In episode #5 – POWER of “Ways of Hearing”, Damon Krukowski states at the beginning of the episode, “the marginal-the rejected-the repressed- is whatever the powerful have decided if of no use at the moment”. He goes on to ask “But might it might not be a key to alternate approaches to art, to society-to power itself?” What I believe Damon Krukowski is trying to say is that the powerful companies that we have today like Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, etc have all the power to what you listen to based off algorithms. Those mainstream platforms have the power to what’s relevant and irrelevant based on the weekly listeners on that genre or song, which closes the opportunity to many options that you do not know of because they aren’t high in numbers according to the company. These companies decide what music genre or songs are old, no longer viable, and are not to be recommended to you which gives them control over what you listen to and closes opportunities to new genres of music that you may enjoy or songs you may enjoy listening to. It may recommend music to which society finds fit at the time. Nowadays you go to the top songs in the United States and it is just music that society is mainstreaming at the time, most of that music is just rap which is what the younger audience is listening to, there isn’t much variety and you don’t have control over this because it’s based on the companies interests and society’s interests. Damon Krukowski mentions that it is not like before when you could walk into a record store and you would enter a whole new world. He mentions that you would have to explore and would decide on which record you would like to listen to. You would be able to communicate with others in the store and hear their recommendations on what to listen to. This made people more social and would open many new genres and music possibilities for you to listen to. The generation we live in now is not the same as it was years ago when we had record stores. In my opinion either or is suitable based on the person and their interests. Now we can listen to all kinds of music with just a click of a button on our phones. Even though many of these companies have control over what is relevant and irrelevant I believe that having the option to listen to music on our phones with just the click of a button is not a bad thing. Technology will advance every year, and it can either be a good thing or a bad thing, but as technology advances things are easier to access just like music has. Music indicates between the powerful and the marginalized by the companies that are powerful deciding what is the right song for you based on an algorithm instead of going to a record store and choosing which song you may like based on recommendations of the people around you and your decisions.

The way we access music and books has drastically changed over the years. We are now able to listen to music at a larger scale through many different musical apps such as spotify,pandora,apple music etc. With apps like amazon we are also able to download and purchase many books online. These types of corporations have made it a lot more convenient for us to purchase music and books. However what they lack the most is the joyful and unique experience we get from going into a record store or even a bookstore. That humanistic contact cannot be replaced with digital technologies. In my opinion Purchasing online is sort of an empty experience in the sense that sometimes you may want an expert’s opinion on what type of books may interest your desires a bit more or what new records should you be trying out instead of going by the popularity bias used by the apps. The marginal-the-rejected-the-repressed is the way Damon describes what is becoming of record and book stores. In this era  digital streaming is becoming a lot more popular among many people. Yes these apps are convenient but appreciating the accommodations of record and book stores is an experience you can only receive by purchasing in person and digital streaming does not provide this. 

In the Damon Krukowski “Power” episode, he discusses about the relationship between music and its consumers in the digital era. Back in the day, music wasn’t accessible like how it is currently. Starting off, going to the record store and buying music was the only way you can attain your favorite tunes, but with that in itself, that was an experience. you would go in and see a variety of art displayed everywhere, art you haven’t seen before. You were exposed to many different genres, songs, and artistry from all over the world. Comparing it to today, now things are way more efficient and simplified. With the expansion of big streaming music platforms, music that you enjoy is accessible at your fingertips whenever you want it. In these streaming services, you can search and listen to songs under a minute and be provided recommendations of other artists you may like in that category. The digital world discovered a new method in making the bond with art convenient for us, but the connection to the art has devalued since then. How we approach art now is very different from way back then. It’s a big world out there and there’s things beyond than a search engine.

I think it is pretty interesting to get to know someone else’s point of view of music and how it’s changed. In this case, Damon Krukowski compares how music was way much hard to hear and having to wait a period of time for you to hear about an artist or what new album they were coming out with. Compare to how music now in 2020, we are getting connected to music apps that we all use now. Now music apps get to have our info, billing info, and getting charge monthly, and before, we only bought a cd and listen to that music until we thought it was time for a new one. He says now we don’t hear new music or talented artists since were stuck listening to the same theme and the recommendations we get from the apps or google. He is right. In my opinion, some of us are stuck in just a few artists and don’t explore anything else. We are also paying more and most likely selling our info to these companies.

According to the podcast episode “Power” Damon Krukowski argues that the marginal rejected the repressed because of how easily we can listen to music with a simple touch from our phones when before there was a specific store we all went to get our favorite records or CDs. What I believe Krukowski is attempting to say is the way the huge companies have control over us; they gather all the data from our most liked music, to which songs we play the most, to even which ones we are most likely to skip. Companies get the benefit of us by gathering this information and give us more recommendations that can be near the sort of music we may like. All things considered, he called attention to how excellent the record shops were with so much information in just one store.

I agree with Damon Krukowski that there is not as much proximity to digital microphones as to analog microphones, yet I don’t believe that means we don’t have confidentiality on the call. Krukowski points out that with the move to electronic, the sound of our voices on the phone has deteriorated, no matter how close we hold them to our face, the cell phone has no proximity effect, everyone sounds as close to or as far as anyone. He says that ” the voice we hear on the phone just provides details, not for most of the environment, and thus loses privacy. However, I think that we can still sense familiarity through the sound of the voice. We can tell if the person we speak to is happy, sad, worried, and so on, on the digital phone as well. IN digital headsets enable us to communicate all around the world with people, such as our relatives. A quick phone call means a great deal to all of us as we operate and we’ll get to it easily in the distance

As Damon Krukowski stated the quote, he is arguing that nowadays even our approaches to art such as music are being controlled by the media, and we may not be able to reach a music or artists that are beautiful and talented just because they are not sponsored. In the beginning of the “Power” episode, Krukowski told that he sometimes visit record stores not to find the music he wants but to find musics he hasn’t yet discovered. He can also meet variety of people with different taste in music and therefore you can get more knowledge of music as well as the relationships with people. By using online to purchase or search music, we are unlikely to meet new taste of music because the internet will observe and analyze your searches or purchases and give recommendations based on those informations. Internet does all the searches for you and therefore we are unable to determine whether the music fits for our taste.

On this podcast, I agree with the points made. It’s almost like we’re all trapped in our own worlds. There seems to be nobody looking up from their smartphones and noticing what’s going on around them. We prefer, as humans to separate ourselves from one another. We do this often to escape publicity and stay out of trouble within NYC, this way life can be seen more than often. We have public transit in new york, which is called the MTA. You can go anywhere in the city on the MTA. The fee cost $2.75. You’ll see everything but not just musicians, singers, and homeless people on the MTA. Our lives in NYC are closely linked to noise. Every day we listen to the sound. “Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore”, as Schaffer says. One way people, like myself, stop hearing noises is by using noise-cancellation inside headphones such as AirPods pro. I prefer to disregard the noise to sum it up, and maybe sometimes I see the noise as a phase of life.