In “Living with Music,” Ralph Ellison describes how music affects his living experience so badly. He describes at the beginning how all this noise around him was so annoying. He couldn’t write anything because he could barely hear his thoughts. From his own words, he said:

To our right, separated by a thin wall, was a small restaurant with a juke box the size of the Roxy. To our left, a night-employed swing enthusiast who took his lullaby music so loud that every-morning promptly at nine Basie’s brasses started blasting my typewriter off its stand. Our living room looked out across a small backyard to a rough stone wall to an apartment building which, towering above, caught every passing thoroughfare sound and rifled it straight down to me. (Ralph Ellison 227)

He describes all the separate noises, and we can tell (if we have experience in a neighborhood like this) that the noises themselves aren’t so annoying. Each of the sounds has basically a little art and story behind them. What I mean is, when a person is singing, maybe this person isn’t good at it, but she or he could be singing with such a passion that it makes you think that, in some ways, it is beautiful how the person is giving herself or himself a chance to dream. At the end, he tells us how he feels that the Oklahoma days weren’t so bad at all. He mentions that they were “glorious”. Such a pain he couldn’t figure out early. Now he lives with nostalgia (a good friend of mine).

A type of comparation that I can make within Ellison’s essay and Episode 2 of Damon Krukowski’s is the relevance of the noises. They have this “annoying” experience, but each of them thinks differently. Meanwhile, Krukowski thinks how each person’s bubble of sound is causing people not to socialize as much as in the old days. Ellison thinks and had the experience that in the end, each person’s bubble becomes one.