Current Thesis Outline

1) Introduction

 1.1 The Sound Environment – Brief introduction to the notion of the sound environment

Opening our Ears

                        1.2 - The Eye and the Ear; sense-ratios and the dominance of visuality 

                        1.3 - Opening our Ears; Sound and the Arts

                        1.4 - Acoustic Ecology; in theory and practice…

2) The Soundmap & Acoustic Ecology

The Soundmap; Introduction and Critique

                        2.1 – Overview of existing soundmap form  

                        2.2 – Critique

Schizophonia

                        2.3 - Schafer's Schizophonia

                        2.4 - Schizophonia and the Soundmap

                        

3) Related Practices within Acoustic Ecology…

 The Soundwalk

                        3.1 - Max Neuhaus & the Soundwalk

                        3.2 - Emphasis on Site-listening 

  

Soundscape Composition 

                        3.3 - Soundscape composition and creative engagement with the soundscape and technology in the work of Hildegard Westerkamp

4) Sound Map: Extensions & Developments

 Soundmap Extensions 

                        4.1 – Focus on progressive examples – Urban Remix etc…

5) Development of a Wellington Regional Soundmap

Main points of development;

Site Listening and AR

                        5.1 - Site Listening; presence and difference

                        5.2 – AR & site listening 

                        5.3 – Reduced Listening & Site Listening

Interface, Narrative & Intertextuality 

                        5.4 – Narrative intertextuality and the social/semiotic dimension of sound

                        5.5 – Multi-media & , multiple - senses

                        5.7 – Cartography and the visual                                          

                                 representation of sound

                                

       

6) Conclusions

Opening our Ears; Silence and Pan-aurality

“Visuality overwhelms aurality in the cultural balance of the senses. The light that sparks the presence of objects and environments seems to be instantaneously everywhere and thus assumes a state of being that has proved to be particularly attractive to Western culture, whereas the actions that produce sounds appear scattered in space and time, tied to events that merely take place within a larger state of being. John Cage set out to tilt the balance in favor of the ear, and many people hear the world differently because of his efforts.”[1]

John Cage, the grandfather of the sonic-arts, and contemporary experimental music in general, spent his career attempting to open peoples ears to silence, as he termed it; “silence is all the sound we don’t intend. There is no such thing as absolute silence.” [2] His method’s ranged, from his early experiments with percussion and the use of noise in his compositions, to his famous silent work 4’ 33”, “which entailed rejecting the importance of whether a musical sound was present or absent within a composition and, in the process, extending the field or artistic materiality to all nonintentional sounds surrounding the performance – that is, by shifting the production of music from the site of utterance to the site of audition. This musicalization was then extended to all sounds, inside and outside the performance space, since the ability and willingness to listen were only requirements, and these abilities in turn were extended, with the aid of amplification and other technological devices, to small sounds and inaudible sounds.” [3]

With this piece Cage thrust open the doors of the concert hall, ushering in a whole world of sound. Opening the ears of those who were willing to listen, to sounds that had previously lay latent, ignored, as largely irrelevant or secondary to their visual correlates. Whilst 4’33” was performed within the context of the highly codified tradition of western classical music, and part of is significance is specific to that particular context (establishing the whole world of sound as material to be appropriated within a musical register) it also took on a broader conceptual significance, heralding a call to listen; “Silence is about listening, listening to small sounds, tiny sounds, quiet and loud sounds out of any context, music, visual, or otherwise.”[4]

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[1] Kahn, Douglas, Noise Water Meat, MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001, pg 158

[2] Ibid, 163

[3] Ibid, 158

[4] Voegelin, Salome, Listening to Silence and Noise, Continuum, New York , 2010, pg 81

Sense Ratios, Mediation, and the Primacy of the Visual

The world of sound that surrounds us, often seems to remain somewhat obscured, veiled not so much due to any inherent lack of physiological auditory acuity, but (as many scholars would suggest - ref) rather by the dominance of the visual apparatus (and the technologies that extend it) as our governing sensory logic. Much has been written about the primacy of the visual in modernity (reference/s needed), highlighting it’s significance, yet only more recently have questions of the role and relevance of auditory perception, and concern and critique of its somewhat marginalized epistemological position come to the fore.

One of the first figures to shed discursive light on this relationship, was the pre-imminent Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan; whose notions of aural/oral and visual/typographical culture explored and exposed this question regarding sensory-ratios and mediation.

