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.

The Soundwalk (pt II) - Hildegard Westerkamp; narrative, transformation, and dislocation

Kit's Beach - Hildegard Westerkamp from Vicky Carr on Vimeo.

Hildegard Westerkamp is a German/Canadian composer who was involved with R Murray Schafer etc in the 1970s as part of the original team of people that founded the acoustic ecology movement, and the World Soundscape project.

Westerkamp's work continues to center around environmentally orientated sound practice; employing a range of techniques/methods ranging from soundwalks & field-recordings; to sound-scape orientated composition and installation work. Her work occupies a liminal territory between categories; field recording and soundscape composition, documentation and docudrama, empiricism and poeisis, are blended together to create something more, to offer an entrance point to a living experience of a sound environment. In her own words she: "transforms sound in order to highlight it's original contours and meanings"(1). "Such original contours and meanings are to be found not strictly within the acoustic shape and dimension of the sound object, but in the contextual location of its origin"(2).

In such a way her work is highly narrative based, and compositional, but uses fiction in a functional manner, to suggest or elude to something that lies beyond. Rather than attempting or presuming to be able to document the sound-environment and somehow capture it's essence via merely technological means, she employs a wide ranging methodology; that is as creative & poetic as it is empirical, to try and reveal something that the microphone itself seems unable to pick up; the living breathing sound-environment, not as a mere objective plane, but as a intersubjective experience, as subjective and social as empirical or objective.

Another interesting aspect of Westerkamp's work is how she plays on the inherent dislocation present in environmental recordings (which I have previously touched on), engaging it creatively and productively rather than trying to escape it. "For Westerkamp (and others) dislocation seems to posit the possibility of finding place: to bring the alien back home. Such tension, I would propose, is at the heart of Transformations and other related works, and further, functions as the potential of environmental recording itself: that is, to offer up difference"(3). Through this dislocation an opening is created, whereby a new relationship to the sound-world can emerge in the listener as they follow the traces or lines of flight offered up by Westerkamp.

1) Westerkamp, Hildegard, from the liner notes of her CD Transformations (Montreal, Empreintes Digitales, 1996), p. 20
2) Labelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum, New York, NY, 2006, pg 206
3) Ibid, pg 211

The Soundwalk (pt I) - Introduction

The soundwalk is an interesting point of reference in relationship to the soundmap, as in many ways both are representative of the same overall process/movement within the sonic-arts; that of environmentally orientated sound practice (I will use the term acoustic ecology here as a working term), and both have inherently similar goals that center around trying to foster a greater awareness, and engagement with the sound environment that we all inhabit. 


It seems that the soundwalk though is the more developed/elaborated of that two, in that numerous artists from Max Neuhaus, too Hildegard Westerkamp and Janet Cardiff, have through their own practice (and experimentation within the overarching model) furthered the soundwalk as a acoustic ecology practice considerably.


In Westerkamp's words;


"A soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are. We may be at home, we may be walking across a downtown street, through a park, along the beach; we may be sitting in a doctor's office, in a hotel lobby, in a bank; we may be shopping in a supermarket, a department store, or a Chinese grocery store; we may be standing at the airport, the train station, the bus-stop. Wherever we go we will give our ears priority. They have been neglected by us for a long time and, as a result, we have done little to develop an acoustic environment of good quality." (Autumn Leaves, Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, Ed. Angus Carlyle, Double Entendre, Paris, 2007, p. 49 - http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings%20page/articles%20pages/soundwalking.html)


In it's basic form the soundwalk tries to facilitate engagement with the sound environment in the field, through active/close listening, typically guided by oral/textual instructions/cues from a director, or from an audio recording listened to via headphones. 


An example from the same text as the above; 


"Start by listening to the sounds of your body while moving. They are closest to you and establish the first dialogue between you and the environment. If you can hear even the quietest of these sounds you are moving through an environment which is scaled on human proportions. In other words, with your voice or your footsteps for instance, you are "talking" to your environment which then in turn responds by giving your sounds a specific acoustic quality.

