The Sound of Being There: Diffuse Listening Environments and Liturgical Memory in Long Story Short, Talk by Noam Fields-Meyer (Gould) at Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026.

For nearly a century, the sonic representation of Jewishness in American popular media has been governed by what Ralph Locke calls the “Exotic-Style Paradigm”: a closed chain of reference in which augmented seconds, minor-key laments, and cantorial melisma function as interchangeable ethnic markers. Drawing on Daniel Goldmark’s history of industrialized ethnic coding and Aaron Fruchtman’s
analysis of Golden Age Hollywood scoring, this paper traces the institutional apparatus that reduced the vast diversity of Jewish liturgical sound to a handful of stereotypical gestures—then examines a
recent work that breaks the cycle entirely. In a pivotal scene from the Netflix series Long Story Short (Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2025),
composer Jesse Novak forgoes recognizable melodic quotation in favor of reconstructing the sonic texture of a synagogue during the Yom Kippur confessional prayer Ashamnu. Working from somatic memory rather than cantorial models, Novak layered dozens of vocal takes to produce a heterophonic chant-mass with no centered voice—a studio analogue to what Judit Frigyesi, Boaz Tarsi, and Rosa Abrahams have each documented in fieldwork as the characteristic sound of Ashkenazi congregational prayer. Integrating their scholarship with Elaine Chun’s theory of mock stylization and Anahid Kassabian’s work on ubiquitous listening, and informed by my own practice as a Conservative cantor, I argue that the scene represents not Jewish music but Jewish
listening: a diffuse, decentered, collectively produced sonic environment understood somatically rather than analytically. The paper concludes by proposing that this perceptual ecology—under-theorized despite its centrality to Jewish worship and its resonance with secular shared-attention spaces—demands sustained scholarly treatment as a phenomenon in its own right.

Dr. Noam Fields-Meyer (Gould) is the Hazzan at Temple Etz Chaim, a Conservative synagogue in Thousand Oaks, California, where he leads daily, Shabbat, and holiday services, directs the adult and youth choirs, and teaches about Jewish music across all age groups. He holds a PhD in Music Theory from UC Santa Barbara (2025), where he also taught in the Department of Music, and a BA summa cum laude in Music and Linguistics from Emory University. His interdisciplinary dissertation, “Beyond Background Beats: Lo-Fi Hip Hop as a Practice of Sonic Self-Insulation and Nostalgic Refuge,” was the first large-scale corpus study of lo-fi hip hop as a genre and introduced the concept of Personal
Ambient Listening to theorize how listeners use sound to construct portable environments of focus and emotional refuge. His current research applies listening modes theory to Jewish liturgical
music, investigating how congregational listening—rather than melody, aesthetics, or ideology—structures the felt experience of synagogue worship. A pianist and choral singer, he has sung with HaZamir: The International Jewish Teen Choir, the Vienna Stadttempel Choir, and other ensembles.