USCTIMES
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 / VOL. 26, NO.8
SOUNDSCAPES
Pump up the Volume
Of Sound Mind
Radioheads
A history professor inclines his ears to the Civil War , page 2
Teasing out the mysteries of human hearing, page 6
Faculty and staff step up to the mic at WUSC, page 12
USC TIMES / STAFF
FROM THE EDITOR USC Times is published 10 times a year for the faculty and staff of the University of South Carolina by the Office of Communications & Marketing.
NOW HEAR THIS
Managing editor Craig Brandhorst Art Director Bob Wertz Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Chris Horn Page Ivey Liz McCarthy Steven Powell Glenn Hare Thom Harman Photographers Kim Truett Ambyr Goff Printer USC Printing Services Campus correspondents Patti McGrath, Aiken Cortney Easterling, Greenville Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Tammy Whaley, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College Submissions Did you know you can submit ideas for future issues of USC Times? Share your story by emailing or calling Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-3681.
Hold this issue up to your ear. No really, please, indulge us a moment. Now close your eyes and flip through the pages. It may not sound like much — a brief flutter, a tiny flit — but you did hear it, right? That’s not just the sound of paper on paper. That’s the sound of writers on sound. Now flip through it again with your eyes open and you’ll see what we mean. When we first decided to devote an entire issue to the subject of sound, the challenge wasn’t in finding stories to tell. Faculty DJs, audio engineers, speech pathology — if the volume at most USC Times brainstorm sessions maxes out at seven or eight, that morning it easily hit eleven. I didn’t stop taking notes, but I did put in earplugs. The challenge was to bring all these various soundscapes to life in what is essentially a mute medium. Apart from the soft whisper as they flip — or (heaven forbid) the violent shred as they rip — the printed page won’t speak to you, at least not in any literal sense. And it’s not like we can embed a YouTube link, now can we? But we made up for the deficiency in other ways. For starters, we found just the right voices. Take sensory historian Mark Smith, whose most recent book, “The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege,” looks at the Civil War (and smells it, and tastes it, and yes, listens to it) as experienced by those who were there. Our Q&A sticks mostly to the sonic experience, but we otherwise let the conversation wander — and ended up in some interesting places. For full auditory effect we encourage you to read it aloud, starting on page 3. Speaking of auditory effects, School of Music recording engineer Jeff Francis helped us understand what goes into making a great recording (on page 9), chemistry professors Stephen Morgan and Michael Myrick showed us a new technique for analyzing the integrity of magnetic tape (starting on page 14); and several on-air personalities from WUSC made the case for college radio (on pages 12–13). It’s a lot, we know. In fact, we became so overwhelmed by aural stimuli this month that we finally had to consult USC’s Institute for Mind and Brain (which you can check out on pages 6 through 8). What the folks there taught us about the cognitive relationship between talking, listening and visual concentration wasn’t simply enlightening; it also got us thinking about our place in your life. Turns out, it’s hard to focus with somebody whispering over your shoulder, even if that somebody is just a stack of stapled pages called USC Times. So tell you what, how about this: take the issue away from your ear, quit flipping pages and focus exclusively on the paper and ink before your eyes. You need to see us to hear us, you see, and that starts by turning the page. Listen Up,
The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.
CRAIG BRANDHORST MANAGING EDITOR
VOL. 26, NO.8 1
TIMES FIVE
PLAN TO WALK?
AFTER THE FLOOD
The university will experiment with a new commencement calendar in 2016 by eliminating August commencement. The decision follows several years of declining interest among graduating students and participation rates well below 50 percent of eligible graduates, and is in line with peer institutions in the Southeastern Conference. Students who have not completed the necessary requirements for May 2016 commencement, or those who wish to graduate early, should plan to do so in the December 2016 ceremony. The university will collect feedback and track participation in ceremonies before making a final determination about the 2017 commencement calendar.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) continues to offer disaster assistance to those who were affected by South Carolina’s October flood. Assistance can be provided as financial or direct assistance to individuals and families whose property has been damaged or destroyed, and whose losses are not covered by insurance. The goal of FEMA assistance is to make homes safe, sanitary and functional. Register for disaster aid online at DisasterAssistance.gov or by phone at 800-621-3362.
DENTAL PLUS PREMIUMS BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina will be the university’s dental insurance provider effective Jan. 1. State Dental Plan monthly premiums will not change. Subscribers have until Dec. 31 to drop State Dental Plan and/
C
K
ET
or Dental Plus coverage for themselves and
TI
TICKET
THE CHEAP SEATS
any eligible family members for the 2016-17
Looking to stretch your entertainment dollar? Faculty and staff are eligible for discounted ticket prices for events at Colonial Life Arena, including Gamecocks athletics events and season tickets. For details visit www.coloniallifearena.com/university-of-south-carolina-facultydiscounts.php.
Dental Plus coverage will be: subscriber
plan years. The 2016 monthly premiums for ($25.96); subscriber/spouse ($52.46); subscriber/children ($60.50); full family ($78.60).
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Recipes for Health and Fitness
See an article you want to share with colleagues or friends? You can find all issues of USC Times – including this one – online at issuu.com/ uofsc. Campus employees can also request additional print copies each month while supplies last by emailing craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu.
