Word: aural
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Women, especially women seeking public office, have been allowed a very narrow range of acceptable behavior. A woman candidate must be neither too sexy nor too severe, too young nor too old. Her voice must be modulated into an aural approximation of the dress-for-success suit. Otherwise she will be thought - God forbid - too aggressive. She must seem tough enough to stand up to the Soviets without being tough enough to frighten Freud...
...audiovisual confrontation. Why should sound alone be enough when sight is only as far away as the TV set or the video machine? Whole generations have had their brains fried with a cathode ray tube, a condition that creates a certain impatience and shortness of attention when limited to aural input. Posterity can rest easy-as Billy Joel points out, "Beethoven didn't have no videos, and he's been hanging in there"-but for rockers, popsters and soul brethren, video will be the way to keep time with the future...
Striking though the individual elements are, they do not always mesh. Although Childs says her dance is closely allied with Adams' music, too often the two clash: the sounds urgent, the movements passive. Further, visual minimalism palls more quickly than its aural counterpart, and beside Adams' expanded vocabulary, Childs' monochromaticism looks dated. By definition, being a member of the avant-garde means always being in motion, like running up a down escalator: if you are not actively moving forward, you are surely moving backward. -By Michael Walsh
Indigenous ruburbanites have developed interesting ways to remind migrants of their presence. Inner-city inhabitants carry ghetto-blaster radios to announce themselves, but ruburban teen-agers favor, as the weapon of aural aggression, the 1973 Pontiac Trans Am with full-throat custom muffler. Rubber is applied to Main Street far into the night, accompanied by rebel yells and the shattering of beer bottles. Newcomers create different problems for the police. Although such naughty amusements are passe in the suburbs, the police chief of Harvard, Ill., had to ask the host of a nude cocktail party to pull the shades...
...phone bill, the state of Virginia ran a computer check on the patterns of its employees' long-distance calls. It turned out that in March alone 2,509 calls went to a single New York City number. What for? A 57-second recorded message that titillates dialers with aural sex, specifically the breathless sounds of an ersatz liaison in which the imaginative caller can pretend that he (or she) is a participant...