How Music Can Affect the Sounds of a Town

I spent the past eight months living in a city. Going from London to Washington D.C., I lost the feeling of what it meant to live in a town. I spent a lot of my time in London going to different concerts and exploring different music venues that were local to the London area. In doing so, I started applying the ideas that I was taking away from the London music scene and started thinking about how it would apply to Ithaca. While I took a bit of a break from concerts when I got to D.C., by the end of the summer I was itching to go to another concert.

The seed was planted and I began to start thinking about the different ways that venues affect the sounds of an area. How space can alter sound and shape what we know as the music of a specific location. Take for example a place that is heavily defined by a genre of music, the South. It's easy to assume that all there is to the geographic South is country music and bluegrass.

While it is easy to define an area by one genre, it's harmful to chalk an area up to one genre of music. Take, for example, Certainly So, a Nashville band that writes indie-rock music, evoking similar sounds to The Brook & The Bluff and Jack Johnson. Though the songs don't include an apparent country twang, any odes to their woman, or any references to trucks, they still are able to play into the sound of the city. And it allows for the cultural diversity of a city to shape some of the sounds of the area.

Certainly So's debut album, "Future Self Only Dreams", also experimented with some different sounds to find what works best for their group. Playing with psychedelic sounds like "Under the Rug" and including slower odes like "Even If You Do". I plan to speak with them in the coming days to learn more about their inspirations and how they came to the indie rock sound that now defines their band.

I will be spending the next couple of months exploring the Ithaca music scene and speaking to local venues to try and explore the relationship that these spaces have with the city. Some of the artists I plan to speak to, while they aren't from Ithaca, chose to perform here so I will explore why Ithaca is seen as a music hub for musicians across the country. And why local musicians chose Ithaca as the place to exhibit their music.

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