For paper #2, I will be attempting to give a go at comparing the differences in the interpretations of the significance of music as described in Living With Music by Ralph Ellison and episode 2 of Ways of Hearing: Space by the podcast host Damon Krukowski featuring writer/activist Jeremiah Moss and historian Emily Thompson. The appraisal/interpretation and the environment like one’s neighborhood in which sounds become synthesized ultimately affects the recipients’ experience with those sounds. Space reveals how sound-space dynamics can alter sounds and in turn alter one’s subjective experience to those sounds. Reporting from New York City, sounds on the street generations ago were louder, more abundant, more blended, and of course, more unavoidable. Nowadays, sound has the ability to be manipulated like never before which means there are more auditory dynamics in numerous places and the people there’s subjective experiences with them. One’s home is the last place in which they would like to hear noise and it is their conclusive perception of that noise which will ultimately guide their experience with those sounds. Living With Music is a first person narration on the effects & influences of growing up with musical bombardment in you guessed it, the inescapable New York City. The author shows the audience different effects music can have on a person and the practical applications it can produce under certain conditions such as deliberately using it to improve one’s own mood when feeling down. Ellison assures the audience that if one were to live under similar conditions to his, it would either incite an unlivable, drowning in noise or lead to an acceptance and harmonious relationship to those tunes. This is one way how interpretation can alter one’s subjective experience with auditory stimuli as the author evidently chose to “live with music” as opposed to “[dying] with noise.” Interestingly however, in choosing to accept living with music, the author later describes himself in the story putting strenuous amounts of effort into creating a contraption that would ultimately manipulate his subjective auditory environment for his liking or in response to his neighbor’s inevitable sounds.