MENTORING
Who Made Who? IN THIS ISSUE LIVE WELL Steady as She Grows ACADEMIC YEARRelax! IN REVIEW
Stop the Presses BRICK & MORTAR J-school gets new home, eyes bright future, page 2
War & Press
Great Wall of Carolina
Historian Don Doyle follows America’s Civil War overseas , page 2
USC’s historic campus wall gets a makeover, one brick at a time, page 7
Faculty and staff chill out for better health, page 4 Campus growth, campus life, athletics, arts, research — it’s time once again to reflect on the year that was and look forward to what comes next.
Eye on the South
Faculty and alumni reflect on the Civil Rights era in politics and protest, page 10
As USC’s footprint expands, campus experts Quit! size up future, page 2 Research explores the science of smoking, page 8
Carolina Road Trip
Palmetto College puts online education on the map, page 16
Faculty mentors give credit where due, page 2
Teaching from the Brain
Three dedicated classroom veterans discuss the changing landscape of Eat! higher education, page 7 Public health nutritionist gorges on greens and beans, page 10
Walk This Way
May It Please the Court
Campus programs help us help each other, page 8
Law students help middle schoolers argue a case, page 14
Educated Guessing
USC faculty members speculate on the future of their fields, page 10
2 USCTIMES / NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
A CONVERSATION WITH MARK SMITH
PUMP UP THE
VOLUME Carolina Distinguished Professor Mark Smith is one of the foremost experts
in sensory history. This month, Smith sat down with USC Times to discuss his most recent book, “The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War” (Oxford University Press, 2014), and given this month’s theme, we were all ears.
Your latest book covers all of the senses, but since this is our sound issue, I’d like to focus on that one sense as much as possible.
That’s actually how I got started on the history of the senses, by listening. I did a book on the 19th century soundscapes of the South and the North, the soundscapes of slavery versus freedom. After a while I migrated into the other senses. In your introduction you quote an 1852 essay from Harpers New Monthly Magazine in which the author calls the senses “our perpetual bodyguards, surrounding us unceasingly.” He also implies that sullying them could weaken the character of man and even of the nation. Were these antebellum attitudes widely shared?
This idea of the senses as sentinels is a very old idea. And I don’t think it was particularly peculiar, the source I’m quoting. The difference between the antebellum period and the 300- 400 years preceding is that it rearranged the hierarchy of the senses. The senses had always been important, but which is the preeminent sense and which are the lower senses?
At the time it was sight — “seeing is believing.” Go back to the medieval period and sight doesn’t have that preeminence. In fact, the original iteration “seeing is believing” was longer in the medieval period — “seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth,” meaning touch. When you could touch it, it was real. “Faith comes from hearing” – you couldn’t see God, you had to hear Him. This chap is entering the conversation at the height of ocular centrism, the Enlightenment— light, perspective, the print revolution, spectacles. Sound is a close second because it has an intellectual component, it engages the mind, whereas the more proximate senses of smell, taste and touch are considered lower in this period. In the 1850s there is a sense that Americans are becoming very modern. They can control their environment to a point. They have noise ordinances, homes are acoustically designed to a certain extent, they have carpets, tapestries — all of these absorb sound. And then there’s a strict hierarchy as to who gets to say what when. He’s saying that the senses are a proxy for civilization. They protect you from the onslaught of the world, and if you control your environment, you control that march toward modernity. What I’m saying is that the war suspends
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this, the war exposes all sorts of conceits about the senses. They become rearranged and they become less reliable. You describe the soundscape of Charleston between fall 1860 and spring 1861 as a “mounting crescendo,” starting with the election of Lincoln.
Right now, for the most part, with history there’s no volume. We’re unwitting heirs to this Enlightenment idea that “seeing is believing” because we view evidence through printed sources. Once you turn that volume up and become sensitive to all of the auditory evidence embedded in those primary sources — because it’s there, you just have to look for it, or listen for it — it’s like putting on headphones. I just chart the increasing volume. I try to give the moments before secession and how they sounded — the quiet and then the hurrahs — through to the moment on April 12 when they open fi re on Fort Sumter. I also try to give some insight into what the people in Fort Sumter were hearing during what was the loudest moment in American history up to that point. I’m sure the Revolutionary War had its moments, but by the 1860s there’s different technology. They have shells now, and more of them. The loudest thing that people would have heard prior to 1860 was probably thunder. This eclipsed thunder. This was unprecedented. People didn’t just go to see, they went to hear. And they went to feel, because sound is vibrational, there’s a tactile quality to it. Like a bass throbbing in your gut —
Right. That’s one reason sensory historians are moving towards intersensoriality, to recognize that, for example, sound is also tactile. I think we need to do a lot more thinking about it before we go too far down that path, but it’s obviously a relevant connection. Cannons and gunfire are obvious, but you also describe the less obvious — the quiet of Union soldiers rowing out to Fort Sumter before the siege, for example. I’m curious about your methodology. Do you imagine what it might have been like and then go see if that’s how it was, or do you simply pore through the historical record until a picture emerges?
The latter. It’s important that this not be an exercise in fantasy because the principle duty of the historian is to present the past with some fidelity to the people who experienced it. Some of the most famous books on the Civil
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War — the bestsellers —do the opposite. Shelby Foote. He wrote beautifully, and that’s why he engages his audience, but he engages sensory gesture without evidence. There’s a lot of booms, there’s a lot of smell, but they’re really literary devices in his hands. I’m interested in what really happened, what did it mean to whom and when. Foote leans more toward creative nonfiction.
