2 - What Are You Hearing Right Now?

Summary

Stretch: Never mind research and about being in and out of prisons. Tell me what's happening in this prison right now.

Me: I can’t.

Stretch: I’ll tell you now, they’re feeding dinner. They’ve got some of the high fours out and some of the high threes, and they’re feeding the low threes.

Stretch was one of the first people I met at Midtown. He showed me around the wing and introduced me to others. He also helped me put up posters on the landings which I used to signal the purpose for my visit while inviting participants for the project. The men largely used these for roach1 material (to roll cigarettes). During our interview, he told me he had been in and out of the place for the past 38 years. His familiarity with the prison made him an invaluable guide. Stretch taught me a great deal about interpreting the soundscape by generously sharing his knowledge. I draw on his reflections here as a frame for considering the process of acclimating to the sound environment as well as how sound featured in his daily life inside. I then draw upon Stretch's account of his uses of sound as a means of decentring vision from the research process and the implications of this for researcher positionality. I return to the use and meanings of sound in more depth, drawing on the theoretical framework underpinning my research, finishing with a consideration of how this framing shaped my understanding of Midtown.While I was initially unable to answer him, Stretch's questions anchored my efforts to learn the soundscape and I would return to them repeatedly (Feld, 1984

). I would come to understand the rather obvious point that there was a limit to the ways ‘feeding time’ was likely to be organized given the goal of maximum speed, efficiency and orderliness. For this portion of the day, it was qualitative distinctions in the soundscape rather than its broad markers that contained the most valuable information about the social climate of the community. What this exchange underscored was that there was a means of, as well as a purpose to, interpreting the soundscape.