Connection During COVID-19

Hi! My name is Avi (he/him) and I’m a rising third-year at Oberlin College. I’m a psychology major, and in my free time I like to get exercise, make music and hang out with friends (but ONLY outside and from six feet away).

Right now we're living in a period of time that will be making the history books. Arguably, there has not been a pandemic that has affected the world in this way – business shutdowns, prohibitions of public gathering, etc. – since the Spanish flu epidemic, which happened a century ago during the first World War. COVID-19 will have reverberating impacts for years to come economically, politically, and most of all for the families losing loved ones to the virus. Yet, in the midst of these world-turning events - here we are, in our homes, social isolating (hopefully). During the process of creating this sonic ethnography of COVID-19, I have been producing field notes that pay close attention to the sounds that create my own sonic experience on a day-to-day basis. Now, I have the chance to connect my personal experiences to this global experience of the coronavirus, making a stab at some generalizations about “COVID season,” as I will refer to this period of time. I will be focusing on ways in which inter-personal connection in the time of COVID-19 can be explored through the medium of sound, as well as exploring my experiences of connecting to music during this time.

P.S. See bottom for pictures of a beautiful sunset and my beautiful cat!

An example that I found of how COVID-19 has changed the underlying context in our conversations is the Passover Seder that I had with my family on Wednesday, April 8. Putting his computer at the end of our table, my dad set up a Zoom with all four of my grandparents, my aunt and her kids, and my great-uncle and his spouse. “The Seder was a state of constant auditory flux: everything from my dad leading a song in Hebrew, to my aunt’s kids (3 years old) babbling about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to songs/prayers that everyone sang, which was of course poorly synchronized due to the imperfect nature of Zoom” (4/8 field notes). Much of our casual dialogue revolved around COVID as we checked in with each other and gave run-downs of our personal COVID season experiences so far. In addition, there were explicit references to COVID in the ceremonial part of the Seder. At Seders, it is traditional to pose the hypothetical question “how is this night different than all other nights?” as a segue into discussing the highlights of Passover such as “we eat bitter herbs and matzah.” However, my dad and grandparents had found pieces online posing the question, “how is this Passover different than other Passovers?” that went on to discuss how COVID-19 has affected people across the world.

As I concluded from examples such as this Passover Seder over Zoom, the nature of social interactions has changed in more ways than one during COVID season. That being said, I think that this time of social isolation has made people more aware of how important and special it is to interact with fellow humans. As I noted on April 29, when I walk around outside and interact with people from a distance it’s seemed to me that people are more friendly than usual and more willing to interact with strangers. In addition, I’ve felt a strong desire to stay connected with my friends during this time. On Saturday nights, a group of my closest buddies at Oberlin have been doing Zoom calls for a couple of hours, where we discuss classes, skating, existential quandaries, movies, and everything between with some good laughs mixed in. While I still feel that half of my semester was basically robbed from me by coronavirus, I have found even deeper appreciation for my friends and opportunities to spend time with them even more.

As much as I appreciate the social interactions that I’ve been having of late, the time I spend interacting with peers during COVID season has been drastically reduced compared to being at college. However, the new-found free time in my schedule has allowed me to have many incredible moments of connection with music, many of which I would not have had if I been at Oberlin. The catalyst for many of these moments has been that when I got home, I started recording some songs that I had ideas for, which snowballed into more and more songs. Since being home, I’ve learned a lot about producing music, such as how to use digital synthesizers or employ different effects such as reverb and distortion. Although I have so much more to learn, I’ve made real progress.

I’ve additionally written some of my favorite lyrics since being back home (and I’ve been consistently writing songs for seven years). For my class called “Song and Book” I designed a project for myself where I would write a poem or song to be due each Monday, inspired by the music I was listening to. Each Friday or Saturday night I would make a playlist of a few of my favorite songs at the moment and listen to them on repeat while I wrote out whatever came to mind. Over a few hours I would churn out five-ish pages of garbled thoughts and images, and then the next day use them to create cohesive stanzas. This was a truly empowering experience as songwriter; it allowed me to both access the unlimited freedom of flow-of-consciousness and to use this inspiration to create coherent pieces of art.

Between producing music and listening to music on Spotify, much of which I have “discovered” since being back home, music has been an absolutely essential part of my sonic experience of COVID-19. To me, even just listening to recorded music – much less creating it – creates a very real sense of connection, one that at times in my life (including COVID season) has felt more palpable than my “real-life” interactions with people. This circles back to a broader takeaway from this class: that music is so powerful in its dual capacity to connect to people and to connect people to each other. I feel incredibly grateful that my experience of COVID-19 has given me time to learn and create and has inspired me to try to put out a debut album by the end of the summer (something I've been working on).

Throughout my experiences of COVID season so far, I’ve become more appreciative of how important connection is, whether that be with people, with music, with nature, or even with your favorite TV show. As weird and difficult as coronavirus season has been even with the privilege of feeling safe and secure in my environment, I get the feeling that someday I’ll be looking back at this period of time with nostalgia. Summer has arrived, and as badly as I want to be spending time with my friends, I’m excited to see what will come of the next few months.