Right. What I’m trying to do is historicize the senses. There’s a sleight of hand going on. When he writes, “Gettysburg reeked,” in a way he invites the modern reader to think, “Oh God, I can imagine that,” and yes, you can imagine it, but I want to present Gettysburg reeking according to the nose that did the smelling. Context is everything. Otherwise you have a kind of unwitting consumption of the past that lures people into thinking, “Ah, I’m experiencing the Civil War,” and I’m just not sure you are. You also address historical reenactments. They have value, you argue, but there’s no way to recapture the experience with complete fidelity.
It is a real challenge. But look, I’ve had some very interesting conversations with hardcore re-enactors. These guys know their stuff, they know more about the Civil War than I’ll ever know, but we have a lot of common ground. We both want to get to what it was like. Also, I try to be careful not to caricature Civil War re-enactors. I don’t think all of these guys run around thinking “I’m experiencing the war.” You have some people who go to great lengths to recreate the sensory experience, but they fully recognize the limitations, and they have found my book very helpful, not as a blueprint for reenactment but as a way to think about what their characters were doing in 1863 or whenever. Oddly, the book has been very well reviewed in the Civil War press. I didn’t expect that. I thought they would slam me. Your chapter on sound focuses on Charleston. Can you speculate on how the soundscape might have evolved here in Columbia?
If you read the primary sources on Columbia, you can begin to think about what those sounds were from the beginning to the end of the war. It would have everything to do with the continuation of ordinary sounds and the overlay of new sounds, such as preparation for war, and then those sounds becoming the normal soundscape. We’re talking about a four-year period in which those new sounds assume normalcy quite quickly. The bit that’s not normal, and would never become normal, is the sound of Sherman, because it’s quite brief and it’s impactful. Think about the physical damage done to the city. It’s going to erase the daily
sounds and even the superimposed new sounds of the 1860s. Just being inside a house with the windows blown out changes the sound. The streets are not going to sound the same after everything’s been burned and there’s garbage everywhere. You’re not going to get the straight sound of a carriage going down the street. You’re going to hear the carriage stop, redirect, stop, redirect. It’s going to be more staccato. Actively listen to your environment. Just listen. Here in this office you can hear these massive air conditioning units, but nine times out of ten it becomes background sound. You only notice it in its absence. And that’s what I think Columbia sounded like after Sherman — lots of sounds noticed in their absence. There would have been a sort of ghostly quality to it, at least for a few days. After that, I don’t know. I suspect that Columbia’s soundscape changed quite meaningfully, and for quite a while, after Sherman. Just the rebuilding sounds — rebuilding on a scale that hadn’t happened before. You have the sound of industry, the sound of new voices. You have the sound of freed people, the sound of Northerners, Northern accents. Of course there were Northerners here before, but now there were more of them. If you spend four years hearing the boom of cannons, the screams of the dying, you’ll likely carry that with you. But the soundscape itself can revert back, more or less. Or can it?
I think it’s perfectly possible for a soundscape to return objectively to what it was before, but the way that people listen changes. You have a sort of balancing act between objective and subjective. This gets to the question of reenactment. You can reproduce the sound of rifles or cannons with great authenticity, but the way that somebody understands that sound is highly contingent on whether, for example, they were at First Bull Run or not. It really depends on who is doing the listening. A tornado can’t sound like a freight train until freight trains exist. So what did it sound like? The metaphors are revealing, they tell you something about the time in question. For example, at first Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War, you have a lot of green guys who haven’t fought before, and all of a sudden bullets are raining down on them. What’s the metaphor they use? They compare it to the sound of bees, the buzzing. Bees swarm, they’re scary, it’s the nearest they could get to that sound. I don’t think you would compare the sound of rapid fire over your head today to bees. We would probably have a more industrial or even electronic metaphor. But this was still very much a pre-industrialized society, even in the
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North. Large-scale industrialization was really a post-bellum development. You completed this book using existing sources. What if you were writing a more contemporary history?
I did a book on Hurricane Camille, 1969, and one of the chapters was on the sensory experience. I had the same types of sources — newspapers, diaries — but in addition I had all sorts of oral histories. That was very handy. If I were to do the recent flood here, I would do oral histories to help inform my understanding, but I might avoid asking about the senses —“Just tell me what the experience was like.” I bet you all the senses would come in anyway, and gradually you’d piece it together, that prelude of incessant rain, a couple of thunderstorms the day before, then the whooshing, a sound normally associated with mountain rivers suddenly making their way into the urban environment. The sheer violence of water is a sound that we don’t hear very often, even during our most torrential storms. And then you had the absence of cars but the increase of sirens. We hear sirens all the time, but we don’t hear hundreds of them. We don’t hear the chop of a Chinook helicopter very often. It’s a very distinctive aural signature, the double chopper. You can almost feel it. It’s probably akin to what you might have heard in Vietnam. That’s the kind of rearrangement of the soundscape that would make its way into narratives and oral histories, I think. Once you start to think that way, you come up with quite a few, the sound of sand going into sandbags or water coming to a boil —
It’s really easy. People say, “Sensory history, how do you do that?” It’s not a source issue. It’s a reorientation issue. You have to step out of the idea that only sight gives you access. Once you do that you find that it’s everywhere. And in fact that’s the challenge — there’s so much that you can’t get your arms around it. Speaking of getting your arms around it, you start and end your book with sound. Why not sight, the preeminent sense of that era?
