{"id":1356,"date":"2011-11-10T23:02:17","date_gmt":"2011-11-11T07:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/?p=1356"},"modified":"2011-11-22T17:25:12","modified_gmt":"2011-11-23T01:25:12","slug":"pieces-of-sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2011\/11\/pieces-of-sound\/","title":{"rendered":"Pieces of Sound"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hum to myself a lot. All these pieces of sound that rattle inside my head, like this non-stop radio station playing my favorite and non-favorite tunes, they sort of simmer and then overflow. Not complete songs, mind you, those only play when I am really <\/em>bored, and I haven’t been bored in a long while now. What I hum are just fragments of tunes, sonic branches that come and go as they please.<\/p>\n

It’s a harmless habit that inches more towards annoying \u00a0if you are the person sitting next to me in office. Somewhat creepy if I am doing it in the bus and you’re sitting next to me, so I don’t.<\/p>\n

It could be worse. There was this time in college when I absentmindedly whistled in class. I did not do it on purpose, I swear, but the subject and the lecture were boring and the tunes, they wouldn’t just stop. I do not blame the lecturer for thinking someone was trying to disrupt his class. He took it in his stride initially – would just stop and look around trying to read the faces of the students sitting in the general direction of where the sound came from. It sort of helped that I do not pucker my lips when I whistle.<\/p>\n

I consciously stopped doing that. It was stupid. But some of my classmates felt more\u00a0mischievous than I did, and began using it as a \u00a0thing to disrupt the class. The next time it happened, the lecturer threw a fit and refused to take any more classes until the culprit came to his room and apologized. Nobody did, and finally I went and confessed to having done it before. He was remarkably nice about it, I remember, just asked me not to do it again and came back to take classes from the next day. I am not sure he believed me saying that I had not done it that <\/em>time.<\/p>\n

The other major class disruption had to do with the bassline of ‘Urvasi’, back in school. It’s possible for an impressionable fifteen-year old to come up with a way to generate something similar to the sound of a synth-bass from the back of his throat. It’s also completely possible for said fifteen-year-old to figure out that others cannot localize the source of a sound produced that way, especially if one keep a straight face. Someday, when I am back in Guwahati, I want to confess to Rana-sir that I was the guy messing with his Advanced Mathematics class, and not someone playing Kaadhalan<\/em>\u00a0from the road, and that it was not necessary to shut all the windows every day before class to block that sound. This was done totally on purpose, oh man, I was a total douchebag.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, I do hum in tune. It’s loathsome to be in tune when the song in question is Mika’s ‘Grace Kelly’, but I manage.<\/p>\n

On the hum-list right now:<\/p>\n