The Sound and my Furious Ears:

Rasmussen, as well as a few other of the authors we have read for this course, has piqued my interest as someone who is trained as an anthropologist, as that is my own background. Their methods and theory seem to elicit some of the most interesting insights from the places they study, and this is a bit more biased but I usually think they have some of the best takes. Rasmussen’s observations on the potency of culturally informed views of sound in religious experience seems to be no different to me. The way that she described the need for one to understand a religious experience such as the Azan when it is played through various sources around Jakarta rather than imagining it as the singular “chilling” voice that most westerners think it to be.

As for my title of this post, I think the fury comes from my need to make an incredibly bad pun as well as my frustration that arises from individuals choosing to divorce the context from an important piece of sound. I am someone who enjoys music as an experience, either at a show or doing pretentious things like listening to an album in song-order and saying inane things like “it was meant to be listened to this way.” Although these things may be a shallow comparison to the experience of someone taking in a highly religious set of music as part of a very important daily ritual but I also think that it gets to some of the most important things that sounds can do, they fill in our environments and make our experiences what they are. Now let's have a listen to the Jakarta Azan in a video below.