35 These thoughts led to the Sonic Field series launch, Soundtracks for Strange Days, during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic’s first months. This will be written about more in detail further on.
https://sonicfield.org/2020/05/call-for-works-sonic-social-distance-and-soundtracks-for-strange-days/
Accessing an Aurality: What can giving voice to history and heritage tell us about the past in the present, and what could that mean for our future? This research is in part an investigation into an interdisciplinary use of terms and methodologies from visual studies, towards an application in sound studies, in a similar method that perception studies took when converting light studies to sound.
This is to say, that this project will work to highlight the interdisciplinary relationship between the two, rather than a superimposition of one area over another. The crossovers, and even areas where visuality is not so commensurable to aurality, still reveal valuable information and application towards the currently quite changeable borders of critical sound studies. I have found the work of Marita Sturken and Nicholas Mirzoeff on visual culture particularly applicable towards a study of aural culture. Visual Culture came together in the 1990’s to, “investigate the convergence of questions of representation.”36 Visual Culture methodologies are already being applied towards considering the representation of images in our visual archives, this project calls for the same to be applied to our aural archives.
I revisited John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (asking myself why there was no equivalent Ways of Hearing) and found myself questioning aspects of his emphasis on seeing, particularly his belief that seeing establishes our place in the surrounding world. (Toop, p. XI)
The limited (but growing) literature I have found existing on aural culture has relationships to sound ethnographies and anthropologies, with a tendency to be quite recent, and most, such as Bull and Back’s The Auditory Cultural Reader, (2003) and Smith’s Hearing History, A Reader, (2004) are attempting to address a world that gives preference to the consideration of visual over aural. Many of these theories and methods display a need for more sensory consideration in cultural research in general, and this project will make a clear relationship between the application in the aforementioned fields, with the arts and artistic studies, as well as ecology.
I came to the term “aurality” writing with researcher and artist Jennifer Heusonon the subject of the possible adaptation of terms and methods used in visual
36 Mirzoeff states in the Sound, Vision, Action Colloquium at McGill University 2014 organized by himself, sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne, and Tamar Tambeck. Retrieved June 5, 2016:
www.soundvisionaction.cc
studies towards a sonic equivalent.37 Sound historian Veit Erlmann defines aurality as the interpretation of the culture and biological, and also states that aurality is still a matter of, “percussing, discussing, percussing.” (Erlmann, 2010, p. 342) Like a diagnosis, knowledge comes through examination and often experimentation. Cultural and biological influences and information will play an important role when further on we relate aurality to the relationships of listening bodies within a soundscape, exploring this with the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis and Information Bearing Elements.
“Aurality” is defined as the quality, condition, or degree of being aural, of the ear or sense of hearing. “Aural” refers to the ear, to hearing, an act that is often passive.
“Oral” to the mouth, to speaking, an act that is always active.38 Listening is an active aural act, and an activity increasingly less practiced. We are becoming un-tuned to the bombardment of information of our surroundings, to the information through our devices. We are increasingly passive in how this information enters us; as hearing is an embodied act, we embody whatever this information may be. My thesis addresses how sound art and design, with a focus on listening, can create counter-auralities to passive hearing. A counter-aurality is borrowing the term countervisuality from Nicolas Mirzoeff, who defines it as a way of not just doing (in his case looking, in this case listening) differently, but an attempt to reconfigure, dismantle, rupture, how we have been doing (looking, listening) it. (Mirzoeff, 2011, p. 24) Sound enters us
“pure”, we perceive all sound in our frequency range, there is no earlid39 to close sound out. Listening requires a choice to concentrate, and activation in parts of our brain that often overlap the areas we use when speaking. We listen, we process, we can consider, we can express our consideration and expression of what we listen to, and what we listen for; can transfer information and create new information within the relationship to our “audience”. This can happen in many forms, have a use through many applications, and be effective in many areas.
37 I would like to further note that within an early investigation, I read the work of Jennifer Heuson, who had recently conducted quite extensively research into the question of an Aural Culture, aural politics, and the use of the term aurality, discovering her research has moved my work forward considerably.
