Word: backgrounding
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...listening for the background is not something that we do very well. In fact, we tend to do everything in our power to increase the amount of background noise in our lives. We listen to music on headphones as we walk to class; we read as we eat meals; and we talk on the cell phone as we drive to work, sipping scalding hot coffee all the while—this, as it happens, is just plain dangerous. I’m as much a culprit as the next guy—right now, I’m drinking...
...during the performance. Even if your mind wanders, you are expected to direct your full attention to the action. Why don’t we commit the same level of attention to recorded music, or food? Seems to me that as soon as you start playing music in the background, it becomes elevator music—glorified muzak...
...that’s what I mean when I say that we are multitasking our lives into insignificance. When we stop treating each activity as a part of the foreground and instead push them into the background, they become nothing more than noise. Can you really taste your eggs when you’re also trying to read Max Weber as you masticate...
...match. The two-minute “In Green” is the best track on the album, and only because it sounds like a lot of other better bands, distorted vocals bopping up and down a melodic line with falsetto “ahs” in the background. This illustrates the central problem with the album—at its best points, it’s simply derivative. Add annoying instrumental interludes and the idiotic “Two Exclamation Points” and the unfortunate result is a hard-to-hate album that you somehow still manage...
...Valkenburgh describes how the background of each juror contributed to the understanding of the other 12. “Those of us that are designers or architects or landscape architects sort of talked to the people about what design was, how it worked, and what drawings were because nine of the 13 jurors were not artists or designers,” he says...