“We, who live in the world of reflected light, in visual space, may also be said to be in a state of hypnosis. Ever since the collapse of the oral tradition in early Greece, before the age of Parmenidas, Western civilization has been mesmerized by a picture of the universe as a limited container in which all things are arranged according to a vanishing point, in linear geometric order. The intensity of this conception is such that it actually leads to abnormal suppression of hearing and touch in some individuals. (We like to call them “bookworms.”) Most of the information we rely upon comes through our eyes; our technology is arranged to heighten that effect.”[1]

McLuhan goes on to elaborate a dialectic sensory logic whereby cultures tend to primarily be governed by aural perception and hence occupy acoustic space which he associates with oral or non/pre-literate culture, or by visual perception and thereby occupy visual space which he associates with literate/written cultures[2], particular those stemming from Greek phonetic script. In his view this sensory basis is primary to how we interact in and understand the world, furthermore the technological forms that a given culture will elaborate, “extensions” as McLuhan termed them embody this bias, even entrenching it further.

He offers these definitions for each mode of perception/sensory space respectively;

“Visual space structure is an artifact of Western civilization created by Greek phonetic literacy. It is a space perceived by the eyes when separated or abstracted from all other senses. As a construct of the mind, it is continuous, which is to say that is infinite, divisible, extensible, and featureless – what the early Greek geometers referred to as physis. It is also connected (abstract figures with fixed boundaries, linked logically and sequentially but having no visible grounds), homogenous (uniform everywhere), and static (qualitatively unchangeable). It is like the “mind’s eye” or visual imagination which dominates the thinking of literate Western people, some of whom demand ocular proof of existence itself.” [3]

“Acoustic space structure is the natural space of nature-in-the-raw inhabited by non-literate people. It is like the “mind’s ear” or acoustic imagination that dominates the thinking of pre-literate and post-literate humans alike (rock video has as much acoustic power as a Watusi mating dance). It is both discontinuous and nonhomogeneous. Its resonant and interpenetrating processes are simultaneously related with centers everywhere and boundaries nowhere.  Like music, as communications engineer Barrington Nevitt puts it, acoustic space required neither proof nor explanation but is made manifest through cultural content.”[4]

Whilst McLuhan’s notion’s of sensory ratio’s are not without their problematic and reductive aspects, they serve to flag the basic inequity of the senses that predominates culturally, and highlight the relationship of this perceptual bias to our dominant modes of knowledge (epistemolgical frameworks), and the technological extensions of a given culture. This relationship between the senses, modes of knowledge, and technological mediation is of central importance here,  as these three concerns and their relationship are key to this enquiry.

McLuhan, in contrast to another Canadian figure of central importance in this study, R Murray Schafer, evidently was optimistic about the role technology might play in correcting this relationship toward developing a more balanced sensory-gestalt. As quoted above, in his eyes; “rock video has as much acoustic power as a Watusi mating dance”[5]

The  French film theorist Christian Metz exposes a similar line of thought regarding the primacy of vision in contemporary western culture, in which vision and touch take on primary significance among the sense faculties, with hearing, taste, smell etc, playing a secondary role. He differs from McLuhan in the sense that his point of emphasis is ontological/epistemological focused rather than McLuhan’s socio-technological emphasis;

“There is a kind of primitive substantialism which is profoundly rooted in our culture (and without a doubt in other cultures as well, though not necessarily in all cultures) which distinguishes fairly rigidly the primary qualities that determine the list of objects (substances) and the secondary qualities which correspond to attributes applicable to these objects. This conception is reflected in the entire Western philosophic tradition beginning with notions put forth by Descartes and Spinoza. It is also clear that this "world view" has something to do with the subject-predicate structure particularly prevalent in Indo-European languages. For us, the primary qualities are in general visual and tactile. Tactile, because touch is traditionally the very criteria of materiality. Visual because the identification processes necessary to present-day life and to production techniques rely on the eye above all the other senses (it is only in language that the auditory order is "rehabilitated", as if by compensation). The subject is too vast for this study. Nevertheless, it is possible to begin to discern certain qualities which seem to be "secondary": sounds, (evoked above), olfactory qualities (a "scent" is barely an object), and even certain sub-dimensions of the visual order such as color.”[6]

This critique of the primacy of the visual put forward by theorists such as McLuhan and Metz, has by un-large fallen on deaf ears. Though various artists/composers primarily with the Classical Avant-Guard and the Sonic Arts frame –individuals obviously somewhat more sensitive to these concerns-, have made significant attempts to correct or in the least raise awareness of this imbalance. It is this process (within the nascent discipline of sonic arts), an opening of the ears so to speak, with which we will now concern ourselves.