38 Radboud University Nijmegen. 2010, August 16. "Speaking and listening share large part of brain infrastructure." ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 29, 2016:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110816084007.htm
39 While the term “earlid” is often associated with R. Murray Schafer, as used in The Tuning of the World (1977) to describe the physical inability to close out sound from a hearing body, the term has been around since the mid 16th century. Retrieved December 8, 2019:
https://www.lexico.com/definition/earlid
Aurality is not just about sounds, but about how hearing and listening and even imagining sounds works to generate emotions and affect as well as creating atmospheres that are both lived in and alive. (Heuson, 2015b, p. 30)
In The Visual Culture Reader, Mirzoeff describes Visual Culture as
“critiquing the lives, powers, desires, and needs of images”. (Mirzoeff, 1998, p. 3) We can replace “images” with “sounds” as a method towards a critical aurality. He describes visuality as a technique of colonial and imperial practice where “power visualizes History to itself”, (Mirzoeff, p 3) claiming authority to produce consent.
Aurality examples of this can be found in music, archives, radio, television, cinema, news, and as Heuson writes, museums–all forms of sound design in our cultural institutions.
It can also be found in nature, or rather what we consider Nature. The sounds of industry were aestheticized, marketed as a positive sign of progress and Western development. That same noisy progression and pollution that has led to our current Climate Crisis was also the noise that set out to conquer and tame Nature and indigenous people, rendering silence and voicelessness in the face of such volume.
Mirzoeff writes in the section “Anthropocene (An)Aesthetics,” in “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” (2014) on how the human conquest of Nature aestheticized our landscapes (and soundscapes) pollution (think of the sound and smoke of factories portrayed as symbols of progression), leading to a loss of perception (aesthesis, those factories become usual and unremarkable in our landscapes), becoming what he calls anaesthetics, to be expected and tolerated. (p. 220)
In the essay, “The Right to Look,” (2011) Mirzoeff places listening as a base of action, as a way to be present. This is expanded upon by Dr. Isabel Ferreira Gould, in her chapter, “Acoustic Remains: Listening for Colonialism and Decolonialism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Life Writing”, (Gould, 2018; 2020) when she writes of aural remembrance, and uses the legal term, earwitness, when “listening connects the self to others and functions as a way of resisting from within”. (Gould, 2018;2020, p. 1) In the archives of Figueiredo’s writing, Gould finds “ear-witnessing and aural remembrance are intimately connected to the politics of self-representation in the text” and can only be reconstructed as echoes of the past through the writer’s autobiographical voice in the present. (Gould, 2018; 2020, p. 4) Voegelin points out
that while the desire to see a whole, leading us to maps and borders, and traces and certainties, is what is behind Visuality, with the outcome of a sense of objectivity, auditory engagement “when it is not in the service of simply furnishing the pragmatic visual object, pursues a different engagement. Left in the dark, I need to explore what I hear. Listening discovers and generates the heard.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 4)
R. Murray Schafer, founder of the World Soundscape Project, and author of The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, (1977) begins a foundational beginning with his work towards a counter-aurality, but it is problematic in its own privilege and separation. Even the chapters in Part One separate “The Natural Soundscape” (p. 15) from “The Rural Soundscape”, (p. 43) to
“From Town to City”. (p. 53) He divides our soundscapes into a dualistic lo-fi or hi-fi category, the hi-fi soundscape allowing for more discrete sounds to be heard, allowing for more diversity. This is indeed often the sign of a healthy and functioning environment, and humans as well as other being will get stressed in what he calls a lo-fi soundscape–the stress of processing so much acoustic information, if you aren’t used to it.
He writes the lo-fi soundscape was introduced by the Industrial Revolution, and then extended by the Electric Revolution. (Schafer, 1977, p. 71) He refers to it as Sound Imperialism. “Western Man leaves his calling card all over the world (…) local culture is pulverized into the background.” (Schafer, 1977, p. 77) Leading up to Schafer and Acoustic Ecology’s criticisms of urban noise as purely negative, in need of eradication. This doesn’t allow room for a critical counter-aurality that takes into full account the many people that for many reasons have to or choose to (or often a complex mix of both) live in noisy soundscapes like cities. To properly address the issue of noise and its affects in these places, we need to address their history, their relationship with their history, and the relationships of its inhabitants with the soundscape and what they may or may not call noise–we need to consider complex and complicated objective and subjective auralities.