The point I really wanted to make was how fundamental the war was to the senses generally. I just used sound as a way in. In 1860, slaveholders insisted upon the silence of 4 million people, the slaves. At the end of the war, those voices emerge. It’s a sea change. Everybody’s seen the photographs of Charleston before and Charleston after. I’m saying, “Look at the photographs and now think about how it sounded.”
Cover of Mark Smith’s most recent book, “The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
So yes, there is that framework of sound at the beginning, sound at the end. It just seemed to me a kind of poetic way to think about the war’s impact. But the war can be rewritten and reinterpreted so many ways. In fact, this is my invitation — go out and do a better job than I did. I want you to. This book was a long time in the making, but I don’t claim it as definitive. I’d hesitate to claim any book I’ve written as definitive.
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Tessa Crawford, left, a 2015 psychology graduate, and psychology senior Carly Strobach in an Institute for Mind and Brain laboratory.
ESTABLISHED IN 2013 AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CENTER FOR BASIC AND APPLIED COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, USC’S INSTITUTE FOR MIND AND BRAIN NOW BOASTS 26 FACULTY AFFILIATES FROM FOUR ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS AND CONDUCTS RESEARCH IN TOO MANY AREAS TO COUNT. USC TIMES, THOUGH, HAD A ONE-TRACK MIND THIS MONTH AND ONLY WANTED TO
OF SOUND MI HEAR ONE THING — THE SOUND OF SOUND RESEARCH.
IND
VOL. 26, NO.8 7
SOUNDS FAMILIAR BY CHRIS HORN Researchers have long known that up-tempo music can induce people to run faster and even buy more stuff when shopping, but when it comes to sound and our responses to it, there’s still plenty to explore. “As psychologists, we’re very interested in understanding how sound is processed, how it affects our emotions and how it’s integrated with the visual experience,” says Doug Wedell, chair of the Department of Psychology and director of USC’s Institute for Mind and Brain. Wedell doesn’t want to help retailers get in our heads, but he and his colleagues have devised experiments to explore our responses to sound in relation to other stimuli. In one scenario devised by Wedell and associate professor of psychology Svetlana Shikareva, subjects watch dozens of soundless video clips, then watch the same clips accompanied by incongruent sound. Think “playful kittens plus ominous background music” or, conversely, “shattering water glass plus soothing music.” “There’s a brutal scene in the Stanley Kubrick movie ‘A Clockwork Orange’ that’s accompanied by upbeat, lilting classical music,” Wedell says. “It’s jarring to the viewer, incongruent. It’s called multimodal processing of information, interpreting visual and auditory cues simultaneously. We’re geared as humans to take those different stimuli and place them on an emotional map. Should I be scared, anxious or angry?” The implications are broad. For example, someone on the autistic spectrum might react differently to particular video and audio combinations than someone not on that spectrum. It’s possible that those differences could be used as the basis of a diagnostic test, Wedell says, or perhaps in a therapeutic mode. Wedell and Matt Roshette, an associate professor of psychology in USC’s Extended University, have also collected interesting data on the tempo of music. Researchers elsewhere have suggested that humans are geared to a fi xed tempo — that is, they prefer one set tempo in a song and can determine even slight variations — but it turns out, that may not be the case. “In our experiments, we tested that notion and found that we could move people’s preference for tempo all over the place,” Wedell says. Participants in the experiment heard a familiar tune, perhaps a familiar Beatles song like “Paperback Writer,” at its original tempo. Then they heard the same song at a much slower or much faster tempo. Their response was immediate — they detected the difference and didn’t like it. Except then they did. After hearing several variations in tempo, many participants thought the original version was playing at the wrong speed and actually preferred a slightly different speed. “It becomes a memory task,” Wedell says. “We reconstruct our memory and blend the most recent with the more distant. So in re-listening to a song after hearing a slowed down version, we might mistakenly think the original version is going too fast. Or we might think it’s too slow after having heard a sped-up version.” That matters because it sheds light on how memory affects our perception. “If you start out with something really good, then watch something bad, it will seem really bad,” Wedell explains. “The order in which you see things or hear things can change your perception.”
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HANG UP AND DRIVE BY PAGE IVEY We’ve all seen it: a car swerves with no explanation or slams on the brakes or fails to move when the traffic light changes. Almost without fail, the driver is talking on a phone. The phenomenon puzzled psychology professor and Institute for Mind and Brain research affiliate Amit Almor —because science says it shouldn’t be a problem. “Parts of the brain responsible for language, conversation, and vision and motor control are completely different circuits in the brain,” says Almor. “There really shouldn’t be any interference. So I got really intrigued by what was very clearly happening in the real world and the science that basically said this shouldn’t happen.” Almor’s initial experiment, published in “Experimental Psychology,” involved putting people in front of computers and having them perform tasks that require responses to visual cues on the screen. At the same time, they were engaged in conversation. The study showed that the level of interference varied depending on the location of the sound and the subject’s immediate role in the conversation, whether he was listening, speaking or preparing to speak. “Something about language and how we interact with it also requires some spatial tracking,” Almor says. “And because driving and language essentially require the same kind of mental resource, you get this interference.” The least amount of interference came when the secondary voice was projected from the front, where the subject was already concentrating on the task. But there was a larger impact on the subjects’ ability to perform the tasks. “The larger effect had to do with the difference between the time in the conversation that the participant was actually talking — those brief moments of silence before they were beginning to say what they were going to say — and times when they were listening to the other person talking,” Almor says. Subjects were most distracted while planning what to say next, and then while actually speaking. The least distracting part of the conversation occurred when the subject was listening to the other person speak. “When you talk, that is when you suffer the most interference, particularly when you are thinking of what you want to say next,” Almor says. Almor now hopes to study how space and sound fit together by looking at how spatial references help us retain information. For example, if we are told something by a person standing to our left, why do we later look in that same direction when we try to recall that information? “What we are looking at is whether the direction of the sound affects how we process spoken language,” Almor says. “Does the direction of the sound help us keep track of the conversation?”
