Fraser University in the 1960’s, where he began to teach soundscape studies.47 The phrase is used to describe the component of our acoustic environment that is perceived by humans, or “how that environment is understood by those living in it”.
(Truax, 1984, p. 11)
It devolves on us now to invent a subject we might call acoustic design, an interdiscipline in which musicians, acousticians, psychologists, sociologists, and others would study the world soundscape together in order to make intelligent recommendations for its improvement. (Schafer, 1977, p. 4)
Ecology deals with the relationship of organisms to their surroundings. This relationship is often clearly addressed in regard to place, but the relationship is highlighted when one also considers change, thus considers time. Acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology have branched out to give birth to a movement in sound art called phonography, a neologism referring to the art of field recording. This has also shown a sonic spotlight upon our changing environment and has become an important tool in bioacoustics and biomusicology, which help us to understand what these changes can mean. For example, we know birds communicate mainly with sound.
What we have found is that when their calls cannot be heard within a soundscape dense with what we might refer to as noise pollution, their reproduction decreases.48 Scientists are working with acoustic ecologists and sound recordists to sonically capture and study environments in which this is happening. These recordings often find themselves into semi-public spaces, such as archives and libraries, and with many of these libraries migrating to digital and virtual spaces, accessibility has grown, and with that as well the field of audio works and design that utilizes the sounds from our world.49 Some of these birdcalls may someday only survive on these recordings, a disembodied voice ungrounded from original context, from original
47 The actual origin is disputed, and Schafer in a 2013 interview said himself that a city planner named Michael Southworth for a paper, “The Sonic Environment of Cities”, 1969, first used the term. It is likely it was used even before this.
48 There is a large amount of research and study on this, a useful review is Catherine P. Ortega’s chapter “Effects of Noise Pollution on Birds: A Brief Review of Our Knowledge.” (2012) Ornithological Monographs No. 74. BioOne: https://doi.org/10.1525/om.2012.74.1.6
49 A prime example, and one that is used and sited further in the text, is The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library, which can be accessed online here:
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/page.aspx?pid=1676
meaning, until once again finding a home within a work embodied with new meaning, or find affect within the disembodiment. Thus, in one path, a recording could cross through many disciplines, pull the time of its recording into the present of its being experienced, and fill that present with elements of its path, elements that could be useful to those future artists and ecologists alike.
1.3.b. Sound ecologies and ethnographies
It is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity. (Guattari, 2008, p. 29)
Sounds and soundscapes are becoming extinct as well. We don’t tend to consider silence as active or activity, but a lull, a pause, a calm within the storm. And storms are catastrophes, and often we associate catastrophes with sudden and massive.
We give “animalistic” descriptions to the sounds made by what we call natural disasters, such as growling tornado, roaring avalanche, shrieking cyclone, groaning earth. This practice speaks to our complex relationship with nature, connecting us to it and taking us out of it at the same time. But what of the slow silencing that happens to our soundscapes when certain species die out? Such quiet disasters affect everything, sadly in ways we don’t (and won’t) notice until too late.
In the book, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places, (2012) author, musician, soundscape recordist, bio-acoustician and naturalist Bernie Krause coins the term, biophony, to help ecologists, biologists, acoustic scientists, and others to understand the long-term impact of disasters, particularly silent ones. Biophony refers to the collective sound vocal non-human animals create in each given environment. (Krause, 2012, pp. 68-69, p. 82) We face many compounding problems with the silencing of certain species and the quieting of a whole biophony, not the least of which is our connection with the world.
Krause provides some powerful examples of silenced biophonies in his book, such as the story of the Wy-am tribe in the Northwestern United States, whose history has been intertwined with the Celilo Falls, a waterfall just west of the Columbia River’s midway point, for thousands of years. Wy-am means “the echo of falling water.” Krause writes: “so central were the falls to the tribe that the Celilo was
considered a sacred voice through which divine messages were conveyed.” (Krause, 2012, pp. 40-41) It was also their yearly source for fish. In 1957, when the Dalles Dam gates were ordered shut by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the waterfall and fishing site were completely submerged, sending the Wy-am into a state of mourning that continued to subsequent generations. Krause cites several similar “silencings” in his book using spectrographs50 to give form and shape to “silent” disasters. A particularly sad example of this sonic loss is the recorded comparisons through time of the coral reef in Vanua Levu, Fiji, that has been devastated by warming waters, shifts in pH, and pollution. (Krause, 2012, pp. 72-74)
< Figure 1 >
Krause also recorded twice at the Lincoln Meadow “forest management area”
in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, once before mass logging went into effect, and once after, a year later on the same date, time, and same weather conditions. Lincoln Meadow was to be an experiment in “low-impact” logging, involving individual tree clearing peppered throughout a forest area, rather than full clear-cutting. Along with the recordings, photography was taken. We can see from the spectrographs that, while visually it seemed that little had changed, aurally it was a different story. (2012, pp.