Try to move
Without making any sound.
Is it possible?

Which is
the quietest sound of your body?

(If, however, you cannot hear the sounds you yourself produce,
you experience a soundscape out of balance. Human proportions have
no meaning here. Not only are your voice and footsteps inaudible but also
your ear is dealing with an overload of sound).

Lead your ears away from your own sounds and
listen to the sounds nearby.

What do you hear? (Make a list)

What else do you hear?
Other people
Nature sounds..."

In such a way the engagement is prescribed through some sought of instruction or narrative construct, which tries to facilitate a heightened listening experience in the subject.


(Part II will focus on the soundwalk practice Hildegard Westerkamp before I will look to draw some conclusions and look for possible points of integration between soundwalk and soundmap practice in Part III) 

The Sound Map: extensions

Based on the aforementioned critique in which two key issues with the standard sound map model were outlined I'm looking at possible avenues to resolve these issues and extend the overall functionality of the sound map...


These issues centered around two key points:

• A discontinuity between recordings and between users; which I hypothesize is a issue of the interface/collaborative architecture of the current sound map model. In such a way I will be looking into ways of creating a interface/collaborative architecture more suited to allowing connections/associations between recording and between users to occur. I am also looking at ways of developing a means of allowing for inter-textual narratives to emerge through the use of textual and visual support material etc.
• The inherently disembodied and spatially disassociated aspect of the sound map, due to the experiential limitations of engaging a body of sound recordings in a spatially dislocated manner, via digital abstract cartographic rendering of a environment. A possible avenue here that I am investigating - which borrows from the related practice of the sound walk, a practice I will explore in my next post - is the use of Augmented Reality technology as a extension of the sound map that would allow for site-listening. The idea here being that this would overcome the spatial dislocation caused by listening to the recording an isolated environment, and allow the user/listening to engage with the sound environment the recording serving as a revealing of a certain listening/experience of that particularly sonic space, an invitation to listen if you will. 

These possible extensions will be explored further in upcoming posts... 

The Sound Map; overview & critique of the current model/s

Spanish sound map; one of the few to offer the ability
to upload visual support material

The established design-model used in most sound-maps seems to involve a body of recordings produced by discrete users tagged to an online map; typically an embedded goggle map with modified API. They create a platform for users to upload recordings, facilitating a basic documentation of the sound environment, and provide a body of sonic reference material to the interested listener.


The experience of interacting with such a map/body of recordings provides a somewhat disassociated  listening experience; as the listener is presented with a mass of discrete/disembodied sound bytes of the sound-environment of the region in question tagged to a map. The recordings are typically linked/associated often only by technical specifics of the content; time, date, recording medium etc. Some sound-maps offer more involved means of creating/elaborating narratives from the recorded material; textual and visual support material etc, and creating associative connections between recordings by means of tags, but still the aforementioned issue is predominant. In such a way the current model, seems to only go as far as -at best- allowing a basic representation/documentation of the sound-environment. The living, breathing, sound-world though remains largely obscured.


The nature of an online map in itself provides another inherent issue; that of disembodiment. The user's experience of the sound-environment in such a model is entirely disembodied and disassociated from the environment from whence the recordings came. On one level this can facilitate a closer listening of the soundscape/sound-objects of the given environment, as they are stripped of the visual referents to which they would often be reduced, but in the same sense it creates a total spatio-temporal displacement/disassociation that is problematic, the recordings tagged merely to a abstract cartographic rendering of a living place/space. 


(The soundwalk provides an interesting contrast here in that they create a temporal but not spatial disassociation; something I will explore in an upcoming post) 


This displacement limits the understanding/engagement with the inherently participatory nature of the sound-environment as the user/listener in such a context is left to interact with a series of disembodied collection of recordings without any understand of the nuances and specifics of the space from whence the recording came, and without any required engagement/participation in the spatial dynamics of the place.