I.2.a. à composing the past à a critical sound design, a critical ear
The approach this thesis takes is an approach Voegelin describes, challenging simultaneously the ideas of objectivity and subjectivity (as she states a
good philosophy of sound art will do), with the collective, relations, meaning, and sense-making. “The understanding gained is a knowing of the moment as a sensory event that involves the listener and the sound in a reciprocal inventive production”.
(Voegelin, 2010, p. 5-6) A sonic sensibility, for Voegelin and this project, is a method towards making thinkable the complexity and connection of time and space, with critical evaluation and engagement. (Voegelin, p. XVI)
To ask again, if sensing is of an essence to an embodied experience, how can we create a sensual past in the present, and what do we consider within that act? A consideration of sense is key to the work of Heuson. In her essay, On Hearing Together Critically: Making Aural Politics Sensible Through Art and Ethnography, (2015a) Heuson writes about a “politics of sensing through the productions of aurality”. Through six summers of fieldwork and practice-based research and art, she explored tourist venues utilizing history, heritage, and myth in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and traced how aural experiences are used to “sell American heritage”
in presenting a constructed past. (Heuson, 2015a, pp. 74-75) Aural modes of production are subtle, yet powerful, and so an excellent means for managing experiences of the past. (2015a, p. 73) Aurality considers that embodiment of the past in the present; considers the experience a sensual one, and therefore a personal one, and still yet a passive one if merely heard and not listened to. She calls for a responsibility in this, an acknowledgement of the power of choice in giving voice to the past, a heritage to a sound. What is the artist’s role in the archive and with sounding the past, and how can that strengthen a critical practice? How can these questions lead to a critical aurality, and a critical sound design?
As if now worn out, the century of cinema, television, photography and audio records relinquishes control to less tangible sensations of a new time. But this sudden growth suggests that the phenomenon of sound in itself, distinct from music and speech, has been neglected in the past (…) sound — and by sound I mean the entire continuum of the audible and inaudible spectrum, including silence, noise, quiet, implicit and imagined sound — can be identified as a sub-text, a hidden if uncertain history within otherwise silent media. (Toop, 2010, p. XIII)
“Distinct from music and speech,” articulates an important clarification to this research, in consideration of both soundscape as well as sound design. In comparison to voice studies and musicology, and their related fields, there has been a drought in sound studies dealing with the other elements of our sonic environments.
Similarly, within the relatively small amount of text I’ve found devoted to cinematic sound design, often there is precedence towards voice-over and musical elements in the soundtrack. But just as visual studies can allow an adaptation of work under its umbrella towards a critical aurality here, so then can some research in voice studies and musicology. The international symposium Musique et écologies du son: Projets théoriques et pratiques pour une écoute du monde/Music and ecologies of sound:
Theoretical and practical projects for a listening of the world, was held at Université Paris 8, in 2013. I was fortunate to attend and present a paper there, the first presentation of the earliest form of this thesis. This international symposium was of great significance to many areas in sound studies and in the following three years four volumes of proceedings have been published with essays from top thinkers in the fields, (Solomos et al, 2016) the last and latest with which I wrote a review of for the annual scientific publication Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology,40 an integral source from The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology,41 and the journal that first published my earliest work on this research as well.