LOUD AND CLEAR BY MEGAN SEXTON The statistics are clear: One-third of adults over 65 have some degree of hearing loss significant enough to impact their daily life. But just 20 percent of that group use hearing aids, and of that 20 percent, a significant portion don’t use them every day. Why? Because, while hearing aids are helpful in quiet rooms, they don’t work so well when people really need them — for example, when they are in a crowded restaurant or a place with a lot of back ground noise. Dan Fogerty, an assistant professor in the Arnold School of Public Health’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and director of USC’s Speech Perception Laboratory, wants to improve that hearing experience. In Fogerty’s lab, research projects seek to define how basic properties of speech contribute to speech understanding under a variety of complex and adverse listening conditions. He is particularly interested in how age, hearing loss and cognitive function influence a listener’s ability to understand speech. Work in his lab attempts to identify the most important cues for listeners to use in varying conditions to improve the programming of speech transmission technologies (such as hearing aids, cochlear implants or cell phones) along with the design of training protocols. “There has been a lot of development in terms of (hearing aid) hardware, but the hearing experience can still be improved,” says Fogerty, who established the Speech Perception Lab at USC in 2011 and is also affiliated with the Institute for Mind and Brain. “We’re trying to come up with some software solutions.” Hearing aids are designed to improve the ability of the listener to detect the sound, since the primary predictor of understanding speech is whether it’s audible. One of the lab’s goals is to develop software and take hearing aids a little further; to customize them to pick up on the cues and the speech processing abilities of the listener. “Hearing aids are a sophisticated way of turning up the volume,” Fogerty says. “But while our ear has a lot of communication with our brain, a hearing aid has none.” For Fogerty, who says he has always been fascinated with speech, it’s about finding the best ways to help individuals unable to process and understand sound. “I am particularly interested in how age, hearing loss, and cognitive function influence a listener’s ability to use these speech properties, and how we are able to use this (research) to provide a substantial benefit and impact in someone’s everyday life.”
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JEFF FRANCIS PUTTING THE ‘EAR’ IN GEAR BY GLENN HARE
Back in the 1990s, School of Music recording engineer Jeff Francis worked for Sony Classical Productions (now Sony Music) in New York City, where he recorded Grammy-nominated and Grammywinning projects with the likes of Bobby McFerrin, John Williams and the Boston Pops, Wynton Marsalis and Yo-Yo Ma. It was a great time to be in the industry, Francis says — partly because he got to work with so many great artists but also because he had so many great toys at his disposal. “We were on the leading edge of digital technology at the time,” Francis says. “We had one of the first 48-channel digital recorders. It was three-quarters the size of a refrigerator, weighed 600 pounds — nearly 1,000 pounds with the case. We shipped it to concert halls all over the country to record orchestras, operas, chamber music groups and soloists.” Now the School of Music’s primary recording engineer for student and faculty performances and recitals, Francis maintains and upgrades all the recording equipment and teaches digital recording and editing techniques. For all his technical expertise, though, he is a firm believer in not letting the equipment get in the way. “In the industry we call it Gear Acquisition Syndrome,” he says. “It’s the idea that the newest microphone, plug-in, software or analog compressor will make a better recording. My job is to show students the techniques to best use the tools they have and then show them how to get those tools out of the way of just making music.” Of course, his job is also to make them sound good, which is how Francis came to play such a critical role in the design of Johnson Hall, the new lecture/performance space in the Darla Moore School of Business. As a classroom, the hall needed to be user friendly so professors could operate the audio and video equipment without assistance. When used as a performance space, however, the same hall had to fit the needs of sound and light technicians.
Jeff Francis
“We spent a lot of time negotiating the two needs of the hall,” says Francis. “In effect, the space flips and all technologies built into the system are utilized.” In the end, it comes down to having the right gear but also having a good ear, something Francis developed while earning his undergraduate degree in music engineering technology at the University of Miami. It doesn’t hurt that he also plays the bass. “It definitely helps,” Francis says. “Being a musician provides insight into how the music is constructed and makes it easier to communicate with the players.”
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Learning the Language AT USC’S SPEECH AND HEARING RESEARCH CENTER THE RESULTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.
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SC’s Speech and Hearing Research Center isn’t located on campus — it’s situated on the second floor of the Keenan Building in downtown Columbia — but step through the center’s glass doors into the reception area and you discover an entire new world. Over the past year, roughly 5,000 people of all ages have done exactly that — people who stutter, people with autism, people who have lost language due to stroke and, of course, people with difficulty hearing. Part of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, the center also sees people struggling to acquire reading, writing and spelling skills. “We see a whole range of children and adults who have speech, language or hearing issues,” says center director and senior clinical instructor Danielle Varnedoe. “And we’d like to see even more.”
According to Varnedoe, who specializes in childhood speech-sound disorders, the center’s combination of academic research and evidence-based clinical practice offers an “added value” both to students, who gain experience working with an array of communication issues, and to the larger community. “Parents say they love coming here because as a university training program we have these young, energetic, eager-to-learn graduate students who are closely supervised by experts in the field,” says Varnedoe. “They know we’re keeping up with what’s state of the art.”
