Smells and Bells

In my last post, I talked about color and colorblindness, and how color was such a personal experience. That statement got me thinking, because, when it really comes down to it, everything we experience is a personal experience. No one ever feels the same way. We may use the same general terms to attempt to describe our experiences, but in the end only we really know how we feel. Our senses and emotions have a deep connection. Another blog I found from Tufts University states that "what we sense triggers a feeling" which becomes a conceptual association. This could be anything- the blog goes into how seeing a cup of coffee, tasting coffee, hearing a coffee maker, smelling coffee beans can make us feel energized or happy. This happens all around us, though we may not know it. The sun after a long winter, for example. I feel refreshed and excited and energized on that first beautiful morning of spring, and that conceptual association leads me into my day happy. Most of the time...

I saw this commercial recently. It actually isn't really a commercial, but more of an unexpected emotional experience. When we have talked about sight in class, I have only thought of blindness as being the opposite of sight. But in fact, colorblindness could be another opposite, and perhaps even a worse opposite. Imagine you can see, but you cannot see color. You know when other people look at the trees or grass they see green, but you see grey. Imagine how frustrating and internally upsetting that must be- you can see exactly what they are seeing, but cannot see the color! Personally, after seeing this commercial, I have come to understand I take color for granted. We all do- it has always been there for us. Although color is a personal experience, we all have a general understanding of what green is, or yellow, or blue, and we all have a favorite color. We do not truly understand how much color plays into our world and how we act and move about this life. Color shapes our wor...

We are doing commodity-chain presentations in my Sociology class, and one presentation was on vinyl records. While the presentation itself had nothing much to do with our class, the history of the vinyl record caught my interest and started me thinking about the connection between sound and touch. Vinyl records were in their heyday from about 1930 to the 1980's, and they are still quite popular today. The idea behind their invention was to get longer playing music available to the public. I don't want to get too deep into the technicalities, because I don't quite understand the significance of the rpm's, although I know that is the rate of rotation that produces the noise; I want to get into why vinyl records really became popular. Some would say it is because of the scratchy, crackly, velvety, smooth, warm, full sound. Others might say it is the tangibility of the actual records. You can organize your records alphabetically, by the colors on the jacket sleeve, b...

What struck me most, in pages 125-165 of Anne Rasmussen's book, was the idea that "although Islam is the third largest religion in the United States after Christianity and Judaism... Muslim America is multicultural. There is no single or even predominant cultural model for religious rituals, clothing, food, or music for Muslims in the United States" (128).  This was a novel idea for me, because, as Rasmussen also states, there is a larger journalistic view that presents Islam as one united culture, which has permeated America's thoughts on Islam. This was interesting to me because, although it is clear to me that there are no unifying standards on Islamic music, music itself seems to be unifying, in a very global way. This does not just apply to Islam, although I believe that music does bring a lot of Muslims together, no matter what kind of "music" calls them ("music" can be anything,  recitation or not). Rasmussen says she was able to spend a lot...