Interconnectivity and an urge against dualism are a continual theme throughout the proceedings and is an important contemporary perspective in consideration of ecology. From thought on nature and culture, to urban and rural, to music and noise; what is desirable and undesirable in and from sound, what is individual and what is social in our relationship to sound, conservation and preservation, phonography and phenomenology, landscape and soundscape and the human and non-human within them. The tension between these and related categories-and what can be found and discussed between them, or what can be found and discussed if we do away with them, or what can be found and discussed if we
40 Colbert, Maile. 2017. “Musique et écologies du son Propositions théoriques pour une écoute du monde / Music and ecologies of sound Theoretical Projects for a Listening
of the World, Reviewed by Maile Colbert”. Soundscape: The Journal for Acoustic Ecology, Volume 16: Sounds Emergent: Diverse Ecologies Part II. p. 35:
https://www.wfae.net/uploads/5/9/8/4/59849633/soundscape_vol16.pdf
41 The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology was founded in 1993 as a multidisciplinary international association studying the social, aesthetic, cultural, and ecological aspects of the world’s soundscapes: http://wfae.net/
interconnect them-forges towards theories and methodologies on sound-music ecologies and ecophilosophy.42 As researcher Ljubica Ilic writes in the publication, in her essay “Between Retreat and Return: Rethinking the Sonic Pastoral”: “We are, globally, faced with the fact that the environment is one whole (…) The symbolic mesh that we live in, intertwined in all possible manners, requires more subtle choices, even when sound is in question.” (Ilic, 2016, p. 256)
The environment considered as a whole, or a complex and interconnected rhizome. “Every sound is evidence of a particular, earthly vitality, and the provenance and impact of these vitalities is of course the business of sound ecology,” (Nelson, 2016, p. 209) reads a key statement from the text “But Does the World Listen? Some Thoughts on Rhythmic Bonding Between Humans and the Sounding World”, from author Peter Nelson. The essays in the book consider in various ways, from various angles, the embodied information gained from the sound of place connecting the listener to their surroundings, such as the text from Makis Solomos and Frédérick Duhautpas that considers sound and music’s ability to allow us the experience of place, and this ability allowing the “capacity to create links, connections, and bonds,”
taking as example the works and writing of Hildegard Westerkamp. (2016, p. 75) Jordan Lacey calls for an ecophilosophy towards sound studies, encouraging us to consider the impact of a soundscape with imagination to provide a “sense of the subjective in the natural, which interrelates with the mental space of the listener”.
(Lacey, 2016, p. 149) As Guattari states, ecosophy is concerned with the whole of subjectivity. (2008, p. 2)
Soundscape ecology focuses on the relationship between living beings and their environment through sound, and so this relationship is of course inclusive to music and sonic designs and interconnected with really any sonic studies one might consider. Frans Mossberg, points out in the section “Fragmentation of the Field” in his wonderfully comprehensive, “Soundscape, Noise, and Music in Interdisciplinary.
Research and Design”: “The complexity of exposure to sound in today’s life and urban environment calls for interdisciplinary approaches that encompass technical,
42 Guattari, F. 1989. Trois ecologies. Paris: Editions Galilée. Guattari defines ecophilosophy (also referred to as ecosophy) as a philosophy towards an ecological harmony, highlighting a need for discourse to be embedded in an understanding of the interconnectedness of social and environmental.
medical, psychological, and cultural disciplines to get an understanding of the effects of sound on the multitude of levels involved.” (Mossberg, 2008, p. 184) Ecology is, by definition, a large register of inters: interconnected, interactive, interdependence, interdisciplinary. The inter attempts to sense a whole in seeing part of the whole and its connection to other parts of the whole. These connections can help us create definitions; these definitions can create new shoots from the rhizome. As the authors describe in their introduction:
Félix Guattari designates three ecologies: environmental, social and mental. What then are the links between music or sound and the environment (or nature), society and subjectivity? More generally, what are the links between music-sound and the world? Studying these links will help us define the boundaries of a flourishing artistic field. (Solomos et al, 2016, pp. 5)
Links inter-acting. My own practice, and the practical works explored in this thesis, can be described as interdisciplinary. Cinema, at its core, its conception, its nature, is interdisciplinary: image, sound, motion, and time. The over fifty-year history and scientific contributions of R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project, which I will go further into in the next section, is interdisciplinary from its beginnings in the fields of music composition and communication, leading to acoustic ecology and sound art, as well as sound recording towards an archive of preserved soundmarks, dying sound and sound environments. Schafer wrote, "Once a Soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of a community unique.” (Schafer, 1977, p. 101) Projects involving phonographic recordings, initially of Vancouver, then later of Canada, then five European Villages, and eventually through global tours and chapters, affiliates, and independent members. The outcomes of which are a massive, digitized library, increasingly important as the dying out of soundscapes, sound signals, 43 soundmarks,44 and sound makers accelerates, as well as albums of composed soundscape recordings.
43 Schafer, R. Murray (1993). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.
Inner Traditions/Bear & Co. (p. 10). Sound signals are foreground sounds, which are listened to consciously
44 Ibid. Related to the term landmark, a soundmark is a sound which is unique to an area.