One such parent is USC physical education instructor Robin Stodden, whose seven-year-old son Camden has been coming one hour a week for the past three years. Camden has an unusual form of receptive-expressive delay that makes it difficult for him to retrieve language. The center’s staff uses evidence-based therapies that incorporate physical activity to teach him communication strategies. “Camden has grown by leaps and bounds developmentally, with his ability to find words, his articulation,” says Stodden. “Having the grad students working 60 minutes intensively with your child is just amazing. His teacher this year said she wouldn’t even realize that he is delayed because he’s now so good at using these strategies. He has just blossomed.” For Varnedoe and the rest of the faculty at the Center for Speech and Hearing Research, that’s a validation of the center’s larger philosophy and mission, which extends into all of their endeavors, on-site and out in the community. “We don’t just supervise our graduate students,” says Varnedoe. “We train them to be good consumers of research, to engage in critical thinking right then and there when they’re with a client, not two days later after they finish the session. Clinical education is our main baby, and it results in excellent care for our patients.”
Consider the Evidence With more than 120 graduate students and 25 full-time faculty members, including academic and clinical faculty, USC’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders offers a broad-based curriculum that includes the study of spoken and written language development and disorders, adult neurogenic disorders and cochlear implant rehabilitation. The center, which is part of the Arnold School of Public Health, provides approximately 6,000 patient hours per year.“Clinical scientists see every patient as a new case and approach the situation scientifically,” says department chair Kenn Apel. “They consider the evidence and consult the latest research, they consider the client’s needs and the family’s needs, and they use critical thinking to solve the problem.”
12 USCTIMES / NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
FACULTY AND STAFF DJs TAKE TO THE AIR
RADIOHEADS BY THOM HARMAN
Joshua Smith at the mic at WUSC for the Friday afternoon show, The Columbia Beet.
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WUSC,
a campus staple since 1946, prides itself on being a student-run radio station. In fact, most days you won’t see a faculty or staff member anywhere near the place — that is, unless you look in the DJ booth. Faculty and staff members host shows as diverse as the station’s student-led offerings, from live local music to the blues to African pop. And they do it for two main reasons: because they love the music and to fill a need. “I really do see this as a kind of public service,” says Bob Brinkmeyer, the Emily Brown Jefferies Endowed Professor of English and director of the Institute for Southern Studies. Brinkmeyer came to USC in 2007 and started his show soon after. “This is one of the few places in the state where you can hear world music — not just my show, but WUSC as a station.” Brinkmeyer’s show airs every Tuesday from 4 to 6 p.m. and focuses on African popular music — “Afro-pop, not the traditional tribal music,” he explains. “It’s mainly music from the 1950s on.” Closer to home, Joshua Smith, day-shift supervisor in Thomas Cooper Library’s circulation department, and Mike Jones, a production manager for University Technology Services, co-host The Columbia Beet. The show airs Fridays from 4 to 6 p.m. and features live in-studio performances, recordings from previous shows and the occasional CD track when a band comes in to support a new release. Jones has been a part of the WUSC family off and on since the mid 1990s and says it’s a fantastic workplace. “Everyone is as friendly as can be and is devoted to the station. It really is like family here,” he explains, “not to mention the freedom that college radio affords the DJs. Free-format show hosts get to spin almost anything, and specialty show DJs like us are given an immense amount of freedom in our programming as well.” That freedom to keep programming fresh has helped keep Clair DeLune on the air more than 25 years. “Blues Moon with Clair DeLune,” which follows Brinkmeyer’s show on Tuesday nights, began in 1990 when she worked for the School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Her weekly two-hour celebration of the blues is now the station’s longest-running show. “I look at it this way,” says DeLune, “You’re getting a night in my living room with my record collection. And if that’s something you’d enjoy, I’d love to have you.”
SO, YOU WANT TO BE A DJ Faculty and staff members who are interested in becoming a WUSC DJ must go through all the same training sessions as students. That begins with an interest meeting at the beginning of every semester. For more information about the station, go to wusc.sc.edu.
14 USCTIMES / NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
TALE OF BY STEVEN POWELL
Magnetic tape isn’t just the stuff that used to get stuck in your car’s cassette deck back in high school. Over the past half century, the magical medium has been used to capture everything from political debates to Civil Rightsera speeches to oral histories from people who witnessed the Civil War.
Unfortunately, time, moisture and other factors can erode the structural integrity of the ephemeral medium. Even put in storage and never played, magnetic tape runs the risk of developing what is called “sticky-shed syndrome” as humidity reacts with the polymers in the tape. But because deteriorated tape often looks fine to the naked eye, the only way to know if it is damaged is to run it on a tape player, where it might literally come unglued. Digitization becomes a game of Russian roulette for every reel. “When you play a tape that has deteriorated, which appears to be caused by exposure to moisture in the air, the layer of material that stores the sound can come off the backing of the tape,” says USC chemistry professor Stephen Morgan. “You lose whatever was recorded. A tape with sticky-shed can foul the tape player as well, which is expensive and time consuming to repair.” Audio on deteriorated magnetic tape can sometimes be recovered, albeit temporarily, by a method called ‘baking,’ which involves heating the tape to between 120 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit in a dry oven for up to 48 hours. The method only restores playability for a few weeks, though, and creates new risks for the original recording. “Heating is not something that you want to do to most polymeric materials if you don’t have to,” Morgan says. “It can accelerate chemical reactions, and there are some concerns about what it might do to the sound on the tape as well, before you even do the transfer.” Luckily, Morgan and fellow USC chemistry professor Michael Myrick teamed up a few years ago with Eric Breitung, a research scientist with the Library of Congress, to look for a solution. Their findings, which were recently reported in the journal “Analytical Chemistry,” might offer preservationists a valuable new tool.
