Background Noise
Posted on August 24th, 2007 by august
That’s the way most city conversations sound to me — that famous background distortion. Lord knows what these people are saying. On the subway I often need several stops to figure out whether a couple is speaking English or not. I wonder if gurgling babies aren’t, in their bubbles, simply repeating what they mostly hear. This isn’t language; it’s aural glare.
6 Responses to “Background Noise”
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
well, damnit, you shouldn’t be eavesdropping anyway.
i’ve always felt that background city noise has a musical quality to it.
Your comment reminds me of my first trip to Hong Kong. I was on a ferry listening to Cantonese, which I don’t speak and up to that point had thought very ugly. Something about the waves and the motion of the ferry, and maybe the mood of the people, made me think of jazz. Since then I love going to Hong Kong just to hear the unintelligible melody.
i didn’t save the link, but i read somewhere that very young infants can distinguish the rhythms and sounds of their native language from foreign languages.
i think it’s possible that yes. they are just repeating what they hear [at first], but this implies too that “hearing” [as applied to spoken language, and possibly to music too] has a richer connotation to it than we’ve accorded it up to now.
Hi hipparchia!
I think if I wrote this again, I’d delete the word “simply.” I was trying to propose the idea that gurgling is not a failed attempt to produce individual words, but rather a faithful rendition of what a lot of language sounds like — conversation involves tuning out surrounding chatter as well as tuning in to a particular person.
Partly because I’ve lived in polylingual New York for so long, and partly because, as an Air Force brat, I traveled a lot in my childhood (and was at one time bilingual in British and American English), I have a pretty good ear for the sounds of languages. Of course, the most commonly spoken language here other than English is Spanish, which comes in many varieties. I can distinguish Cuban Spanish, which is very rapid and staccato, from the more languid Dominican, Mexican and Puerto Rican versions. I’m pretty good at identifying French, German and Italian just by their sounds, even if I can’t make out words. The first time I heard an Israeli couple conversing in Hebrew, I thought they were speaking French. The one language I can’t distinguish from English by its sound is Dutch.
Off topic: you’ve been tagged.