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[1] McLuhan, Marshall, Visual and Acoustic Space excerpt from Audio Culture, eds. Christopher Cox and David Warner, Continuum, New York, 2006, pg 68

[2] Ibid, pg 68

[3] Ibid, pg 69

[4] Ibid, pg 69

[5] Ibid, pg 71

[6] Metz, Christian, and Gurrieri, Georgia, Aural Objects, excerpt Yale French Studies, No. 60, Cinema/Sound, 1980, pg  68-69 

Soundmaps, Soundscape Compositions, and Soundwalks - thoughts on their relationship -

From my research thus far it seems that exploring the relationship between these three practices is central to elaborating viable extensions for the current sound map model. The three exist within a continuum of acoustic ecology/environmental orientated sound map practices, they are all essentially related and their is considerable overlap between them on both a level of method and concept.

My previous posts regarding Hildegard Westerkamp's work are a case in point, as here work involves various combinations of soundwalk type practice and soundscape composition.

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For the purposes of this study it would serve to isolate the three practices in ideal form...

A) Soundwalk practice - as exemplified by Max Neuhaus with his ardent refusel to document his soundwalks (and other installations) in any form. In this modality the emphasis is on immediacy and site-specifity, the only mediating factors (aside from the physiological) are the cue's provided by the artist/director. In this modality schizophonia is avoided entirely by the emphasis on site-specificity and immediacy which see's the subject engage the sound environment in the field.

B) Soundscape composition - Westerkamp's work will provide the working example of this method, whereby recorded elements are processed, and compiled via various means to create a particular listening/constructed representation of a sound environment/s, whereby affective transformations are facilitated in the listener and the space of listening. In this instance schizophonia is overcome through schismogenesis.

 C) Soundmap practice - exemplified by the online examples previously dealt with, in which audio recordings (typically without the creative synthesis of soundscape composition) are tagged to a cartographic rendering of the environment from whence they came. The user is left to engage the resulting body of recordings as the will, but as aforementioned with the current model, a schizophonic effect seems to dominate.

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The idea then is that in drawing from the strategies used to overcome (or avoid emtirely) schizophonia within the other primary modalities, that the sound map can be extended accordingly, to make it more viable towards the aim of the overall discipline - that of facilitating and cultivating listening and awareness if the sound environment that we inhabit.

Schizophonia & Schismogenesis (pt II): Schismogenesis

-An image of Bateson & Mead painted by a Balinese artist-

Feld's borrows the term Schismogenesis from the Anthropologist & Cyberneticist Gregory Bateson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis) in an attempt to described the generative/productive process that is often illicited through initial schism or dislocation. Feld's usage pertains to world music specifically, but given his contrast of the term with Schafer's Schizophonia it nevertheless falls well within the scope of this inquiry. 


The specific relevance here in, is the use of these two terms to explain the shift from the schizophonic effect - as embodied in the majority of sound-map recordings... to the schismogenic effect illustrated in the work of Westerkamp who works creatively with dislocation & difference to suggest something more (detailed below - http://wellingtonsoundmap.blogspot.co.nz/2012/02/soundwalk-pt-ii-hildegard-westerkamp.html). These two modalities effectively can either be understood as two distinct responses to the inherent schism produced through recording a sound environment or (possibly) more usefully one could look at productive schismogenesis as being the next step or extension of schizophonia, where as Labelle details in his article; "place paradoxically comes to life by being somewhat alien, other, and separate, removed and dislocated, rather than being thoroughy mimetically real." (1)


1) Labelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum, New York, NY, 2006, pg 206

Schizophonia & Schismogenesis (pt I): Schizophonia

Stephen Feld's appropriation & juxtaposition of Schafer's notion of Schizophonia with Gregory Bateson's notion of Schismogenesis is a useful point of reference here, in terms of articulating the inherent dislocation present in environmental recordings, and the success of artists such as Westerkamp etc, in terms of using this dislocation or schism productively.

Schizophonia:


"The Greek prefix schizo means split, seperated, and phone is Greek for voice. Schizophonia refers to the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction." - R. Murray Schafer (1)


Schafer (who is in a sense the father of the acoustic ecology movement) in his foundational text The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World seems to hold an almost fundamental distrust for modern technology, and the process of psychological and sociological fragmentation that he attributes to it. This sort of bias against industrial/post-industrial society and technology seems to inhabit much of his work, implicit in such notions of "hi-fi" and "lo-fi" (2) environments, and his dismissal of the acoustic milieu of urban space as mere "noise", as well as the aforementioned notion of schizophonia.