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THE TAPE
As Morgan explains, for the vast majority of magnetic tape, deterioration is thought to be caused by chemical hydrolysis of polyester — when water from the air reacts with the ester linkage, separating it into an alcohol and a carboxylic acid. The USC team used infrared spectroscopy to differentiate tape with intact polyester and tape that had undergone enough hydrolysis to cause sticky-shed syndrome. Using a surface infrared technique called attenuated total reflectance FTIR, they analyzed 133 reel-to-reel audiotapes from the Library of Congress Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division that had been classified as either intact or degraded. The intact and degraded tapes, which appear identical, also have very similar spectra under infrared light, but there are enough differences that the team was able to identify several peaks corresponding to changes in ester, carboxylic acid and alcohol content. The researchers then developed a method to measure the spectral intensity at five different frequencies and look for patterns related to playability. They were able to predict whether a tape was playable or unplayable better than 90 percent of the time. “This gives archivists a way to triage the tapes that they have,” Morgan says. “They can identify the ones that can be immediately digitized, and they don’t do anything that harms any of them in the process.”
16 USCTIMES / NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
CAROLINA ROAD TRIP
USC BEAUFORT FULL SPEED AHEAD BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
N
ew University of South Carolina Beaufort Chancellor Al Panu didn’t waste any time getting to know his new community. In fact, the man tapped to take over as the head of the comprehensive institution, following the retirement of longtime chancellor Jane Upshaw, began talking to students before he was even hired.
Chancellor Al Panu
“When I came to interview, the young man working the counter at my hotel asked why I was in Beaufort,” Panu says. “When I told him he said, ‘Oh, I’m a senior in the hospitality management program!’ This young man went on, unsolicited, to rave about his experience, about the access to faculty, the networking and internship opportunities — and I’ve heard that same story again and again.” For Panu, those stories reflect an emphasis on student success during a time of unprecedented growth. Since USCB began granting baccalaureate degrees in 2004, the Lowcountry comprehensive has expanded its academic offerings to 18 majors and 20 minors. The student body, meanwhile, has swelled to 1,950 while maintaining a student-faculty ratio of 18:1.
“USCB continues to expand its baccalaureate degree program offerings in ways that leverage the strengths and aspirations of Lowcountry residents,” Panu says. “Combining USCB’s strategic expansion of degree programs authentic to our region with the academic support of Palmetto College and our USC partners serves our students well.”
“We have a growth rate of 10-12 percent, depending on whether you’re looking at headcount or FTE,” says Panu. “That’s an affirmation of where the institution is and where it’s headed.”
A High-Energy System
The goal now is to build on that reputation, whether through degree programs like the new baccalaureate degree in human services (offered in partnership with Palmetto College), proposed programs in secondary education or an expansion of USCB’s multi-campus footprint. USCB currently boasts two campuses — the original campus in the heart of Beaufort’s historic district and the larger, newer Hilton Head Gateway campus in nearby Bluffton — and plans are in place to open a third campus on Hilton Head Island in 2017 to house the hospitality management program. Panu also hopes to add additional student housing and another academic building on the Hilton Head Gateway campus. He has initiated a new strategic plan to be in place by fall 2016.
If you ask students Haley Edwards and Calvin Calvert why the chose USCB, you’ll get different answers. But if you ask why they’ve decided to stay all four years, they both point to the same thing: faculty. Edwards, a Beaufort native majoring in English, says USCB wasn’t her first choice, “because it wasn’t the cool thing to do, to stay in your hometown.” She was accepted at Furman and a few other schools, but money was tight. “I thought I’d stay for a year as a sort of pit stop, but I got involved with the English department and saw this excellent faculty and staff,” she says. “Everyone was so invested in me that I just really fell in love with this place.” Now a junior, Edwards tutors in the Writing Center and is the copy editor for “May River Review,” a new interdisciplinary critical journal for undergraduate scholarship. She is also doing an independent study in rhetoric and composition with her advisor, Lauren Hoffer.
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“Some of my professors said to me, ‘This is something you clearly care about and have the aptitude for. We don’t have that program yet, but let’s make it happen for you.’ So they designed a course to give me that opportunity. They wanted to enable me to pursue what I love.” For Calvert, who graduated from Hilton Head Island High School in 1998, leaving home wasn’t even an option. The senior computational science major joined the Army out of high school, moved home after a tour in Iraq, joined the workforce and started a family. He’s on the G.I. Bill and has a scholarship from the National Science Foundation, but a college education costs more than tuition. “The expense of moving to, say, Columbia would have been outside my budget, especially in my situation, having a family,” he says. “And this is just home —South Carolina is home, the Beaufort area is home, USCB is more specifically home. Coming here was absolutely the right decision.” And it’s not just the convenience and affordability that appeal to Calvert, who hopes to put his problem-solving skills to work in industry. He’s also impressed by the academic rigor, which he credits for making everyone work harder. “I work in construction right now so I use construction terminology,” he says. “When you have a high-energy system, you can’t put in a low-energy wire. USCB is that high-energy system. It takes highenergy students to do the work demanded by high-energy faculty. It has to be that way, and it is.” Collaboration, Innovation, Application
“We really feel like a small liberal arts college, which makes USCB a very vibrant learning environment,” says anthropology professor Kimberley Cavanagh. As the school’s lone anthropologist, Cavanagh teaches everything from introductory surveys to Anthropology of Tourism, which requires students to interview people in the tourism industry on Hilton Head Island. “Because we’re a minor I try to make it applicable to what the student’s major is,” says Cavanagh. “The tools of anthropology are useful in so many other disciplines —participant observation, interviewing skills, critical thinking. I try to show how they can use these skills in whatever they go on to do.” Cavanagh is also involved in a number of research collaborations, including a project with assistant professor of nursing Mary Ann Jarmulowicz and assistant professor of human services Najma Thomas that is looking into the lack of diversity among nurses and nursing students in the Lowcountry.
