think the way the algorithm works,
Mack Hagood:
Yeah. I mean this, I think, I can't remember which term Liz coined, but one of the things people call it is Spotify core.
It's just this kind of very middle of the road, easy to have on in the background and shorter song lengths, like anything to create more conversions, more plays. It's really super interesting to think about the format of musical distribution affecting the content itself. But this has always been the case. I mean, when we were the gramophone, like the wax cylinders could only hold so much music, so people had to condense their performance to that length. Or we have the 45 RRP M record could only hold whatever it was, three and a half minutes. And so you get all these pop songs that are that length, and we get the lp, which can handle about 44 minutes or whatever it is. And so you get people conceiving of a musical work as being two sides and roughly 22 minutes each. And it just goes on and on and on with every format we've ever had. It's shaped not only the consumption of the music, but the production.
Leah Roseman:
And people are into these very long playlists now too, so they don't have to think. And the whole idea of a mood playlist
Mack Hagood:
Too. Yeah. Again, this is just where I am right now in my life. I don't know why, but Well, first of all, when I'm writing, I can't listen to anything because I'm too interested in sounds. So I just can't. But even when I'm just sort of hanging out, I just don't listen to music anymore. I listen to music when I want to actively listen to it, and I go to a lot of shows. I like going to hear DJs spin old dub reggae and go dance to stuff like that. But in terms of just the passive consumption of music, I don't know. I'm kind of over it. It feels the same way for me as the social media stuff. I really want to focus on it or just not listen to it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I mean, I listen to so much music, but never in the background unless maybe I'm cleaning, doing something like that.
Mack Hagood:
Or even, I mean, there are ways you can be listening, but you can listen pretty deeply while you're cleaning or while you're driving. Right. Those are definitely scenarios where I would listen to music. But yeah, music that I'm going to ignore, I don't know.
Leah Roseman:
So Mack, there's so much we could talk about. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that, that you'd like to talk about?
Mack Hagood:
No, not necessarily.
Leah Roseman:
Well, one thing I didn't ask, which I'm curious about is how did you become a sound scholar? How'd you get into this field?
Mack Hagood:
Well, it was a very, very circuitous route. I mean, to give you the really long story, I would say I was blessed to be born and raised in New Orleans, which is a very, very sound rich culture. I heard so many every Mardi Gras, you're a little kid and you're out there and on the parade route, and there's so much music, the high school and college marching bands. There's the smaller New Orleans brass bands. There were, I mean, the first time I ever heard Steel Pan music was on a Mardi Gras float that the Coast Guard or the Navy would always do, even just local TV commercials. There would be a commercial for the zoo, and it was the Neville Brothers or the meters who made the music, just incredible funk music, even on TV commercials. It was just everywhere, everywhere. And so I think that kind of opened my ears.
And then, I mean, I had just a long journey where I did a lot of things. I lived in East Asia for almost four years. I worked for in the early.com era, I worked for one of the very first online music stores where we had to find the photos and descriptions of all the musical instruments or write them ourselves, because none of that existed online. We were kind of inventing the online store. And so that was a rich musical education and just all these different experiences playing in bands, whatnot, sort of came together when I found myself in my thirties and sort of realizing I was probably never going to make a full living as a musician, and I was trying to figure out something I could do with my life. And I had heard about ethnomusicology and I was like, oh, well, I used to make field recordings in Asia.
I didn't even know that there was a name for that. And so I got into Ethnomusicology. I went to the Department of Folklore in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, sort of venerable program. And then I realized after I was there, there are not many jobs in Ethnomusicology. Nobody told me this. And the jobs that there are, at least it seemed to me at the time, I would have a much better chance if I could lead a gamelan ensemble or something, which I was totally not qualified to. In fact, the classes, like the music at the musicology classes were killing me, like transcription and analysis, oh my God. I was self-taught guitars who could barely read a note. So that class was a nightmare for me. So gradually, both due to my interests and I think my strengths and weaknesses, I found myself gravitating towards media studies, and then I kind of discovered sound studies just based on the interests I had.
Because at the time, people were really interested in fandom, both in popular music studies, but also in media studies. There was a lot of talk about fandoms and fan cultures, and for whatever reason, maybe I'm just a contrarian, but I was just like, most of the media consumption people do is not a fan relationship. The vast majority of it is something we just kind of have on, and I'm way more interested in what's that all about? Why do we have media on in the background and what does it do for us? I started to think about things like my grandmother, when my grandfather died, she stopped sleeping in her bedroom and started sleeping in her living room where the TV was, and she just slept on the sofa for the rest of her life. Well, what was that TV providing? We think about media and we're like, okay, media are technologies that transmit information.
They provide entertainment or inform us in some way. That's what they do. I was like, she wasn't getting any of that from the tv. It was like the TV was giving her this simulation of a human presence. It was providing sound like human voices. It was providing a little bit of light. It was like a kind of warmth to it. It was creating a space. And so I just became really fascinated with this more ambient way of thinking about media, that media create spaces, and what we like about media is that they help us control the space we're in. So once I was really starting to think about this in this way, I was looking for things to read, and then people turned me on to sound studies and scholars like Jonathan Stern, who very kindly mentored me from afar as he did with so many people, really great sound scholar, who unfortunately just recently passed away. So it was a very indirect way, and in fact, in all of my graduate training and my undergraduate training for that matter, I never had a professor who was a sound scholar. That wasn't really quite a thing yet
Back when. I mean, there were faculty out there, but they were very thinly dispersed around the world.
Leah Roseman:
That's fascinating. Well, thanks for coming on today. It was really, really great to meet you.
Mack Hagood:
Yeah, so nice to meet you. Thank you for inviting me.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missedat LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support the series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this funnel. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