68-74)
< Figure 2 >
“Even the surrounding hills were hushed, as if brought low by language”
speaks Grendel (1971) in John Gardner’s novel telling Beowulf’s (Anonymous author, disputed date: c. 700-1000 AD) story from his side, that of the “monster”, exploring the necessity of the other side, and that opposites need each other to define their existence as opposites. There is battle, but also an implied balance within the war these opposing forces and their battles make up. Opposites are active; they push and pull at each other, creating oscillation and vibration. “…one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence. Not only
50 An instrument that obtains a sound spectrum by analyzing a complex sound into its component elements, it allows a visual analysis of sound into its frequency components, as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence takes its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.” (Sontag, 1969, p. IV) There exists a sculpture that elegantly and visually embodies this consideration. Its creator, Kadet Kuhne, is an artist whose use of different mediums and technology allows for experimentation in a diverse array of forms, which is clearly seen within her oeuvre. One has the sense that her initial dreams and concepts are never attached or weighted by a set structure or know-how, but rather she finds and forms the best path to them, fearless of unknown territories or technologies. This feels especially apparent within her recent Interference series (2013-14), which includes 3D printed sculptures based on the architecture of sound waves, specifically the phenomenon of destructive interference and how it relates to the audio waveform.
When two simple sound waves share the same frequency are produced simultaneously while holding opposites of phase that coincide with one another in an exact counterbalance, the alternating pressure disturbances of both waves cancel one another, producing an amplitude vibration of zero–which we can consider, silence.
(Holland, 1997)
The waveforms of spoken words are phase shifted, or inverted, to create cancellation, rendering the perceived sound silent. This cancellation brings into consideration the transitory and subjective nature of thought and aims to question the solidity of language. (Kuhne, 2015)
In Dependent Origination (2014), the sculpture is a printed sound wave of the title being spoken, whose meaning is also an ongoing theme within some of Kunhe’s other works. Dependent Origination is a core Buddhist teaching that speaks to the interconnectivity of all things. There are no beings or phenomena that can exist independently of other beings and phenomena, and they are caused to exist because of other beings and phenomena, which may also cause them to cease, in a perpetual rise and fall that if mapped may even look something like a complex sound wave rendered visual. Kuhne not only renders sound visible, renders silence visible, but freezes a voice in space and time, in volume and silence. Her sculpture is a time capsule and an archive, a sound and an object. It creates place by placing a visible silence, and surrounding it like parenthesis, transposing it from a time-based media into a sculpture.
< Figure 3 >
Jennifer Heuson, when writing about the silence of the representations of indigenous people in the American Southwest museums, calls for a more artistic approach to ethnography, arguing for anthropologists to grapple with the sensorial representations and politics of their practices. She asks them to ask themselves in their practice “how to make the past sensible to the present”. (Heuson, 2015a, p. 73) How can we share sense across times, places, and peoples, towards a shared understanding.
“Sound in its varied forms works to forge common sentiments.” (Heuson, 2015a, p.
76) The power of aurality is its description of the process of mediating and making sound, silence, noise, and linking this to emotional affect. (Heuson, 2015a, p. 77)
Her initial approach considered sound as something that could be quantified and contained, then documented and offered as evidence. I can relate to this assumption, having approached my work in a similar way, initially trying to approach as “science”, rather than “art”. In working with methods from soundscape studies and sound ethnographies, it was inadequate. When Heuson also approached tourism as post-colonial, and approach that has been important in contemporary assessment of representations and narratives of the past in archives, this helped to form critical aural culture assessments. The tourism industry (re)produced “stark contrasts between the natural and cultural world, and between Native and non-Native peoples”. (Heuson, 2015b, p. 93) She considers these productions in heritage and tourism venues forms of
“frontier aurality”, and what is called for is a counter-aurality to them. (2015b, p. 31) The Wayback Sound Machine as well needed to go beyond soundscape studies and sound ethnographies, though each of those fields is important to this interdisciplinary work. It needed as a thesis to highlight and discuss writing and works that explored these disciplines’ overlaps with sound art and design, and as a conceptual tool in art practice, explore and study those same overlaps, and how sound in artwork allows complex information to be sensible. Art studies allows for the complication and complexity to be an important part of knowledge. And the base for all of this, is listening.