“Being the only anthropologist, I pair up with all these different people on campus, which makes it really fascinating,” she says. Swati Debroy, an assistant professor of applied mathematics, is similarly invested in the collaborative process, routinely involving her students in research projects. Several of them are helping Debroy analyze BMI data collected by area school districts to more effectively address childhood obesity in the Lowcountry. Debroy also helped start the Gateway to Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Conference with fellow math professor Kasia Pawelek, Spanish instructor Lukasz Pawelek and humanities and fine arts chair Babet Alvarez. Conceived as a way to bring recruiters from graduate schools to campus, the conference has been hailed as a tremendous success. “We are showing our students what lies beyond their undergraduate degree and how they can get to even greater places than they thought was possible,” she says. Asked what makes USCB tick, Debroy points to the administration’s openness to new ideas. “I feel I can make changes here,” she says. “When we talk to the administration about our visions for education and providing opportunities for students, they are eager to let us implement them. There’s just a feeling that we are all working toward a bigger goal.”
ENDNOTES During this month’s Q&A on the soundscape of the American Civil War, USC historian Mark Smith also refl ected on the more recent sounds associated with the catastrophic October fl oods that inundated South Carolina. In the interest of documenting that historic event for future generations, USC Times contacted the university’s oral historian, Andrea L’Hommedieu, who interviewed several members of the USC community, beginning with her closest colleagues, about their experiences. Because this issue is dedicated to the subject of sound, we have chosen only those excerpts that relate to people’s auditory experience of the event, but L’Hommedieu is now pursuing a larger oral history project on the subject. “We started by interviewing people here on campus, but so many people across the state want to and need to tell their stories, and we want to capture as many of them as we can,” says L’Hommedieu. “This is just one way for us to reach out to and serve the larger South Carolina community.” Quotes have been slightly edited for clarity and length by USC Times. If you have a story about the 2015 fl ood or you know someone who does, contact L’Hommedieu at alhomme@mailbox.sc.edu.
“I think the sound got real apparent about 2 or 3 in the morning … When you have that much rain there is a sound or a sense of a vacuum. You know, it’s coming so long it’s like it’s sapping the air of air. When it woke me up, that’s one thing I noticed, the vacuum-ness, the emptiness of the pouring of rain, immense amounts of rain. Ssshhhh, vacuum, like a tornado …. I said, ‘This is a tornado without the wind — what? How strange is this?” — Vennie Deas Moore, researcher at South Caroliniana Library “We realized we were all in trouble when the water was already four feet higher, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, where are my keys? It’s time for us all to evacuate.’ And then literally while we stood there and watched, within an instant we saw it just almost suck out — sshhhh — and we realized something catastrophic had happened, and the water began lowering. We knew something had failed, either our dam or the dam below us had failed.” — Linda Stewart, microfi lming staff at South Caroliniana Library. Stewart lives on Lake Carys, the largest of the seven Arcadia Lakes, in Northeast Columbia. Water in Lake Carys rose quickly until the dam below her house broke, kicking off the domino effect as subsequent dams broke downstream. “I have been in the military, I have fl own with civilians, emergency situations, as a respiratory therapist doing transport, so I know very well the sounds of helicopters, can distinctly tell the diff erence between types of helicopters when I hear them. And the other signifi cant sounds to me, besides sirens, constantly, were the helicopters overheard — news helicopters [have a] much lighter sound, but the heavy whoop, whoop, whoop sound of the military helicopters also signifi ed to me that there was a lot going on. — Bob Wynn, shipping and receiving for University Libraries. Wynn, a resident of Arsenal Hill, was not directly aff ected by the fl ood but recalls the constant sound of helicopters and sirens for four days following the fl ood. “I heard my phone going off with the little warnings, but I sleep very hard, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s just someone beeping me about nothing,’ and that was I think at 3 a.m, and that’s when I should have gotten up. I sleep so sound, and night just wraps around me like a blanket. And then at 7:15, I heard these bangs, just bang, bang, bang, bang on my door. And I sleepwalked or whatever to the front door, and my neighbors were standing there up to their thighs in water, and they were saying, ‘You need to get out now. The fl ood is coming, the fl ood is here.’” — Teri DeBruhl, program coordinator, College of Education “I was awakened at maybe 4:30 or 5 in the morning by the sound of the rain pouring down. And then there were alarms that came through the cell phone to say that there were fl ash fl ood warnings. And about 6 or 6:30, I was already up and got a call from somebody on the lake saying that the water was rising.” — Jessica Kross, professor emeritus of history