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Radical Listening in Staten Island: It’s Time
Staten Island, like the rest of the world, is dominated by packaged audio experiences. In restaurants, you must listen to football games and sports commentary. On elevators, you are subjected to Muzak. In your doctor’s office, a TV talk show host fills your audio space. On the Staten Island ferry, loudspeakers broadcast garbled safety announcements that drown out the sounds of wind and waves. It’s enough to make you stop listening—or drive you to create your own sound track of commercial music, audio books, and podcasts—anything to counteract unwanted sounds. In the process, all awareness of the true Staten Island audio environment is cancelled.

The “Sounds Like Staten Island” (SLSI) initiative proposes a new approach to the daily audio onslaught: radical listening. Through radical listening you engage the world directly with your ears. Counter-intuitive as it seems, attentive and focused listening to the sounds in your built and natural environment can re-connect you to nature, culture, community, political undercurrents, and vanishing local histories. Radical listening even brings awareness that what you think of as “noise” may, in fact, be a source of gratifying sonic experience. In short, radical listening can change your world. 

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The SLSI Initiative: A Community Composition
The SLSI Initiative is for anyone with a connection to Staten Island. The website is a community composition and an information trading post for you, the educators and parents, the artists and musicians, the students and scholars, the community activists, everyday citizens and visitors. SLSI supports your efforts to listen with intention to Staten Island, the better to reveal, protect, nurture and contribute to its unique geographic, cultural, natural and built environments.

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