Critique: 

• The current sound-map model seems to produce a body of discrete recordings, made by discrete users. In doing so it fails to reveal the living breathing sound-environment on a level beyond basic representation/documentation. In such a way the human element is largely left out, and the inherently participatory aspect of the experience of listening are largely ignored. 
• Secondarily, the complete spatio-temporal displacement that is engendered by the interface in question (the online embedded-map) creates a disassociation from the actual environment that I think further obscures a participatory and embodied engagement with the sound environment that is key to cultivating aural/acoustic awareness. 

Examples:

• Barcelona Sound Map
• Spanish Sound Map; one of the few to offer the ability to offer visual support material.
• London Sound Survery; distinct grid based geotagging system, also offers a wide variety of recordings, content etc.
• Montreal Sound Map

From the Personal to the Collaborative

The initial compositional idea outlined in my proposal was essentially a personalized representation/engagement with the local sound-environment. Stemming from my understanding that the sound-world is on some level inherently participatory/collaborative; both in terms of it production and it’s revealing/exposition in the experience of listening, it seemed appropriate to rather than create a more personalized work, construct a collaborative platform to facilitate participation and engagement with the local sound environment.

From here the sound-map presented itself as a interesting referent point.

Excerpts from Initial Proposal

Overview:

The world we inhabit is abound with sound, from the ghostly rustling of leaves in the wind, to the mechanical throb of a passing car’s engine, to the high pitch staccato hum of the cicada. The sonic life-world is rich with timbres & textures waiting to be apprehended by the willing ear.

The proposed project draws on the notion that the listening experience, and by extension the experience of the sonic life-world is de-emphasized in our current cultural-context, playing second fiddle to vision as our dominant mode of sensory engagement with the world. Drawing upon the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Marleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, various strains of film (Metz) and media-theory (McLuhan), psycho-acoustic research, and Salome Voegelin’s study of the philosophy of sound/sonic arts (alongside various other texts dealing with the sonic-arts in specific) my project will endeavor to chart and explore this relationship.

Using this theoretical basis as a point of departure, I will endeavor to employ a design-methodology derived from various strains of the sonic-arts in an attempt to construct an interactive sonic-art piece that can temporarily invert this relationship in the participant-listener, and lead the listener back into an immediate, immanent engagement with the sonic life-world.

Aims and Objectives:

Building on the work of Salome Voegelin, I will explore/outline the existing discourses present in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory that deal with sense perception, epistemology and mediation, and endeavor to identify correlations between this material and the results of current psycho-acoustic research. Construct a methodology drawing on various strains of sonic-arts praxis; from the Acousmatic Research of Pierre Schaeffer, the Field-Recording and Site-Specific Listening of artists such as Lawrence English and Akio Suzuki, and the Sound Walk & Listening practices espoused by the likes of The World Listening Project. Drawing on these aesthetic, theoretic, and practical foundations, compose a sonic-art piece that can successfully facilitate an immanent, engaging experience of the sonic life world in the participant-listener.

Research Benefits/Significance:

Central to this project is the idea that the listening experience, and by extension the sonic-life world, are de-emphasized aspects of our experience both on a subjective/personal level and on a wider social level. This neglect limits our ability to experience and understand many of the subtleties and nuances of the world we inhabit, reducing our ability to engage and apprehend the world to certain sensory channels, and by extension to the certain layers of ontological strata, to which these sensory modalities allow access. Cultivating listening as a means of engagement with the world, and the greater appreciation and understanding of the sonic life-world that such listening facilitates has a range of positive implications both subjectivity and socially.

Indeed it is this process that Voegelin identifies as central to the praxis of sonic-arts, and it is within this context that this project should be considered; as part of an on-going attempt to promote listening as a means of engagement with the world and the validity and importance of the experience of the sonic life-world in and of its own right. This wider initiative of which this project is apart has many implications and benefits in diverse cultural fields, from aesthetics, to environmental ethics.