"Since the invention of electroacoustical equipment, for the transmission and storage of sound, any sound, no matter how tiny, can be blown up and shot around the world, or packaged on tape or record for the generations of the future. We have split the sound from the maker of the amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. In the same instant it may issue from millions, of holes in millions of public and private places around the world, or it may be stored to be reproduced at a later date, perhaps eventually hundreds of years after it was originally uttered. A record or tape collection may contain items from widely diverse cultures and historical periods in what would seem to a person from any century but our own, a meaningless and surrealistic juxtaposition." (3)

Schafer's concern is not only the schism, and resulting "meaningless juxtaposition" that is created, but also the role of the "synthetic soundscape" that is produced through this process, as a further element of obscuration of the natural "hi-fi" sound world. While Schafer's inherent biases make much of work useless here-in as anything other but a point of critique and contrast, the above notion of schizophonia does serve as a useful descriptive term, when it comes to articulating the sense of dislocation that seems implicit in environmental recordings (i.e within the current sound map frame). While the emphasis in Schafer's work is very much negative,  Feld's juxtaposition and extension of the concept vis a vis the notion of schizmogenesis provides something useful here, in that it articulates the sought of productive engagement with the space made by the dislocation/schism as seen in the work of such artists as Westerkamp etc. In part II of this blog-entry we will explore Feld's use of schizmogenesis, it's relationship to & embodiment in the work of Hildegard Westerkamp, and look at what can be drawn from this in terms of sound map practice.

1) Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape; the tuning of the world, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1977, pg 90
2) Ibid, pg 43
3) Ibid, pg 90

The Sound Walk (pt III) - Conclusions

The sound walk is in many ways the dialectical opposite to the sound map; it is spatially situated, rather than removed/abstracted and tagged to a cartographic rendering of space/place and it is typically highly narrative orientated rather than primarily based around documentation, as so many sound maps and the archives of recordings they host tend to be. From another perspective though they can be seen to occupy poles on a continuum of acoustic ecology practice/s; as all such practices bleed into and support each other. As within a single work (or an extending body of work) from an artists such as Hilderkamp etc one will see soundwalk techniques, field recording, soundscape composition, sound mapping etc combined in various ways to create a particular listening/revealing of a particular sound enviroment.

Much of the sound work within the sound walk frame though, does seem much more highly developed and elaborated than the current fair one see's within the explicit sound map frame (Although there are various more progressive examples which we will look at in upcoming posts.)Two of the primary developments within the sound walk frame, (which as aforementioned  are explicitly embodied in Westerkamp's work) are the productive use of narrative, and a creative engagement with the inherent dislocation that seems implicit in the process of field recording. Both of which could be appropriated to sound map practice as possible extensions.

Narrative: The use of narrative here-in allows for a greater revealing of context, and relationship as present in the sound environment, when it is employed successfully. Which is something significantly lacking from the mere documentation, point and click approach to recording that seems to populated sound map projects. It also can be used to highlight the participatory relationship of the listener to the environment, and the constructed perspective implicit via the representation/mediation of the recording process. The main limitation here is that the use of narrative constructs a privileged position (i.e the artist/composer) whereby a singular primary narrative/logic is imposed on the listener-environment relationship, whilst at the same time reducing the listener to a degree of second rate participation in the experience, as a audience member, rather than truly a listener-composer oneself.

It seems to me that the employment of narrative techniques within the sound map frame pose one of the primary avenues whereby sound map practice could begin to go beyond the mode of mere documentation that has thus far dominated it's history. It is my hypothesis that the architecture of the soundmap interface/platform can be designed to facilitate inter-textual multi-media narrative/s as a way of extending the basic field recording and listening practices that form the basis of the platform. Furthermore the aforementioned limitation of the authorial voice/privileged position of the artist/composer would be limited by the inherently participatory nature of the sound map, as it's recordings are constructed by myriad artists/users, who themselves continually switch between the logic of composer/audience member within their engagement with the platform, it's archive of recordings, and other users.

Dislocation: The aforementioned dislocation is similarly present within sound map practice (as it is inherent within field recording to some degree) though one would hope that through narrative-emphasis and site-listening integration the dislocation could become productive as it often is within sound walk practice rather than limiting. The emphasis here being to find a way to use the dislocation to produce difference, and transformation rather the just disassociation.